Lighting the Splendid Torch
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose
recognized by yourself as a mighty one …
I am of the opinion that my life belongs
to the whole community and as long as I live it
is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die,
for the harder I work, the more I live.
I rejoice in life for its own sake.
Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me.
It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment,
and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible
before handing it on to future generations.”
~George Bernard Shaw
Amen. This is one of my very favorite quotes, even though I sometimes feel unworthy when I read it, like I haven’t quite got the torch burning brightly enough. Still, it brings tears of recognition, and I know that I am doing what I can with the moments I have. More often now, I recognize that the brightest burning comes from the stringing of moments, one bright bead of time after another, so that they all come together to create this splendid torch I call my life.
Consider how you are stringing your beads of time, and whether your torch is glowing as brightly as you’d like. So many of our moments are simply lost to the inevitable ‘to do’ list or in emotional response to past stories or future inventions. When we live fully alive to the gift of the moment (the ‘present’ ;-), we are creating a worthy torch to pass on to future generations.
It’s easy to be consumed by the negativity that surrounds us in the media and sometimes in our daily circumstances. It takes great compassion to live in a world where many are still homeless and hungry, while others live with more than we really need. In at least one way, those with excess have the bigger challenge: how do we choose where to focus our resources when the needs seem so much larger than any one person can fill?
Have you ever noticed how the very heart of compassion, the simple caring for others, is PASSION. It takes extreme passion to live in this world for the good of the whole, and to show up day after day after day doing what is needed to care for the less glamorous parts of our world.
It’s humbling to see the work that is already being done all around the world … people joining together to build bridges of hope, sustainability, and transformation. So many acts of simple giving become life-evolving, and we each hold the key to unlock a prison door for someone less fortunate than ourselves.
Andrew Harvey, sacred activist extraordinaire, guides us to follow our heartbreak…to choose one thing that hurts most and find a way to give to that. It doesn’t need to be a life-altering giving, although most of us know that when we give to that which is breaking our hearts, our lives are always changed. And this is a good thing.
Last month, I wrote about co-creative alchemy, and today I feel more passionate than ever before about the need for us to ACT TOGETHER in co-creation. This is a time of great change, and as visionary-futurist Barbara Marx-Hubbard so elegantly tells us, “collapse is an inevitable seed within the natural process of evolution.” We are the imaginal cels that are birthing a new way of being, and this is a powerful choice point for how we are to Serve this awakening society. (If you want the full juicy story about ‘imaginal cels’ watch Barbara’s enlightening video, ‘Humanity Ascending’.)
So … what is your heartbreak? Where is your passion? What bright or subtle burning will light your torch even more brightly?
And how might we come together to create a truly Splendid Torch to pass along to the next generation?
I celebrate the Light within each of you.
~Shining Sor’a