At the Centre of the Compass

Pukaki 1

I wonder how many of us spend time exploring ourselves and why we do things. I wonder how many of us spend time looking at our own journey and the direction our life has taken.

I think things begin to change when we look beneath the surface and especially when we realise that in a way we are icebergs drifting on the Ocean of the Infinite, with most of who we really are below the waterline. We like to think we are who we experience, that the daytime, when we are consumed by living, defining and achieving our goals is reality.

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Icarus at the crossroads-2

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.”

– Antoine De Saint-Exupery

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

It isn’t easy being Libran.

I think that there may be some things for which we Librans have an instinctive loathing or perhaps fear. One of those would have to be the crossroad. We get to a crossroad and we must  make a decision. We must choose.  This of course throws most Librans into a spin, for making a choice implies committing oneself to a particular course of action and living with the consequences. They may work out well. Or they may not. We may have made the ” right” choice or we may have added up two plus two and given ourselves an answer of five. We will set out, confident we’ve made the best possible choice, only to find out later on that it was not the right one. And then we are faced with either being told we are wrong or, worse still, sitting there in the darkness, telling ourselves we were wrong, that we should have taken an altogether different route, made another,  in hindsight, wiser choice. Perhaps the fear lies not so much in the act of choosing but rather in the consequences of the choice and the possibility of a future self-beat-up.

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What is it that binds us all together, what is that that joins all living things?

It is breathing. Hau.

When I breathe, I am sharing the air that circles our planet and infuses everything. When I breathe, I am sharing the air that all livng things need to sustain their lives.

When I breathe, I am sharing the air that all men are breathing. Not only that, I am sharing the air that all those before me have breathed, have inhaled and exhaled, have taken in, absorbed, transmuted and then exhaled. I am breathing the past and all that has gone before me.  I am thus physically connected to my ancestors, my tupuna, along with the descendants of all those around me, seen and unseen, known and unknown. I am also breathing the same air that those who follow will breathe. I am therefore physically and directly connected to the future. For this reason, because I breathe, I am part of everything, connected to the All, connected physically to every thing.

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Day after day alone on the hill,
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still,

I imagine all the people I am and I am all the people I imagine.

If I was to sit, my back pressed against one of the trees in the middle of Fitzgerald Avenue and watch the traffic, to be amongst it, what would happen?

For a time, I suspect, nothing much. People would drive past, on their own journeys. Whichever way I faced, I would have my back to one stream and my face to the other. Some would come from behind, while others would come toward me. Some might look up or to one side and observe me. Others would not. They might wonder why a man was sitting there. They would, no doubt, draw their own assumptions about why I was there and a few might wonder who I was. Almost all would make some kind of judgement. He is a nutter; he is homeless; he is a druggie or he is mad. In doing so they would affirm their own beliefs. They would pin their own illusion on me, or attempt to do so.

I might do the same. but I would try not to.

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