Luctor et Emergo

Thursday December 8th, Year 3

A meditation for today

Luctor et Emergo

Sometimes for my morning meditation I pick a phrase I came across  in my reading or a phrase comes into my head and I try  imagining a picture or a short visualization of the meaning carried in the phrase.  I like phrases that are in foreign languages because I don't know any foreign languages and have to study the often multiple ways the phrase can be translated.  This is really educational as you very quickly come to realize many words (phrases) do not translate one hundred percent accurately, some are just close approximations at best.  At times I wonder how we ever communicate across cultures at all.  Over the years I have come to appreciate the many nuances that are unavailable to the single-tongued.  To be fluent multilingually, as to fluent monolingually, is to order off a French chef's menu as compared to McDonald's drive-thru offering.

Today was "Luctor et Emergo"  usually translated as, "I struggle, I overcome" and variously as, "I struggle, but I will survive, I struggle and come out on top, I struggle and emerge".

Word-for-word analysis:

Luctor ----  luctari Verb = wrestle, struggle, fight (against)

         et ----  et Conjunction = and, also

emergo ----  emergere Verb = rise up out of the water, emerge, escape, appear,…

As I consider I am drawn to, "I struggle, I emerge".  Struggle is no stranger, as I have experienced and observed the physical and mental struggles Fate has presented individuals to live with.  I like the pregnant meaning carried in, I emerge.  It has a sense of transfiguration, to emerge (throw off the husks) as something new, something completely different.

As I meditate on this, I see fist-sized bubbles working their way to the surface of a pool of otherwise still, crystalline water, deep in the grotto beneath a cathedral's floor.  As they reach the surface and burst, they send tiny droplets of water arcing through the illuminating light like falling stars in reverse.  Every once in a while, when one of the bubbles bursts it releases a beautiful iridescent butterfly flapping its wings upward.  They are just beautiful.

I see a cast iron caldron bubbling with a foul smelling witches' brew of pain, suffering, anger, hate and utter hopelessness.  Like the grotto pool, the bubbles burst as they reach the surface, but the arcing droplets appear more as fiery artillery shells speeding on their way to the slaughter below.  I'm surprised, as like the grotto pool, every once in a while one of the bursting bubbles releases a beautiful iridescent butterfly flapping its wings upward, and they too are just beautiful.

I ponder the meaning of this.  The grotto view I think I can understand;  From Beauty and the Sacred comes the beautiful and divine.  But the cauldron puzzles me, what am I to make of it? From its foul brew can come what? 

The pure, the beautiful and divine too?

From there?? Really??

I think of those rare souls I have met.  Young and old alike, who birthed from mother's wombs filled like that of the cauldron, into a world overflowing with more of the same. Never to have known anything but the rot, yet they were not...

Almost souls of another species, pure, and clean and filled only with good and abundance within.  I think they are souls born old, themselves bearing the message of Hope to the lost, Light for those who have never seen, and Love to those who only dream of it.

Upon this I will meditate today.

bobb



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