This has been a strangely intense start of the year personally, and it would appear, globally. The challenge has been to find the love around the edges of things, where I don't expect to find it.
So, back on October 11 ("The Face in the Mirror") I mentioned the fact that increasingly, when I look at my face in the mirror, I see my dad's face. I may have looked like him all along, but when my hair was short, my bangs (fringe) fell over my forehead. Now that I have such l long hair, much of the time, one or both sides are pulled back, revealing "his" forehead and features more clearly. Yikes. Talk about paradox. I'm going through kind of a rolling series of reactions to this. Initially, horror. Then an attempt at acceptance. Then appreciating for at least a few moments that I look beautiful, before seeing Dad and cringing. And back again. On Sunday, I wrote a letter to him, trying to embrace the ways that he had been a good teacher (even, if kind of "what not to be"!) Yesterday, I was on a video call, and the effect was still particularly strong. I know one thing, which is I need to reach the point where I can love myself and my face in mirrors, photographs, or video calls no matter how much I resemble him. I have to laugh too, at the larger metaphor, of how all of us women see ourselves in large part through the filter of men's opinions and men's eyes...maybe many women look at themselves and see their fathers.
Then, California. I this is really a much bigger event than we realize yet. Clearly, people losing their homes and livelihoods, cities, towns, and the state and federal governments are not going to have the luxury of considering the bigger picture, but I keep coming back to how important that will be for any of us who can. Where is the love in what is happening? Because it is there, around the edges. I truly believe that the only power in the universe is love, and that the Nature's creative urge on earth and throughout the cosmos is love. Gaia's passion to maintain earth's viability is a form of love. And the wild, uninhibitedness of what's happening is love. Seeing love in what looks like sheer chaos is hard for us humans. But my sense is that we are being asked to start doing that, and to look with wonder at these events. Literally, "I wonder what Nature is trying to tell us. I wonder what this will look like when She is done. I wonder if and how I'll fit in, in times to come." Love will certainly come in through the cracks of what has broken up.
I'm remembering that back when I was painting, I might work in oils on a landscape or still life that simply wasn't working. You go as far as you can to try to "fix" it, but when that fails, there's always the option of taking a rag dipped in turpenoid, and literally rubbing away the entire image. What's interesting is that usually, there is a faint ghost image left on the canvas, which I often found helpful to work with in my second attempt, which was usually far more successful. If Nature, the creative artist, needs to start aspects of Her creation over again, or if Earth has outgrown certain realities and is maturing and adapting in powerful ways, we cannot fight it. Or we should not. When most frightened, keep looking for love around the edges.
