Fire And Flow |
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By: Beca Lewis Posted: 2010-09-28 08:20:33 |
| During one of our early morning talks in the dark, Del with his coffee and me with my honey and vinegar, we sat watching the fire in our stove.The fire was doing something we had never seen before. It would quiet down so that all that we saw were very hot logs, and then a spurt or whiff of fire would rise and immediately blink out, as the entire roof of the stove would suddenly be alive with flame. Within moments it would quiet down and repeat the process, but never the same way twice.Fire is like that, it is never the same way twice, and yet the essence of it is always the same. Everyone knows fire when they see it even though it has an infinite variety of ways to express itself.This made me think of plans and making lists. Yes, I know that on the surface it appears to be a strange connection. But, just a moment before we were talking about plans and lists, and the fire's show that morning was the perfect symbol of the difference between how we think things should be, and how it is when we are aware instead of how life flows.I thought, "What if we were more like fire when we made plans and lists?" What if instead of saying this is exactly how my day, my work, my party, my dinner, my life-my anything-is going to go, what if instead we accepted that the essence of our plans will always be perfect, and then let the outcome be expressed in a variety of interesting, and yes, beautiful ways.What if we flowed like fire? Then instead of feeling remorse, or guilt, or anger, or emotion of any kind when our plans do not go as we expect, or we don't finish our to-do lists, we flowed like fire and lived within the awareness of the beauty and uniqueness of each moment.What if instead of seeing ourselves as limited humans, we saw ourselves as a unique expression of consciousness, then no matter what happens, we would be aware of our innate, individual perfection of being.When we study fire it is easy to see that no matter what shape it takes, it remains fire. We can see the same thing with anything in nature. A tree remains a tree, a squirrel remains a squirrel.It is when we get to ourselves that we often stop having this basic awareness. We think if we haven't done this or that, or the situation we are in is not as we planned, that we ourselves have been impacted and become someone else.However, the Truth is, that we remain who we have been and always will be.Even if we don't know who we are, it doesn't change who we are. As we let go of expectations and fears and judgments the view of ourselves begins to clear up. When that happens we often think that we have changed, but we haven't. Instead, we have begun to see the face of our own fire, the Truth of our being.In his excellent book, "The War of Art" Stephen Pressfield makes the point that we must always be about our work. Yes, we must. Just as fire must be doing fire, we must be doing who we are.However, if we make the mistake of measuring that idea in human, linear, and stilted terms we miss the fact that when we are aware of the essence of ourselves, like the fire, whatever we are doing we are doing "our work".I love making lists and plans. I have a list by my computer I check every hour. I have plans for today and plans for next year. However, if my plans change either in the next moment or the next month it will not change who I am. And if I don't let emotions cloud my awareness, it will also not change the quality of my day or my life.As we strip off expectations and judgments and discover the infinite ways that we express the essence of our being, we discover that we have always been an individual expression of the Divine Mind.We are like the fire. The only real plan of fire is to be fire. Like fire, we flow into and as our life in an infinite variety of ways, always remaining ourselves. We will become increasingly aware of this fact when we let joy be our guide, and gratitude light our flame. Then our lives become what they are, a spectacular show of infinite expression. Never the same, always beautiful.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Subscribe To Beca's The Shift Ezine and get free Ecourses here: http://budurl.com/bfpkYou have permission to reprint this article as long as it is copied in full without changes and includes the following footer:*Article by Beca Lewis, author of Living in Grace: The Shift to Spiritual Perception. Visit http://www.theshift.com/ez.html for more ideas to help Shift perception. Reprint permission granted with this footer included. |
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