We Are Formed of Ancient Clay
Have you ever had the sense that you are feeling something that resonates within you but is not of your own memory - your own personal experience? I would guess that most people reading this now have had such an experience.
Those drawn to my pages are usually on a journey of self-discovery and are what might be called empaths - meaning you are highly sensing and sensitive, more intuitive than intellectually based in decisions, in tune to the emotions of others, naturally giving, and spiritually gifted. If so, I would also guess that when you have such feeling, sensings, or "knowings" is is often uncomfortable and left unshared.
PHOTO CREDIT: cANDACE bOHANNON
I've often had these experiences and it was affirming to come across this beautiful passage in John O'Donohue's, Anam Cara.
“You represent an unknown world that begs you to bring it to voice. Often the joy you feel does not belong to your individual biography but to the clay out of which you are formed. At other times, you will find sorrow moving through you, like a dark mist over a landscape. This sorrow is dark enough to paralyze you. It is a mistake to interfere with this movement of feeling. It is more appropriate to recognize that this emotion belongs more to your clay than to your mind. It is wise to let this weather of feeling pass: it is on its way elsewhere. We so easily forget that our clay has a memory that proceded our minds, a life of its own before it took its present form. Regardless of how modern we seem, we still remain ancient, sisters and brothers of the one clay. In each of us a different part of the mystery becomes luminous. To truly be and become yourself, you need the ancient radiance of others.” ”
O'Donohue provides a loving and soothing balm for our overcritical mind by "reminding" us of our belonging to something far greater than this point in time. We, indeed, belong to the universe.
We are an ancient people participating in an ancient and incomprehensible dance of life - from no beginning and with no end (that we can truly prove or know). And, at times, we feel in our bodies these ancient emotions running through us. In a universal sense, we comprehend them and "know" them though in our present sense, they are not "of us".
Our path is to allow the movement of these ancient emotions immersed, within the clay that formed us, to flow through us unencumbered - perhaps to bear witness - though not to slow down or stop - not to provide residence - to simply allow passage.
When we witness and allow both joy and sorrow - happiness and grief - pain and ecstasy - to run through us - to breathe in and out of us - to not take up permanent residence within us, we allow a balance to emerge - a much needed balance.
This is the path of universal healing in the most loving and compassionate sense.
“And All Will Be Well. And All Will Be Well. And All Manner of Things Will Be Well.”
May You Be Well.