This blue is the color of hope.
For such a long time I’ve been asleep. Not the easy, restful sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, but an exhausted slumber, half aware and half nightmare.
I’m not the only one, of course. I thought I was almost through it, that dawn had come, but a dirty haze still hovers over my conscious now. Almost, I keep saying, almost over.
It isn’t just the political insanity, it’s more the realization that humans are so gullible, content to never question, and filled with fear and hatred. How did we come to this? It’s not hard to see, decades of disinformation and downright lies used to control the less aware of the population. Men using politics, force, and religion as a means to keep others down, convince others that they know best, to make themselves more powerful, to profit from superstition and ignorance. Especially power over women, always women.
And why, even now, do we women continue to buy into it? Are we so brainwashed that we can no longer think for ourselves? Are we so weak that we must have men tell us what to do? Are we ashamed that we bought into and led a life where the man is always the final say, because we succumbed and submitted, that now we are so ashamed that we have to justify that life? A life surely unfulfilled? Or does the lie of being the ‘good’ wife and mother by never putting her own needs first justify the waste of intelligence, ability, art, science, peace, and all other lost opportunities that would benefit not only ourselves, but the world, really justifiable?
No. Of course not. Just as it absurdly sad that the person who may one day find a cure for the cancer that may kill your mother or your child will never have the opportunity to become that doctor or scientist because they live in poverty, or were uprooted from the home and country they thought was safe. How many good and loving people will become so angry by the bombing of their homes, the slaughter of their family caused by men creating war for money and power, that they feel the need to strike back and draw blood to leech out some of their own unbearable pain?
It’s not that hard to understand really. With no education, no access to empathy, misinformation, fear and violence are soon to follow.
And how is it, that after millennia on this planet together, we still do not understand that we are all basically the same. How long will we allow others to use us for their own personal gain?
As long as we allow it. As long as we keep buying these lies of difference, as long fear of anything ‘other’ rules your life. Other religions, other skin colors, other sexualities, other countries, states, cities, families, they are all lies.
If you want society to go backwards, you will fail. You might cause great pain to others in your ignorance and denial, but eventually you will fail. Time doesn’t work that way. Think I’m wrong? Are you getting younger?
If you choose to try to go forward only by viewing life through the arrow slot of the lie of separation, of superiority, or of difference, you will fail. You will cause great suffering to many, you may even be able to convince yourself of those falsehoods throughout your life, you may even teach your children or your students to echo your fear, but ultimately, you will fail.
The world is changing, we are all connected, you are not alone, you are not different, you are not special.
You belong.
So do I.
And none of us are getting out of this alive.
So you might as well love and laugh, and give.
It’s all out there, inside you. It’s in all of us.
We all fear, we all have the capacity to love, to choose something better.
It isn’t easy, but once you try, it’s so obvious. You are part of a whole. Part of us, just as we are a part of you.
You’re not special, less, or more. You just are.
Just like everyone else.
Isn’t that refreshing?
Shari, November 15, 2020
Anima mundi