Courage Rises in the Heart

Courage.  I’ve contemplated, wrote and signed off with Courage for so many years now- certainly it is available to be drawn from the ‘bank account’ of practice.  I feel simultaneously up to the task and so very inadequate.  Courage—from the French cour and sage—or at least that is how I like to think of it, courage as ‘wisdom of the heart.’  The marriage of intellect and highest compassion coupled with the capacity to confront and in that, access whatever skill held to act in accordance with the heart’s deepest desire.

The Heart here defined as Consciousness writ large, the source of all creative impulse and manifestation and also its dissolution.  To borrow from Abraham Lincoln, it is the home of “our better angels.” How can we listen?  How can we invite this wisdom?  We must go there, experience must be had, there is no other way.

I have spent many years forging a clearer path to the Heart; I have steeped and continue to do so daily, in its dynamic throb.  I have soaked in the light of Consciousness and take great comfort from its unending source and I feel the pain of challenge not less, but oh so much more potently!  How can this be?  Meditation makes you stronger and also weaker; weaker to do that which is deleterious to cultivating our higher circumstance.  Perhaps this is why I cannot look away from the terror that is all around now in the time of Covid 19, and feel it more acutely.

My inadequacy to the task at hand has me grieving.  Yes, I fear for myself and those I love but it is so much deeper than that.  Truly I am not worried about myself.  I will move through with grace as cultivation of grace is ongoing.  But how can I assist and ease the suffering I feel mounting?  It is hard to separate the personal from the public here and I am not sure it is even warranted. 
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So, I continue to nurture courage and the heightened capacity to act with skill and compassion.  In communicating with our various groupings, we fertilize the seed of desire. The incipient sprout needs tender care to blossom.  It matters.  What we do matters even if it is simply to add a drop of courage to the collective bucket of light, the scale is tipped.