When Anthony Was

Remember Nature's Harmony

"When we begin to come back towards our recalling of this, we remember the best of ourselves."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

BY ANTHONY ROSS

In The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, we are reminded again that we must remember.  We must be kind to ourselves, for we are telling tales through our lives that have never been told.  Each breath is a life, arising and passing away.  Where are we taught to live in line with these laws of impermanence and harmony?  Only in nature, it would seem.

These laws are something that man has to remember at first, unlike the animal which is in harmony as it must be.  Man, or human beings, have to water this memory until it grows from a tiny flower into a beautiful tree with thick roots and thick branches.  He must recall these laws in his mind again and again until there is no action through himself that is contrary to these principles in each breath and each life he embodies.

Without being taught, how does one remember these laws?  They are not laws that we 'forget' in the sense of forgetting to have them work as they should.  The laws are principles of nature.  We did not create them, but we abide by them.  If a man is clumsy in his undertakings and did not abide to these laws, his actions would be those that are not in harmony with the law of arising and passing away.  Therefore, these actions would be naturally narrow and ultimately frivolous.

A man may know these laws with the intellect.  He may see the tree and its leaves fall.  He may see the snow rise on the ground and melt in the spring, or the sun alive for the season of summer.  Either way, his insights are not something he carries at the root of his being. Rather, a view of it being outside himself will arrest any development of this principle within himself.  When I say development, I again don't mean that he makes these laws work.  He must work as they do in order to live these laws, to live them in the next step of remembering.

Remembering is a gathering principle.  Re-member.  Anyone who enrolls in a membership in a principle that is not conducive to a relationship with nature and the nature of change within himself, will be lost.  They would feel that they are alien to the environment they inhabit.  To feel that way about the outer world is one thing, but to feel the same with the body itself would amount to tremendous confusion.  To return to Robert Henri, we must be prepared at any moment with the total readiness of all our faculties. The highest of these faculties is a quality and understanding of our own physical nature at the physical bodily level. This is the root level of our being, and only seeing it in the world outside this body is no attempt at applying these principles.

When we begin to come back towards our recalling of this, we remember the best of ourselves.  Yet, we know this not in ideas that are beyond us, but as an intrinsic development of who we are as human beings.  Each one of us, an essence of nature as complex as the ocean.  Signs on the path of excellency are what we must carry with us, as extensions of ourselves to continue finding new signs, implicit within our transforming, changing existence.  Always ready for an absolute transformation of all that we are, yet never taking a step beyond the place which we are.  Never stepping further than needed, we float on, moving ever more gracefully to discover new signs of life.