The more I go through life, the more I understand the value of "loving it all" - ya know, loving the good AND the bad, the joy and the pain (need I go on? Likely not). I am continually amazed by what I refer to as "the power of opposites"; life is incomplete if we only love, desire and experience the light, since without the darkness we can never truly know it, never truly experience it's complete depth and breadth. We are limited. We are half alive, half awake. We spend so much time running away, avoiding, repressing, denying and fighting all of the things we've been conditioned to believe are "bad", and then wondering why we feel incomplete, why we still feel empty or can't get ourselves together, and why we have no time to truly live.
Meanwhile the answer was there all along. Love it all. Be free.
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We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
LITTLE GIDDING (No. 4 of 'Four Quartets')
BY T.S. Eliot
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