Shaky Egg

I have a darling soul mate friend who, among so many other amazing things, is a gifted LPC and is also Cherokee.

This week she got on a roll and sent me as one of her usual email forward group a lovely, personal piece of writing. She wrote of sittting at home with her ten year old on New Year’s Eve, listening to gunfire interspersed with the firecrackers down in the historic district just as we were over here on the wrong side of the tracks. Like her, perhaps, the only reason I bothered to stay up that night was to fulfil my promise to my pee wee shaky baby that I would take her out to see the fire works at midnight. I truly couldn’t have given one shit, but there was something about that promise.

Something told me, that night, as I stood on my porch alone, searching the clear night sky and smoking one last cigarette as my husband took the kids to bed at about 12.05, to step under the cover of the eaves, because a bullet coming down is going just as fast as it was when it was discharged up. Days later, I did see that a small child was killed here by what was most likely a stray celebratory bullet… Anyway, between waiting for midnight to give her son the traditional New Year’s blessing, as her mother had given her, and her mother’s mother had done before her, between telling her son stories of New Year celebrations when she was a child, she was reminding him that they were safe.

This, and a stop in Cherokee NC over the holidays for a reconnection with the clan, got her going. She wrote of the Cherokee law requiring blood revenge, and how, thirty years after the law was abolished, the Cherokees were decimated by US Government betrayal and the Trail of Tears. Her thoughts ran from the Trail of Tears, to the Twin Towers, to Al Qaeda’s tactics and the terrible loss of life on both sides and the situation in the Middle East today.

Her detailed description of the Cherokee lifeway including the blood revenge requirement was enough to give me a little rush of awe.

But she asked her email group of friends for our thoughts. Here were mine, slightly edited for many reasons.

I have often wondered, and continue to wonder, if this sort of philosophising is the luxury of a decadent, bourgeois society, and if all my peaceniking would be completely meaningless and ridiculous had I been born in Sudan or Bosnia or Kurdistan… but then I think of the Dalai Lama, and what the Tibetans have been through and how he continues to speak, write, and conduct himself, and wonder if thinking these thoughts, even if only by little old anxious, exhausted, judgmental, and exceedingly bourgeois me, could still be of use. Certainly lots and lots of folks in our decadent and cruel society are turning back toward each other and our original mother, nature… things could be getting better… healing school work tells me– as does any thought about the Dalai Lama’s teachings, actually– it doesn’t matter one way or the other. I’m just blowing off some very rare extra brain energy here– embarassing myself by showing my attachment, I guess. Whateva. Human. Wounded. Just where I am supposed to be.

Anyhoo…

“Writing this [response to your thoughts] has humbled me and reminded
me of where I want to be, right now.
Do you remember that wonderful group you did at my house? With the red circle and the blue triangle or whatever? We came to an amazing truth that night. We were able to switch back and forth, at will, between the thought that made us so damn angry, and the thought that made us feel comforted and happy.

Holding the anger and hurt right there alongside the peace and the joy is what it means to begin to heal.

At the end of the group you mentioned that song ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, and I said, so if every person would simply be responsible for and learn to live with his or her pain– holding both anger and hurt, and peace and joy, at the same time– and STOP taking it out on others, there would never be any more violence, ever again. I felt myself profoundly changed that night.

Of course when my husband and I hurt each other verbally we still lash out and try to the other down HARD… Some times it just hurts so much, and I can’t believe the depth of my feeling of betrayal, fear, anguish and hatred, and while I can’t speak for him and I’m sure he’d express it some other way I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. And some of that is about one of us being a jerk, and most of that is about our own lack of self esteem, peace, coping skills, or healing for our own wounds which have nothing to do with the spouse we perceive to be hurting us at that moment.

We don’t become peaceful over night.

Okay, here’s what I think about our Sign.

I believe in the cosmic reality and necessity for revenge, blood, justice. It is a part of who we are as humans who have been temporarily separated from our God or divinity. For some of us, revenge or murder or vengeance is part of our soul contract or sacred tasks for our lives.

I also believe that we have to do some level of containment in the middle east.

But here’s what I think about revenge…

I don’t believe in a simple cause-effect relationship between the ability or failure to stand up for oneself or take revenge. I don’t think there’s a sign.

