“ Each of us is born into this life with a light inside of us…What’s most important is to never let that light go out, because when you do it means you’ve lost yourself to the darkness. It means you lost your hope and hope is what makes this world a beautiful place.”
Excerpt from a book I recently read, Help for the Haunted, by John Searles
I used to think it didn’t matter what motivated a person to “do the right thing”, but I am no longer sure about that. I mean if you did the right thing because you didn’t want to go to hell when you died I pretty much said ok, regardless of my personal religious feelings. If you did the right thing because you wanted to win a prize I didn’t really care. JUST DO THE RIGHT THING MAN!
But then I got to thinking about how that perpetuates fear and fear either shrinks us or makes us monsters and so we become bullies or frightened shadows and the light within us is so hidden that sometimes it simply goes out for lack of tending.
Doing the right thing should be as natural as dancing barefoot on a sandy beach or sitting on a porch with rain falling on a tin roof and watching the evening shadows gather and the stars become visible and the fireflies flicker through the woods. Doing the right thing should be motivated by love for the Universe we have been gifted to live in. I don’t want to leave a legacy of fear, but one of hope. I pray that I might have the strength to do the natural and easy thing and not complicate my thoughts with arduous convoluted negative energy that can only lead to the end justifying the means. My road is a country lane, not a super highway, sometimes it isn’t really a road, but a waterway.
Back in the day….Some of us wandered around the country in our huaraches and shunned commercial chemicals on and in our bodies. We donned cotton tee shirts and peasant blouses and wore skirts and drawstring pants of bright rainbow colors. We grew alfalfa sprouts and mung beans. We advocated making love, not war. We revered the Earth as Gaia, a living organism. We still had the instinct we were born with, to know and do the right thing. Somehow it felt like we were in tune. Then, as the bumper sticker says, Shit Happened”, or “Events Occurred”, and before we knew it a new millennium dawned and then it was 2014. Do not despair because it hasn’t been a straight line. It never is, and the most interesting journeys are fraught with twists and turns and sometimes we have to hide from the bogeyman, or give a nod to pragmatism.
So, where did the “Flower Children” go?
Silly, we’re still here. Just look around you and you will see our footprints. We are in the organic food departments, the recycled bins, the movements for sexual, gender, and racial equality, and even alternative holistic medicines. I filled out a form yesterday at a doctor’s office and was asked if I had ever used illegal drugs, OTHER THAN MARIJUANA!! We are in the wind that turns the turbines in our fields. We are in the warmth that heats the solar generated panels atop our homes and boats. We are in a grand childs face as he dips his hand into the cold running creek and looks with hope and wonder toward the future.
All these things have happened and continue to happen because we are still trying to make the world a better place…because…well… because it was and is about acting from the heart and loving each other and the Planet Earth and the Universe…and because…we passed the urge to do the right thing for the right reasons on to new generations. Some of us shouted it and some whispered it, but we never forgot… THE BEAT GOES ON….
So, tend the light My Friends.