Buddies

It is the height of hypocrisy, you realise suddenly (but for the eleventy seventh time), to bemoan the fate of the outside world ~ where the supposedly strong overpower and demean and shame the weak ~ and yet to do it to yourself.  You hear Gandhi's mantra, the one that reverberates through you like a gong, to be the change you wish to see in the world.

And so you've embarked on a campaign.  It's like the buddy system at primary school where a big Grade 6 kid befriends the new little scared Prep kid.

And so the Gaping Void ~ he sort of looks like those alien creatures that used to be on Sesame Street (the ones that say brrrrrrrriiiiing when the telephone rings and are amused and bemused by everything around them) but who has a big hole right out of the bottom of him so that everything falls out, and he is constantly and continuously hungry and thirsty for what he can't seem to ever get.  You go and call to the Gaping Void and he comes to you moaning and then you go and find the Mother, the one who has compassion and understanding and far-seeing.  She is the one who may seem weak on the outside but who is totally strong on the inside, who understands what it is to be open and to love and understands too the near-sightedness of  the fearful and the ignorant who think that it is weak

And so you buddy up the Mother and the Gaping Void, and she takes him on her knee and rocks him, and you think that maybe if left together long enough she would take some of her thread and begin to sew up his hole.

And then along comes a creature who also wants and needs, but he is made out of long bits of sticks, and he tries to climb up on the Mother but he can't. And she picks him up too, and cradles him too on her lap, uncomfortable though it be for him.

And then there is the part of you which is dead but walks, Overblown Ego, who thinks that things like this are stupid and childish, this game-playing, and that you should put it away.  But you know that voice.  It's always there, at the ready to criticise anything that has life or love in it.  Because they scare it.  That part doesn't understand, being like an inflated jumping castle you had to puff up one day when you were small, a fort in which to protect yourself but which no longer serves.  That bit which thinks it is strong, is the weakest of all of today's cast of characters.  It just doesn't really know it.