May 25, 2002

• Mwahaha… *wicked grin*  The kid’s online fair experienced a hitch, a glitch.  This means mom can slip in and post .  There are two items in this  post.  The first one came to me all by myself last night, and the one below it was inspired by something I was asked in an email this morning.

  
  

  ONE

  
  

  I’ve been getting some of what I came here seeking, catching on to this shadow business–that the closer I come to the Light, the larger the Shadow looms. My shadow is the hardest part of me to love, if viewed one way. Viewed another way, it is my strength… or my weakness… or the key to something essential in my Work.

  
  

  My thoughts on this come out in a jumble. I think much of the cause there is that these thoughts don’t integrate well with the frame of reference crystallized in English. I’m barely able to wrap my mind around some of the concepts I’ve been working with, and entirely unable to encompass them in words. I try borrowing words that approximate my thinking:

  
  

  The litany against fear from Frank Herbert’s Dune: “Fear is the mind-stealer, the little death…”

  
  

  E.J.Gold’s Labyrinth Voyager’s Quatrain: “…making no sudden movements; my habits will carry me through.”

  
  

  Across the front of my black t-shirt, in blood red letters: “I scare my own family.”

  
  

  People do have some odd reactions to my sincere efforts to serve them.

  
  

  A significant segment of my clients react strongly, angrily, defensively, upon getting a psychic reading from me. They opt not to pay me. The majority of these then, two or three years or more later, write me letters of gratitude with generous checks, and start referring friends and family. In other words, people pay me to piss them off, but they don’t start paying until they’ve cooled off. Some job I picked for myself, here. Right livelihood, indeed.

  
  

  What a dharma, eh? The thing I do best is stir up people’s feelings. It really is the right task for me, and I’m the woman for the job. The anger and the criticism that they spout before the truth sinks in don’t hurt my feelings. I need all that vitriol and spleen to keep me humble. Ignorance and arrogance make a pathetic combination. If there must be both, then let it be in moderation, please.

  
  

  The biggest irony of them all is that I’m usually blindsided by the anger. I certainly don’t try to elicit it. I do my best to give the help that they ask for, only to learn later that what they wanted was to be comforted, validated, reassured. If you want me to reinforce your denial, why not just say so?

  
  

  Go ahead, if you dare. Ask me to reinforce your denial, shore up your pretty illusions, tell you everything is all right, that you’ve done all you can, you had no choice. [The one of you there who really knows me is laughing her ass off at that.] I know that the world is full of sweet, helpful people willing to tell you what you want to hear and then bask in the warmth of your gratitude. With me, you can keep the gratitude. I prefer my own integrity.

  
  

  If you ask me, I will tell you that what is, IS; that nothing beyond this moment is ever sure, that this moment itself is largely a mystery, and that security is only an illusion.

  
  

  I will freely share with any and all seekers this Great Secret:  There is no Great Secret. There! Now you know it. No Great Secret; no magic pill, wand, or secret formula; no sure thing. Every moment of time, we’re spinning on the Wheel of Fortune; at any moment the Lightning can strike the Tower and everything we’ve built goes boom.

  
  

  You always have a choice even if the only one available is whether to die with or without peace and dignity. With impeccable courage and Strength, each of us can learn to steer his own Chariot. What you seek, you find. If you wear a mask, it distorts your own vision. And if you’re willing to let it all go and take the empty-handed leap into the Void–then, wherever that takes you, there you are.

  
  

  AND

  
  

  TWO

  
  

  One of you [you know who you are] asked in an email: “What is love?” I may have asked for that by saying how much I love dogs and all doggy things, or you may have had reasons of your own. It’s a good question anyway, and the 2 paragraphs I gave to my answer as the kid hovered, anxious to get back to ROL, didn’t begin to cover the subject. No one will be trying now to take this old laptop from me, so I’ll give the question the time and seriousness it deserves.

