Pencil illustration by Ele McKay https://www.elemckayartist.com/landscapes
Life is a playground, a workshop where the Master hones us into perfect diamonds. All the makings are inside—light, clarity, brilliance. Each hardship and heartbreak like a facet making us more gorgeous. We just don’t know it yet, don’t feel it. But in the quiet and solitude of meditation we become conscious of union with what is, with that perfect self.
Perhaps you were abused as a child, born into poverty, experienced the brutal arrows of racism, suffered illness, experienced brutality and loss. Life is harsh. We are powerless over it. But as the Star Trek Borgs say, resistance is futile. I say resistance is painful, and yet it is normal to resist pain. Eventually, we learn to go through the pain, to breath with it, endure it, accept it, and then it changes, dissipates, revealing yet another sparkling facet that lets in the light and makes our hearts and souls shine with the love they naturally hold, releasing that light in dazzling brilliance and color.
I embrace this grand human experience. I say let me know you Lord, Goddess of Wisdom, Source of All. Let me give thanks for the lessons You teach, bitter though some of them are. I am not alone. None of us are. The illusion of isolation evaporates when we reach out to one another with love and compassion and when we reach into our own souls and love the precious jewel that we are.
Open our hearts,
That we may hear Thy Voice,
Which constantly cometh from within.
Disclose to us Thy Divine Light,
Which is hidden in our souls,
That we may know and understand life better…
–Khatum by Hazrat Inayat Khan