Viktor Frankl – Spark The Flame

This video doesn’t do justice to this set of thoughts and feelings I have. But it is a little hard to unravel, I will try a little here:

I write, speak and think a lot about meaning. Creating meaning, living meaningfully. Experiencing meaning. The reason why is because I’ve felt and experienced the opposite, which is a dangerous place to be because without meaning it is difficult to come up with a good reason to stay in this life.

I love this quote: “it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” – Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

Somehow, meaning is tied up in this, in a sort of giving, sacrificing. We are all temporary. Like beautiful pups or tiny plant shoots that spring in the beginning of our lives, we are full of all kinds of potential, time, vigor. Through life, time, and all that, we expend, transmute and propagate energy. We are energy conduits, channels. But every conduit in reality that humans use, endures weathering with usage and time. There is another beautiful quote which I love to try to remember: “We have only the present moment, sparkling like a star in our hands — and melting like a snowflake.” – Marie Beynon Lyons Ray.

When I think of that quote, I think of the snowflake like a burning star in our hand. Alive it once was. Alive it began, full of potential, life, energy. And then it expends these things, giving beauty, giving heat and warmth. Very likely, giving meaning to the observer. In this expulsion and giving, sacrificing of energy, of life, of meaning itself, it creates meaning in whoever or whatever is lucky and blessed to experience these things.

It gives its breath. It gives its mind. It gives its heart, its warmth, its focus, its attention, its Presence, and burns into that palm. And in that experience is beauty, warmth, wonder, tears, love. Meaning.

Is that star asking for anything??? WELL? IS IT??? If you think so, go ahead and tell it that. Tell that star, burning itself to death, but in that process exuding brilliance, light and practicing love of life, that it is asking for something. Maybe it is. Maybe it wants connection. Maybe it wants your attention. Your presence. Your focus. Your kiss.

That is my intro to this video, which comes off slightly different than this intro, but which is trying to get at the same thing, I think.

Blessings. And Love.

Here is another quote from Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” The author was a researcher who survived the Nazi concentration camps. In this book he writes about these experiences, and how it impacted his awareness of how people find meaning:

“Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. ‘Et lux in tenebris lucet’–and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.”

This quote struck me. I find it beautiful in many ways.

Right now, regardless of what we think about the bird in this excerpt, it is obvious it was profoundly meaningful for the author, for the bird to land in front of him and look steadily at him. I gather that this meant there was connection there: connection between him and his wife (who was deceased at this time), and connection with this bird. And I think the meaningfulness stems from and has something to do with this sense of connection.

Spark the Flame Podcast 18

Spark the Flame Podcast 17