Courage (by feralkat)

Courage. It can't be found in formless pursuit or in forms laced to the bone of my ankle. Freedom has been hardly known, rarely practiced, wound up in clanking, honking duties.

We have all been forewarned since childhood to hurry, time's passing by, still, sometimes the beauty of a vanished moment can be more encompassing than a present awareness of the now. And if you are looking at a painting, or serving up a gourmet meal, it can be both here and/or not to be here. Commitment, due diligence, ambition are noble enough, but only when touched by grace do they rise above the mundane into a place of deeper understanding. With new awareness comes an intolerance for complacency, to make room for enthusiasm.

But that's not enough sometimes. We already don't like it because of the intolerance factor. There's already a dichotomy. From the simplicity of nature, the Huntress Goddess looks at the charred bones of the feast and would rather see a living bison. It's not the awareness, but the intolerance that is intolerable in the awareness. Until the intolerance thunder-cloud rolls on.

You have to break in your new shoes before you can walk comfortably in them. We want to be perfectly beyond intolerance and here come the ghosts marching down Bourbon Street blaring jazz that you can hear above the white noise of the buzzing traffic. All these centuries worth of programming from expectancies, from learning, from knowledge, experience, reaction, genetics, conditioning - like a nightmare they come out howling and dancing around a bonfire in the moonlight, a couple of shadowy gremlins with blood-dripping grins emerge, yes, it can be that grotesque. It's undeniably a fight to stay alive.

Courage, to bludgeon the darkness, but even sometimes just to take a baby-step into the light, the blinding light, with no dilution. Those old ideals of perfection, those are the last straw, the one that breaks the camel's back. You were born just this last Spring and you haven't seen a season like summer or winter yet before. And even in the present our instincts have an awareness of changes, we can trust the sunrise and sunset to happen once each every day of our consciousness. Courage, not with a mask like the Lone Ranger, overblown with hard-ridin' horses and yelping sharp-shooters, but as a process of living, of bringing hotly brilliant vibrant energy through the ever-so-resistant belly push-button solar plexus. That deep spot where the body knows things the mind doesn't know, because it's always computing. A place where the belly button does not negate, but rather, accepts the full garden of intellect and all it's potential seeds because the solar plexus is non-judgmental. Be courage fueled by awakening, in whatever you do, think and say.