Thursday, April 22, 2010

Is this the truth??


 Like a silent serpent weaving itself into the corners of comfort,  the very presence of it shocks your delicate balance and makes you feel trapped in a place so heartless.  Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King in Selma and described the experience of standing up for human rights as "praying with his feet" also wrote, "the opposite of good isn't evil.  The opposite of good is indifference."  I truly believe this.  Goodness inside out is indifference.

Listen to people's stories of their struggles trying to seek help within a system driven society........ think about the times when you were trying to seek direction or clarity only to be head butted by recorded messages and dead ends.  The resulting feeling is smothered by the choke hold judgement of indifference.  It's like your "be-ingness" is stripped from your flesh.

The message?
You don't matter.
You're insignificant.
You're not equal.  

You're an inconsequential unbeing.

We live within systems and layers of heartless bureaucracies, some of us in cities where everyone minds their own business and rarely sticks their neck out for a human being they don't know personally. Fed by a feast of unresolved emotions which have gathered internally,  indifference breeds all around us.   When one projects the passive aggressiveness of indifference to another, it sends shivers into places you never felt them before and leaves you with a sense of invisibility and rawness.  It is feeling unloved.  The detachment is so cold and final.  Even when you know cerebrally it is simply a misfired coping mechanism.

It will take me a while to let go of the incessant question that rolls around in my head......... "How does one turn off loving another person with such finality?   Then, I forcefully ask myself.........."Is this the truth?  Is what I'm thinking really the truth?"  It centres me again.... allows me to catch my breath ..... takes the bite out of the serpent feelings which had silently warped my level headedness with their anxious poison.  Again, I ask myself........... "Is what I'm thinking REALLY the truth?"

And then, I hear a teenie tiny voice whispering an answer through the hollow echo of my question........  "no. what you are thinking isn't the truth.  The truth is a slippery creation of your own making.  Love evolves.  changes colours. hides awhile.  takes on different meanings.  love never leaves, but gets lost in the hurt of others misconceptions and slippery truths.  love fights off indifference because it becomes overpowered by the strength of compassion.  some people are afraid of love, afraid of the intensity and he complications of its imperfection." 

"True love is God's love,  the teenie tiny voice continues.  there's no such thing except God's love.  the other love is the human kind and is hasn't been perfected and never will.  know that happiness is available seven days a week.  know that love alights when you share its blooms with others. don't wait for it to return as you once knew it........ right now, it is cocooning so that it can transform into something beautiful." 

All of a sudden, the angle of my gaze alters.  And the serpent?  Well, I killed that beast.  Again.  You can kill the beasties too you know?  And when you do??? 
The human being becomes a being again. 
Respect unfurls in smiles and recognition.
Love comes out from under the covers.
And you remember that happiness is available 7 days a week...... 
That's the honest to God truth.  

6 comments:

Mark said...

Bravo! Your words so eloquently teach one of the great lessons. May we all be the love that we are and in doing that be the truth and banish the indifference.

Anonymous said...

God Bless you for writing this, Dana. I felt like I was sent here to read this today. How did you know I needed to hear it? I am convinced more and more of your innate goodness XXX

awareness said...

Mark... thank you! I wrote the first half a couple of weeks ago and it was so negative. I was literally perseverating on my view of "the truth" and it was so painful. This week, I found the ending to this piece, and the realizaton that we must question our thinking and if we do we can make necessary shifts in our feelings and actions. The evil serpent of indifference has a tendancy to paralyze me and fill me with such a sense of rejection that I can't even think straight. To question my perceptions is important..... as is the belief that what we give out, comes back in connections which always reinforce our own being-ness.

Selma.... You are a dear person. :) We all have goodness in us as well as evil. Yes, we have evil in us too. I opt to try to be good and not indifferent. But, I think there are times when I'm not perceived that way, or there are times when I am trying and my messages are received/filtered through hurt eyes and woundedness. All we can do is try and continue to be givers as well as receivers and know that human love is imperfect.

theMuddledMarketPlace said...

where did you find that image?

awareness said...

mmp.... The stained glass is from a church in Toronto, the Church of the holy Trinity.

The other image? it was a storefront in Toronto as well.

Relyn Lawson said...

Oh, I do love that sign!