Falling in Love with the World

It seems silly now, but I once believed that life needed to be a certain way for me to even be able to tolerate it. I needed to be in the right mood. I needed things to go my way. I needed to achieve my dreams. I needed people to appreciate me more. Such foolishness.

I saw myself as a consumer of the world rather than the creator of it, and I was far from a happy customer. I wanted to complain to the manager of this shitshow but could never find anyone willing to take responsibility, so I just blamed other people instead. I didn’t realize that ‘the manager’ stared back at me each time I looked in the mirror.

Beauty Comes from Within

I stubbornly persisted with the ludicrous notion that it was the world that wrong for decades. I blamed the world for my own inner turmoil. I couldn’t see that it was my inner resistance to life that was creating my external nightmare.

Beauty comes from within. I call this beauty ‘stillness’, an it is the recognition of this same stillness in the external world that causes me to fall in love with it. It is because I no longer need anything from the external world (this stillness is always there no matter what) that makes this love unconditional. The strangest thing is that the less I need life to go my way, the more it seems to.

I no longer need the world to fix me because it was only the stillness that was ever required. I realized the real motivation behind every one of my desperate attempt to exert my will on the world was only ever to get closer to the wholeness that is found in stillness. I needn’t have bothered because it was always already there. In fact, my efforts to find wholeness made it seem like I was further away than ever.

‘For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.’

Wendell Berry (from his poem ‘ The Peace of Wild Things’)

The world is such a beautiful place when we stop resisting it. Everything we want is already here. Everything that we think we want can only give us what is already here.

In this video, I talk more about falling in love with the world.

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