Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
- (Sufi Poet Rumi)


Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Shining Your Mirror


Recently while in Guatemala I kept hearing how “bad” humans were and that we weren’t as good or pure as the birds and the forest. The people telling me this were folks working with front line conservation in very bad conditions in the north forest of Guatemala. They were using all their people skills, mental abilities, patience, and heart to treat one another with compassion and to help save the planet. I worked with them as avian veterinarian, and also as “conservation chaplain,” trying to help them by being the mirror that showed their human essence as being beyond wrong doing or right doing. Believe me, this took work, because I had also to keep doing my deep spiritual work of shining my own mirror so it could reflect love and beauty back to them. It isn’t easy to shine with acceptance in a world so full of pain, sorrow, and disappointment, however, I know no other path for we humans to come into our own possibility of belonging on this planet so that the days of all beings may be long, and belong.

Where in your life do you experience others or yourself as “wrong” or “right?”How do you shine your own mirror so that others see that they are being wrongdoing and rightdoing?

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