Looking Within

Let your love flow outward through the universe,
To its height, its depth, its broad extent,
A limitless love, without hatred or enmity
Then as you stand or walk,
Sit or lie down,
As long as you are awake,
Strive for this with a one-pointed mind.
Your life will bring heaven to earth.

Sutta Nipata

It's comforting to be reminded that the aim of God in the end is to make us as vessels ever-growing receivers of his love - to allow love into ourselves - from others, too, but especially from God - and to swim in it, and learn to love ourselves - and then to spread that outwards. How painful it is to be in the process of that growth and to see the weeds within ourselves that hinder that. It's hard to underestimate the pain. We all understand this pain because we all must experience it.

How lovely it is to stop and take the time to look at our progress. It's easy to look at our cracks and faults and miss the healing going on at the edges, the puckerings that are beginning ever so slowly to signal the onset of healing.

It seems the lessons are never-ending for me lately, and I welcome them, coming thick and fast as they are. As painful as they are, the delight of new discovery within myself is a joy that never diminishes even if it is a discovery of a new weed. Discovering the terrain of my garden is always a place of safety, no matter how much I wish to flinch away from the hocks and thistles.

Yesterday reminded me of my propensity towards defensiveness, my rejection issues. I appreciate those willing to be honest with me. It is a difficult thing to be honest with another, to point out the things causing them to stumble. Hearing those words are painful. And our initial responses are always interesting to observe.

I watched myself do that yesterday, when I received an email from someone who I hope to one day be friends with. His words to me were honest and helpful, but it was interesting to see how differently I read them after a few hours to my first reading. My first response was defensive - they seemed accusatory. After I came home from work and reread them, with my defenses down and after prayer, they seemed honest and only slightly accusatory ;) (j/k)

Sigh. When do we ever really *see* reality? None of us do, not in its entirety. We are always filtering everything through our own wounds, or our own freedoms. That is both an encouragement and a warning.

I'm so tired of some of my wounds. I suspect they are in the process of being dismantled. That's the reason for the scaffolding. In other ways, that scaffolding is nothing other than my own crustiness, childhood constructions to attempt to protect. We all bring to the table what we can, and it amazes me that children are able to construct things to guard themselves which work so well (what amazingly adaptable creatures we are, like weeds growing out of footpath cracks).

Observing those still-standing-but-crumbling twin towers of rejection and defensiveness in myself alerts me to the residues of shame that still linger, like shallow pools of water on the rocks after the tide has gone out. I don't want those twin towers there anymore. They blight my landscape. They hold me back and they cause me to treat people much more harshly than I ever wish or intend to. They did their job, after a fashion, but now it is time for them to leave. They serve no purpose anymore, not now that I have got God to hide in instead of childhood cardboard constructs.

It is an encouragement and comfort to look to God after observing my biggest wounds. My self-nurturing thang isn't so well developed that it's an automatic response. But looking to God is self-nurture. It's like going off and having a nice bath. Looking to God is like looking in the mirror, only better, because looking to God reflects back his love to us and also reflects back our true natures to ourselves in some mystical not-yet-here-but-nevertheless-operational way.

God's creations are much prettier than my own. My twin towers housed stuff, and were practical. But they don't fit into the landscape being created in me, the new trees springing up and casting new shade, the delicate new mosses that are beginning to grow in that shade. The twin towers cast their own shade, sure, but it was too harsh for a lot to grow in its wake. The shade cast by self-nurturing allows all sorts of wonderful things to grow, hellebores and violets and ferns. Now it's just to learn how to tend them :)

Seriously, I mean it - happy Saturday, bloggers