Originally published on Facebook on December 12,2013 by Chad Ponder-Clevenger.
Really far-out, metapathetical, transgenitalian, holidatious, attempt at cultivating hope and brotherhood for those in need…
Whatever you believe, I hope you believe that you are a valuable, relevant, and essential part of life and the world as it can be experienced, however we are able to experience it.
Last year a neighbor and father struggling with work, bills and divorce committed suicide. It was a tremendous and totally unnecessary tragedy.
I’ve been through a few hells and I always come back, and ultimately, I am quite certain we all do in some expression or other. In light of the heaviness that some may experience over the course of a personal or seasonal Winter, I offer these thoughts about pain, suffering, loss and self-abnegation/destruction:
Trust is the willingness to include, to have within and be within. I trust you = You are in my heart. You break the trust, you break the heart. The heart is the integrity of the spirit, it is the vessel, what holds the spirit, the spirit is as water. Break the vessel, and the spirit has lost it’s form, it shatters into confusion, chaos and falls back into the pool from which it was drawn, but always and eventually there can be another vessel to draw up the spirit from the pool and resume and resurrect an existence, always there can be a new trust, and sometimes a better one, but never the same trust, nor should there ever be. Each time is a different possibility, only the process is the guarantee. It is the will and nature of all things to find their breaking point and to be broken and resurrected with greater integrity and so a greater extent. Time is irrelevant to this process of the precipitation and drawing out of spirit, only it is a matter of falling back completely and gathering oneself together again so that one may be drawn completely up. It is a process of clarification and purification.
Suicide (any form of self-abuse), is a dramatic effort at expression of this, but a wasteful, unnecessary one, for one can accomplish and experience this process infinitely in a single lifetime, a year, a day, or even in a split second. Time is an irrelevant illusion in this realm of spirit that bears no determination over it, and so a release and renewal of life can occur independent of any physical conditions or environments, if you know how, it’s called SPIRITUAL FREEDOM, and it is an easily overlooked trump card we are all born with, but far too few realize and far too many die in ignorance of.
ONE NEED NOT DESTROY ONE’S BODY TO RENEW ONE’S MIND, SOUL OR LIFE.
However one eventually and ultimately will if they do not renew these.
The water needs to be poured out and replenished, it is the nature of life. Death is a factor but it is not necessary to this process. The water can be replenished without breaking the vessel, the trust or the body.
It is among my goals to cultivate awareness of this.
So trust is built and we gather ourselves inside many many types of trust, and perhaps they are even as cascading as waterfalls of life flowing one into the other—let your own imagination guide your own understanding.
The point is, whatever you may think you are, you are much more than that, and whatever happens, stay strong and keep creating, revealing, healing, and growing, NO MATTER HOW BROKEN YOU SEEM, FEEL, LOOK, no matter WHAT, life is a continuous process, and in the pool, the water is the guarantee, the vessel we put there to draw it out and the manner in which we do this, the experience and future and pleasure of that is the possibility. The goal of life is not to be unbroken, life IS unbroken, it cannot be broken, it is only the vessel that breaks, dies, the point is to keep BUILDING, and life will flow whether you do or not, it’s really a matter of choice as to what you can put there to put yourself into.
The road to recovery from self or other abuse or substance abuse or any kind of ruin is a creative and building process and it is actually the simple process of living life and in this wise, we are all of us here on the same terms, if not on other terms as well.
Btw, if you happen to ever find a waterfall pool of chocolate milk, I happen to be very interested in that.
~cc
“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
~BRUCE LEE
