Are you a Shepherd?
Are you a Shepherd?
27 April 2024 Daily Meditation
Be a lamp or a lifeboat or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.
— RUMI
What comes us for you when you contemplate this image?
I can tell you that when I entered recovery it was the last thing that I would ever have considered. Oh, I did think of myself as someone who cared about others, especially my friends. But help someone’s soul heal? It was the farthest thing from my mind.
My own wounding kept me from feeling such a kinship with another.
Perhaps the pace of the world also contributed. It was inconceivable to me how one could achieve the accomplishment of everything demanded in daily life and possibly think much of anything outside of one’s own close circle of family and friends.
My own mind wound up to the pace of things around me.
It seemed that was what was expected of me.
Pretty soon, even in my early life, I began to seek things that would help me to keep up with that unruly pace, or maybe I just naturally began to amp up. The adrenalin in my body amped up and I liked that feeling as I explored new things, so I did more, sought more, amped up more, did more and so on. I ate more, drank more, sought more, bought more, and it became a pace. All around me, my friends did the same. Maybe I sought friends who did the same, because my early friends were not so much that way.
Wow. Faster and faster, round and round. I couldn’t keep up.
Until I crashed.
It didn’t take long. Then I found that the people who reached out to me were made of something different. They were seeking peace. Wanting serenity. They were calm.
I found I wanted what they had, but I didn’t know how to get it. “If you want what we have, you’ll do what we do,” they said. It sounded like a cult. Simple. It was a spiritual program and I wanted nothing to do with that. I was wounded by past spiritual experiences.
“Just sit and listen,” they said. So I did. I found I related. So I stayed. Slowly I came to peace. I learned another way of life.
“Give it away to keep it,” they said. I learned how to live a new way of life, to give up using other things and other people, and to turn inside myself and find peace.
That was forty-three years ago this week. What a blessing to find peace.
Be a shepherd.