Imagine your best self, in a warm, sustaining embrace.
Find something, anything that stirs for you hope.
Take a mindful minute and feel all of yourself right where you are. Feel your breathing. When it wanders, gently bring your mind back to here.
Feel urgency relax into later; swap resentment for gratitude; feel prison walls of self-fullness become softened by intentional outward love.
These are the gifts of the mindfully present, where we are our best and highest.
Imagine the world above the cone of mountaintop and boulder, where oceans of stars are the mountain’s context.
Imagine the world beneath glacial skin of mountain slope and scree worn by sliding grinding millennia, where slope is the context of glaciers.
Imagine the world below barren tree line, joining alpine flora, forested haven sustaining life, producing oxygen, fed by draining melt.
Imagine the world of souls, and flora, and oxygen, and melt, all in it together, where parts mesh in natural order; where everything is enough.
This world where all life’s parts, interwoven into a whole, this whole is the context of living souls.
Imagine cooperation is the context of thriving life and all of this together is original creation.
Now, imagine a world of manufactured self-serving lust, of greed and drive to grab selfishly, to compete for power; a world where nothing is ever enough, where superiority dominates the context of control.
Imagine this world where remnants of selfless humanity coexist with selfish indulgence, where tension is a constant and souls struggle for balance; contentment is elusive; where dominance dulls the context of harmony.
How easy is it to imagine this as the context of today?
But re-imagine a world where We, comes before Self; where empathy rules action, judgmental fear loses traction; a world where our gods don’t compete; where we seek to thrive together, where all are lifted up in Love, and Love is the entire context of life.
Re-imagine your world, your mountain, where your ocean of stars is all of us interconnected by threads of light; where sliding grinding pressure wears down greed; where sharing together is sustenance; and in knowing community, alone and self become the context of nothing.
More from Jim Beach: Can You Hear Me? Will It Matter?