Brilliant red Flame trees sit side by side with the delicate mauve of a Jacaranda. It’s a popular combination, to be planted in gardens and along the roadsides, and it hits my eyes with continuous delight as I drive the seven hours - down the mountains, skirt the great city and head north and into a Spring which arrived six weeks earlier than back here, at home, one mile high - in the hills - and in the sky.
‘One mile high’ is a comfortable place to live if you’ve a cottage to live in. .... after all ... mountains do grow much higher.
‘We are all one.’ is true from the lofty standpoint of a mountain peak but a mountain peak is both unsuitable and inhospitable for permanent residence by man, woman or beast. Flowers do not grow there. Nothing lives there.
That breadth of vision - seen from space or mountain peak is real but how to maintain such vision in daily life - which is what occurs on the coastal plains where the horizon may well be a street corner and a red tile roof..... an apartment window and a dusty street.
We are all one doesn’t have the ring of truth when surfing the coastal plains. Vision is reduced and often to blank eyed nothing but not really - not when cunning replaces ‘true’ behaviour.
‘Oh yea,’ .... sigh ... ‘What’s that then? .... ‘True’ behaviour ?’
Back to the mountain peak where the companions you may have travelled with share an approach to life which is uncommon. There are traits of character - the ability to endure in the face of obstacles, both large and small but obstacles all - and to ultimately overcome by virtue of what once may have been called patience but, like a rose in bud, reveals more dimension when in flower.
How can you not display endurance on the way to a mountain top... literal or otherwise.
‘To thine own self be true.’
That’s nice but first you have to know who you are and you can’t find that out unless you’re in a position to observe yourself and, by that, I mean - observe how you interact with others, have a think about what motivates the words that come out of your mouth....the actions you take or fail to take.
Along the way - if you’re serious - you uncover many a rock, buried deep in the sludge of your mind, and which exposes just how capable we are - if ‘we’ are truly ‘all one’ or not - to create heaven or hell on earth for those who have the good fortune or misfortune to pass our way - to cross our path.
Creating hell - it’s what some of us do. If cunning replaces the ‘natural’ - the instinctive knowledge that we all possess which recognises right from wrong .... which knows that greed and love do not co-exist, then the possibility of a real relationship evaporates.
Having recognised that reality in this particular world, I recognise that many, in apparent human guise, are literally monsters and become so, as I see it, by abusing their power of free will. Members of our immediate or extended family, they take no responsibility while they take everything else.
Love gets worn away within me by contact with such people and its threadbare cousin consists of good will and probably nothing more.
‘People change.’ was what I’d said, in conversation with sharp minded sister.
Quick as a flash she replied ‘No they don’t.’
Hmm ..... people do change ... or some do but whether it’s because of a deep change of heart or simply a recognition that the games played no longer work - that’s another question.