2010-08-16
the seed of bitterness
i have to rip it from me, this bitterness I have known for so long. I would have thought it had grown in vines already, entrenching small but powerful roots throughout my existence. But either in my time away I was cleansed, or it had not yet spread so thickly that I could not remove it. Maybe it had been weakened as I have gone through my life, still exploring my possibilities with hope and faith. I have not felt it in some time, and suddenly here it is again. I know now, without doubt, where this seed originates. Before I had believed that I was capable of removing myself from it, That my will was strong enough that I could start from a new beginning, that I could reshape my very past with my thoughts and the proper re-direction of my life.
Well, apparently no one can do that. But I hated weakness, having seen the destruction it can cause, and I believed that to fail at the reconstruction of my self was weakness. But there is a metaphor that is all too correct, about a house and it's foundation. I tried to rebuild my walls with beauty and joy, my ground with strength and belief, and decorate myself with peace and respect.
But beneath what I had built lay a foundation of constant humiliation, pain, and the terror of constant helplessness. From that helplessness, sprouted the seed of anger. I used that anger to fight, to defend myself and my brothers, and it was that very plant which continued to grow that I attempted to prune into the shape of strength. The shape of one's strength cannot come from a seed of violent anger, that can only help one through survival. One cannot keep it and use it and build with that plant a ground to walk on through all of one's life.
From humiliation sprung the seed of defiance, and in setting goals that were opposite from the ones causing me suffering, I believed I had set an image of myself. But this was not a self, this was an inverted reflection, a reaction simply to what I did not want, and not a spontaneously created self-affirmation of what I wanted to be. I became stuck in my defiance of what I saw as wrong, while believing I had progressed and settled in a place I had filled with peace and respect for life and for others. I believed this even though my ground of anger occasionally shook and toppled all the lovely peaceful and respecting furnishings, making me want to smash them, to take led pipe to everything I had placed down, and to move on to the walls and show beauty and joy that they were weak and easily destroyed.
But true beauty and joy are not weak, and are not easily destroyed. Yet, my beautiful and joyous walls were. Because I had reshaped them from a seed of pain, and pain has the most persistent sproutlings of all growing things. Tending to walls of pain to cover and shape them into beauty and joy was one of my proudest achievements, because it took constant power and shocking amounts of will. And I was succeeding... or so I thought. But there is no success in exhaustion and self-denial.
I have to knock everything down. I have to dig everything out. I can't move to another location, we are all born into this metaphorical plot of land. We build in our image, and our foundations are mostly how we are raised. But maybe there is a way to take everything away, to nurture the ground, to ask it if you can refill, and then to rebuild with new tools and new material. Where to find these new things is another thing I have to discover. How to be naked temporarily, after I've ripped out the rotting foundation, standing in a plot without a ground or walls, that's another thing I have to discover. And, how to build correctly, to fortify, to use the right materials, to learn what shapes suit me best. And then, to live with myself.
I want to live. That's always been true. But maybe I didn't realize that same thing I've told myself about people who are suicidal - they don't want to die, they want to live, but live better. I am living in a stagnant dead place, telling myself I made it out alive and succeeded, but now I want life.
The Greeks had a distinction for life. Living in the sense of biology (zo), and living in the sense of being a self (bioo). We should adopt something similar.
goldenpear at 9:41 a.m.