I love this saying in all its variations to date. Its an old concept, older than the popular quote, and part of a story I vaguely recall about a flock of vain songbirds boasting about their beautiful voices yet none dared to reveal their song less they were to find they were not the best afterall... and in the end only one bird, and not a songbird, was confident enough to squawk out a tune proudly and sincere, and even though it may not have been the best of all the forest, he was the only one willing to sing and therefore broke the silence with confidence, while the others were doubting their own competence and avoiding possible embarrassment. The moral is: sing your song anyhow, not for competition or comparison but because singing is part of who you are and something you enjoy doing. Have you ever taken a moment to think thoroughly about an old philosophy? No matter how many centuries pass, the same concepts keep resurfacing for air, and then seem to fade away until someone mentions it again in a new era with a new metaphor or undertone, and thus continues the ebb and flow of enlightenment like the passing of a prerecorded commit... here and gone, was once here before, and will be here again someday. And who will see it? Who will pass on what they learned from it? And how will that person interpret a lesson about something they never saw themselves or discovered on their own terms? The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best. is a concept worth contemplation. Not only is it a word of encouragement to do your best regardless of your current and perpetually improving skill level, it can also be deducted that in a state of such silence if any one sound were emitted it would echo thru an otherwise silent forest, even the faintest whisper of a caterpillars bite upon a leaf. What happens next in this proverbial world where the birds refuse to sing for fear of having a worse voice than their fellows of equal ability and potential? The pride of protecting ones confidence in what they believe to be an utmost truth, that they themselves are the best singer, yet they do not want to temp the possibility that some other bird has a more beautiful song. As the story unfolds, eventually a simple squawk is what breaks the silence and brings song back into the forest. I dont self-accredit myself as a superior writer... I like to write, and so I do. And in the practice of writing I learn more about how to weave with words than if I were to be silent and not write at all and do instead what others dictate a person is to be... others who are not me and live a different life than I do and enjoy and pursue different things than I do, and as such do not understand the world from my perspective any more than I understand the world from theirs. So, here again, are my thoughts today, as inspired by the attached quote. September 30, 2014 ~Penndra Ann In silence, any voice is immense. The way I view it, which could be different than how you view it, - because thats how quotes are, they speak to the mood you are in and confirm or deny it or have no meaning that day at all till it sinks in days, months, years later - , who really cares if your perfect other than your own inner voice, and if your own inner voice is continuously singing without competition then who are you listening to?... not yourself, but old memories of things others said to your developing childhood mind before you were learned enough to interpret what was being said to you during isolated windows of self-discovery and self-definition. Twisted unintentionally into the self-defeating echoes and the falsified praise that systematically redefine the self into someone we are not comfortable with... because it is someone elses idea of victory while the child ego is pacified with trust in the misguidance of superiors. Echoes from the past, disconnected concepts that we so easily allow to shape current ambitions and limitations. You do have your own voice too, your own beliefs, your own ideals, your own sense of proper and disrespectful, your own evaluation system to determine your level of growth and success. Your own idea of the non-existence of failure within the flow of progress and inspirational mistakes. What is failure, but the surrender to a disembodied voice saying No, you cant achieve that because I wont allow it. You have permission to turn down the volume of those birds who echo old songs that have long lost their meaning and so too have lost their value of influence. Be the loudest bird in the neural network tree of your brain. You have lived, you have learned from experiences, you have grown from a fuzzy ball of down into your own magnificent being. That is what it is to be yourself instead of embodying the feathers of a memory. That is what it is to sing your own song rather than repeating the good-intentioned ill-teachings we try so very hard to manifest in our daily lives to honor superiors we had undoubted faith in to be honest and beneficial to us. We had undoubted faith... Another favorite quote is from pop-culture, You must unlearn what you have learned. A Zen sort of concept, too, which deserves more attention than pop-culture allows us to respect. Understand that only experts have studied all the avenues leading up to one thing to arrive at a generalized and speculatory idea of what is what and why is why. And whose repeated words are ingrained into our minds as if they are some sort of ultimate truth that rules every aspect of what is what and why is why??? Flailing fumbling under-educated guessers who, in turn, were also imitating the voices echoing in their own head defining how to approach this situation or that conflict who were also flailing fumbling under-educated guessers with good intentions, unchecked negligence, and irreproachable authority over the world being misshapen on the other side of realism. Simply a series of mistakes in judgement, an ill-routed attempt at reaching a justifiable goal, a lack of defiance against the only bird singing echoes from the past - the ancestral and unchallenged hymns that hold tyranny over subsequent generations. A cycle of belief that those who guide our early mind into being are equated with the almighty omnipotent knowledge of the universe due to their position of provider to which we are dependant on in our impressionable state of plasticity, and thus attribute absolute power over us and our way of deciphering every element of foresight about every second of our observations far beyond infancy. Why are we compelled to decode existence in such a way that