The Garden Of The Bishop Myriel
Get your life in order so that you can better understand the true face of your nature.
Mister Myriel’s inner life was filled with the same thoughts he had in his public life. For who could see it up close, the willful poverty in which the Digne bishop lived in would’ve been a serious and delightful show. Like all elders, and most thinkers, he had little sleep. His slumber was short and deep. He was very busy otherwise.
The time he had left after all the countless occupations, functions and breviary, he gave firstly to the needy, the sic and the afflicted. And the time left after this, he would give to work. He worked the ground in his garden, read or wrote. He had but one word for both ways he had of working. He called it "gardening."
He gladly stood there for an hour or two, cutting, weeding, and making a hole in the ground here and there, in which he put seeds. He didn’t study plants, he loved flowers. He had great respect for scholars, but had even more respect for the ignorant, and without ever deviating from these norms of respect, he sprinkled his furrows with a green painted sprinkler every summer evening.
"The soul is a garden", bishop Myriel would often say.*
Do you let yourself be guided by the existential model of support: the genuine inner man, in such a way as to give meaning to the moments of relaxation that make you appreciate the quality and values of life?
The effects of an intellectual or spiritual becoming exist mainly due to moments of pondering over the essence of your own being and your relationship with the world, often materialized under the aspect of the meaning you give to life. This, in a scenario in which you imagine yourself truly content with what is happening to you, with what you have and what you hold dear, simply being guided by a responsible force that you can control: the force of the genuine inner man.
This man, somewhat superior, placed ever higher that the consciousness which permits you to access the different levels of reality in which you exist, plays its role perfectly as a protector, teacher, advocate, counselor, sage, always maintaining itself in a realistic position from which he can observe, clarify and correctly fix the images, influences, and experiences from which your whole reality is formed.
In order to master the state of great spiritual charge of the inner man and to strengthen his steps to the heights of what is important to you, you must first learn to look at yourself under the impression of a feeling or in order to awake a philosophy over the fragility of life.
The inner man is not the creation of an intelligent being that you are responsible for following everywhere, but it is the exercise of the natural function of the soul that scrutinizes the meaning of life, indicating the direction of the spiritual goals that forces you to become aware of the present you are reporting and to experience it in an authentic, harmonious and fulfilling manner.
Is your basic attitude a plea for the formulation of a new philosophy of nature capable of deriving your entire existence from the manifestation of a spiritual principle?
Read Marcus Aurelius. He said: “When the things that surround you constrain you, cause you to struggle, then return quickly to yourself and do not get out of the rhythm more than necessary. For with the continual return to harmony, you will gain more mastery over it. Distance yourself from the Imperial Court. Turn to philosophy often and find peace and quiet in it, because things and people in the yard distract you from the true search for happiness and the sense of life.”
Seeing leadership under the guise of intrinsic value, taking into account the temptation of requesting access to a form of knowledge which doesn’t derive from the logic of renewal, but from the perception and immediate acceptance of coherence in present experiences and accomplished changes, we can infer a certain reality.
This reality, though far away from becoming an illusion in the mind of the man that is consumed by things which are not worthwhile, with thoughts repeating endlessly, not synchronizing itself with the totality of his experiences, but with everything that is contrary to the experiences he had, takes shape into a medium of certain vibration, of an "impulse" type. Which not only brings moments of joy and excitement, loosening the link between chaos and harmony, between rigor and virtuosity, but it creates and identity for himself based on a moral and intellectual satisfaction.
You can get your life in order only if you better understand the true face of your nature from the experience of day to day life, ignoring the presence of negative aspects. Leadership that inspires manifests itself in a framework of existence dominated by the indispensable authority of imposing yourself in the face of surrounding events, being at the same time penetrated by the pleasure of enjoying yourself.
Remember Jesus Christ who regularly retired in the Gethsemane garden. The great philosophy of nature, through a retreat away from agitation and daily stress, is to free yourself from the unpleasant feelings of life’s events, in freeing yourself from the resentments and frustrations that you have, from external influences, by the passions that falsify your nature. All these renunciations are necessary to achieve true freedom, freedom of thought, spirit and purity.
The first spiritual principle of a leader can be formulated as follows: “If you manage to endure your own person for a lifetime, then you can perceive others as an extension of your own person.”
The Garden Of The Bishop Myriel brings forth that relationship man has with his own traits, his own thoughts, expressed or not, within a framework of existence that identifies those realities constructed around all the possibilities of knowledge and understanding of the self.
* Note: Victor Hugo - Les Miserables
