Not a peaceful thing.

Truth is not a peaceful thing.
Truth can be unkind.
I wish it was a made-up thing
I made up in my mind.

But truth is laws that can't be broke
and truth is oh, so not a joke.
Truth like love goes deep inside
and changes you forever.

It's worth, they say, a love that's lost,
but knowing comes at such a cost.
It breaks your heart and frees your mind.
It's easier to stay blind.

Truth is not a peaceful thing.
It tears apart my myths.
But I choose freedom over peace,
reality over bliss.

Beware

Beware, oh seeker of the Truth!

It is a fearsome creature.

Sharp of tooth

and strong of jaw,

it holds steadfast

to nature’s law.

It will not kill you

nor leave you alive,

and yet somehow

you will survive.

For a time, that is.

For a time, that is all.

No questions asked,

no trumpet call.

Death, and that is all. 

Beware, oh seeker of the Truth!

Do not go out in glory.

Crusader,

warrior, you will not like

Truth’s ending

to your story.

And once Truth scars you,

and it will,

there is

no going back.

Stay home, where you’re safe.

Stay home, where there’s love.

Ask no questions,

call no bluffs.

Live, that is enough.

Beware, oh seeker of the Truth!

Your armour is your lie.

Once you lay it down

you’re light.

You may dare

look Truth in the eye.

Will it harm you? No,

but it will wound.

Will the pain

be worth what you gain?

Can you stumble to a fresh start?

Bear the burden of your broken heart?

Do you need to be free?

Is it vital to see?

Seek then, with me.

 

An apology to the dogs.

Dogs and I have not had a happy history. Years ago (okay,
decades) I developed a phobia of them. I've tried for years
to overcome it. I've even figured out that the phobia itself was
most likely created as the only way I could express my terror
at something else entirely:  the Child Sexual Abuse of which
I was a victim at the time.

Knowing this is only on an intellectual level, though, and does
nothing to stop the primal terror that surges up within me when
I have to face a dog, even a puppy. I manage to overcome it only
under certain circumstances. Stray dogs are less scary, especially
if I pass by them every day. And for some mysterious reason, 
golden retrievers don't scare me at all.

All other dogs:  scared. Top of the list are black dogs, and
pet dogs. (So to all you friends who live in doggie houses -
I'm telling you this just once:  no matter how nicely (or 
how often) I assure you that I'll visit, I never will.
And tying/locking up your dog won't help, because that just
makes the dog miserable, which makes me feel miserably
guilty - and no less afraid.)

What we fear, we tend to hate, don't we? I've never really
"hated" dogs - in fact, there are a few I've been very fond of
 in the past (none at the time of writing). But I also love cats,
and so I suppose I picked sides.

I saw cats as clean, regal, independent creatures, with high
self-esteem. So naturally I saw dogs as dirty, dumb, slavish 
and menial. And then I came across something about dogs
in a book on Native American spirituality, on the symbolism
behind various animals. Dogs, the book said, were symbols
of compassion.

I've mulled that over in my head a couple of times, and  
sort of got the gist of it. Then this morning, I drove past
a mangy white stray dog, sitting on the pavement sniffing
at a bit of bread someone had dropped. It turned its head
to glance at me with its lovely eyes (all dogs have lovely
eyes, even Cujo did) and then turned back, but didn't eat
the bread, just looked ahead serenely.

I don't really know what about this struck me, but in that moment
I thought of Buddha, and suddenly I knew what doggy compassion
meant. It's not about putting up with human cruelty or ill-treatment
because they are the slaves and we are the masters, it's not that
at all. These are creatures descended from wolves. If cats are royalty,
dogs are soldiers, warriors. With their heightened senses they can
smell fear, they can hunt down another animal, they can do this
alone or in packs.

They can rip out our throats if they want to. But they don't. 

By that last sentence, I don't mean, "they don't rip out our throats".
I mean, "they don't want to." They can, but they don't want to.
And considering how very stupidly and/or cruelly we humans
treat each other, let alone other species, this is no small thing.

So now I understand what the Native Americans meant. I have
seen the light in those doggy eyes and shall henceforth look
into them with a new respect*, and a new understanding of
what it is that we have to learn from them.

I, cat-loving, dog-fearing human, hereby apologise to the dogs.

*From a respectable distance, of course - and no, this doesn't 
mean I'll be visiting the doggie houses any time soon.

