Consider The Lilies

Laura Basha

Photo By: José Ignacio González Pansiera

 

“Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not …”

 

– Luke 12:27

 

---

 

How willing are we to listen to the Silence? To listen to the quietness inside the cacophony of our own thinking?
 

Are we interested in growing? There’s learning, and then there’s growing. What’s the difference?

 
Learning occurs mostly from the outside-in, utilizing the intellect to store more memory. A very good and useful practice to be sure. Growth, on the other hand, is more of an inside-out process, a process we allow to unfold us: without toil, without spinning – through stillness, from Center to circumference.
 

It requires a type of deep listening, a listening to what we don’t know, to a realm of creative mystery which is the realm of genius. It requires the willingness to be uncomfortable in not knowing, in not having an answer: a “growth” mindset.
 

Growth requires a willingness to learn how to tolerate our own survival patterns squirming in the face of uncertainty.

 

In being willing to stand in this Silence of not knowing, Infinite Intelligence reveals to us the answer to the question we have brought, the solution to the problem with which we are wrestling.
 

The answer actually precedes the question, pushing the question up to consciousness so that we can ask it and become aware of the next insight.

 

Such is the beauty and possibility of a problem.
 

“Consider the lilies … how they grow …
and yet … Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

 

How do they grow? And unfold in such Beauty? How do we grow? What beauty within us will unfold?