What is this?

So this then: What is this? Surely not nothing. Not a detour en route to our goal? Is it a test? A trial? What is it that I need to grasp for this struggle to end?
     I ask these questions all the time while caring for my father. It takes every ounce of energy, every inch of determination I have, and most of my time. Trying to live with awareness, staying in the moment, I have to say: This is the dark side of the moon. This too is what it is about. Not only the being present to the pristine beauty and exiting newness of our new home and surroundings, the luxury of fresh air and quiet, but this: this struggle. This getting to know who I’m not. What I cannot cope with. Cannot change. Cannot handle. Have to handle. Have to face. Myself.
     My shadow, in the guise of my father, sits opposite me reflecting whatever it is I am feeling at any given moment. He mirrors it all the time: when I’m irritated, he snaps back at me, when I’m sad, he hangs his head. When I shout, he does too. But he doesn’t swear like I do, he says. Achilles heel. Weak link. Call it what you wish. I am confronted much more with myself than with him. It might be the most important lesson of my life.
     I’m not in control. I never was. Forces greater than my feeble will have engraved behavior and beliefs in me that I thought I had managed to shake during the past decade’s inner work. The damage wrecked by what Richard Rohr calls the loss of original innocence Original innocence, still lies just below the smooth surface of my sorted life.
     It happens to all of us. In one way or the other we get programmed rather forcefully to handle life as best we can. A lot of the software gets downloaded from generations passed: genes, beliefs, coping skills. With no new and necessary updates we may never be able to bring about the changes we all know to be crucial to human survival or highest realization.
     George and I often discuss a Buddhist saying we find very difficult to unravel rationally. Maybe it is not supposed to be understood. Only lived or taken note of. Coming back to it as a way of surviving a moment perhaps.
     

It is the way it is; and the way it is, is perfect; and one day that truth will be revealed to you.

Our idea of what perfection is gets in the way of our understanding of this truth. For us, for something to be perfect it has to be extremely beautiful, going exceptionally well or be truly spectacular. It is therefore easier to try to say what it doesn’t mean.
     It doesn’t mean that everything should be allowed, borne or suffered, whether good or bad because it is in God’s perfect will, whatever that means. Nor that we have no say and no right to make decisions in our best interest.
     It has more to do with the acceptance of what is. The way it is, is perfectly what it is. It can be perfectly good or perfectly bad. As an example, our current position is a truly difficult and trying situation. One could say; a perfectly difficult and trying situation. It is perfectly and exactly what it is.
     If it is raining, it is most certainly raining. It may be just a drizzle or it may cause flooding like we have recently experienced in South Africa, but the fact that it is raining cannot be denied. For me to not accept that and hang my washing out to dry, would be to not acknowledge the perfect isness of the situation. It would be senseless.
     In exactly the same way I make things much worse for myself by not accepting the reality of my situation; by finding it near impossible to accept that my father may not be able to get any better and more stable than he is at the moment in his very fragile and unsteady state. I try so very hard to make him feel better. To try and install some interest in life in him. I may be hanging washing out in the downpour, for all I know.
     Yet, it also doesn’t mean that what perfectly is, cannot grow into being perfectly something else. How we handle life is what brings transformation about. Firstly though, we have to accept what the reality is in order to have any reasonable or constructive reaction that can lead to growth.
     In this instance, more than anything, I am being forced to accept my own limitations. Especially as far as my self concept of someone who can handle and fix most anything goes.
     I made the sculpture of an imago, freshly hatched, soon after my divorce. I felt bruised and exhausted from the terrible struggle of the hatching process it put me through. It had everything to do with identity, with a buried self that needed to emerge and having to learn to trust my own wings. It was a struggle to truly come to life, it seemed.
     The sculpture speaks strongly to me again. But differently this time. I feel that I am going through another hatching; this time it is more a shedding of a self that has become superfluous. I feel weak and vulnerable without the tough outer skin of my self assured chrysalis.
     We are being forced to face the truths we deem crucial to live with consciousness in a very real and hard way. What’s in the way is the way. Therefore it is no bad luck, accident or punishment. It is also not an excuse to not face up to what we are intended to do or be. Martyrs we aren’t either, though we may feel buried up to our necks with stones being pelted at us. It is merely life happening. How we handle it, is what determines the harvest.

I’m not even sure what the crops are. It feels like weeds mostly, at the moment.

Matilda