Subtle Rules

I was at a party recently, observing fifty or so twenty-somethings interacting with each other. They all had their stories, their dramas. I began thinking. Then writing.

If you keep scraping at the garden, you will never allow anything to grow. People in our hungry modern world are always scraping at the clay of our hearts. They always have a new thought, a new plan, a new syndrome, that explains why they are the way they are. They have found an old memory that opens a new wound. They keep on relentlessly, again and again, scraping the clay away from their own hearts. In nature we do not see the trees, for instance, getting seriously involved in therapeutic analysis of their own root systems or the whole stony world that they had to avoid on their way to the light. Each tree grows in two directions at once, into the darkness and out to the light with as many branches and roots as it needs to embody its wild roots.

And then I began pondering many a friend’s comment that I "think too much".

Negative introspection damages the soul. It holds many people trapped for years and years, and ironically, it never allows them to change. It is wise to allow the soul to carry on its secret work in the night side of your life. You might not see anything stirring for a long time. You might have only the slightest intimations of the secret growth that is happening within you, but these intimations are sufficient. We should be fulfilled and satisfied with them. You cannot dredge the depths of the soul with the meager light and self-analysis. The inner world never revelas itself cheaply.

Perhaps analysis is the wrong way to approach our inner dark.

-HKR