If what we need is so important, why do we settle for what we want? Why does it take an act of God or lapse of consciousness to get our attention? What is the end of our being alive in the first place if all we have done with this infinitely valuable gift is to squander it on hopeless waste and fool adventuring only to come to our final moments in regret and disllusionment anyway? I do not want to be a bully, nor do I wish to be bullied. I build no walls, nor do I seek to break any down. I want nothing, and yet I need all that is interdependently connected to the environment that sustains me.

Many times I find that people will only speak of their deepest selves when they are in crisis. I ask then why we should wait until the last minute to get real with ourselves and others. What do we do about the rage, the regret, the unintigrated parts of our psyche? What do we do with the lost and stolen moments that have now become loneliness and isolation? We laugh publically and we cry privately. Why spend another moment being other than who we are when we an taek steps to become our most true selves?

Facing our own fears and intolerances is a martial art. Painting on a blank canvas takes the courage of a lion. Stepping out of the skin we have known takes bravery and sublime humility. If we are to awaken from the nightmare that is our own lack of standing for inner peace, then we must go to war against our own ignorance and learn to become tolerant of the intolerant selves that we are. To judge others is to condemn ourselves; to co-dependently allow others to enslave our minds to their untried ideas is slavery. To step beyond ourselves, we must do battle with our own reactiveness and learn to respond to the world as it is.

Warriors pick their own fields when they can, but accept that the terms of battle can only be accepted when one faces himself. The opponent is always the self, and the other guy is merely the delivery system by which we have choosen to engage our own egos.

runningturtle87