  
  

  Right from the start in this life, I encountered conflicts over love. My mother “loved” me, and she expressed it by feeding me, washing me, restricting my movements, trying to keep me “safe”. My father loved me, too. He expressed it by teaching me, making a set of tools to fit my small hands and letting me use them in his workshop with him. He encouraged my curiosity by answering questions, and empowered me to learn by sometimes answering, “I don’t know… go find out.” He challenged me to take small risks and he applauded my successes or sent me to Mama for bandages if I failed.

  
  

  In retrospect, I consider his love more truly loving than my mother’s nurturing maternal worry. I think Neale Donald Walsch makes a valid point when he says that every human action has but two possible “sponsoring thoughts”. We act either from love or from fear. Fear was what my mother’s “love” was all about.

  
  

  No blame: she was programmed that way, and by her lights she had plenty to be afraid of. I was almost not born alive. She had lost one baby before me and couldn’t have any more after me. I was her only chance at posterity. And then the damned doctors told her I’d probably not live long enough to grow up. The motive uppermost for her was to keep me alive, largely because she believed that a woman’s main job was motherhood, and I was her only chance.

  
  

  My father’s motive was to give me as much of life as I could cram into whatever time I had. He was proud of me, enjoyed showing *his girl* off to every one. By the time I was three he had taught me “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” and shoved me onstage at a big union Christmas party to recite it. By then, I had already learned to read, mostly from sitting on his lap with the evening paper after work. My vocabulary as I entered kindergarten included words like integration and indictment. Some of that stuff was stroking his own ego, and some of it was just fun, the pleasure of watching a bright young mind develop, but to him it was love.

  
  

  Love, to the girl I was then, what I felt as opposed to the various loves people were expressing toward me, was the feeling of comfort and safety I derived from my parents. Then very soon someone gave me a puppy and that awakened the maternal nurturing affection that’s hardwired in most girls. Oooh, I loved that pup, but Mama feared his fleas, intestinal worms… maybe even the competition for my affection, who knows? …anyway, she made me give him back. That was my first broken heart.

  
  

  Hearts don’t break, but I didn’t know that yet then, so mine got broken over and over as I formed unwise attachments and had them torn apart one way or another. As a sexually precocious adolescent under the influence of fairy tales, whose adored father had died young, I was vulnerable, needy, randy and seductive: asking for trouble, in other words. I found plenty of that kind of trouble, and like everyone else, I called it love.

  
  

  Attachment is one of many words that are euphemized into “love”. Who really wants to admit that they have an unhealthy attachment to someone or something? Doesn’t it sound ever so much better to say, “I love…” whatever? In that same “unhealthy” vein, there is a blend of deference, self-deprecation, and empowerment of the other, that emotionally wounded people will offer to others in the hope of purchasing “love”. They’re saying, in effect, “you’re so far above me, here, take this part of my soul, I’m yours.” The unwary object of such affections eventually discovers that it wasn’t a gift, but an intended trade for a part of his soul. In my lexicon, those are some things that aren’t love, but are commonly called by that name.

  
  

  Real love doesn’t demand or expect anything (not even “love”) in return. Real love does not need to have the love object around all the time. If you feel you can’t get by without someone, that feeling isn’t love, but rather a sexual bond or emotional need or attachment.

  
  

  Just as deference is only a surface show of the “respect” it often passes for, nurturing, ego-stroking, longing for someone’s presence, and sacrificing yourself for another isn’t love. Sacrificing yourself for “love” is like destroying land for the sake of the crop–self-limiting and ultimately counterproductive. Unless you love yourself first, you can’t really love another.

  
  

  If you want to be loved, do it yourself. Love is a verb. We do it, or we don’t. We don’t win it or fall in it. There are other better words for the things we can win and fall into. Some of those words are lust, gratitude and co-dependency.

  
  

  If a life of love is what you want, first get on good terms with yourself. Forgive all mistakes and give yourself credit for attainments. Then, from now on, do nothing to damage your self-esteem. That gives you a good base from which to transcend fear. Once that is done, just follow your instincts, throw love all around and don’t forget to claim plenty of it for yourself. You deserve it.

  • 9:24 pm
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