Titanium

The wind may bite but does the mountain yield to its clenching jaws? Just as Atlas shoulders the world, you too are carved from that same stubborn mould. Remember that within you lies a fierce, quiet core that refuses the collapse.

Let me ask you, do you take on violence when it is directed towards you? When someone attacks you, do you inwardly attack yourself, allowing such confrontation burrow into you for days or weeks afterwards? Finally, do you use the ammunition that has been discharged to hurt you against yourself or retaliate out of a perverse sense of vindicated justice, further binding you and your mirror in a deeper karmic embrace?

Would it not be better to liberate yourself from this potential incarceration by transmuting the hostility by looking that person in the eye, offering them the gift of a heartfelt smile and inviting them to alkalise their acid?

After all their reactions come from an isolated place of enslavement within their pain body and they are merely seeking to find companionship within their lonely cell. You don’t have to join them in this dark place, but your firm compassion and resolute conviction can offer you both a key to unlock that prison door.

Strength is rarely a loud explosion. More often, it is a small, solitary match struck in the damp dark. It is the decision to take one more ragged breath when your lungs beg for stillness. It is the willingness to look at a road that has broken you three times before and say: I am still the one who walks.

So that pain you feel, the sacrifice you have made, the loneliness that caresses your skin, is part and parcel of the Way. You are not shattering; you are being forged.

Let the hill grow steep. Wrap your fingers tighter around the edges of your purpose. Stand your ground. Hold fast and remember that the dawn has never once missed its cue.

May you know this week that the words discharged at you like stones find no purchase in the deep and ancient substance of what you are, for you were fashioned from something the fire has already visited and left more itself than before.

May that orange light burning patient and unhurried across the vast distances of space stand at the threshold of your seeing this week, and may its steady radiance remind you that the part of you which cannot be wounded has never once required defending, for it’s woven from the material through which the unmanifest itself seeks passage into this world.

When the acid comes, as it will come, may you have the quiet strength to look upon the one who carries it and recognise the loneliness that has driven them to such a lonely door, and may your smile, the smile of one who has walked this road three times and chosen to walk it again, be the key that neither of you knew you were holding.

You’re being forged. The portal through which all new light must pass is being widened in you, and what loneliness caresses your skin this week is part and parcel of that widening.

May this week make of you what comfort never could, and may the dawn, which has kept every appointment since the first morning, keep yours also.