“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us. it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” ~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
This week between the last post and this has been a really difficult one for me. Nothing terrible happened. It’s all inside stuff that has been coming up for examination that has laid me low. I haven’t been interested in food, or programs on TV. Even though I restarted doing my audiobook, I’m not excited about what I’ve done. The recording seems boring. Why would anyone want to listen to me drone on?
Other things have niggled away at me. Several posts on Facebook this week irritated me, almost prompting me to make comments contrary to the person’s point of view. One of these stopped me in my tracks for a little while. The young woman who posted it is a loving person. When she smiles she lights up a room. This past week, I read one of her posts. It started off with the kind of sentiments I’d expect of her. She was asking us to come together, to listen to each other, and try to resolve our differences. Then she wrote that our president had to be strong to stop the … My stomach clenched up and I felt such dark emotions. I almost wrote a response, but I knew that anything I wrote would not change her mind and would damage our relationship.
I thought about her post for the rest of the evening and just as I was getting ready for bed I realized why I’d felt so terrible. It felt like she wanted those of us who don’t think like she does to listen to her and to accept that we are wrong and to think the way she does. I may be completely wrong in my assumption. But with further thought I came to the conclusion that’s what I want. That’s what we all want. We want people to see the world the way we do. It’s so much easier because then I don’t have to do the work of loving them no matter what.
I get signals all the time to help me untangle the knots in my thinking and feeling. This week my dramatic structure class watched a movie version of An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde. It’s a story that seems trivial on the surface, with a character, Lord Goring, who often says: “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” It seems he loves to be idle more than to engage in any meaningful endeavor. But he’s the character who gives most of the great pearls of wisdom throughout the play. In fact, the title of this post is one of his lines. And that line, that it is the imperfect who need love, gave me pause. Not one of us is perfect. Well ultimately, our souls are perfect, but as we live out our time on this planet, we’re here to make mistakes and learn from them. We all need love.
And this is what I’ve been learning this week. It’s our self-hatred that causes most of the problems we face. We think that there is not enough of anything to go around, and so we scratch and fight each other for the seemingly limited resources. We take offense if someone disrespects us, when in reality, we don’t respect ourselves. To avoid doing the necessary work to love ourselves, we demand that everyone adopt our point of view, and we post nasty comments to those who contradict us.
Now, I’m just as guilty of everything I’ve just outlined as everyone else. I’ve been working on loving myself for most of my life and sometimes I wish I’d just get to the end of it already. It’s so much easier to blame others for my faults than to take each one out and love it to healing. I mean we are taught that loving ourselves and putting our needs first is selfish. But what if that’s wrong? What if Lord Goring is right, to love oneself is not only the beginning of a lifelong romance, but the answer to the worlds problems?
I’m in the middle of reading the most profound book, The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It takes place in the days before the Civil War when the Underground Railroad helped many “tasked” people find their way to freedom. Today something in that book stopped my mental wheels in their tracks. What if, instead of pointing out all the faults of the president and his cronies, we stopped our resistance and just loved them. I’m not saying ignore the sins of the past. We all have to face the consequences of our actions. But what I’m saying is to do what Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
I believe we’re at a confluence of Divinely orchestrated energies that are forcing us to change. We each have a specific role to play in that change. There are people who’s purpose it is to bring out the truth of all the dark deeds of people in power. It’s their soul contract. They chose to take on these roles so old institutions and ways we’ve been treating each other throughout the centuries can end and we can build something out of light rather than darkness. This is something that’s happening throughout the entire world not just in the U.S. But that’s not everyone’s contract.
I’m not exactly sure what my role is beyond continuing to learn to love myself and sending Reiki and spread love and light to support people during the change. Sometimes, like when I saw those Facebook posts this week, I hear this little voice telling me not to respond. And often I don’t understand that because to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. if we stand by and say nothing we condone the evil. But in the Tao Te Ching, there is a concept called Wu Wei, the art of non-action. It’s a philosophy that states, the best way to deal with conflict is not to act at all, not forcing any solution, but letting things flow. And I do remember seeing this powerful image on social media a few months back of demonstrators, standing still in the streets. In fact they looked like they were meditating. They weren’t carrying signs or shouting. They were just standing, peacefully. I don’t know what part of the world this demonstration took place. But I’m thinking, maybe that’s what we could be doing now. We could be standing up and implying by our silence, “Enough is Enough”.
I do not have any answers. Sometimes my head spins with all the opposing energies flying around exploding against each other and it’s draining. I have to make daily intentions to return to love no matter what anyone says or does and trust that the Divine is in charge and has our best interests at heart.
I send love and light to you. Thanks for following, liking and commenting.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2020
Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards.
Have you ever experienced life shattering events? Yeah, most of us have. In The Space Between Time, Jenna Holden gets slammed by her fiancé walking out, her mother’s untimely death, and losing her job all in one week. But she receives unexpected help when she finds her three-times great-grandmother’s journals and begins the adventure of a lifetime.
The Space Between Time is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords and for Kindle at Amazon, or you can find the ebook at iBooks or Barnes and Noble. If you prefer a physical copy, you can find a print-on-demand version at Amazon. Stay tuned for news when the audiobook version is published.
Sage Woman Chronicles 