How Things Flow

Just had another bathtub epiphany, well, it happened just after I stepped out of the shower…

I saw suddenly, just how the energies of 2 opposites flow and balance is achieved, in the way the wealthy West pays great sums of money each year for the privilege of having a retreat in the often impoverished but earthier and soulful parts of this planet. A retreat from the rat race of our lofty aspirations and relentless pursuits, a retreat from selling our soul each day in the marketplace for status quo. For that, we are more than willing to shell out what it takes for a little reprieve, a deeper breath or two, perhaps even a chance to recover a piece of our broken spirit. Although we are not usually aware of this balancing mechanism at work, nevertheless in the last few decades a whole industry in tourism have grown and flourished in its wake. And in this way wealth is shared amongst the people of the Earth, the energy of money is exchanged for love and kindness and beauty, and made to circulate from the rich to the poor, the poor to the rich, materially and spiritually. In the blink of the moment I saw this, I felt a great relief from carrying the burden of guilt that I have since our last trip to Mexico, when all I could think about was the damage that we have done promoting global tourism, that all we were doing was destroying beauty and spirit of another people after destroying our own.

It is not an excuse to further corporate ambitions, or even to encourage evening of the score, but sometimes, it is so healing just to untie a knot, and to see how justice is served, in the Greater scheme of things.

Interesting to note that this happened right after I pleaded, out loud, under the shower, with the Great Spirit to help me surrender, because I don’t seem to know how (and this came after I woke up this morning with the fear of impoverishment on my mind). Perhaps this came, to show me how the exchange of energy takes place, how yin and yang dance and play, in ways we do not expect, can not see, because of what we have not yet surrendered. Fear has blinded me to the remembrance of how all the energy flows in this world, because it always flows toward love, in spite of fear.

~~~~~~

I do believe I am having the alternate-monthly malicious PMS today, recalling last month’s as the benevolent one. I am only half-grateful for that at the moment, as it feels like I would never make it to the point where I can fully appreciate and actually love these ‘bounties’ of womanhood. Is it that I do not love myself? I want to, I really do. Goddess help me, I really want to love myself, but again, I don’t seem to know how, where to begin. I look around the immediate circumference around myself, and all I see is the charred remains of defeat. Dear God, I am a spitting volcano and a river of ashes today…

However, on the way to the healthfood store I had another mini-piphany (my contribution to the urban dictionary). In mid-rant to Michael the realization that it is mostly the white men—on whom we, those of us who can easily be distinguished from, blame for most of the plights of humanity—who are responsible for the dissemination of the good and bad things that has become the global movement, the trend of the future. Therefore, I concluded right there on my personal soapbox, that white men aren’t all ‘bad’, if it is the divine plan that oneness be the destiny of our planet. It has been the white men with their inexhaustible adventurousness and courage (often presenting as ambition and greed) that have led the way for cultural (and racial) cross-pollination centuries thence, and that is still our heritage. By calling it our heritage, I am admitting to the part I play in this phenomenon, that even though I am not visibly a white man, I am one inside.

I will also admit that the cost of this planet-wide diaspora has been heavy at times, at least seen from the human perspective, which is usually limited to snapshot-like moments in our history, blips on the radar in the history of time. But what if, God itself came down in the early 1900’s and told us, particularly the citizens of Europe, that a fearsome calamity is imminent, and with it pain and suffering the likes we’ve not seen in recent times. But, it is being brought upon us for a really good reason, divinely conceived (therefore unfathomable to us), which will blossom huge and sweetly into a new kind of future for human kind.

The only catch is, of course, we are too small and limited to see that future, each generation of humans less than a blip on the radar. Could we have, in the face of this terrible news delivered personally by our maker, trust that this upcoming horror and hardship will not completely destroy us, but bear its beautiful fruit for our great-great-grandchildren and their children? Could we smile graciously, and say to the only one who has the Big Picture, “All right then, Almighty! If that’s the best way, bring it on!” And, would we then have no need to blame God and the devil, Hitler and the Nazis, the Russians, the Japanese, the people who made the bombs and the people who dropped them, the people who continue to make them and feed their children from the money they made? People will still die, all of us still suffer, even if we had been assured of our species' future through our sacrifice by none less than God itself. But I wonder, what would the world be like, without blame?