Chapter 10 living room

A mason came up and said: Please tell us about the living room. He replied: Before you build your house within the walls, use your imagination to build a gazebo in the wilderness. Just as you have a home when twilight falls, so should the distant and lonely wanderer in your heart. Your house is a larger shell of you. It grows in the sun, sleeps in the silence of night, and that sleep is not heavenly.Is your room dreamless?Don't they also want to get away from the city and go to the woods or mountains? I would gather your houses into my hands, and scatter them like sowing seeds in the forests and pastures.

I would that the valleys be your streets, and the green paths your alleys, so that you might visit each other through the vineyards, and your garments smell of the earth. However, this is difficult to achieve. Out of fear, your ancestors brought you too close together.This fear will persist for some time, and your walls will continue to separate your families from your lands for some time. Tell me, people of Orphalias, what is in your houses?What do you guard with closed doors? Have you peace, that quiet impulse that shows your strength? Do you have memories, those looming bridges to the mountains of the mind?

Have you beauty, the guide that guides souls from wood and stone to holy mountains? Tell me, can you have these in your living room? Could it be that there is nothing but ease and the desire for it--the furtive thing that enters a house as a guest, becomes a master, and becomes the head of the family? Alas, it turns itself into a tamer again, making puppets of your greater desires with bait and whip. Although its hands are like silk, its heart is like iron. It tempts you to sleep, just to stand by your couch and mock the dignity of your flesh. It mocks your sane consciousness, placing them like fragile vessels under thistle wool.

Indeed, the desire for ease kills the affections of the soul, and it laughs at funerals. But you, children of the universe, motion in stillness, you should not be trapped, you should not be tamed. Your dwellings should not be anchors, but masts. It should not be a shiny membrane covering a wound, but an eyelid that protects the eye. You should not hold your wings back to walk through a door, bow your head to avoid hitting the ceiling, or hold your breath for fear that the walls will crack and collapse. You should not dwell in the graves that the dead make for the living. For all the splendor of your mansions, they cannot hide your secrets, nor conceal your desires.

For the infinity within you dwells in the heavenly palace, which has the morning mist as its door, and the night's song and silence as its window.