By Giles Hutchins and originally published at The Nature of Business
‘Returning to the Source is stillness, which is the way of Nature. the way of Nature is unchanging.’
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, 4 Quartets
The flute of interior time is played whether we hear it or not,
What we mean by ‘love‘ is its sound coming in.
When love hits the furthest edge of excess, it reaches a wisdom.
And the fragrance of that knowledge!
It penetrates our thick bodies,
it goes through walls –
Its network of notes has a structure as if a million suns were arranged inside.
This tune has truth in it.
Where else have you hard a sound like this?
– Robert Bly, 16, The Kabir Book
Sing, my heart, of unknown gardens poured in glass,
transparent and unattainable.
Fountains and roses of Ispahan or of Shiraz,
Praise and joyfully sing of them, incomparable.
Show, my heart, that you could never truly miss them, since
it is you, alone, for whom their figs have ripened.
That in your revery, envisioning powers heightened,
you are kin to each flowering branch the sweet breezes evince.
Avoid the error of thinking something dear was shed
in the transaction of your grave decision to be!
You are part of the very weave, o silken thread.
Whatever the motif constricting you internally
(if only for a moment in the painful life you lead)
intuit the full meaning of the glowing tapestry.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets of Orpheus
To embrace the ever-changing yet unchanging presence of Nature is to tap into its paradoxical Wisdom; a wisdom beyond words: the diversity within unity, the communion of opposing tensions, the fluidity of boundaries, the alchemy of divergence-convergence revealing emergent evolution, the stillness within the movement, the movement grounded in stillness – this is to know the art of regenerative leadership.
And yet, as Morpheus said to Neo in the film The Matrix,
‘There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.’
‘That I might know the innermost weave of the world, witness its dynamics and creation, and stop rummaging about in words’ – Goethe
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For Giles Hutchins’ personal website www.gileshutchins.com
Republished with permission of the author.
Featured Image/graphic link added by Enlivening Edge Magazine.
