All the Angry People....

"...but angry people are not always wise..." 

~ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Lately, I cannot help but notice...the "world situation" is making any number of people angry, and in very personal ways.  Because world situations are always very personal - they have to do with human life.

It is indiscriminate, the outrage.  If you are angry about something, and the more openly you express that anger, I can just about guarantee there is someone across "the divide" who will match it willingly, or even without thinking.

Sure, I have felt it, I have at times expressed it.  Openly.  And not so openly.  But I'm thankful I have gradually learned throughout my life to find a way to deal with it (even if imperfectly).  I'm dealing with it now.  Right here.  Right now.  Because something made me angry earlier today, and I consciously chose a different approach.

I claim no particular expertise, except to know what I have observed:  When we are angry, we are generally judging more than we are observing, and we are very rarely breathing, or at least not particularly well.

What if we could do our best to put our anger on a shelf and decide to understand instead? 

What if we could actually make an attempt to glimpse the other side? 

Wouldn't that be astonishing!?! 

(OK, fine, that last remark was just a little bit angry, because you see, I'm just a little bit angry about the anger itself and what it's doing to our lives and to our society.  I choose to see mine too, when it arises.) 

What if you could try on someone else's shoes by trying on their hearts?

You might begin to hear.

And some of "them" might very well begin to hear you too.

I must include a warning.  It takes a lot of courage to "try on" someone's heart, to allow yourself to understand.  Because the absolutes begin to fade, and that can feel uncomfortable - if you decide to tell your friends, some of them might choose to judge you, and you need to let that go. 

The starkly outlined blacks and whites begin to shift.

Some say they blur to shades of gray.  And you may see the gray at first, the mind sees gray, you may only see the gray, the mind sees ambiguity.  Keep going through the gray, keep going, keep on going (this is a very important step, it's still in process for me too).  Because when you keep on going, when you consciously choose to understand, you begin to see the colors, at first they come in softly.

There is a knowing that is impossible, yet real.  It embraces every contradiction of the mind.  It is a knowing that can only arise from Love, from heart to heart to heart to heart.

And the anger falls away.

You can look into "their" eyes, completely, without flinching...you can look into their eyes and See.

And the tears begin to flow.

The New Earth doesn't exist on one side of the bridge or on the other.  The New Earth is the Bridge.

Veiled

Love lifts the veil of Fear and weds us to Peace.

Last night when I would normally be writing in this blog, I was waiting on the line for a radio show. Since well-after-midnight blog entries are becoming the norm rather than the exception, and 6 AM comes early, I decided to opt for sleep.

Something came up while I waited on the line, something I've been pondering a while.  The topic had to do with salvation returning from the sky, whether alien, Jesus or otherwise.  A caller with a Southern backwoods twang in his voice confidently shared his faith in the Jesus variety of return.  But this would not be the loving Jesus, he reminded us all, this warrior Jesus would come to judge us all and rule with "an iron rod". 

And there it was.  The contradiction.  Astoundingly blatant, yet astoundingly veiled.

What would this man think if he realized it's not just distant evildoers to be subject to the sword, but neighbors, dear friends, even beloved family.  I pondered a rather bold and poignant response, but chose to stay on my intended topic. Love will lift all veils of fear in time.

Of Mountains and Molehills

Perhaps it is not in releasing our memories, but in accepting them, that we finally find the peace we seek.

I had something come up in the past week that was intensely important to me when I was young, yet in retrospect, at least on the surface, seemingly should be quite trivial now.  It was resurfaced for me in an entirely new way, and then I found myself not only in a kind of obsessive mind trap regarding the topic, even mentioning it to an old friend, but then later berating myself for caring about it at all (and worse yet, giving it even more life by talking about it).

From afar, it looks like a molehill...

What it was exactly is of significance only to me, and I'm not going to get into it right now, but what I do want to get into is this process of coming to peace with those things that have troubled us, whether they be mountains or molehills.  And how do we know the difference?

From a higher perspective, it's so easy to say that everything is a molehill, no matter how daunting, and in a way, that's indeed true.  At that level, all of the concerns on Earth, trivial or not, are miraculously resolved.

But from the perspective of why we came to be on this Earth to begin with, if indeed we came from a place where every mountain is a molehill, could it be that we actually wanted to make mountains out of every single molehill so we could have the richest of experiences in exploring their intricate detail?