Timely and relevant writings keep coming my way!
And they seem beautifully connected.
Yesterday, I casually picked up the latest issue of Lavender Magazine and found myself drawn to the following words of editor Andrew Stark. Indeed, I soon realized that Stark’s words serve as a wonderful follow-up to the insights of Jeff Foster – and my own related question of how to “hold everything in love” – that I shared in my last post.
The connection between positivity and general well-being is not a new concept. Park et al. (2016) wrote the following in an article for the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, “Evidence is accumulating that a happy, engaged, and fulfilling psychological and social life is not just a consequence of good health, it is what leads people to live a healthy and long life.” In other words, positivity and health go hand in hand.
Positivity in this sense is not merely the absence of negativity; it is the presence of self-love. If you exercise self-love, you create positive energy, thus sending that energy into the world. Think of it as a kind of light source, touching everything around you. And since we are all ambassadors of a cosmic consciousness, what Carl Sagan called “a way for the universe to know itself,” our self-love is also a gesture of universal peace. By loving yourself, the world is made better.
If flowers are, as Eckhart Tolle explains in A New Earth, “the enlightenment of the plant,” then we, too, are the enlightenment – or flowering – of a universal consciousness. And like flowers, we are colorful and exquisite.
Unfortunately, I do not know the name of the artist who created the beautiful image that opens this post. It’s an image that is very meaningful to me as I see it as representing the sacred or divine source (what Stark calls “cosmic consciousness”) that is both within and beyond us. In my view, the cultivating of “self-love,” i.e., the connecting to and living from one’s deepest Self, requires an openness to and relationship with this divine source, one which many people refer to as “God,” and which since ancient times and across religions and cultures, has been symbolized by light.
With the awareness that I am both aligned with and an embodiment of the sacred; that I am, in other words, with and of the living light, I am ready (blessed, if you will) to go out into my day and share through my words, actions, and presence this transforming light with others. I trust that this sharing cannot but help encourage others to get in touch with and live from (to whatever extent they’re able) their own inner light; their own source of and connection to the divine.
May it be so!
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• A Sacred Pause
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• The Light Within
• No Stranger Am I
• The Source Is Within You
• Like the Sun
• “There's Light in Love, You See”
• Cultivating Stillness
• Blue Yonder
• Dancer Calvin Royal III: Stepping Into His Light
• In the Dance of Light, Eyes of Fiery Passion
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Marianne Williamson
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Eckhart Tolle
• Diarmuid O'Murchú on Our Capacity to Meditate
• Thoughts on Christian Meditation | II | III | IV | V
• Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: Quote of the Day – February 8, 2013
• Chadwick Boseman and That “Heavenly Light”
Opening image: Artist unknown.
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