An article by Sha'Tara - local writer and friend.

(May the following put an inspirational spin on your day!)


Of Sorrow and of Joy

[thoughts of a    ~burning woman~   Sha’Tara]

When you reach your own possible abyss of sorrow, what do you do in your sentience tested, but cry?

When you reach your own possible apex of joy, what do you do in your sentience tested, but cry?
                                                                                                                        ~a burning woman~

(an overdue explanation:  the  ~   ~  on burning woman represent the flames of her burning flattened into wings by the Solar Wind, so that what was to be her complete destruction through the hatred of a misogynistic Solar God, enabled her to free herself.  Of the flames of her own burning flesh she fashioned wings.)

Life “is not a thing, it is a way.  It is a series of happenings, it is the evolution of patterns which carry information; it is growth and decay and re-growth.  Wherever the possibility of this exists, life will be.” (The Avatar – Poul Anderson)

Life in balance reveals itself to me, its partial, as Joy and Sorrow.  It is I, the hopeful, who chooses moment by moment which aspect to engage.  And it is only in recent moments of higher perception that I have realized the necessity of engaging both in a kind of slow and steady pendulum motion.  Joy and Sorrow are inseparable twins, life-support post-creation entities within the cosmos.

Once, when I was very young in my thinking and greatly influenced by the thoughts of so-called wise ones of books, of churches, of schools, of successful business, and by the stuff that surrounds me, I thought that life should not be a struggle.  I believed that.  I believed it because I saw much suffering, much grief, on this world and I reasoned it to be wrong; a grave error.  Yes indeed, make no mistake: such suffering is wrong.  It is a serious failing among Earthians that such should exist, be allowed to exist, or much worse, used as a means to profit.  But I was wrong to think that promoting its opposite would resolve the issue.  How many hours, days, nights and years I spent pondering solutions that sought to oppose the horrors my human mind saw each day and felt helpless to stop?

Then a few very dear individuals, some of earth, here and now, taught me to consider a thing they call ‘unconditional love’ and they insisted I’d find my answers therein.  So I put my bio-computer to work out an answer based on this new concept and after several years of amazingly complex calculations, it rejected it.  ‘Not in the best interests of the entity’ it simply declared.

Why not?  I thought.  ‘We are a survival mechanism and unconditional love would be our demise’ was its reply.  Indeed, I thought, it is absolutely correct.  Observation declares that in a predator-prey environment such as exists on earth, love cannot function except by allowing itself to be ‘eaten’ by the predators, the most successful of these being the Earthian creature itself.  Do we not have an ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail?  Of course I knew this.  I just never made the connection because, well, ‘love’ as most know, is a very common commodity on this world and is used in an endless array of ways.  I could begin with the famous “God is love” belief that upholds so many religions yet carries not a single shred of historical evidence or living proof this is so, quite the contrary in fact. 

So I disengaged the bio-computer and began a series of ‘self-tests’ based on everything I knew for fact; on what I am; on what the world sees me as; on what I desire to become; on the quest I’m on;  on all those ‘other’ aspects shared with many yet only known by myself: my spirit world.  If I could not be, or even have, unconditional love and remain alive among the sharks, hawks, tigers, hyenas, cobras and whatever other sort of predator there be that Earthians emulate too well, then I’d have to find another path whereby I could still somehow qualify to become an avatar.  Mostly because I could not, and can not, bear to consider myself just another Earthian at this stage of awareness.  OK—I want more.  And… and Morn Hyland says in “The Real Story” by Stephen Donaldson, “I need a better answer.”

What the self-tests revealed was not what I wanted to see, but it was everything I could claim to be, like it or not.  I put the esoteric and utterly impractical concept of unconditional love on the proverbial shelf and began a new quest: to become an empath.  That is getting down and dirty.  Nothing romantic about this.  Unconditional love shines from the heights of the Tower, but empathy wanders the limited, closed, dark places of earth.  She takes the human senses and joins them all so the individual who joins her, joins the human condition.  And there it was, in its stark amazing clarity of hope and horror, of pain, suffering and grief along with pleasure, happiness and ecstasy. 

Of course an ordinary human cannot cope with such revelation.  It is overwhelming.  So my higher mind sought a way to make sense of it all without destroying the lesser aspects and in a way the entity, me, would continue to be made aware, enlightened and strengthened in resolve.  Reaching out to the realms and hidden worlds outside the control of the Time Lords, she brought me Sorrow and Joy to be my companions in my quest. 

Sorrow and Joy.  Cosmic twins of Understanding and Wisdom.  In these you can enter the human condition at any level, share fully and honestly in it without becoming overwhelmed, or distant.  You can rejoice with those who rejoice without feeling let down when it ends.  You can die with the dying without dying, feeling everything he feels without obeying the natural compunction to withdraw to a place of personal safety.  You can give your life to save others, time and time again, ‘dying’ with them only to rise again.  You can accompany a spirit to the gates of heaven and shed tears of joy when you see admittance and you can follow another into the pits of hell, hoping against hope to hold him back before the black gates close ‘forever’ upon that lost one.  And you can return, day after day, to do what must be done in the normal tick-tock world where others see you as nothing more than one of them.

In Joy and Sorrow you learn not to swear and not to pray.  This is the place of self-empowerment;  of personal choices that accept responsibility for everything: for the small that can be changed through personal involvement, and for the enormous that cannot be changed, no matter what one does yet knowing it must be. 

Joy and Sorrow exist beyond all the powers and forces known to Earthian man.  They are wooed through detachment, which means though a letting go of the manifold small things that contribute to Earthian self-centered and so destructive thinking.  When the ‘things of earth’ begin to look dull, to taste bland, to lack excitement, take a walk on the wild side of life: to the end of the universe and step off into the chasm.  Maybe some day you’ll come back with a new way of looking at everything…  Maybe.  Before you step off, take heed of your reasons for doing so.  Many are the ones who have tried this way and never returned.

On the ‘taking of the waters of life’ ritual of the Bene Gesserit,  Leto asks his mother why only women take the waters to enable them to see into the past and the future.  She replies that many men have tried the ritual in order to go where the women could and men could not.
Leto: “They tried and failed?”
Jessica: “They tried and died.”  (From ‘Dune’ by Frank Herbert)

Remember the serendipity prayer,  “Lord grant me, etc.?” 

We who have seen beyond the grave, beyond the ends of the universe, beyond space and time say it this way:

“This is my moment.  In this moment I grant myself the strength to change the things I can, the serenity to accept those I cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference.”