Today, I was sitting at my mom’s house in Atlanta and started to feel a sense of total quiet. Everything around me turned stock still; it was like a curtain was pulled back somewhere in the back of my mind. I could suddenly see that ALL the suffering I’ve been through had been Useful. I didn’t have to fight against it anymore. I was so tired of thinking it was cruel, or unjust, or mistaken…. Suffering was simply part of the whole package. Widening my consciousness meant letting in those parts that I had denied, my parts of sadness, anger, unfairness. That’s what certain experiences came to give me. And I could accept that that was OK. I did that. I had to go through it.
It was even beautiful. It was beautiful that I had to do it. It was beautiful that I did it. At the time, I just didn’t understand suffering. And since I didn’t understand it, it just didn’t seem fair. And that’s what had made it so painful.
But today I go to see that it is just a part of The Whole Package.
Yes, we grow stronger, but also in a way that’s not attached to things. We grow and we accumulate and then we grow more and we lose the pieces that kept us small. We grow and then get emptied out. Bigger but emptier, with more room at the Big Heart Table for the world to come in, sit down and feel loved and accepted.
At a certain point, we stop playing hardball with the world. We realise that the most important thing is this “waking up” that’s happening to us, and that we don’t really know what that entails. So, like we do when we download a new app, we accept any and all terms, just to move on to the next step.
What else can we do?
Joy Biscuits 