Life is made of choices, and in every instant, we have to consider what is really important and essential for our journey in this world.
We can choose the beautiful fireworks that dazzle us but which, from so ephemeral, soon disappear without our hands even touching them, or we can choose the seeds that are thrown to the earth and of which we do not have news for some time, but that one day will become sturdy trees from which the fruits that will nourish us will spring forth.
In the fires, we have the fascination of the moment, the stimulus of those who seek to satisfy a fleeting pleasure, a pleasure that feeds the ego in a force that soon turns into an immense emptiness. We jump from spectacle to spectacle, satiating ourselves with moments that bring nothing to us then the ecstatic applause of the ceasing of the fires, which soon are stilled in the emptiness of a sky that became black after all the colors that have inebriated us.
In the seeds, we have the promise of something that does not fall apart, even though nothing is before our eyes than just the plowed land. There are no fireworks or sounds, there is no spectacle beyond that which Life itself brings us in its simplicity. There is only the promise of something so sacred that just asks from us the care and the sensitivity of being present whenever it is necessary, watering that promise with the love that will make one day the seeds become trees and the trees, mature fruits.
While inebriated by the thousand colors of the fireworks, we have nothing to give. Our space is all ours. We live for ourselves and for our pleasure. But in the seeds, we have this magical thing that is to yield part of that ephemeral freedom that we deem so important, and which in truth is nothing, on behalf of the time it takes to water that promise and to turn it into the reality which, one day, will give us a shadow to rest and fruit to eat.
Fruits that will eventually nourish all those who, in the emptiness left by the fascination of the fireworks, lost from themselves, believing that they conquered a freedom that never existed, for, without full surrender to something that transcends us, we remain slaves of ourselves.
May we understand that true freedom comes from the commitment we take to these seeds and not marching from spectacle to spectacle, whether it is material or spiritual, for, in the dark night of a sky that has been extinguished, we will find ourselves gagged by selfishness which will consume us and from which we are slaves to a freedom that never was.
From the book Spiritual Reflections for a New World
https://www.pedroelias.org/en/books