Riding the wave

                                                                                                                                                            gratitude to this art 'Great Wave off Kanagawa' by Katsushika Hokusai

Sometimes I make a great effort to accomplish something, only to find my progress awkward, slow and filled with obstacles. At other times even the smallest willingness on my part propels an action forward with ease and potency, as though unseen currents carry it forward with unstoppable momentum.

I have often grieved the apparent slow pace of progress made by us humans, the raising of our consciousness to a truly integrative and generative world-view. Are we going to remain as a species so bogged down by ignorance, so fascinated by fear and lost in our frenzy of consumption that we lay waste much of the beauty in the world? No matter how righteous some of us may imagine ourselves to be, each day we get to take a sober look at ourselves in the mirror of our lives and see aspects of the same fragmented consciousness that reveals itself globally in such gross inequities, ecological ignorance and desperate violence.

Who can know whether the darkness we see now is evidence of our collective failure to evolve or whether we are in the deepest night before some grand dawn? Like an iceberg, our progress can be largely invisible to us but reaching deep under the surface is a form that may one day be revealed. We all reap the fruits of countless efforts by ancestors who strived for an accomplishment never to witness it in their own lives.

Whether or not we get to see obvious shifts for the good within our time on this earth, it seems like our task is still the same, to participate wholeheartedly in true and inspired lives, to build together a more loving reflection within and without, day by day

---