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| Andy Warhol - Skull (1976) |
And fear is one of the great doorways; it is not to be fled from, it is to be entered.
The adventure is all that matters in the end. And adventure demands that you fight for what you desire, win or lose, and that you allow desire to sit on throne of your heart.
At whatever cost.
There is no love without loss, there is no joy without sorrow. It is all a transaction.
And the greater the treasure the higher the price.
When you embrace the adventure fully, all of it, you come to identify even the value of bitterness, and cherish it and store some of it for medicinal purposes. Sorrow, bitterness, pain - all have properties that can be extracted and mixed into tinctures for great healing.
I am grateful for the life I have lived; I am grateful that I have lived it as a warrior, striving for impeccability, at both my best and my worst.
I am grateful for the raging storms, and I am grateful to have kept the fire of love burning in the torrents. I am grateful for the harshest of the deserts, and I am grateful to have kept the water of the inner spring flowing on those burning dunes.
Spiritual truth is not trying to dwell in desirelessness or non-attachment (they are impossibilities); spiritual truth is simply being open, present and authentic for every twist of the blade that IS living.
The adventure tells you when to hold on, and when to let go. You have to listen to it.
You have to be willing follow your truth into the unknown.
You have to be willing to let go of that which you want, if you ever want to see it again; and you have to be able to hold on to what you want while letting go of it, otherwise there is no possibility of seeing it again. Yes, it is a paradox, a divine paradox. And to be an adventurer is to live inside of that divine paradox, and make it wholly yours; to be a warrior is to know that there will be moments in life when the only weapon you have is the fact that you live inside that paradox, and that therefore you understand it from the inside out.
Life is adventure. There is fear at every turn.
And fear is one of the great doorways; it is not to be fled from, it is to be entered.
The adventure is all that matters in the end. And adventure demands that you fight for what you desire, win or lose, and that you allow desire to sit on throne of your heart.
At whatever cost.
-- Richard Power
Power's eighth book, Humanifesto: A Guide to Primal Reality in an Era of Global Peril , is available now in soft cover and Kindle versions, from Amazon and elsewhere.
