1/20/02 6:35 – 7:00 am
There is an interest in longevity on earth. The approach is from the cellular level. There is focus on vitamins and minerals, nutrients added to the body. But the focus should be not on feeding the body after the food or before the food, but feeding the food itself. Remineralization of the soil is vital. Vital for human being’s longevity and for the earth itself.
Longevity of the body, as thought of, is not as important as longevity of the breath. What we mean is that if humans focused more on their breathing and less on the garments they wear, or what extra they put into the body, their bodies would live longer. There is much too much attention given to what things look like, rather than what things are. Humans are breathing apparatuses. Breathing is life, Breath is the animator. Minerals and vitamins do not breathe like lungs and cells do. In fact many of these products are incompatible with the body’s ability to absorb them, as they are not in their natural state. Synthetics and extracts have thier own metabolic cycles that are not always in harmony with the body that has consumed it. If you want to live long, breathe deeply.
Finding Ones Way
There is a parable about a man and a donkey. The man was a very old man from a village where no one could read. Thus, he didn’t know how to read signs on the road. So at each juncture, he would ask the donkey which way to go. He would do this by taking the donkey’s burden and putting it on his back. He would wait unitl the donkey turned one way or another and then reload the donkey’s back with the items he was peddling from village to village. As he was often in lands he didn’t know, as he did his own mountainous home, neither he nor the donkey could memorize where they were.
But one day, after taking the donkey’s burden, the donkey, instead of taking the road to the left or right, gave out a mighty last hee haw and died in the middle of the road. At that moment, not only was this man carrying the burden of the animal on his back, but he did so with great bereavement in his heart. He cried out, “why did I not understand all these years, how it was that you knew the way and I, a human did not ?”
Keeping the pack on his back as he did all those years, he imitated what his donkey had done so many times. First he would turn to the east and put his nose in the air, then he would turn to the west and mark it with his hoof, which the man did with his foot. Then he would turn in all directions slowly as if sensing something, looking for something, Then after he had done as his donkey did, he waited for a bird to come, as it seemed the donkey never made its choice until a bird came. After a little while, and no bird came, the man was so overcome by his sense of loss, and being lost, that he put his burden down. He was not afraid for himself, but he realized how lonely and difficult the rest of his journey would be. It was in that moment however, that he learned what the donkey had shown him all those years. For in the heaviness of his loss, and the weight of his burden that he would be carrying alone, he knew what the animal had known. Serving another was a selfless act of love. It took one’s entire body, mind and soul. The way to travel, was the shortest route. It could be felt by the amount of joy in the air, which the soul could feel and which birds are sensitive to. Whereas, the long road was often full of sorrows, and extra burdens that others had left by the roadside. The donkey knew that joy in the air, sustained the carrying of burdens and that if one took the route of joy, it would be the surest way of arriving at one’s destination in the service of love.
ZMH