I am no more brave than the steadiness of a great tree leaning into the brutish force of hurricane winds. I am no more brave than a boat with reefed sails awash with cresting waves. I am no more brave than a feather on the wings of a breeze to be blown one knows not where. I am no more brave than the leaves that fall from a tree at the end of a dry summer to lay as carpet under the weight of a herd of elk. I am no more brave than a bedouin laying beneath the pin-holed sky of an immense night in the cooling sands of the endless desert.
I am no more brave than a baby that makes the journey from its confined watery world into the air – for it is not this mind and body that produces the act of bravery but the very detachment from that which we’ve conjured necessary to survive. I am brave when I release my mind and the ego I of my actions to dwell, instead, in the space of spirit within.
Having edged into the realm of Elder, looking back at those moments where action was needed for survival of myself or another, where another might have witnessed my actions as bravery, I now know the look and feel of the place-that’s-noplace into which I would slip where bravery is given form, ever so briefly. Like all things of spirit, the room of bravery cannot be explained but through metaphors.
Though it is nothing physical, I see that source hover before me as a horizon-wide, giant cube that is solid and yet I can enter into it; it has no doors or windows but I can move into its space to rest within. It’s a within-ness devoid of substance and yet it is a completeness in itself from which I cannot separate. In this pure space there are no thoughts and without thoughts there is no fear. Without fear, without constrictions, bravery is easily tapped into, like an endless stream of energy from which I can draw as needed; not unlike the endlessness of love, bravery dwells in this space beyond mind and body, always available to fuel a necessary action. Bravery is complete surrender to the dwelling place of spirit.