Apprentice, journeyman, master

Threshold crossings need to be hard. And we get to choose the thresholds we cross.

This is what it means to give sovereign choice.

There is a wacky belief that because you live in a community, state or nation, your rights trump the rights of anyone. (The use of language was deliberate.) By nature of being in a community, we agree to the laws of that community. If we do not like the laws we get to vote (or leave the community), and if voting is not possible, we get to protest. To become activists. History tells of those who began revolutions of change that took decades, centuries.

But to insist that my rights come without any responsibility to the rights of my fellow inhabitants, including non human inhabitants, and even the non sentient inhabitants, is to enact a story that says the individual is supreme.

That story is a story of death, and its time is over.

Show me, anywhere in the course of history, all the way back to the beginning, an individual that survived, from birth to adulthood, as the solo individual?

We need each other. We need healthy soil. We need a healthy home planet.

If we choose a journey towards mastery, the path is not straight. There is a direction. A vector of intention. We choose to begin in no-where-land, the novice. Inept. Stumbling. Open to learning.

As our skill solidifies, we become the teachers to the new apprentice, and in the teaching learn.

Mastery is the place we arrive when we pick up our instrument, and still learning, we play with the ease of exhaling.

We can choose to support action from the periphery. To champion. No major threshold crossing required. But to become an active participant, to be fully engaged, we must choose to cross, and as we do, pay the ferryman. The price — paid in multiple domains. Currency. Commitment. Time. Learning. Sweat. Breakdown and breakthrough. Love.

Beautiful. Awe inspiring. Hard. Love.

Photo taken July 27th, 2020