Summertime
image: cesareal
Summertime and the living is easy. It appears that the fish are jumping and the cotton is high.
The song Summertime, paraphrased above, has the duality contained within so many of the genuine or faux spirituals. The element of an earthly travail alleviated only by the promise of a heavenly release. One of the classics of the genre being Swing Low Sweet Chariot wherein the lyric urges the singer’s companions that they’ll be coming soon, to the promised land. The idea is that death is the ultimate freeing of the individual from the burdens and troubles of the world and this is undestandable given the origin of the song.
The idea of a chosen people, a contract with God, a covenant is compelling. The concept that the world is a place of struggle, hardship and suffering from which the only respite is the certain knowledge of another dimension where these things are as shadows that dance upon a wall in the firelight.
This is the sanctuary of certain peoples whose life is affirmed by a transcendent state of spiritual ecstasy that promises and offers release from the constraints of the physical world.
It is unequivocally the case that within each of us there is a certain quality, a matter that is difficult to define because of its transcendent nature. It is the vital essence of life itself, that thing which initially gives animation and potentially offers illumination. To be at the core of a carousel of happenings whose occurrence constitutes your life is like being at the helm of a great craft. Your ability to surrender to the influence of these things will determine how your life unfolds.
Presumably you are not a slave. At least not in the classic sense as we in the west would understand it. So this means you are unlikely to be battling against physical hardship ad privations that render the self electing life an impossibility. Your liberation is in transcendence of the mundane. Your freedom is in escaping the cycle of repetition that becomes your habitual way of being and, in a sense, an enslavement.
Aspire to greatness. Approach your life as a one shot deal. Make it count.