We are co-creators, and as such we carry within us great power; but with power comes responsibility. You may be a medicine for someone, or you may be their poison. Everything in nature may be medicine or poison, including water, including plants, including us as human beings. Know thyself is the beginning always, and of self awareness we may be choosing more consciously which path to walk and embody. What we eat we become, and words and actions and emotions and beliefs become us also.
Today we’ll shift our eyes towards a word that seems to be on the extinction list in our modern day: honour. Just like “my word is my vow”, honour too has become perhaps like a distant memory that we may often associate with the knights and their code of ethics. And while we may think honour is merely a quality we hold, or a reflection of our character and virtue, honour serves a greater purpose for our humanity: it is a healer, a medicine that heals people on various levels.
Human and humane. Two words not necessarily the same, as one does not for certain the other. Being human does not necessarily make us humane, though being humane is about being human and holding humanity as ourselves. It is about being humane. It is about understanding the interconnection of everything and holding ourselves to compassion, integrity and responsibility of how we may be influencing and contributing to others.
If we can truly understand and awaken ourselves into our humaneness, I truly believe our world will be a more loving, peaceful one. We are continuously making a difference and living out our purpose; it doesn’t have to be on big world stages or with some extraordinary title of the work you do. Our purpose unfolds in the way we are, and how we become, and the kind of person we choose to be in our every day.
Through our every day lips, hands and seemingly ordinary gestures, along the circling staircases of life, love can be embodied by us. This is how change is made, and how we infuse more beauty in our world. You never know who may be listening, and how even a smile of yours or a kind gesture can be what someone needed in their day as you crossed paths on the sidewalks.
Let’s first begin with what honour means,
Honour can be seen as a quality or personal ethos that may often manifest itself as personal integrity and guiding principles and ethics one holds and acts through. Within the world of honour are held various other important worlds such as valour, compassion, chivalry and respect.
Samuel Johnson, in his A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), defined honour as having several senses, the first of which was “nobility of soul, magnanimity (i.e. the virtue of being of great mind and heart, thereby refusing pettiness refusal), and a scorn of meanness” (i.e. refusal to be mean and harmful to others, and choosing not to engage with those who are of such mean character).
Essentially, honour is based upon our personal integrity and alignment to higher spiritual values, ethics, and an embodiment of such higher virtues through our actions and choices. This is a choice indeed. A conscious choice. A continuous awareness to consciously choose on the kind of person we want to be; and a continuous dedication on acting of integrity, and speaking of kindness and respect.
A humility, in understanding that within each human being is a temple of God; for some it may be an awakened God, for others it may be a sleeping God, but nonetheless, we are here as human beings to honour the sacredness of human life and apply our wisdom and spiritual integrity towards our relationships. To intend grace upon others. To commit to doing the right thing not because of what the other does, but because this is whom we choose to be.
The Medicine of Honour
Honour is a medicine, it heals people. It helps them feel seen, understood, it raises them and lifts them up. In a world that seems so continously strip people of their sense of self and self worth, where our world is so divided, so separated, so polarized, and continuously categorizing, criticizing, judging, humiliating, shaming, disrespecting, gossiping, betraying, devaluing, I believe honour is a medicine humanity needs for its heart and soul. Honour renews spirit.
Honour protects people’s privacy and trust; honour protects the sacredness of life and the tenderness of hearts. Honour restores trust, and trust opens love, softens skins, opens palms and connection happens and we deepen into love. Honour transcends and dissolves the categorizations; honour reaches its hands across the lines that separate us and holds anothers’ hand. Honour embraces humanity’s lower natures with love, and it seeks to pour compassion where there was none, and through these waters of warmth of compassion, the other person too may someday try to forgive themselves.
Honour holds the complexity of nuances and emotions of the human experience with gentle awareness, clarity and warmth; holds it all with love and compassion, like a moonhold, because the waning is always held by the waxing, within the wholeness of all. Honour holds the tears of humanity, the struggles and the joys into the same hands, with the same gentle touch.
To honour something or someone is to see them in the highest light no matter what the current circumstances, no matter what their current challenges, with compassion, mercy, and devotion. Honour sees clearly, it sees the truth, and while it doesn’t deny the lower natures and the reality of situations, and while it clearly knows and see right from wrong, it also sees the light still, and it seeks to show you and reconnect you to that which also still resides within you heart and spirit.
Truly honourable acts serve to unify others and unify humanity. Through discovering the warmth and compassion within our own hearts, and building our capacity to feel them towards others, we essentially touch the tenderness of humanity; we may share in their tears of love, and we may even weave the warmth of intimacy throughout our communities. The hearths we create from the depth of loving, wise, awakened hearts may then welcome in the soul of humanity back home. Love returns us to love.
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Cover art by Conrad Kiesel, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
