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Behind Enemy Lines
Yosh Ginsu, Unsplash
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it…Make it your ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life. — Eckhart Tolle
Each life involves an essential errand; not simply the task of survival, but a life-mission imbedded in the soul from the beginning. — Michael Meade
It was survival. I was learning to create a life of “work and love” to quote Freud. But what was the overriding emotion, threat? From what?
Was it a search for meaning, beauty? Could those things satisfy my unnamed hunger?
Making a life and having a life are two different things. Having a beautiful life is empty. Only making it satisfies, for me at least. Having the confidence to create beauty is irreplaceable. I always had a personal need for beauty and larger meaning.
But that was a personal project. As I’ve aged, I’ve begun to feel more concerned with the fate of the world than my own little life.
I recently came across these lines written years ago that show me I have always had an eye toward the fate of the Earth and its denizens:
