This is profound, SWOT.
This is the heart of the issue for all of us. I think about this alot, actually. I posted a quote once about looking up at the stars and being aware that, all over the world, there are animals looking up at the stars, too. Reptiles, birds, elephants.
Spiders, maybe.
Fish.
Surely, plant life knows the difference between the day and the night. The nature of its respiration changes in the night.
So all at once, reality shifted.
Somehow, that beacon of unconditional love fits in, here. It has something to do with Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, but is even more encompassing.
Tolle is writing about our fascination with our own stories, and with our need to be right, to feel justified in hurting or in demanding healing or whatever.
It has something to do with time, too.
What I am trying to say is that there is no such thing as unconditional love, but that there is a changed perception of what we thought everything was and means, and is.
And once we get there, that is unconditional love.
Cedar
Okay, so I just got it. You were asking about how that would feel, what it would have meant to us, to have been seen and identified as someone to be cherished and taught, instead of having been identified as one of those it is appropriate to victimize, and to lie to, and to shame.
All I know about that this morning is that our locus of control was shifted from in here, in the heart of us where it belongs, to out there, where the abusers get to have at us for free because we still don't exactly know how to stand up for ourselves.
Not without accusing ourselves of being them in our hearts, we don't.
I don't even know that I love anyone. There are people and animals I am so enamored of that I find everything they do endlessly fascinating.
These people can hurt me, when they are hurt, or when they do not reflect a good person, a job well done, back to me.
They are that important. Much of the time of my life is freely given for them without regret.
If that is loving, then those are the things that I love. If that is not loving, then I don't know what that is, love.
I only know that once you break through, it is difficult for me to know where you are and what is me. That is why I feel best myself when we are together and everything looks and feels and smells and sounds beautifully, the way it should.
Anything less is dangerously chaotic.
And that is when the monsters come. (There are still many places inside where I am afraid reality will be blown to smithereens. F blah, blah, blah, mom.)
Sacred horror, right? Like Elie Wiesel.
Cedar
I am taking the muffler off my motorcycle today, and capitalizing my personal needlepoint motto. The more clearly I see the hurt of what happened to me, and to all of us, the more determinedly, stupidly and irresponsibly evil abusive people seem.
It's about that win thing, again.
What in the world did they win, to justify what they did and then, did again, and never, ever stopped doing? And wouldn't whatever they won feel tainted?
?
And I know we are supposed to forgive, and to understand they do these things from a sense of hurt, or from having been hurt. Maybe, from having been hurt worse than we were, so that what they did to us was actually a triumph, given whatever it was that happened to them.
But I swear, there is informed intent behind the repetitively destructive patterns of a life.
But then, I cannot see my own destructiveness either.
So that is the dilemma of human, I suppose.
