Suddenly, things snap into focus.
I’ve been pursuing unity all my life,
But could only glimpse the monstrous vision in fragments;
It has haunted me for years.
Each time I sighted it, I struggled to make it concrete.
At first, it seemed I only had a sculptor’s yard of unfinished figures —
Then it slowly began to make sense,
Gathered from glimpses and inferences.
More and more, this mysterious life comes together.
It may take years more to reveal the whole.
That’s all right.
I’m prepared to go the distance.
One’s life’s destiny is not easily revealed. It’s too big. You may certainly set your sights early, but you will still have to make changes and adjustments as your true purpose is clarified. When it does begin to come together, there is a tremendous feeling of assurance.
Then with each step upon the path of Tao, your certainty rings from peak to peak.
“I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.”
— Og Mandino
“To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche (sorry, Nietzsche makes me laugh…)
“Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not.” — Oscar Wilde (Wilde makes me laugh, too..)
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home.” — Australian Aboriginal Proverb
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
— Pablo Picasso
“My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?”
— Charles M. Schulz
“I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, “Where’s the self-help section?” She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose”
— George Carlin
“While goals are chosen, a purpose is discovered. Our purpose is something we have been doing all along, and will continue to do, regardless of circumstances, until the day we die.”
— Peter McWilliams
“We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.”
— Joseph Campbell
People ask why others blog, how they blog, what they blog. For me, it is an attempt to capture “the rapture of life”. My own, if I can, or the work of others. That is why the artworks show up that sometimes make people gasp or leave comments about how surprising or pleasing they are. That is why the quotes are here, to perhaps bring someone to that “aha!” or “oh, yes..” or “hmmm” moment. That is why I cite my own experiences, to connect myself to a thought for the day and maybe inspire others to think about that thought as well and see where it leads them.
My “sculptor’s yard of unfinished figures” is huge — there are so many things I have begun, only to find that is not the direction I wanted to go at all, that I had to stop working on one thing and begin something else, and yet – there is an overall pattern to it all.
The people I’ve been around in my life have become better people. Even those who have left me were forced to make a difficult decision and had to determine their own values and admit it when they didn’t align with my own. I know it was difficult for them to leave, as it was difficult for me to accept their choice. And yet – I’m a better person for their leaving, for accepting that I did not need their cruelty in my life. No, they did not think themselves cruel, but they were, for they denied me what I needed most – communication. To cut me off and not speak to me is the cruelest thing a human can do to me. It denies my very existence itself. I was destroyed by that, and had to rebuild myself from the ground up, learn I was someone even if they denied it.
And it helped bring me to my purpose here of blogging, at first as a way simply to say, “I am here”, and then, to try and understand the Tao and help others to begin to see it as well. And now, to move on from that as well, and begin to explore new ways of communicating.
I believe our voices here are important – all of our voices. I believe our thoughts here are important, the spoken and the silent ones. I believe our witnessing here is important – commenting when we want, or just our silent “yes” or “no” or “what the hell are they thinking?” or our disgusted clicking back when someone offends our thoughts.
Most people don’t ‘get’ blogging. They think it’s a waste of time or write it off as trivial. It isn’t. This is a world-wide conversation, the first ever. And parts of it are trivial and self-involved, and parts of it are so big, we can’t get our arms or our minds around it – it seems a bunch of “unfinished sculptures” but – there it is – UNITY.
We are one planet, one people, one world, all of us speaking our thoughts and creating our postings and sharing, sharing, sharing – giving ourselves away for free every day here.
What more purpose do any of us need to be here than that?
One Response
I like to think of myself as a smart girl, but there are a ton who are smarter than me. At least I’m not like Dubbya who has called himself “the Decider”. HAHA – That’s so funny!