Spiritual Exercise

Exercising the bird in the cage

Added: Tuesday, 24 April 2007

Here's a poem:

AT THE START OF THE DAY
At sunrise thirty young people ran out into a clearing,
they fanned out, their faces turned towards the sun,
and began to bend down, to drop to their knees, to bow,
to lie flat on their faces, to stretch out their arms,
to lift up their hands, and then to drop back on their knees again.
From a distance you might have thought they were praying
In this age no-one is surprised if people cherish their
bodies patiently and attentively every day of their lives
But they would be jeered at if they paid the same regard for their souls.
No these people are not praying.
They are doing their morning exercises.
- by Alexander Solzhenytsin

In one of my earlier vlogs I spoke about how in the Persian language the human body is likened unto a cage. If it is a cage, would you say it's wise to spend all the time that we do attending to our cage? Making sure it's nice and strong and sturdy? Polishing the bars and adding extra stability to it? Wouldn't it be wiser to attend to the bird inside the cage? Make sure it survives and even flourishes in its cage for the time it's in there? Exercise the bird rather than the cage?

A simple question to think about before we head off to the gym tomorrow morning! :-)