Revenge has its own consequences, which are unforseeable. It is also not possible to see how or why the sins of previous generations will or will not be visited upon our children. There is a plan– we do not know what it is– the only thing we can control is our own choices, but still, horrible things happen to decent, loving, peaceful, civilized, educated nations and persons.

The grief of the mothers and fathers who lose their children, or the children who lose their parents, or the young veterans whose lives are broken by physical and emotional mutilation in war, regardless of which side they are on, is a cycle which we continue to perpetuate, and it MUST BE STOPPED. And it has to stop somewhere.

God’s (or whatever each person calls the creative or higher power in the universe) love is reflected most clearly in the fierce love felt by usually a mother, but often by other caregivers too, for a helpless newborn and the child and adult that newborn will become (if we are lucky).

That love is, in my opinion, the only thing that reaches beyond the grave, and it is the closest we come to understanding God in this life.

It’s not that we need to love every person we encounter the way we love a newborn. It’s not that one has to become a parent before one gets it– it’s not about the external circumstance of parent or nonparent. It’s that we need to remember that fierce, immovable acceptance and nurture– for ourselves and for others– the very minute we feel tempted to lash out.

It ain’t easy, but it is the answer.

Remembering that powerful tie to other humans regardless of language, color, culture, or whatever marital or parental heartbreak you’re embroiled in at the moment, is the only chance for survival of our species, and it is no wonder that early religious cults centered around feminine fertility– those elders knew something we don’t. Our society does everything possible to sever connection between babies and adults, between humans and the ecosystem which literally keeps us alive, between humans and humans. That disconnection allows us to blindly assent to so many dangerous, hurtful and destructive practices, from how we parent and relate to others, and how we raise meat to eat, to how our industry dehumanizes and poisons most while enriching a few, and we will die from it.

[And that may be our divine destiny, as individuals and a people, and that's fine.]

When that bond, that tie, is severed by violence, whether through violent communication, parenting or relationship styles, whether a ten year old dies because he stepped on a land mine from an old war, or whether blood revenge is taken upon a murderer– both the innocent ten year old and the murderer were someone’s child. When we violate others with words or actions we are violating God and we are poisoning ourselves.

When I think of the Middle East I think of the little picture or Catholic-style prayer card I saw one time at my sister in law’s house– small children clustered at Jesus’ feet. The picture read something like: Jesus would never call them ‘collateral damage’. In our attempt to stop the violence, we are not doing a very good job of getting the bad guys, but we’re doing a great job of slaughtering the innocent and the bad guys continue to do their horrible work.

I believe that we as a race will not, cannot, ascend until we see every human being as precious as that innocent newborn he or she once was, and that has to start within each person. It starts with how we parent. It starts with how we react when our spouse is being an asshole. It starts with how we manage our own pain.

There isn’t always a cause effect when we make changes in how we see and live our lives. Some really bad people really prosper in this world, and some wonderful or at least innocent people are burdened by terrible pain and problems. We don’t know why and we can’t make it all better like we want to.

All we can do is let it begin with us, one tiny step at a time. Reading the wonderful books Sex God by Rob Bell and The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton. Blessing our children as often as we can with quality time and kind words, like [my friend was] doing on New Year’s Eve– especially since we know that in just a few days or hours we’ll be screaming at them or seething silently because they are being such little brats.

Biting our tongues when our spouse or a customer or coworker is being a total jackass– you didn’t start it, but if you try to finish it you’ll just make it worse. Reporting or working to stop injustice especially to those who cannot help themselves– children, animals, the incarcerated, the elderly, victims of genocidal campaigns just as Native Americans experienced.

Working in counseling on the huge hurts we have endured or are still facing in our lives, to nurture ourselves through the pain and make the best decisions we can to try to change what we can and accept what we can’t. Making a routine of asking for the ‘me time’ and support we need and offering it to others. Nurturing ourselves so that when others need us we don’t become dried up angry old martyred bitches and our giving comes from a place of nutured, endless joy.

Thank you, darling friend, for sharing your awesome thoughts and reminding me of where I stand on this. You are the greatest.”

* * *

‘I summon you here, my love’

Spoon

(or is it ‘No I can’t just relax, knowing you’re coming back’?)