Thursday, August 30, 2007
Sacred things
What we hold sacred does much to define us as a people, but more importantly, as individuals. IS your body sacred? Your mind? Your spirit? How about your word, your honor, or your image? What we value determines who we are. If we do not value our bodies, they are worthless. If we do not value our mind, it will become useless. If we do not value our spirits, we are essentially nothing. Certain things should be sacred. There are parts of our physical, intellectual, and spiritual lives that simply should not be compromised or cheapened. It's that simple, as far as I'm concerned.
All day, every day, a person, or group of people, is trying to get someone to compromise. Overtly and covertly, we are constantly asked to compromise our spirituality, our opinions, our sense of self-worth, our moral position, our ideals, etc, etc, etc. Why? Why do people continually seek concessions from others where base principles and values are concerned? More importantly, why do we feel compelled to succumb? We are nothing if we are not beings with principles and beliefs. Without a vision to guide us, we are hollow and pointless, at best. At worst, our lives are spent doling out and ingesting misery.
With only one journey to create and shape who we are, there is no goodness in expending life's energy devaluing what we are. I'm not perfect, too far from it to ever make myself completely right again, but I feel like I have won at least a small victory in realizing my faults and engaging in honest work to address them. In so doing, I've come to realize just how dangerous compromising core values can be. The very act of compromise diminishes us, as it makes us liars whispering in our own ears. Once we start lying to ourselves, we are truly lost.
I have a hard time with values, not in embracing them, but in my acceptance of the reality of values in a human society. People who claim to have values are everywhere. Every sane person has some declared value system, but people who live their values are rare as diamonds and infinitely more precious. If only we could segregate, by some wholly objective method, the principled from the unscrupulous. We could each have our Walden Pond experiences among people with similar hopes and aspirations. In a pure place, we could find ourselves purified, and better placed to harness our full potential. Ascension would be something we do, instead of something we strive for. Let the sociopaths, narcissists, and egomaniacs have the rest of the Earth. Give me a corner of the globe in paradise where I might spend my days surrounded by seekers and travelers.
A place where Lindsay Lohan doesn't qualify as newsworthy. A place where cheap and easy were universally irrelevant. Somewhere where the life journey, with its struggles and triumphs, was in and of itself the point. A secret land where the souls are golden as the sun and our days could be spent evolving, rather than continually running in place on a broken treadmill. Our values and sacred dreams are more than who we are, they are everything we could be. Without these things, we are wasted time. Maybe I really am suffering some sort of mental disorder, because I'm becoming crazy enough to believe my own bullshit. :)
If you're wondering what the tag below is all about, it's my effort to share a bit more of how I think. I listen to music continually, and I remember MySpace having a function that allowed a blogger to post information about the song they were listening to at the time of posting. Come to find out, FoxyTunes (a Firefox plug-in) allows a similar tag to be inserted into HTML forms and windows. So, I'll try to remember to tag future posts in order to share a little bit of what's inspiring all this nonsense. It seemed like the type of thing my 2 or 3 steady visitors might enjoy...and I'm enough of a geek to think it's cool. ;)
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Now playing: Amy Winehouse - Back To Black
via FoxyTunes
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