I meditated with some Gladiolas in a vase this morning, they were so beautiful they almost hurt my eyes. In my meditation, I realized that I am coming to the conclusion that my greatest ambition has already been achieved – to be what I already am.

I don’t need to love everything that I am, just to accept who I am.

Thomas Merton wrote that he would never fulfill his ambition to surpass himself unless he first accepted himself.

I came to the same conclusion some years ago. If I accept myself fully, and honestly, and without delusion, then I will already have surpassed myself.

This was a big decision, for me a painful and a lonely one. It meant I had to learn to tell the truth, and that meant I had to learn to be alone so much more of the time. Curiously, the more I accepted myself, the more I found that the people I knew had difficulty accepting me.

I am coming to know what I am, and also what I am not.

Then I found that this acceptance was comfortable, for me, it was all right. It is who I am. I wonder if we always look for labels, even when they aren’t any.

A friend of mine wrote on her blog that she is a mystic.

I was surprised to read that on her blog. I could never say that about myself, it seems too self-serving, and, in my case, untrue.

I used to think of myself as a mystic, it was a conceit for me, a way of rationalizing how different I was from everybody around me. The best I could do for myself was to see me as beyond conventional wisdom, beyond the expectations and rituals of the people around me.

But as I learned to accept myself, I found that I didn’t need a label like that, I thought it was just cowardly, something to hide behind.

By definition, a mystic is a person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute.

A mystic believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect.

That isn’t me. That’s as far as my morning meditation got. Bud came up and licked my hand and woke me up.