Sanctuary for Delicate Flowers

We would all like to be surrounded, if possible, by the most delicate of flowers: only the best and most beautiful. And yet, surely, such flowers cannot grow on a busy footpath. Nor will an exotic peacock nest on a roaring highway amidst unconscious drivers and noxious fumes.

So look around: what we're seeing, at any time, is that fraction of life that can survive where we are, in the habitat we're presently offering. We must learn exactly how to take this matter of habitat into account, for it is true that in our lifetime, we will see and have only what's supported by the environment we create.

What is coarse is dense, solid, and thick. It may take a jackhammer to get through it, a drill to penetrate it. By contrast, consider the supreme delicacy of all that is most beautiful — like joy, love, and tenderness. These things are not granite; they are the most delicate and precious flowers that soon wilt in the face of doubt, skepticism, rudeness, and coarse thought.

Now consider the delicacy of human beings. Take me, for example: I am delicate, innocent, and beautiful inside. But I cannot openly be the tender innocent being that I am in the face of coarse irony. I cannot be a child in the face of jaded adulthood and overweight mind. The babe vanishes in the face of negative mentality, doubt, chronic concern, and scrambled fact. These bits of coarseness hardly support innocence. Innocence needs innocence, to be. Innocence will only be where it can.

The problem we face in having the finer things in life is simple: those things cannot exist in the face of the various forms of coarseness we use to “protect” ourselves. Thus, for example, a person armed with skepticism and negativity, and bristling with denial and defensiveness, will never see delicacy, much less enjoy it. We wonder what happened to tender love in our world, but there is no mystery about it. Tender love fades from view in the face of people who hold to the negative, and to negation itself. To quote the words to a song:
 
    I'm crying for soldiers whose aim is to kill
    They will have no surrender, no they never will.

Surely the ways of defense and offense are incompatible with the ways of gentleness. God help us to remember that. Then we will always understand what we have, what we do not have, and why. And we can do something about it. And we will know exactly what needs to be done.

Even truthfulness — the awareness and communication of what is true — depends upon the right environment for its existence. Truth cannot long stand in the face of lies. We must realize that if we lie about what is true, if we change the names of the picture we're seeing, if we manipulate the truth with forms of ignoring and denial, truth will fade from our sight. And truthful people will, too.

A simple example will illustrate the dependence of truth upon the proper (receptive) environment: How many times have you tried to tell someone something they refused to hear, even though it was true? And how many times have you had to stop, and reverse your direction, and remove the truth from their unwilling sight?

And what of love? The presence of love, like the presence of truth, depends upon welcome. Everyone loves love. Everyone wants love. And yet, almost everyone doubts love. In this, we doubt what we want, and we practically refuse it. Can a delicate flower be held out forever without being taken? How can what is not truly welcome be actively offered for long? How can love that is doubted by us thrive in our company? Do you see? That cannot work. Love needs love. It needs a welcome home.

Love is qualified and quantified by the degree of receptivity that exists for it. We can have our theoretical love, and we can have our symbolic love: we can have our consoling conceptualizations, for what they're worth. But what about the tender living flower in full bloom that is the real thing? The living bloom of love can never be a pressed flower, a photograph, a symbol of itself. It blooms and continues to bloom only under circumstances that do not resist or offend its being.

Tender love is a living thing, and as such is minutely sensitive to all else that is alive. It requires what it requires: It needs an open heart; it needs safe refuge; it needs what it is. That is why we cannot and will not see more than flashes of the tender love we crave until we make our hearts and minds a tender, fertile place for it to be. When love can thrive in us, it can thrive around us as well.

Know, then, that nothing can thrive or persist in your company that cannot survive and persist in your own heart. Therefore, what you wish to see outside must necessarily be welcome within for you to see it elsewhere.

Let us have what is great. In order to have it, let us create the circumstances that can make that possible. We can have what is great to the extent that we give it an appropriate home, a great home — a home compatible with the nature of what is great.

It is my job to offer love; it is my job to be innocent; it is my job to preserve these for another day; it is my job to accept rejection. It is my job to be myself, and I am the innocent one. It is my job to protect this flower, and to similarly protect all other flowers from harm. It is my job to preserve the good and the beautiful, even if I have to withdraw these from sight in order to preserve them. Sanctuary! According to the principle of sanctuary, I will always be innocent, but I will not always be apparent. Not everywhere, anyhow.

All power lies in the direction of greatest delicacy. All joy rides on the gossamer wings of a dove. All hope lies in the direction away from what is callous and gross. What you most want — what we all want — is tender beyond this world. It is also tender beyond the world of your present mindset. It is incompatible with parts of what you presently think. So change what you think, and thereby make a fit sanctuary in your mind and heart for what is beautiful. Then it will come.

Have you noticed that nature has a miraculous way of populating any place with whatever that place is fit for? Some years back I bought a piece of dry land, bone dry. I dug for water. I found water, so I dug a small pond. Before long, though there was no other pond within miles, frogs appeared in the pond, and several forms of water-dwelling insects. To this day I have no idea where they might have come from.

Know that everything is — including everything you could possibly want. And, know that everything is always already living wherever it is welcome to live. Do you hear me? Let a word to the wise be sufficient.

If you do not see any doves, know that you have not provided refuge for doves. You may have even run them off with callousness, or fumes. So, welcome what is beautiful without harmful doubt and ugly resistance. Be warm, soft, and embracing.

Trust in nature. Nature provides the forms of life that fit. Just make a place fit for what you want, and it will appear there, and stay as long as the place remains fit.

Now you know how to make a sanctuary for delicate flowers. And you know that if you do, as I live and breathe, delicate flowers will surround you.

Love,

David