contradicts good judgement, and causes us to go insane with rebellion to what we inwardly understand is incorrect and competitive against the enlightened thoughts we bury deeper than the notions we want to ignore. Impermissible acknowledgment that we can learn from the misguidance, rather than echo it to the next generation by setting an example of submissiveness to good-intentioned under-educated self-proclaimed experts of life and living and interaction and all that defines validates and destroys our potential motives to achieve or crumble in the hands of disembodied voices continuously testing compatibility within the unsuspecting host. Disassemble what has been learned so as to wash each piece without staining another. You have permission to evaluate and reevaluate, to rotate and repair, to reassemble and renew. You have permission to dismiss the perceived expertise of those who were in ultimate rule long ago. You have permission to hop into the unsupported air of the unknown and questionable and fly to a different tree to sprout congruent harmonies from unbeguiled blooms and approach the writing of your own song with dignity and respect, full-knowing the omnipotence required to create perfection cannot be administered nor embodied without eradicating the foundation of cosmic law itself. Perfection is unabating forgiveness of social constructs and giving yourself permission to be imperfect according to assumed standards set forth by manifested ambiguity. Perfection is out of place in all but a consistent pattern, the pattern of inherited habit, the warp and weft of echoes to which we alone choose to be Apprentice then Master. Another throw of the shuttle, another jerk thru the shed, another pull of the beater, another thread parallel to the race. The patterned habit of creating the pattern, the loom of man, an incomprehensible machine made of simple wood and metal and fiber to simplify the product of ancient tools. Weve forgotten how to make tools in our pursuit to learn how to use what has already been made for us to produce the life that is no longer befitting to expired opinions of who we are. Painting a road onto a wall does not give the wall a destination. Giving obedience to commonplace perceived perspectives does not alter a victims hunger for power over a faltering world, to allow the followers of dysfunctional patterns to chirp louder than the beating of your own heart IS failure, is cohesive and justified, is given credibility by accepting the product of worn tools on face value. Better tools are available, better tools are sought and in love with, wished for but remain a longing as their description and significance elude us as foreign objects while we are reminded they dont exist. It would be inconsistent, challenged, and found defiant of normalcy to recognize a concept outside the confines of the window we were given to look thru at segmented portions of humanity and the hierarchy of acceptable observation and response to thought thereof. The trees are full of birds, the sky is full of stars. Our minds are full of thoughts, few of which are ours. That is how it is when only echoes are allowed to sing their disdain against your inability to reach their version of perfection, to match the likeness of their motto, to achieve what they could not achieve, to embody the divine they could not make sense of, deafening accusations and threats of follow blindly or else you wont be human unless you are inhumane to yourself! When we are afraid to sing, we listen. We listen to the echoes. We let the echoes build walls and paint them with illusions of openness and welcoming. Our innate curiosity investigates every crumb of mortar, naively categorizing it all as undoubted truths that make the wall a life and we believe in the reasons for why the wall exists without worry of why it was built. It just is because it needs to be for the wrong to be accepted as right. And we are content with the explanation and implementation of contiguous behavior, of the power to create a unified delusion. Yet, we are not an isolated society. We are met with controversy in ideals and likenesses to the divine that complement our inner reckonings with the absurd. It is not just one acting as a thorn in the sandy erosion, but a whole vine of thorns digging into the mortar and separating the bricks from their implied cohesion. We see glimpses that wed rather ignore, because going against the familiar is heartbreaking to realize, disrupting to embrace, destructive to pursue, denied in all attempts to counter the ingrained message to repent then repeat... because its a cultural habit to illicit respect by being disrespectful. Its a cultural norm to expect love without taking on the responsibility to be compassionate. To echo the echo, even though we know it to be inconclusive and subject to manipulation, we follow because we were told to do so and to not steer off the path of our narrow segment of definition else great peril would befall us. The peril of discomfort by the unfamiliar. Yet we hopefully trust, just as an infant trusts its caregiver, that needs will be fulfilled and discomforts remedied by those whom we designate to sustain our worldly view of what should be and why. We consciously place ourselves in the paws of a predatory ghost in the pursuit of establishing trust with the echoes within by creating the world such memories tell us is deliberate and unyielding. A bird can bend a branch, but wind can lay the tree to its roots. There are more powerful lyrics in your mind than mere echos of old songs. Let the windows fall out and the wall to crumble, and look upon humanity for its potential to escape prideful repetition. Dont accept the unacceptable and allow the absurd to continue unchecked. Learned behavior does not entitle disrespect to be an act of unchallenged righteousness. Allow respect and compassion to be an option, rather than feared as a loss of power. Power is not lost or gained in the natural world, it is a constant fluctuation of sustainability among the shared energies of a boundless whole. All else is a creation of humanity in an attempted explanation for the misunderstood and trying to set permanence to the temporary and indoctrinating reasoning to address discrepancies between natural order and divine theory. Yet the echoes persist, and we insist to obey, to conform to the rules that drive us insane. Because we can know no other way, until we learn to walk away.
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:32:17 +0000
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