barn's burnt down -- now I can see the moon. - Mizuta Masahide

 

Amor Fati

(love of fate)

The time is now past when accidents could befall me; 

and what could now fall to my lot

 which would not already be my own!

~ Nietzsche

from Thus Spake Zarathustra

...

It is said that before entering the sea

A river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has travelled,

from the peaks of the mountains, 

the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, 

that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.

The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.

To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean

 because only then will fear disappear

 because that’s where the river will know

 it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,

 but of becoming the ocean.

~ Khalil Gibran

a path with heart

No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!

Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: “What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?” Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self. Compare these objects, see how they complement, enlarge, outdo, transfigure one another; how they form a ladder on whose steps you have been climbing up to yourself so far; for your true self does not lie buried deep within you, but rather rises immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your I.

Your true educators and cultivators will reveal to you the original sense and basic stuff of your being, something that is not ultimately amenable to education or cultivation by anyone else, but that is always difficult to access, something bound and immobilized; your educators cannot go beyond being your liberators... She is liberation instead, pulling weeds, removing rubble, chasing away the pests that would gnaw at the tender roots and shoots of the plant; she is an effusion of light and warmth, a tender trickle of nightly rain…

There may be other methods for finding oneself, for waking up to oneself out of the anesthesia in which we are commonly enshrouded as if in a gloomy cloud — but I know of none better than that of reflecting upon one’s educators and cultivators.






~ Friedrich Nietzsche

 with thanks to Brainpickings
art by van gogh