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Boldness, Imagination and A Greater Sense Of Life
Part of what has been lost in the reckless rushing of modernity is the sense that each life has an authentic interior that shelters important emotions as well as inherent purpose, and that the dignity of existence includes a necessary instinct to unfold the unique story woven inside each living soul.
“Fear is the guide for the true direction of the heart,” they used to say when considering the courage required to become oneself. Our way of loving and healing is seeded within us, yet it takes more than one breakthrough to reach the inner treasure. A long road made of longing and self-discovery is required in order to re-open the heart and reveal the gold within it. Another old proverb states that “what the heart loves is the cure.” Life is the ailment and what we love provides the cure for what ails us.”
In the end, all we can offer the world is the life we came here to live and the gifts our souls would have us give. When the end seems near, genuine security can only be found in taking the kind of risks that lead to a greater sense of life and a more encompassing way of being in the world. When the enemy is fear itself, only boldness and imagination can save us from it.
— Michael Meade
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Education should lead us to what the heart loves rather than what the head thinks to profit from. We become so instilled with ideas of power and advantage and self measuring that we completely forget what we could love and devote our lives to. Fear becomes established in us by systems of rewards and punishments, by tribalism and ideas of advantage and disadvantage that we can’t get off our culture’s treadmill.
Work without love is soul destroying, as is religion or family or anything else. The reason the climate is in danger is because we treat the Earth like a bank account. God fills it up and we make our withdrawals without any sense of responsibility or care about its health. That raises the question of what kind of human beings we are, and how we got that way.
If we’re going to live the life we’re capable of, the one Michael Meade says we came here to lead, we have to have the nerve to question whether we are acting from love or fear. Individuals in this system get dragged along in its wake and it…
