Freedom Or a Trap
It is 6pm, the sound of 'calling to prayer' is echoing around outside...
The sun is setting on the City...
'I wouldn't want to live here', Anadi said, as we navigated the bikes, mopeds and people, to find an ATM machine in the busy square earlier today...
'You do live here', I laughed, 'for now... And tomorrow I am flying off and leaving you here for a week!'
Nothing is disguised on the streets; the poverty, the pain and the desperate energy are transparent; they exist alongside the energy that is glamorous, uplifting, fast moving, creative...
Today I jumped over a cobra as I ran through the square...
I thought it was a toy one, because we had just passed a man holding a handful of the wooden snakes...
Suddenly a head and it's writhing neck moved out across the ground in front of me, and I leapt...
I was telling Jamal when we returned to the riad... 'It is animal cruelty really' he commented, 'they are drugged and their poison has been removed'.
Anadi and I then regaled him with a few of our encounters with snakes in the wild...
Even if it was a sleepy snake, it crossed my path and that is a herald for more transformation, more shedding of the skins of my history, my past, my old stories melting away...
This morning I found more of the park to run around... The path took me behind football pitches, tennis courts, a man was gutting a fish by the side..
'I wonder where he got that?' Anadi mused as I re-joined him and told him the tale of my run...
I recognise that moving about as we are is shedding more skins, letting go of everything that I might be holding onto ... Even what day of the week it is, and whether I might run certain sessions on certain days...
I cannot attach to anything anymore...
I remember reading a story about a man carrying his bags up the mountain, and meeting an enlightened master. He asked the master what enlightenment was...
'Put down your bags' the master instructed...
There was freedom, enlightenment; in that moment...
We can put down our bags, everything we are attached to in any moment...
And then we can pick them all up again, and be free within them...
Everything we own can be freedom or a trap...
It isn't the item, or the situation, or the person... It is our inner state and the relationship we have with ourselves, that informs how we relate to all we have around us...
Joy is within us and does not depend on anything outside us, and so when we know this, it doesn't matter whether we own a palace or nothing at all...
The key is to remain silent, aware and still within, whatever is going on, on the outer realms
