Sovereign

I feel that today’s date holds a certain significance, although I’m not sure what that is. It could simply be the sequence of numbers that’s causing me such childlike excitement. Whatever it is, shallow or deep, let me explore it, if for no other reason than to mark 22/2/22.

Since it’s only February, I was wondering what my words are for this year. Ease, lightness, clarity have been the favourites for some time but quite unexpectedly sovereign, agency, and volition have recently surfaced on my radar. I can truly say I have no idea from where. These are not topics I have been consciously considering.

My first thought was, I really need to stop watching the British Royal Family fall apart on YouTube 🙂 On a more serious note, and in order to make sense of this, I decided to look at the definitions of each of the three words, compare the correlations and see what comes up. The words that stood out to me the most were: ‘powerful, supreme, majestic, unlimited’, and, ’self-determination’, ‘ownership of thoughts, actions, behaviour’, and finally ‘means or instrumentality by which something is done’.

Almost immediately a Rumi poem came to mind.

Love is not condescension
Never that,
Nor books, nor any marking on paper
Nor what people say of each other.

Love is a tree with branches
Reaching into eternity
And roots set deep into eternity
And no trunk!

Have you seen it?

The mind cannot
Your desiring cannot
The longing you feel for this love
Comes from inside you.

When you become the friend
Your longing will be as the man in the ocean
Who holds to a piece of wood.

Eventually wood, man, and ocean become one swaying Being.
Shams Tabriz, the secret of God.

( One Swaying Being, translated by Coleman Barks )

Sovereign, agency and volition sound almost synonymous at first but not quite. They are, however, connected. We all wonder about our purpose, the deeper meaning of our life, our legacy. None of these questions can be answered unless we first realise who we are and what we are capable of.

It is through the recognition of our own divinity that we reach for the sublime but it is equally true that the divine looks to us to become a ‘means’ or an ‘instrument’ to channel the infinite into the finite. Only through free will, self-determination and taking ownership of our actions do we root deep into our own power and thereby lay claim to becoming sovereign.

 

 

Best
Afshan x