"Named" STORMS

We are entering the “Hurricane Season” here in Florida, and the weather prognosticators are issuing their dire predictions of the number of “named storms” that we can anticipate this year. This set me to thinking about this business of identifying these weather phenomena with a name… and that name then linking them, for all future reference, to their power and effect.
It occurs to me that we are all in our own “storms of life.” In fact, we too are known to the world about us by not only our name… but, even more significantly, by the power of the forces around us and the effect that our “individual named storm” has our world. “Oh you know, he is the fellow who___" and then a description of all the swirling circumstances that constitute our knowledge of “him” (or “her.”)

Cases in point: Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa, and Nelson Mandela. Here we have four people of radically differing personalities… politics… circumstances… and backgrounds, who all distinguished themselves by their clarity of personhood in the midst of their particular life storms. All about them, others were caught up in the force of circumstances that these individuals harnessed and directed toward an effective and world-changing outcome. They became the “Eye” of their respective Life Storms.

Allow me to make note, today (with further elucidation tomorrow), of the import of the storm’s “eye.” It is here that the effectiveness and the direction of the particular “named storm” is measured. It is in the eye of the storm that the power and significance of each storm is known. And it is here (in the eye) that peace, quiet, and stillness is found. The stronger the storm swirling around… the more clearly defined and absolute the eye.

And so it was for each of the four exampled individuals. All with vastly different circumstances surrounding them… but all four with a determined, quietly resolute, and firmly clear identity in the center of their particular tumult. The admonition to “Be Still and Know” was exemplified in their exercise of their unique steering of the forces around them toward meaningful and significant accomplishment. Their identity became the label… the name with which we know of momentous happenings in our history.

Today, I ask that you not allow yourself to be caught up in the forces that encircle you. Insulate your precious Self in the center of all that you are living with (for those circumstances will NOT simply go away.) Strengthen your resolve to BE the marvelous individual that you were created to be with no reference to, nor reflection on all of that noisy encircling madness. And embrace your own purpose to be… for just this moment… and then just one more moment… and then… the name identified by all who look at your life (firstly in your own mirror) of a storm that moved over the face of your world and made meaningful and positive changes for the Good.

IMAGES: Various Public Sources