Stepping Forward into the Despair

... and be the change

I'm not sure I can even write about this or if there is any point to writing anything at all, but alas, it seems I cannot not. Writing is what flows through me, an avatar, a seemingly personalized window into the here-now. This one is no more important than yours. It is simply my unique expression in this funhouse madhouse manifestation of infinite aliveness, God, consciousness, the grand is and isn't show. No word is right. Heck, no word could ever be right, so pick your poison.

These days, I mostly write about the human side of the equation, about compassion and caring, about allowing the hurt to show, the love to come through, about being real even when it feels absolutely wrong to be so vulnerable, about the multiplication effect of peace and equanimity (anger and hate too).

Something in this design, in this human contraption, can't fathom why such hate and anger is allowed to fester like boils and spread into the hearts and souls of mankind so I write.

I write about opening up to deeply nakedly feeling the pain and suffering being inflicted on our neighbors, how it is actually self-inflicted, not as in they are doing it to themselves, or that they have it coming ... no one deserves to be brutalized, no one ... but self-inflicted as in we are all that's here. There is nothing else no one doing it to us, just us doing horrific things to ourselves. Yes, it looks like they are they and we are we, but that's part of an incredible illusion.

And we keep on doing it. I know you don't want to hear this or just maybe you've already figured it out, but every time we pile on anger on top of the already overflowing pile of anger, every time we verbally abuse the abusers, every time we hate those who hate us, we add more weight to hate's side of life's balance scale and then wonder why it feels there is so much hate in the world.

We don't call it hate. We call it discernment. We call it being right. We call it caring for others. We call it helping others. We can it many names. We call it anything but what it is.

What it looks like is one group of people raining hell down on another group. The hell bringers see their targets as less than nothing, as having no value other than as scurrying varmints for target practice. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell one side from the other these days.

So yeah, I've been writing about that, the human experiential, the sensational incarnation thrill ride. At times, it even sounds like I've picked a side. Words do that. They automatically give the sense of duality, of win and lose, of you and me. Can't be helped.

I am on a side, on the side of love, but fortunately, love doesn't actually have sides. It embraces all of its creations, just like the sun that doesn't pick and choose who to shine on.

Some days it's easy to forget that, to slip back into the fray, to pick a side, an actual side, to believe at least for a moment, that one's version of righteous anger has a place, that it is of more value than being absolutely useless and surrendering to what is.

Surrender has a bad name and leaves a bad taste in our mouths. The word, always misunderstood, elicits an image of a weak, cowardly person, bowing down and letting others walk on them. Here in the West, we've literally been trained to be twisted, to take strength and make it a weakness, to take courage and turn it into cowardice. There's a lot of very good reasons surrender isn't something people are lining up to try.

We can't put out the fire by adding more fuel. We cannot stop a runaway train by giving it a steeper hill to run down. Divisiveness thrives on our division, on our willingness to make others wrong, to divide ourselves up into self and others.

We say we want peace and happiness, that we want love and compassion, that we are tired of all the hate and anger and yet we don't live lives of peace and happiness, of love and compassion. We add fuel to the fire. We steepen the grade and let the train run.

'Be the change you want to see in the world'. Those words are often attributed to Gandhi, but no one is certain of their origin. Perhaps it was Jesus or Buddha, or one of the other masters, the beings who realized that love starts with them, that they must step forward into the despair of the world and be the change.

There is no other way for change to appear.

Amaya Gayle is the author of 6 books, the latest Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY

Image: Wordpress AI by Amaya Gayle