A love lesson from Paulo Coelho.

"The heart decides, and that it decides is all that really matters ... Those who are truly enlightened, those whose souls are illuminated by love, have been able to overcome all the inhibitions and preconceptions of their era. ... They have been joyful - because those who love conquer the world and have no fear of loss. True love is an act of total surrender ... One doesn't love in order to do what is good to help or to protect someone. If we act that way, we are perceiving the other as a simple object, and we are seeing ourselves as wise and generous persons. This has nothing to do with love. To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God"

These quotes are from one of my favourite writers' books - By the River Piedra   I Sat Down and Wept. I am in awe of Paulo Coelho, and am quite certain that sometimes God breathes gently down upon him when he's writing.

I must confess when I first read this - more than ten years ago, I think - I thought it was purely about romantic love:  the mushy stuff.  And/or the sweaty stuff. Back then, that's what I thought love was. I suspect that I must have looked to these words for relationship tips, and then proceeded to be a perfect doormat for the most imperfect lovers.

As I read through these words today, they mean so much more. I look at these lines now and feel that he is talking about compassion and respect and acceptance. They are about that thing which will ultimately save the world. Without necessarily having to be mushy and/or sweaty.

So that's what love is! Good to know. At last.

It's time for me to take that book down off my bookshelf and read it once again, to find out if he meant what I felt. Because as far as I remember, it was a love story (the mushy kind, don't recall any sweaty stuff in there). But I doubt Mr Coelho could disappoint me. I'm sure it was all there and I just didn't have the awareness to notice it. When I read it this time, I'll see the other stuff. The stuff I missed first time around.

Post No. 2 on Russell No.3

"The supreme principle, both in politics and in private life, should be to promote all that is creative, and so to diminish the impulses and desires that centre around possession."
- Bertrand Russell

I'm not sure what impulse led me to pull Mr Russell's book off the shelf at the library, but it was this quotation on the back cover that made me bring him home. The timing was almost too perfect. I'd just finished watching an interesting little documentary, The Story of Stuff. It was one of those things that makes you want to slap your forehead and cry, "But of course!" when you encounter something that's so true to you, but you haven't quite been able to get your head around.

Mr Russell is like that too. I've often thought about these things - the value of creativity, the irritating and until now couldn't-quite-put-my-finger-on-it way that advertising strokes our insecurities, the stupidity of war, the stupidity of men at war, the stupidity of men, and the resulting stupidity of women - but I haven't been able to organise my various strands of thought as Mr Russell has. He does it so well. (I should warn you, if you're planning to dig in to one of his books, that he uses a lot of big words and large solid paragraphs, and there is not much dialogue and "things in inverted commas" to lubricate the reading journey and make it easier).

This one sentence of his inspired me to start reading Why Men Fight, and inside the book I keep finding many more such sentences - each sentence speaks volumes!

When I look at this sentence in particular, it reminds me of something that had got my knickers in a twist a few years ago. It was after I started therapy for healing from my experiences of childhood sexual abuse, and I'd begun to realise something. A lot of my therapist's "prescriptions"* for healing were linked to creativity:  Read a book. Sing. Draw. Exercise. Listen to music. Breathe. Dance. Get close to nature. Make. Laugh. Believe.

And it struck me, these things that were so healing for a wounded adult, were all the same things that were given so little importance in school. Sports. Choir. Playtime. Art. Craft. Games. Poetry. Moral Science. Needlework. Literature. These were the subjects that only mattered a bit more if they had the potential to bring in trophies. But if there extra classes, or exams to prepare for, these were the things that were dumped to the side so that we could be better schooled to get better marks.

We thought - and I assume most people still do - that school was preparing us for life, for "the real world"* we'd have to face once we were grown-ups. For some years now, I've been thinking that school failed us. Not any one school, not my school in particular, just school in general - the traditional method of schooling that's focussed on competition and percentages.

They taught us all this stuff and we went out into the world and we live and we love, we work and drink and try and think, we save not enough and we drive too fast and when the world starts to sicken us it's not the sciences or theories or historical dates that save us. It's the stuff we were told wasn't that important.

