Sympathy vs antipathy

We have been on vacation for a while, visting old friends and making new ones. It has been a delight yet we are also glad to be back and starting our homeschool year. Today was our first day and we accomplished much. We have set the forms of the homeschool day, the verses and songs for opening and closing, the fuctions of the space and also details like the weather chart, etc...

There is something special about starts and something special about friendships too, I think that sometimes we may be carried by the sweet beginnings of a relationship, and yet forget that in the older relationships new things can arise too if we are open to it.

I have found examples of this in this last trip where older friends had been moving in different paths of life and thus have less things in common between them, but as I listen closer, it does seems that a lot can be united where distance abides.

The same holds true for antipathy and sympathy, we may seem attracted to some kind of personalities, and get to befriend the same type of people, perhaps if we are of one temperament we feel inclined to like the opposite one, and vice-versa, but is is in overcoming this law of sympathy that we can exercise our full human freedom, in choosing to be friends to those that we might not feel inclined to, usually the ones that hold some likeness to us, that some truth about ourselves is discovered and yielded to the service of the highest. ( That is one of the benefit in having children that have the same temperament working together for a while, their temperaments soften up with each other's company)

I have been observing sunflowers for a while now, following the indications of observation exercises to get to know the essence of the plants, and I discovered that after a while, a relationship with the sunflowers arose, somehow the thoughts of sunflowers got intermingled with my daily life and at some point the picture came of the whole plantation, where the spaces in between them got brighter and intense, whereas the sunflowers themselves difused in the background.

 It is this kind of exercise that also helps us see through our human nature, and focus on the spirit that resides in us, thus vanishing anger, jealousy, hatred and other such like thoughts from our life.