What does it take to do nothing?
- Thread starter Childofmine
- Start date
Scent of Cedar *
Well-Known Member
Thank you.
I will be thinking about these observations. It would not be merely not to speak. It would be to be comfortable and fully present, no defenses. Even in the core of us, nothing to protect. To be there, right there, without judging either the other or ourselves.
But if this were possible for me...how long would I listen, and why would I listen.
I don't know.
Nor to feel inadequate, which the need for brilliance covers over, covers up ~ all the times our performance was not perfect and so, we were left feeling helpless.
Very scary, to confront helpless.
I read a story last night. A woman is chased by predatory animals. She sees a cliff. Jumps over, preferring that death to being torn apart by predatory animals. Catches a vine.
It holds her.
Many feet below her, there where she clings to the cliffside, other predators come roaring toward the place she will fall.
This time, the predators are a savage tribe. There are bows and arrows and darts tipped with poison.
"How long can I hold on?" the woman worries and moans and cries and bewails her fate.
And then, there above her head where both hands grip that vine with every ounce of energy...she sees two mice. One white, one black.
Each mouse is gnawing at the vine, one from either side.
The woman sees a strawberry, growing from a crevice in the cliffside.
She picks and eats it.
It is delicious.
***
That is the end of the story. The black mouse and the white mouse are the days and the nights of our lives.
Cedar
The word I chose during the time COM posted about One Word was something from an essay by Anne I can't remember her last name. The word is KFCD. KFCD is like a radio station, like a blast from the past playing away in our heads, telling us who we are and which are the things that matter.
The year before that, my word was kindness to myself.
Both words, "kindness to the self", and "KFCD" have been excellent tools for catching myself in the act of self disparagement.
When I catch myself making nasty accusations about my appearance or about how I have handled something ~ and it is shocking to me just how many of those disparaging comments, truly hateful things, revolved around my appearance ~ I get to see how I was formed.
I just hear it.
Nothing more.
But nothing more is required, because the things I hear, rolling along beneath my conscious understanding, are lies.
There was a time I did not know that.
I felt the poison from those amygdala-entrenched voices, but not the voice, not the face of the speaker.
If the things rubbering along in my under-psyche are truths, they are being presented in a condemnatory way.
Everyone knows true things are there to teach us, not harm or belittle us.
Listening for KFCD took it one step further.
It plays loudest when I most need to be centered. It drenches my psyche with contempt.
But I catch myself being aware of it, now.
It is shocking how toxic, and how immediate, the feelings of inadequacy, of helplessness or downright contempt are.
That is what I have been fighting, all of my life, it seems. The belief in contempt.
It is my mother's face I see there, her voice I hear, of course.
But once I do see...there is no more power in it. I am sad for myself then, and free.
Little, tiny shreds of self and freedom, all coming together instead of repeating the mantra of contempt.
KFCD.
The things we taught ourselves about life, and about who we were, that were wrong.
