So much is swirling, in the world and in my head. I keep trying to let three or four days pass between posts, but at times, that simply isn't enough.
This morning, my heart is going out to so many of my friends. They have literally spent a lifetime promoting their values and/or protesting assaults on their values. They've marched against war, for women, against Wall Street, for social justice. In some cases, their passions became work in the world, helping people in a range of paid and volunteer posts. And right now, many of them are simply devastated. In the last five or six years, so much that they worked for has started to slip away. At 65 or 70 or 75 years of age, there isn't time to say, well, things will be better in a decade. We elders may not have a decade or two or three.
I say "they", not because my beliefs are different from my friends'. In this duality construct, I am on their same page. However, I knew early on that I didn't have what it took to march, hold vigils, or otherwise protest. I attributed some of this to the fact that I do not feel comfortable in an environment of anger; most (not all) demonstrations happen when people are protesting something. Truthfully, the thought of being in a sea of angry people terrifies me. (Increasingly, I acknowledge that there is anger in me too, so I don't judge the anger, per se. I just find nothing beautiful about marching and chanting and holding signs, and beauty means too much to me.) In the sixties, the law of attraction was still far into my future; today, I wholeheartedly believe (I think this came from Abraham-Hicks) that we are in a "yes"-based Universe, so to protest war is essentially the same as rooting for more war and more violence.
This is so counterintuitive, isn't it? And so maddening. The quote about evil triumphing when good men do nothing (its attribution is debated) has inspired so many people, and rightly so. We don't want to be the person eating chocolates or filing our nails when the concentration camp is built next door, or our neighbors are attacked. In a fight or flight world, the only choice is to fight, right? Well, yes, in a duality construct, it is.
There is a missing, assumed clause in that famous quote. "...when good people do nothing [to stop the evil person]". And here's the rub. To build a unified construct where there is less and less evil in the first place, we cannot do others-based actions. We must act from the goodness within, creating beauty, not fighting ugliness. We need to model peace, not fight violence. We need, in a word, to pay less attention to "evil" deeds and doers, to stop feeding them with the oxygen they need to prosper. Fighting them, even protesting them, simply builds a bigger monster.
One of the biggest paradoxes of growing up in a narcissistic family (and, perhaps it could be said, society) is that clawing your way out of the black hole requires a level of alignment with self that perhaps might itself be called narcissistic. Being a woman expressing herself might similarly be called narcissistic, when people are used to your silence. ("How dare you think anyone is interested in what you think?") That's part of the high wire act I spoke of the other day. There is a slim, but very important difference. Am I focusing on my values for my own profit, hoping to save myself or to draw attention to myself? Or am I doing it to help create a better world? This distinction is on my mind every day, and I think most of the time, my genuine focus is on creating a better world for all. But it is torture, not fighting when people are suffering, and I'm sure I'll revisit this topic more and more frequently.
On a completely different note, we have finally gone a full two weeks without snow. Away from Lake Superior, the temperatures are springlike and I presume things are greening up. Here, it is "colder by the lake", with highs in the 40s, but I do see a little green in the grass and at the corners of people's gardens. There is hope in the air about the arrival of Duluth's compressed but radiant summer, even as COVID levels rise again. We are all on a tight rope, aren't we?
