You are called, Arjuna
There are some writings to which you are close enough, in historical moment and the nuance of language, that each word falls like a spark on your skin, an electric current to the wire of your life.
Others are foreign even in translation, even after the attempt to make them current or accessible to a modern sensibility. Those are the words that might make a difference, that will stretch you skyward and allow you to see out from the box you have comfortably called home for so long.
Tonight I am sitting in a chariot on the fields in south-central India. Behind me arrayed the clan for whom I am responsible, before me prepared for battle and my blood, those whom I had called kin so recently, and who now discard trust and negotiation for silence and the sword. The Prince falters: how to submit and be slain, how to resist and slay cousins and kin?
The Bhagavad-Gita leaves us in the chariot whose wheels cannot roll, but must roll. Leaves us with a blade in our hand we cannot use but are told we must.
The charioteer is Prince Arjuna’s advisor and companion, who is none other than Sri Krishna, who holds in his questions the energies of suns and the wastes of the Void, the blood of birth and the blood of death, the wheel of seasons within the wheel of one’s life. He says – in my most superficial conception of this spiritual classic – “You are responsible for acting, you must respond with the skill and the wisdom you have; but you are not responsible for the outcome. That is the realm of the gods, not of women and men.”
So in these days, when good will is tangled in misunderstanding, and misunderstanding born of distrust, when the circle feeds the failing circle and words no longer cause the armies to hesitate, hope cannot be reserved for what comes now… perhaps the stillness that arrives later… in these days it is more important than ever to follow a spiritual practice that reminds you how small you are, how insignificant, and yet in your small stature how responsible you are – responsible! – for this one small spark you call your life, and how you will face its challenges.
That is all. The wheels will turn, the lances will lower toward your heart, the thunder of hooves will begin, you will turn with resignation toward those who depend upon you… then you will raise your standard, lift it with the integrity of a sun which rises each morning without complaint over green fields or red, lift it with the sound of a true trumpet, a golden flash that reaches out over the plain to whatever is to be… and signal them forward to ride out… to whatever is to be.
How we arrived on this field is no longer important, the consequence of yesterday’s charges and successes or failures. We are here, and our duty is neither to killing, nor to running, nor to any particular action pre-ordained by the constellation of events… but to engage with the greatest skill and clarity of which we are capable.