If only our schooling had taken what kindergarten started with, and expanded on that. How different would the world be? I sometimes like to imagine that in some alternate universe, Adolph Hitler drew and painted and it was enough and he lived happily ever after and let everyone else do so too. Why not in our universe? It's too late for Hitler, but what about the rest of us, and the children to come? Are we going to squash that most holy of gifts - to create - and turn these magical beings into people who never think they're good enough, who who need a bigger car or a smaller butt, a new job and nothing old? 

That one little sentence at the top of this post:  it spoke of all these things to me. What did it say to you?


*got the inverted commas there? You're welcome.

Know.

Digesting lunch.

In this quiet time
The world recedes. The leaves stir
and tell me secrets.

Why we need trees.

We have innumerable reasons, but I'm sure this is one of them. Sometimes I look around me at the garbage strewn around, at the strays, at the unsmiling faces. Sometimes I'm down. And then I say to myself, "Look up."

 

(These are pictures I took one sunny Sunday afternoon in early March, walking home. These trees, and more like them, form a canopy all the way down my street).

(Edited 15 April 2014)

Choose joy.

The answers are always around us. It's how we look that helps us
to see. I can focus on the ugly pipe shaft from the building next door,
built a little too close to its compound wall, or I can focus on the way
the sunlight plays with the plant on my windowsill. There's always a choice.

A tiny bit significant.

 

My last post was about something hugely significant. It's getting 

such an incredible response that for the last two days I've been 

worrying about how to follow that up. Finally, I chose this picture 

I took last week. Visually I find it appealing - the round green 

leaves, the curl of the dried leaves, the white streaks against 

that lovely dark grey in the granite, and the texture of the sand. 

What I like about it best, though, is the fact that the green plant 

you see there, from one tip to another, would fit inside 

a 50 paise coin (a diameter of no more than 2 cm).

I love that it's possible to find beauty and symbolism in 

the tiniest of things. I look at this and I see so many different 

things. A story of survival in spite of the odds. A story of 

life's timeline - birth and growth, solidity and strength, 

withering and crumbling. And a story of reassurance:  

because if there is significance and beauty in a little weed 

down at my feet, there is significance in me, and in everything. 

And if everything matters, if nothing is unimportant, then 

the things I give far too much importance to - success, 

perfection, improvement and competition - might be over-rated.

All I have to do is be me.

Opium was a medicine, too.

For some people, it's the first thing they turn on in the morning. For some, it stays on all day. For some, all night.

For some it's the soaps or serials that Simply Cannot Be Missed. It's just not the same watching a rerun the following morning. It would be like eating cold pizza. Oh, the rerun might be watched too, but that fresh first showing, oftentimes with extra cheese, can't be missed.

Sometimes the TV is a babysitter who can turn hyperactive children turn into placid zombies who can go without blinking for extraordinarily long periods of time while their parents reassure themselves that this lesser evil is for the greater good.

Sometimes it's company. Voices .. actors, musicians, news reporters .. men, women, children, animals .. the good, the bad, the ugly .. it doesn't matter what, as long as it cuts into the silence of loneliness.

Sometimes it's crowd control, because it's easier to watch a screen than it is to go out and be part of something else, whether that's a sporting event or a riot.

Sometimes it's journeys - into the past, onto an African savannah, behind the scenes or where the action is.

But whatever it is, it does something for us, takes us away or distracts us or just fills the time between one day and the next.

I'm not addicted to it, no, not me. I could easily live without it, but I like having it around. I like my serials and comedies and movies, and voices coming from the other room. I like the vampires and the impossible stunts and the surprisingly good-looking forensic scientists. I like everything except the ads (but that's another story.)

But what I like most is that inbetween all the channels and cacaphony, I sometimes find little poetic pearls of wisdom that I consider good enough to scrawl on my designated scrawling wall. (Yes I really do have one, and highly recommend the concept). And I thought I'd share them with you:

"Your job is to be yourself. And my job is to love you, no matter what."
- the father of Kurt (who is gay), on an episode of "Glee"

"We're all scared. If you're not scared, you're not paying attention."
- Dr. Bailey, on "Grey's Anatomy"

"One day you wake up and you find that you don't mind carrying it around with you."
- Detective Kate Bennett, on "Castle"
(she was talking about coming to terms with her grief and trauma over her mother's murder)

"Scars remind us where we've been. They don't have to dictate where we're going."
- Agent Rossi, on "Criminal Minds"

TV may be the "opium of the masses", but sometimes it has a healing touch.