Mining The Heart

It is the living who might be spared if we could quarry the message which lies buried in the heart of all human experience.

Lawrence Durrell
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A person could be content being an observer of his own life if he could find a safe place to stand. I think every person's life is a book that should be written and read. We all share the human story of joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, success and failure, fulfilled dreams and destroyed hopes. Suffering is wrong, whether it's great or small. But all conditions are faced somehow, in some way, by a creature who has intelligence, reason, experience and ability. How each one of us copes with the demands of life in our own individual way goes to write the history of the human race.

Buried in that history is a fundamental truth about our lives and why we have these phantasmagorias to deal with. It is way too much to expect, in spite of legend and hero worship, for any one individual to unearth the great, golden ore of human nature. And yet there it is. Some people roll up their sleeves and dig, others quit the quarry.

The ancient prophets preached the dignity and divinity of natural law. Who turned the human race away from that rich mine and made us deny ourselves? When did the valuable vein of human experience become wrong, a sin, a destruction? When did the human being become insignificant, slightly better than the beasts?

I like to remember that when I walk down the street I am treading on an edge of the universe. People look out at the stars and sense something so grand that it diminishes the importance of us humans. I look at it rather as an example of how grand we are to be a part of it, and a part that is free to explore every inch of it. And why do we have that freedom? Because we want it. And wanting it is not a sin, it's part of our human nature.

One of the great and necessary benefits I see from investigating and trying to understand, whether it's in your living room or in outer space, is that we are slowly getting away from an old mistaken notion about who we are. We grew used to thinking that there is the Earth and then there is the rest of the universe, and somehow one is separate from the other. There is I and then there is the rest of the people. Two groups: I and everyone else. And, of course, no one else's life is a complicated as mine, I think.

What is your life like? How have you coped with it's dangers and dilemmas and what have you mined from the quarry of human experience? What is the message in your heart you can share with us? What is life like on your star?

DB - The Vagabond