Polishing the Gem
Is finding our true selves enough?
The small ruby everyone wants has fallen out on the road.
Some think it is east of us, others west of us.Some say, "among primitive earth rocks," others, "in the deep waters."
Kabir's instinct told him it was inside, and what it was worth,
and he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth.
—Kabir
The Kabir Book: Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir
Versions by Robert Bly1
Many years ago, I taught this poem in a Freshman Composition class at a community college in southern New Jersey. While Freshman Comp is—as many of you will remember—an essay-writing class, I offered this poem as a tool to teach students about how to read imagery and metaphor.
I asked their sleepy faces (the class was held during the 3 p.m. slump of the day) what they thought the small ruby represented. There were a few conjectures:
Money
Happiness
Love
All of them pretty good. Next, I asked the students to trace each of their guesses through the poem to test their theories and see if they held up based on the language of the poem. As my father Anthony Piccione used to teach in his SUNY poetry classes, “A poem is what it does.”
Money didn’t seem to make sense since wrapping it up in the speaker’s heart cloth felt like a selfish act that the poem’s celebratory tone didn’t support.
Happiness and Love made it through the aesthetic process obstacle course intact, but which one of these terms did Kabir mean? I suggested to the class that we integrate the remaining concepts of Happiness and Love and see what we came up with.
As a class, we resolved that the ruby was our personal essence, our highest self. Or, more specifically, the satisfaction of living as our highest self.
Contentment, centeredness, unflappable YOUness.
This substack, Foundation of Self, is in service to that ruby, that jewel that you are. The gem that deserves honoring and polishing so that you can go out into the world and live as your highest self—for your own benefit as well as the benefit of others.
The small ruby everyone wants has fallen out on the road.
The ruby of our true nature is small. Not literally; perhaps Bly chooses this word because although the ruby is of great worth (by its very nature of being a ruby), it is unique to each of us, and therefore, in the grand cosmic scheme of things, it is a mere spark of universal consciousness. But! It is valuable. And due to it being the size of one human life’s essence, it is easily lost.
There it goes—fallen out onto the road as we travel through life. Maybe it was a breakup of a relationship. Or a traumatic childhood. Or the practice of trying and failing to achieve our dreams. Oof. I can identify with this. Can you? Don’t we all want contentedness? And isn’t it so easy to lose our true selves along the path?
Some think it is east of us, others west of us.
It seems as if everyone and their guru has an idea of where we can find our true selves. If you’re a psychospiritual pilgrim, your Insta and Facebook feeds probably have loads of memes and workshops and seminars that promise you their way is the way to find what has been lost in you.
Some say, "among primitive earth rocks," others, "in the deep waters."
Interesting. Maybe in order to find our lost selves, we need to turn to telluric intelligence. Or maybe to the sacred waters of the unconscious. It can get confusing, no?
Kabir’s instinct told him it was inside, and what it was worth,
Let’s look at that: Kabir’s instinct told him where to find the ruby. Instinct is an oft-overlooked gift that is innate in each of us. Perhaps he is calling us here to return to our trust in that ability. Kabir turns off the world chatter of opinion and guidance (however well-meaning) and two things happen: He finds the ruby (amazing!) and he discovers how valuable it actually is. All this by turning inward (via instinct) and consulting the true oracle: The “ruby” itself.
and he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth.
Once he discovers this, he knows how precious this ruby/self is and places it carefully in his heart center. Another way to say this is that he protects his divine nature by wrapping it tenderly and stowing it deep within himself where it cannot be lost again.
Most of the inner work we do is toward this end: To find our true nature and protect it at all costs. This might look like creating healthy boundaries with others. Or speaking our truth with integrity.
If you can do this, you’re well on the path. Maybe it’s taken you half your life to achieve this level of self-awareness, but who’s counting?
I don’t know about you, but as I reached midlife, I recognized that all this self-development wasn’t really doing much for me. Or, rather, it was doing great things for me, but that’s all. Somehow that wasn’t gratifying.
I lost the ruby. Again.
Damn it.
What occurred to me was that while it was essential for me to find and honor my true nature, there was more I needed to do with that true self in this short time on earth.
I was meant to share my unique and sacred self-being with others through mentorship.
Even as we grow and develop in solitude (the truly deep work can only be done by us alone), we heal in community.
So, the theme that underlies this substack is this: Our life’s work is not really complete until we have unwrapped the ruby of our highest self from its heart cloth and polished that gem so that we can share its wealth with our fellow human and non-human beings. Ultimately, we are all siblings in this realm and, as Ram Dass reminds us, “We’re all just walking each other home.”
Bly, R. (1977). The Kabir book: forty-four of the ecstatic poems of Kabir (Vol. 544). Beacon Press (MA).