Angels Are Made on Earth, Not in Heaven

Artem Rogowoi, Ukrainian

“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach….

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. […]

In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

It’s strange, isn’t it, how beings so obviously made from love and beauty can find themselves so far from such things. Is it the nature of physical existence that maroons us in a sense of separation? Why does it take unusual courage just to be our truest self? And then, of course, we must ask why we organize our lives as if we’re going to war? ‘Real life’ is imagined as a battle for survival.

Mending the world, standing up and ‘showing your soul’, are seen as heroic because it is so unusual to show yourself, to even know and affirm yourself. This world presents a constant challenge to find the angel in us rather than the all-too-human, small-minded coward that also exists in us alongside the angel.

This inner landscape is projected outward in shocking dramas, quite naturally. It breaks out as a matter of course, with a kind of inevitability that we dread, knowing our history, but which we’ve learned to expect almost on a regular timetable.

Our lives on this planet seem to be a kind of proving ground of the soul. We seem to be…