A Life of Seva

Serving the collective serves you. Only if you convince yourself that you are apart from the collective will you hesitate to serve it. The individual is fabricated within the collective, not independent of it.

You are a fractal.

As am I.

We, the collective, are more than a self, more than a career, more than family. More than a city, a state, a nation, a species, a planet, or even a universe.

We are more than the food in our bellies, the neurons in our brain, or the stars in the sky.

We are the ever-evolving, ever-oscillating embodiment of co-created synergy.

"It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies" (Michel Foucault).

And it is by exploring the full spectrum and depth of the individual that we come to know and better understand the collective.

The emotions, thoughts, behaviors, characters, storylines, languages, cultures, relationship dynamics, compulsive urges, karmic inheritance, perceptions, and choices are as much in here as they are out there. Which also means, we are as much out there as we are in here.

The heart, like the soul, knows no "other."

Love is inclusive, not exclusive.

As we do unto "others," we do unto ourselves.

Self-care is collective care.

Our collective cannot afford to keep sacrificing the individual for the collective, forgetting that the branch is still a part of the tree.

Or that, when you cut off that branch, the whole tree still feels it.

When every organ serves a purpose, who has the right to say we don't need a heart just because we have a brain or lungs?

If every organ serves the body in the way it's designed to, then we too, must serve in the way we're designed to. This is what it means to be a microcosm of the macrocosmic universe.

Our service has to serve us because the truth contained within the service cup we pour from is most nourishing when it is properly sourced.

The most nourishing nectar comes directly from nature. So too, is it our nature to serve and be served. One without the other leaves the feedback loop/circuit/cycle incomplete.

And we all know this life, this nature—is cyclical. We see it in the seasons. We know it by our lifespans. We feel it in our emotions.

It all comes in waves.

So the more I serve, the more I can be served.

And the more I'm served, the more I can keep serving.

It's the eternal switching between 1 and 0. The cosmic dance between giving and receiving. The simultaneous living and dying.

Our oscillation is our vibration.