The Seed of Potential

The Unbearable Weight of the Gift

It is a curious and often brutal circumstance of human life that the very thing which might set a soul free is the thing he labors hardest to deny. We walk among women and men, day by day, seeking to mimic what the world calls 'success' a brittle thing, often purchased at the price of one's own singularity. Yet, a human's true power is never found in the counterfeit. It resides quite often, in that one thing which seems so painfully and profoundly easy to him or her, a thing he or she dismisses precisely because it costs him or her of no great sweat to perform. This, then, is the burden of the gift: it is so much a part of the self that we cannot recognize it as rare as an offering of grace to a weary world.

And the world, mark you, is always weary. It hungers not yet another echo, but for the clarity of a sound it has not heard before.

The gift is not merely a talent to be polished; it is, in the deepest sense a question that the Creator has posed only to you, and for which only your life can furnish the answer. It is a seed, waiting in the soil of your soul, and if it does not blossom, if it is choked out by fear of being seen or the necessity of imitation, then the soil itself is rendered barren. How many of us, I wonder, have spent our finite hours attempting to cultivate a garden that was never ours to begin with, all while the potent, authentic seed within us lies dormant?

The universe, in its terrible and magnificent indifference, does not require your perfection. No; that is a fear dreamed up by women and men who do not trust the weight of their own being. What the world requires, what it waits on, perhaps with a kind of desperate patience is the courageous expression of your authentic self. The gift, when finally given over, does not merely ask for a seat at the table. It builds its own table, and dictates the terms of the conversation.

We must cease the weary labor of becoming what we are not, and risk the sublime difficulty of simply being what we are. What, then, is this potent thing in you that you are underestimating? What is the passion, the natural ability, that you've judged too small or too strange to matter? Let us begin, now to uncover the hidden truth of that seed. The opening is waiting for the courage of the planting.