Blog 2444 – 07.04.2022
Refusing To Blow The Knee
This last week I began rewatching HBO’s long running series The Game of Thrones. It is not for the faint of heart or those offended by coarse language, nudity, or violence. It has all those a plenty as many vie and fail to sit at all or for long on the iron throne of Westeros to reign over the Seven Kingdoms.
North of the Great Wall in the frozen north are a fierce and determined people who are called Wildlings by the Seven Kingdoms but who call themselves the Free Folk. They refuse to bow the knee to anyone and like American Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale their sentiment is “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Today in the fifty United States and it’s territories we observe the annual summer holiday commemorating the day we as a people told the Mad King of England that we would no longer bow the knee. It was a brave and bold move and had we not had the help of France and others we might never have been able to secure our freedom as an independent nation.
On the other side of the world today the people of Ukraine are fighting to stay an independent nation. Our President announced last week that U.S. troops are being stationed in Poland to prevent the Russians from trying to invade there. Russian President Putin it would seem envisions himself a Czar or King of a Russian empire. The game of thrones continues and with it the slaughter of innocents. Satan or Ego from John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost still shouts with his clinched fist raised high, “I would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
I was reared in the proud tradition of rebellion and it has taken me a lifetime to unlearn some of those engrained beliefs that I was taught as a boy. The greeting Namaste literally means, “I bow to the divinity in you.” The true king/queen is within us all. Discovering Who and Whose we are is the true Game of Thrones.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White
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