I was staring at a candle, my mind’s eye at the same time still attuned to my endless internal chatter, manifesting worry about some triviality or other. But the flame had enough of my attention to make me think:
Even a flame has form, a shifting form, the base appearing softly gentle; I look into the center and a blackened wick stands inside the glow; around that pulsates the flame’s core, bluish or purplish in hue; draped over that enthralling center of energy, the yellow flame, radiant, in perpetual motion, yet upon closer attention revealing its own layers of varying intensity, the layers melding together into a form; inside the form the layers of yellow diminish in brightness moving further from the core; the flame points but remains rounded; there is a form to the flame.
The form has an aspect that intrigues me - it is not rigid, it is flexible, sometimes compressing into a short, wide stature, sometimes elongating into a more narrow stature, and everything in between.
What causes the flame to move in its own particular manner, maybe prevailing air currents in the room, maybe other unseen, or perhaps even unintelligible forces at play, who knows, but it seems to me that movement both adapts to circumstance in the external world and brings about new circumstances in the external world.
The human mind also has this ability to adapt to circumstance. Yet we far more proactively attempt to change the environment, to our personal advantage. Those who have found peace of mind through self-awareness say that there are essential elements of our reality we are not facing, which must be accepted, primarily death, followed by an element of aloneness that is part of us as well. It is those fears which prevent us from flowing as smoothly as the flame, changing with circumstance, not fighting it, yet influencing what happens.
The flame is a lesson to us as individuals, because we are fighting social circumstance, the boundaries of our inner passionate flame turning into hardened defenses of some concept of small, disconnected self, yet a self which desperately wants the acceptance of and invitation into some group.
The flexibility, grace and strength of this little flame makes me think that we certainly can have an integrity based upon dignity yet remain adaptable to circumstance, remaining softly tethered to a wick of warmth, empathy and compassion, an umbilical cord that instead of chaining our minds with rules, slogans, fears and fantasies, instead of using carrots and sticks, instead that natural social umbilical cord can allow for the free flow of our passions into the individual search for a new way to express that which we are thinking and feeling, and experiencing within the world around us.