Sit Around The Fire
Reading time: 4 minutes
Themes: Presence, gratitude, change
“Quiet the mind, open the heart. How do you quiet the mind? You meditate. How do you open the heart? You start to love that which you can love and just keep expanding it. You love a tree, you love a river, you love a leaf, you love a flower, you love a cat, you love a human. But go deeper and deeper into that love ‘til you love that which is the source of the light behind all of it.”
I recently had a discussion with a close friend in a hot tub on the plains of eastern Colorado. In the last few years, I’ve grown to love the opportunities hot tubs provide, allowing for deep conversations with loved ones and a preponderance of contemplations about our world. Our discussion that evening surrounded visions, progress updates, and encouragement for the similar yet separate journeys we are currently engaged with. That evening I left with more joy, confidence, and gratitude as the pertinence of community had once again been reinforced in my mind. It can be challenging in social media to make time for the critical human connection we all desperately need to progress on our journeys in a healthy way.
Community is only recently a notion I’ve set my sights on as a top priority thanks to some of the incredibly positive influence I’ve received and contributed to in my own community. Life has been full of change for us all recently. It’s genuinely remarkable to honestly take stock of the amount of change and instability the world has undergone in the past few years, and often times our mental health suffers as a result. There is a pattern that I’ve become privy to recently as I engage with other people - kin and strangers alike. It seems that many of us, as a result of the change the world has undergone, have changed and adapted in parallel. We became aware of the things in our lives that are no longer serving us and haven’t been for some time. The hum of routine and mundanity came to a halt, and we had to figure out what our lives look like beyond that.
Fortunately, the adaptation I’ve witnessed has been incredibly positive. I’ve seen friends and family get married and start lives, abandon security to pursue dreams, and embrace discomfort in pursuit of a fuller life. Strangers have expressed similar observations repeatedly in conversation as well - the common theme surrounding this change is growth and resilience during adversity. Another good friend and I often exchange excerpts and quotes to motivate and support each other. Today he sent me the following:
“A proper understanding of impermanence comes from witnessing your experience, not thinking about it. All of us can understand impermanence on a conceptual level but still be caught in the suffering attachment creates. When we pay careful attention to our lives, as we do in meditation, the mind sees the nature of experience more clearly and organically releases its grip. This is wisdom.”
Change is inevitable, and while I believe growth and resilience are something humanity has gained in abundance due to being alive through the last few years, it’s inspiring to look at the connection gained to our hearts and true selves as well. Our minds are incredibly powerful tools capable of sorting through thousands of thoughts every day and making sense of them. Our thoughts can evoke anything from anxiety to gratitude and anything in between. At the end of the day, though, we are not our thoughts - our thoughts are simply a byproduct of being human. Great teachers such as Ram Dass remind us that the real work we have to do occurs in the privacy of our own hearts. The key to discovering who we are and what we genuinely want to be will always remain in our hearts, devoid of stimulus from anything or anyone else.
Pay attention to your heart and nurture your inner voice and intuition that results from doing so. Allow thoughts to come and go, taking stock of them but remaining stable as they transit. You exist outside of them and constantly will, so engaging with any thought for too long will only muddy the waters of your own connection to the world and your role in it. Let the judgments and opinions of the mind be judgments and opinions of the mind, and you exist behind that.
“Everything in you that you don’t need, you can let go of. You don’t need loneliness, for you couldn’t possibly be alone. You don’t need greed because you already have it all. You don’t need doubt because you already know.
As if in each of us, there once was a fire, and for some of us, there seems as if there are only ashes now. But when we dig in the ashes, we find one ember, and very gently, we fan that ember.
Blow on it, and it gets brighter, and from that ember, we rebuild the fire.
[The] only important thing is that ember. That’s what you and I are here to celebrate. Though we’ve lived our lives involved in the world, we know. We know that we’re of the spirit. Pretty soon, you realize that all we’re going to do for eternity is sit around the fire.”
