Kneel and kiss the earth...

Listening to the land and the water and the sand. It teaches you something. The earth embraces humility in all her faces. In all her complexity, the earth lets her simplicity stand at her core. The belief is strong, the conviction at the center is rooted. Mirroring that centered conviction is not only essential, it is emancipating.

Once high up on a sand dune with the wind through my hair, I felt the urge to leave something of myself behind on the seemingly endless landscape stretching before me. I knelt and used my fingers to trace my name in the symmetrically formed patterns of the sand beneath me. Today I imagine those grains of sand that fell below my name blowing around somewhere, nowhere, everywhere in the desert landscape.

The desert has always symbolized non-violence to me. It has much passion, as it has much patience. Life is treacherous in the desert, but the cactus survives. It waits, it hoards and it survives. The rats scrounge, they are patient and they survive. Life in the desert is a never-ending quest for what is essential, but is always away from reach. Passion to survive is absolute, as is the patience required to bridge the gap of desire. Non-violence is the most exotic cocktail of passion and patience there ever was.

Patience has the potential to be revolutionary. The waves never-endingly wash away at rocks, just as everything that seeks life in the desert embraces long waits. We seek out that which gives us peace. Irrespective of whether we are those that believe it is inside of us, or those that seek it outside of ourselves. A moment that is complete in itself. A moment in which all begins and ends Everything is contained in that moment, and everything is absent from it. Full and exclusive peace. And that, I think, comes from passionate patience. Spontaneous, yes; desperate, no; colored, yes; non-descript, no; enduring, yes; irreverant, no.

Let the beauty of what we love be what we do.

There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the earth.

--Rumi

Hmmm....