Monday, August 12, 2013

The Cycle of Great Work

      We are all set out to do work in this world. Whatever work we do, whether it is healing work, building work, physical work, inspirational work, ecstatic work, or any work otherwise or inclusively . . . though this work may be for others, the work we do for community is inherently for ourselves. This sounds selfish at first. I pray you dig deeper and swim within the pool of cooled meaning to my statement. As humans, we are thinkers. As thinkers, we walk out into the world and find as may ways in which we can identify ourselves with the surrounding  world. (Thus was born the poetic artistry of personification!) And in striving to identify ourselves through our surroundings, the work we fall upon doing somehow is
the work our innate selves set out to do because somewhere deep inside us our work is identifying with our deep selves and bringing us even deeper within the caves of self mystery.

      We may heal people, but the healing is primarily for us. We may building homes to support the lives of others, but that work is really the work of building our own lives, stable upon the ground. We may encourage others to be physically fit and train people to live more healthy and productive lives, but this work is just as much for ourselves as it is for the people we do it for. Wellness for us, through the wellness we teach others; foundation for us, by way of the foundation we build for others; healing that we so deeply need, by healing the people in our lives and in our communities and around the world. As dancers, we shift and move for the world, our own souls who need the flame of Salsa, the giddiness of the jitterbug, or the slow, hypotically passionate flow whilst embracing a lover.

      A wise woman once spoke to a group of my fellow pupils and I during a club meting back in high school. She told us how she wasn't able to accept her daughter being Lesbian. Not at first at least. She said, "I realized that in order to accept my daughter, I first needed to accept myself." Many of us hear that often and in many different ways, and it's important that we do because this here describes the process of the all the
work we have ever done and continue to do in our lives, all of it interconnected with the work of our surrounding kin and the natural world(s). In order to love others, you first need to love yourself; in order to strengthen or heal or teach others, you must first strengthen yourself, heal yourself, teach yourself, or at least be open to the flow of knowledge to be taught. You cannot provide outside of you if you cannot first provide for yourself. Otherwise, doing so would be equivalent to sitting on a chair with missing legs; no support. Once you do the work on yourself, you can further do the work outside of yourself.

      But this isn't enough. This isn't the end of the work. More inner work is required. We do the work from the inside-out. Shaping ourselves, we shape the world around us. Then, it is time for the world we've surrounded ourselves in to shape us, reform us, working from the outside-in. The work we do for others becomes us, is us in extension. It's like extending our self out into unseen realms, then retracting our self and bringing this newly refined piece of us within our own being, to once again be transformed into a different yet still gorgeous being.

      So do remember that the work we do on self does help the world, and that that isn't the end of the work of our lives, for we are still constantly growing, even after mastery of our destined work.

May our work transform the world into beauty; may our beauteous world transform us and our work.

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