By Amaya Gayle Gregory
Sedona, AZ — I’m not sure why sleepless nights are so rich with insights. Regardless of reasons, and mind can come up with a million possibilities, mine are. Maybe the breakthroughs require the freshly broken sense of control. I mean really, if we can’t control whether we fall asleep, what can we control?
Last night I couldn’t fall asleep fast enough. Reading in bed, my eyes kept sliding shut like a dyslexic on crack. I had little awareness that I was skipping paragraphs, reading paragraphs twice, three times, so when I finally tuned into it, I turned off the light and went straight out, About four hours later, bingo! Wide awake. It’s natural to try to figure out why, or it is for me at times, and that of course, just prolongs the story.
Usually I just pretend (to myself) to rest. Sometimes I don’t really know if I slept or not. It’s actually pretty funny when the old programming about how we need sleep isn’t activated. When it is, it’s kind of a pain in the ass. For a while it was one of those less fun-ny nights, so I had lots of opportunities to surrender, to do surrendering rather than actually surrendering, to get neatly tenderized by my absolute inadequacy in the sleep department.
I don’t think I’m much different from most of the more liberal people in the US. We’re disturbed, so it’s not surprising that sleep patterns are disturbed too.
I love how insights come out of nowhere, unsought, unexpected. Boom!
I won’t extend the suspense so here it is: I cannot hang onto political or religious rightness, righteousness, not even ideas of better and worse, and be of good use where this world is taking us. It’s not that hate and anger, revenge, and whatever else is coming, are equal to love and compassion. Equal’s a mind game. It’s just that hanging onto that judgement, aye, even discernment, will build a rock wall across the road we are all walking down, want to or not.
This wasn’t an insight I was looking for, but damn, it made sense all the way down to my toes.
This is an entirely different story that we are entering into. It is mostly accurate to say that these times are the ones we are here for, and make no mistake, we are here now, and that happening is not a mistake. We are here to live into the question: Are we here to watch Rome burn or to be love and model awakening for others?
The two are not mutually exclusive; they are mutually dependent. It all ties together. Without love Rome simply burns, taking all of us with it. Putting our attention on the burn, love is choked out by the thick black smoke until we can’t find it anymore. It’s interesting that the standard solution to fire is cover your mouth, drop to your knees and crawl.
With love, we have no idea what will happen. We leave that up to love. It’s not our job to figure it out.
Anyone who says they know, is mistaken. This is an entirely new ballgame. With love, the foul balls of life are left to take care of themselves in ways we cannot yet fathom. Will it be fun? Likely not. Will we grow and evolve, absolutely.
If there was ever a time for self-awareness, this is it. Well, it’s always been IT, but the stakes are set at the top of the bar now; the ante is up! I am encountering fairly instantaneous repercussions for focusing on the burn — sleeplessness, closed heartedness, righteousness, general discomfort and tensioning in the body and mind — none of which bode well for love.
… but isn’t love grand. It doesn’t sit around and bide its time (poetic license taken).
One of love’s very cool, but not always comfortable, redeeming features is that it shows us what we’re doing, what we are thinking, what we are believing. Through the growing discomfort, it points out our sticking points, the hand grenades we’ve pulled the pins on, not realizing they are primed to explode. Love is a built-in living breathing demonstration of what contracts us into knots, and what expands our hearts, bodies and minds. It’s all love. There is nothing else even though that appears to be a lie.
Yeah, we’re here. It’s now, and it’s crazy time. It’s always crazy time for someone. No one’s immune. It doesn’t matter how awake we are. This is our moment and like every other moment that will ever come to pass, it asks just one question. What about this moment can’t you love?
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Image: Free content, Pixabay.com (artist unknown)
3 Comments
We tried being kind to those who hate after WWII and now we have fascism on the rise once again mostly here but also abroad. Perhaps stone walls are what the world needs now? Rome is burning again and it’s not full of people who love others. On the contrary I’d say. Good luck remaining neutral when they come for you as well or someone you care about.
Ms Gregory and Ms Jill,
I’m not a politician. I lived my life as an apolitical servant of the country. I didn’t ever think to get involved in politics until Trump came along and began destroying our country, it’s long established government, social and legal norms. Then he began praising fascist and adopting their language and methods mostly thanks to fellow criminals Steve Bannon and the incredibly fascist Jewish Stephan Miller. This was followed by felony convictions and impeachments of Trump for crimes he very much did in fact commit that his fellow MAGA criminals made to disappear with lies and propaganda. This was followed by a physically violent assault upon law enforcement and our democracy led by Trump himself. Then the Nazi style abductions, detentions and disappearances of many US citizens and many non violent working migrants (some legal, some in the process of becoming legal but were arrested and deported without due process or recognition that they were legally following the laws to become citizens). Then he began using his DOJ as a personal weapon of vengeance against those who legally and lawfully investigated Trump for his many many many crimes and lies.
This was all supported by MAGA voters who gleefully proclaimed, “he’s doing what we elected him to do”- hate others and destroy our democracy.
Worst of all they proclaim themselves as Gods chosen and devout when they violate every word Christ allegedly ever spoke about the futility of wars and hate, loving thy brother, welcoming the stranger, loving the homeless sick etc.
And yet you want good people to open their arms and hearts to this hate? As Ms Jill stated, we have already tried that and it bit us back like the rabid dogs they are.
Not saying to meet haters and hatred with more hate (I’ll do that for you, I think I’ve earned that right after combatting hatred and evil for most of my adult life). But don’t you think you should be encouraging people to combat the hatred using every legal means necessary? Shouldn’t you be encouraging peaceful protest and the arrests and legal consequences for the haters rather than opening their arms to them and accepting them for being haters of mankind?
I get that you want to be a good person and likely are in fact just that. But expecting “open wall less roads” between good and evil is a pipe dream that has never and will never work. It’s very likely why the men who wrote the Bible spoke out so strongly against evil.
Gandhis and Mandela stood against evil doers and ultimately won the day for their causes. The US during WWII stood against evil and also prevailed despite dragging their feet to enter the war primarily do to the American Nazi resistance against the country getting involved against Germany, Japan and their axis of evil. And now we have become the leader of that Axis because we had wall less roads that allowed hatred to flourish right under our own noses.
Combating hate is not hate it is the duty of every good person alive. It is a necessity if we are to ever have a civilized country and world ever again.
Rome burned because of Roman hatred and violence around their conquered world, slavery, gluttony and ignorance. Love would not have saved it from itself as it was far too late for that. Which is why the so called “primitive” Celtic and Pict cultures were able to easily wipe them out. Just as the Viet Cong did the US military in Vietnam. Rome got what they deserved (twice now historically) just like every tyrannical government ever.