The Rose is without why

She blooms because she blooms

She does not care for herself

Asks not if she is seen.

….Meister Eckhart

This beautiful, crushing life allows us to doubt, to cower, to slither out of our own skin, and to disavow heartbreak…..like the rose we don’t know our beauty, deny it, fight it, and forget the thorns are there to let us shine…….dive deep into the silkiest heart of the rose…

Disillusionment, though deeply painful, offers an opportunity for cultivating discernment and healing unhealthy patterns and tendencies in a way that few other things do. What is brighter, more essential, and more true can shine forth when we break down the illusions we have overlaid onto reality. At such times in our lives, a deep interior need compels us to try to discern what we have previously been unable, or unwilling, to see. In seeing, there exists the possibility to take far greater responsibility for our lives, to open ourselves to more understanding, more heartbreak, more challenge, more expansion, and also to serve humanity in progressively deeper ways. Although we may have felt we were looking inward in years past- and we always have been doing so to the degree that we were capable of at the time- we now find ourselves turning more deeply toward our true selves than we ever have before. Sometimes we do this consciously, but more often, life simply breaks us open….Mariana Caplan

light up in crimson red

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap…..Vladimir Nabokov