A **WOW!** quote ... and a wander through discipline, wanting, and oneness

Discipline is remembering what you want.
~ David Campbell ~

Reader, what's your first response to those words? Go, jot them down, then come back and read ...

... My first response was a bursting-open heart chakra. Then my intuiting mind exploded with a YES!

Discipline is remembering what you want.

My body and being remembered in an instant. There were (and still are) no words for what those burstings of sensation could mean ... except for ... Life.

My body remembers such a wanting; my mind does not. Hmm ...

Wanting from the heart (for that is where we first respond from) ... wanting love and joy and quiet communion; wanting warmth. Wanting soft and hardy arms to embrace me until I want something else. Wanting like an infant, from the body, from the heart. Wanting and needing to give and receive touch, gaze, and coo. Wanting and needing that primary sustenance of blending in relation with other beings -- the wanting that comes from our recognition that we are inextricably bonded in relation with every other being that lives. This recognition of our place in relation can seem terrifying at first ... for through relation, we respond ... and if our sense of relation is based in the heart, then we can't help but respond ... and who doesn't know the exhaustion of too much response? Anyone familiar with burnout?

... and yet: the heart. The heart who will never cease to relate and respond. The heart who can only rest in relation. We are made and moulded for relation -- this is our soul's central purpose. Without relation, we die or go mad.

From the eighth Hexagram/Principle, UNION, evolves our full understanding that we exist in a state of inevitable and intrinsic relation with other beings. There's a startling realization, too -- that we are called by our hearts to respond in relation, to act in relation ...

To realize the principle of UNION is to accept our place in relation with all other beings ... to recognize that we are always at rest in our intrinsic UNION with others ... and to apprehend that when we act in relation with others, we will never exhaust ourselves.

I've been coming to realize this over the last 13 years or so ... through wrenching events like a divorce, my mother's death, several betrayals, and a chronic health crisis. I have also come to realize my intrinsic and rightful place in relation -- I matter to someone ... to several someones. I really do exist in relation with others. Our lives are intertwined -- we all are threads who strengthen one another through our bonds. We are weavers ... of one another.

May we all come to realize our interweaving ... Only through this, will we stop all our wars.

Amen.

Visionary art, "Creatrix", by Jack Haas ... His site is at http://www.jackhaas.net/