Trauma

 8 Dec 2020

11:15am

Thoughts on things. Writing feels like surrender. 

_____

29 Feb 2021

10:00am

It's so mysterious, the wounds that lie underneath, lying in wait for uncovering and exposing to the sun and air. I must venture down to them and dig around and bear what they are bearing, but more deliberately and with clear seeing. To bear what they are bearing is to acknowledge that they are part of me and to include them, to validate their part in my existence and the equally valid and enriching part they have to play in my contribution to the world, past, present and future.

I find the topic of  "choice" to be supremely relevant at these times. It seems to me that no matter how many times I fail or succeed, fall down or get up...the now I'm currently facing is what matters in the end...in the now! It is this perpetually renewable resource of ending and beginning, of happening. Constantly demanding participation at a level that engages the heart. It doesn't seem to be a matter of right or wrong, but of quality of engagement. "How am I engaging with this moment? How am I facing this challenge? Am I escaping? Fighting? Accepting?" None of it seems to be the "wrong" choice, but rather a continuous flow of connection and development of meaning. A deepening of inclusion and exclusion and love.

The love has many layers (in my experience, so far). In accordance with that I was hearing Robert Bly describe in his W.B. Yeats workshop, the psychologist Wilhelm Reich was one of several to posit the existence of three layers of the human psyche: 

1. Superficial Love, Politeness, Niceness
   
2. Anger, Resentment, Violence, Ugliness
3. Love, Trust, Stability

So that the more I'm willing to acknowledge and go through all of my experience, however pleasant or unpleasant it may be, the more depth of Love and strength and reality develops. The irony of human experience is seems to me to be what we try to hold on to most we strangle to death, and what we seek to avoid the hardest we force feed into a monster. So our resistance to any part of our experience prevents us from experiencing the peace, happiness and wholeness we most deeply long for and know as a missing part of ourselves. We must let go of what we long for the most, and stop pushing away what most we fear. Apparently. 

Easier said than done, naturally. I believe all happens in due course. It will happen when it's ready. I feel that we don't have free will until we become cognizant of the presence of the possibility of choice in the present moment. We don't have a choice until we realize that we do. And I feel that that choice matters more than we can know.