A Mason's Work

[00:00] This week, we've been moving through the spectrum of what it means to go from appreciation to
[00:07] gratitude at the shallow end, the daily noticing practice through to the sort of transcendent
[00:14] recharging or refilling of yourself by virtue of these profound surrender gratitude experiences.
[00:26] What is important to understand about a lot of the gratitude conversation is that when
[00:38] we look at gratitude, there are some alluring problems with it.
[00:48] And I say problems, I want to be very careful here.
[00:51] You very likely have met people in your life that only see the perfect Ashlar.
[00:59] They only see what's working and working well.
[01:05] They are super appreciative at all times of the right stuff.
[01:12] So much so that they dismiss or blow off the opportunities to improve or to fix things.
[01:22] They diminish them as something that is a focus on the negative.
[01:29] Clearly, that doesn't work, right?
[01:31] That kind of perpetual ignorance of the fact that the world has rough edges and opportunities
[01:40] exist to improve it is in its own way, a type of denial of reality.
[01:47] And in the same way, we all know folks that are focused only on the rough Ashlar, that improvement
[01:54] activity, that perpetual polishing, so much so their nose is always to the grindstone such
[02:01] that they never see the world around them.
[02:04] And that is it's a different type of misapplication.
[02:09] What really is what we're cultivating with this kind of approach is this true and genuine
[02:19] appreciation that we find in ideas like the Masonic pavement, that there is this positive and negative
[02:28] at all times, and they are in perfect harmony.
[02:35] This perfectly imperfect understanding of the way the world is creates this foundation that
[02:46] allows you to selectively move from place to place as you need to.
[02:52] You can move to the place of refinement and move to the place of appreciation and into that
[03:00] deeper space of that depth gratitude.
[03:04] When you can appreciate both the rough Ashlar and the perfect Ashlar conceptually in the context
[03:11] of gratitude, you can appreciate the opportunities of learning and growth of really improving
[03:18] yourself and the world around you.
[03:21] You become grateful for the roughness of the world because it gives you a place to work and
[03:28] refine the self and cultivate consciousness.
[03:32] And you gain this appreciation of the grand architect of the universe and how everything fits together,
[03:39] even though all the edges are rough.
[03:43] This appreciation and gratitude both combined become this nourishing force that you can harness
[03:55] to recover, to refresh, to also become its very own type of agent of change in the world
[04:05] by expressing gratitude.
[04:08] And we'll talk more about what that looks like tomorrow.
[04:11] You can take this practice and turn it into this type of agency to change the world around you.
[04:19] So for today's sort of takeaway, what you want to look for, if you can see it,
[04:26] are the places where something or someone in your life is perfectly imperfect.
[04:33] Maybe it's the way they mispronounce something.
[04:37] Maybe it's the way they have a superstitious behavior that doesn't make any sense.
[04:44] Maybe it's just the subtle imperfection that gives them such a delightful character.
[04:52] When you can do this, you'll begin to relax a little bit more into the present moment.
[04:58] And that's the goal.