Brian’s Reflection: Monday, March 7, 2011

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that
within me there lay an invincible summer.

Albert Camus


Believe it or not, there are “depths of winter” even on the sunny Californian coast. I who have lived in the Eastern USA and in Canada know well the sense of a seemingly endless winter. I remember painfully how I, as a child bundled up in a snowsuit and boots and mitts and fur-lined hood, was sent out to “play” in the freezing snow and cold. How I despaired, experiencing even at age four a desolation of heart.

Now what a powerful symbol this has become in my mind for our World in these times! Does the human race go through this in cycles? I think so. I would say that certainly all individuals do. To be human means intrinsically to experience isolation, lostness, fragmentation, abandonment, fear. Americans, who so long have considered themselves immune, have discovered it in spades since 9/11 and the economic collapse - and have discovered the shallowness and ineffectuality of its religious and political underpinnings. It is the experience of having developed a unique Ego, then of not discovering that a unique Ego is not an End in itself, but the necessary preparation for Wholeness ~ and for the capacity to love.

I experience the World today as a collection of lost Egos. I smell its stink of fear ….. of a cold, bitter lostness in a “depth of winter”. It rises to our nostrils from Madison WI and the US Congress to Darfur to Libya to Saudi Arabia – from all places where humanity has become a casualty of lost Egos.

But Camus speaks the truth. There is “an invincible summer” at the very core of each human being. I know this is true, because I “know” it. I do not exactly know how I “know” it, or how I got there. Except perhaps in one way: I intuit that there is no distinction between myself and Being Itself. And that this is true for us all, for all things. If I can be said to have any “faith” at all, it is this.

I also sense this: I must surrender to this truth unconditionally. It is the only way to make my contribution to Wholeness, to Love, whatever that contribution may be. I think the same is true for you.

I am also reminded, by the many who have surrendered, that the cost can be heavy.

Brian+