It has been said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. And, as much as I believe this is true, I also believe that every window has two vantage points—one for seeing in and one for seeing out.
What is most familiar to a soul is its own image, and it is constantly drawn to what it recognizes as itself. When our eyes stop to gaze on something magnificent, when the view is so magical that it takes our breath away, it is our soul reaching out to touch the miracle of its own reflection.
I have been asked many times why I have chosen to fill the pages of my Web site, Quantum-Grace.com, with nature photography. The answer is simple. Focusing on the beauty around us is a gentle reminder of what we are made of. From the smallest dewdrop to the largest mountain the beauty that surrounds us is who we really are, and it is our choice to see it or not to see it.
If it is majestic mountains our eyes are drawn to, we are being reminded of our own enduring strength. If it is the center of a rose, we are reminded of our tenderness and innocence. Oceans reflect the power, rhythm, and grace of our eternal selves, and a drop of rain, our simplicity.
We are often encouraged to close our eyes and look within. This is something I do myself, every day. But in a world sometimes overflowing with persuasive randomity and magnetic emotion, it is not always possible to maintain the peacefulness of inner vision. The Universe is very practical, however, and sometimes our greatest revelations come when we open our eyes and see all that we are made of right before us.
Free will is having the right to choose what to focus on and what not to focus on, and your choice of focus is your rite of passage. It’s as if we are each holding a camera, and while looking out through a tiny “eye,” we have the freedom to focus on whatever brings us joy.
You don’t have to focus on what doesn’t make you happy―just move the camera a little to the left or a little to the right until you find the awe-inspiring landscape of your soul. These are the pictures worth a thousand words because these are the pictures of your own integrity and beauty, and they’re the only ones worth keeping.
On a daily basis we are surrounded with the energy of millions of people going millions of places doing millions of things. If we allow ourselves to get caught up in their pictures, we are allowing others to determine what we should be looking at and focusing on, and we miss the magical progress of our own natural evolution.
Nature is the mirror of humanity, and it reflects the affirmations of the soul. Within nature are found the same qualities that our own spiritual essence holds. The qualities of strength, courage, passion, patience, trust, and love are within us as well as outside us. And it is up to us to notice them.
We need not hurry as there is no urgency in evolution; and we need not scale Mt. Everest to claim a view of our own endless magnificence. It takes only a moment to look out a window and find the bluest edge of the sky. Honor yourself today, and immerse yourself in what you are made of—remembering that it’s not the room you are in that determines who you are, but the exquisite view on which you focus that is you.
Author's Bio
Heather O’Hara is an award-winning author who encourages us to look beyond the ordinary and find the extraordinary. A contributing editor for various publications and author of two books, AXIS, The Song in the Center of the Soul and Living on Level 7 (Choosing a Life with a View), her passion for inspiring others has evolved into a wealth of empowering articles; many collections of original poetry; and a free, inspirational newsletter that is now received in more than a third of the world’s countries. For more information on Heather O’Hara, please visit her Web site, http://www.Quantum-Grace.com.
ocho-onda Dear Paula,
Here's my take,just a humble opinion, not gospel truth ! :-)
"Free will is having the right to choose what to focus on and what not to focus on, and your choice of focus is your rite of passage. It’s as if we are each holding a camera, and while looking out through a tiny “eye,” we have the freedom to focus on whatever brings us joy.
"You don’t have to focus on what doesn’t make you happy―just move the camera a little to the left or a little to the right until you find the awe-inspiring landscape of your soul. These are the pictures worth a thousand words because these are the pictures of your own integrity and beauty, and they’re the only ones worth keeping."
What if circumstances do not permit us that luxury to choose ? And what if there is no escape, that in choosing to look away, what had actually transpired anyway, still affects us or worse still, come back to haunt us another day ?
As far as free will goes...I am not so sure.
Here's my take on freedom that I posted on Antares' blog a while back.
What freedom ? We are not meant to be free. :-)
Everything gets recycled back to Nature to our source !
What comes first - the chicken or the egg ?
Do humans really know who they are, where they are from,why they are here ,can they truly justify their existence ? (Perhaps, if we know the answers to these questions, we will all start to look and treat each other differently, like more humanely !?!
We are born into this world,we try to make our life and existence as meaningful as we humanly and possibly can and then we die and become fertilizer !
So, we are never free because we have to repeat the cycle of propagation to prolong our existence as a specie !
What goes up must come down. We are all held together and contained in this oblate spheroid called Earth by the same gravitational force that holds all the planets to the Sun - the centre of our universe.
So, the word, freedom , is a misnomer because to be truly free we will all cease to exist as a specie !
The other alternative will be to take a rocket to transport ourselves into outer space and drift on and on and on into infinity !
February 22, 2009 8:48:00 AM MYT
ocho-onda said...
Maybe we are not meant to be so emotionally and physically attached!
The human spirit is supposed to move on once the body has expired.
If we look at the animal kingdom, the bondage between parent and offspring is severed if not lessened once the offspring matures.
Whereas humans have this unique behavioral trait to not only maintain their special bondage with their living but with their dead as well as in the carrying on with the paternal name.
We are not meant to accumulate all this material junk that in our delusion, we called treasures because we know we can never bring it with us when we expire but instead, we decide to pass on our material junk to our next of kin and in the process develop the habit of possession, control and greed and that is the root of all human miseries - both pleasures and pains !
February 22, 2009 9:48:00 AM MYT