The Royal Path

Ocasionally (like yesterday) I find something so intriguing that I jump the queue and bring something out that is fresh. I have touched on the idea of Royalty before, because it figures in my stories. I say I was once a mage to a queen. I don't know if I have ever shared this:

My mother used to wonder how I came by certain traits. One of them was my displayed sense of "to the manor born". She divorced my father when I was two. Already some characteristics of his were mine. More appeared in me as time went on. She marveled at how aspects of my character seemed genetic since my father was nowhere around to drive them. This drove her crazy, since some of these characteristics were the ones she didn't care for in my father. Oh well. Some of my character seemed to skip generations too.

My paternal grandmother came from the south, from a line that included landed gentry, plantation owners. She herself was not rich, not land rich even but she had certain Southern attitudes. Robert de Bruce of Scotland (remember the movie Braveheart? That movie about William Wallace is fractured history but history nonetheless, and Robert is the son of the ailing and devastated king of Scotland, a large part of that story as told in the movie) is a reputed relation in my grandmother's line.

My mother thought there was a genetic thread carrying this sense of inheritance that seems to always have informed certain parts of my character coming up through this lineage. We were university student, post depression poor in my early years, me a child of a single mother, and I was raised up in the liberal and egalitarian leftist politics of the post war forties, nearly socialist. Yet here I was a scion of the realm even so. I carry royal blood and in certain ways, not all fortunate, I act like it.
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The true person is an active participant, engaged in her environment while remaining unoppressed by it. Although all phenomena are going through the various appearances of birth, abiding, changing, and dying, the true person doesn't become a victim of sadness, happiness, love, or hate. She lives in awareness as an ordinary person, whether standing, walking, lying down, or sitting. She doesn't act a part, even the part of a great Zen master. This is what Master Linji means by "being sovereign wherever you are and using that place as your seat of awakening."
--Thich Nhat Hanh, “Simply Stop,” Fall, 2007 Tricycle


The Royal Path

You tell me I am.
You say I am sovereign
anywhere I am,
anywhere I go.
You say I can use myself
as the throne you left
me, the legacy
of my gracious royal birth,
the seat of my loft,
my awakening,
my victorious return.

January 5, 2010 2:16 AM