The Rose Garden: Autobiography of a Modern Day Naqshbandi Sufi by Jenenne Castor-Thompson

Author:Jenenne Castor-Thompson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781499037999
Publisher: Xlibris US
Published: 2014-10-09T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Endings

Does it make any

difference

Whether the ring is upside

down

Or right side

up?

Does it?

Three years alone

Waving the yellow flag

Holding the yellow arrow

Humans hate endings. We like our lives, our work, our age, our looks, the surrounding area we live in all to remain the same. Very few of us thrive on change. But the true mystic lives no where else.

My own life during the years that I was “taught” was filled with endings and change. I left a relationship in Denver, my only child left home because he was grown, my only parent died, I left a business that I had worked so hard to build. I then left job after job, or I was fired from those jobs. I moved from Colorado to California, only to move back to Colorado and then back to California once more, where I remain today. Numerous people came into and left my life also during this time.

I was searching, I was wandering, I was lost, I was found, all at the same time. I was ending while I was beginning. All of me was in flux. I was experiencing constant change and endings so I could learn to live in that state and as I said before, the true mystic can live no where else.

Mrs. Tweedie talked of Bhai Sahib and how changeable he was. She herself in later years was very changeable. Unpredictable is perhaps a better word. The Masters were like the weather, you could not count on them to be anything that was ever the same. One learned to live in “a flowing river that was never the same water”.

However, around one were people who wanted and needed everything to remain always as it was. And, it seemed to me, after years of trying to live with so called “normal” people, that they were very rock like.

Ten years into my own walk I was becoming extremely tired of being told how unpredictable I was, how inconsistent I was. It was, in fact, beginning to annoy me. But despite my annoyance, I had to live in the world, exist in the world, and be surrounded by rock-like people. I wanted to please these people so I kept trying to be like them despite being totally unlike them and for many years I did this much to the detriment of my spiritual path and myself.

I was seen as a fool and a loser. And I was slowly not caring that people thought this of me. I was lonely but not as lonely as I had been when I was younger.

I was beginning to resign myself to the fact that I was going to be completely alone. A young child that once came to Mrs. Tweedie’s group remarked to her, “you have no friends”. And, indeed, Mrs. Tweedie had no friends, no friend but the Friend.

One must finally make the ultimate commitment to leave the world and yet be in the world and exist only for what the One wants of one. It was a terrifying and extremely lonely place to be.

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