Cardinals in brush — a parable?

© 2017 Peter Free

 

31 December 2017

 

 

Caveat

 

Only for the spiritually tuned.

 

 

Flutter of cardinals

 

Flat south Texas is not my mountain self's best liking. But it has virtues. Winter, for example, is warm compared to the survival challenge posed by higher latitudes and altitudes.

 

On a gray but above freezing day, repeatedly mountain biking up the only steepish hill I could find, I noticed a branch-perched red cardinal. He watched from among a cluster of birds.

 

Fatigue allowed me to stop and be still, without suffering non-achievement's guilt.

 

No questions. No ambition. Just emptiness. Or fullness, depending upon one's perspective regarding the inexpressible.

 

 

Pertinent because

 

As Jiddu Krishnamurti once said:

 

 

No statesman, no teacher, no guru, no one can make you strong inwardly, supremely healthy.  As long as you are in disorder . . . you will create the external prophet, and he will always be misleading you.

 

[T]o be psychologically free and original can only come about when you are aware of your own inward activities, watch what you are thinking and never let one thought escape without observing the nature of it, the source of it.

 

When you watch attentively, with diligence, there is nothing to learn; there is only that vast space, silence and emptiness, which is all-consuming energy.

 

Love is as real, as strong, as death.

 

© 1987 J. Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal (HarperOne 1987) (respectively at pages 62, 122, 70, 82 and 134)

 

 

The moral? — Will we help, from a perspective grounded in accurate awareness?

 

Or oppress, resolutely buried in flailing ignorance?

 

Discover in stillness.