I’m going to go out on a limb in confessing I very well may be one of the most stubborn people you will come across. Not in all ways, nor for the sake of being stubborn, but when I lean into the stillness and what moves through me in those moments, what matters to me simply matters unequivocally. If it is a question of being accepted, finding external success, or being true to my interior listening, I will choose me in higher priority and my life is an ongoing testament of this.
Since I have grown the awareness to even reference such notions, I have always acknowledged that all peoples and heritages have gifts and challenges. That little about such things is readily packaged or homogenizable to the degrees the dominant culture of oneness and global hierarchy and submission at all costs insists upon. I used to frame the latter mentioned differently, but life is refining my perceptions and abilities to see it differently and more clearly for me.
Indeed, how different my life may have been if I’d just embraced my living and sharing about wild places and gardening forays and the fruits of those ways without any deepening connection or questions of my own brought in. I’m fairly certain I would’ve cried far fewer tears. But it’s not the choices I made, nor could I have. Hell, it was the gateway for abuse as I experienced it anyways. And I could no more choose to go that way now than I could resist winds or rains as they come.
It wasn’t the path for me, or the abuse would’ve never come at me as such, and if it is all this life has for me because of the overarching hypersensitivities of the times we live in, meaning what else comes through me as interconnected relationally is wholly deemed unfit to be allowed to be seen or appreciated, or I am the inappropriate vehicle for such movement to come into this world through as even one tiny participant, I’ll move into silent retreat in my inner world and embrace it without need for more or to be seen congratulatory in those ways for doing so.
Politics and measures of psychology have always been politics of the heart.
I don’t need others to do things of solitude. I do love observing others sharing about things I love in those ways, but that is not the parts of my experiencing’s of this world I am passionate about sharing. Not anymore. Life has guided me to see those are the things for sustaining me quietly. Though pieces are ever entangled in so much else I do or create, it is sensed as a result of all I have endured as more of a betrayal of self to want to approach the most intimate aspects of my life otherwise for anything more than my simple and mostly silent practice of such participation.
I heard Conor McGregor recently express in reflection of his Irish heritage that he comes from nothing in reference with the degree of very real despair experienced in his homeland. In a lot of ways, the rural urban interfaces of America may relate to the struggles of the Irish at present more than many may ever understand. But I’m not trying to get hung up in international geopolitics that shape near everything about the world we’ve all been born into. Regardless, it was in context of him wanting to inspire others to rise above their own seemingly impossible odds.
I am inspired by a life story such as he shoulders and can relate in a lot of ways of such a weight. I come from indentured servants. A long line of them, surely many if not all taken against their will or choosing. Famine survivors too. World War surfacing survivors as well. And I’ve lived along the American gentrification rich rural urban interface my whole life where the powers that be care very little about the struggles of the working-class people, which are more so lower class people anyways.
Like so many, I’m learning to survive through the present world war, which is really more of a continuity of thousands of years of this same bloody war just masked different this go around as it always is. While my heritage is not so simple as McGregor’s in obvious ways, including being only of those physically ghosted and displaced, I do still have Irish heritage and I am interiorly a very different piece of some larger whole, many wholes of the larger humanity whole really.
My gut response rising in alignment with inside my heart was the longing to reflect back that he doesn’t come from nothing. He comes from everything. And that inversion of perception is something that has grown to live inside my inner world in countless ways every day. Yet I also understand the inversion of the lived experiences and conditioning for such thinking in this world system.
My own personal shadow work has flipped upside down and made visible for me the many shadows in the subconscious shadows of the European psyche and what has fueled so many of its weaknesses and insecurities that have negatively influenced others outside of them. Though I cannot say even that without inclusivity of the caveat of all the ways those stories too have been grossly homogenized, decontextualized, and thus misportrayed. In my experiencing, it’s been literally nothing of what others need for it to be interpreted as.
My very tiny existence and personal need for exploring the mapping of all that came at me only exposed more depths of this, not lessening it. Do you know what it’s like for your heart to be on trial lastingly and for very real consequences to take over so much of your life for the misunderstandings and triggers others cling to and experience from their very own transgressions of and over you anyways?
Growth does not dwell in consciously going along with ignorance, ignoring shadows, not even for the collective whole, but in conscious integration.
I’m not one, nor have I ever been, to shy away from the complexities of the world or how the world has become what it is. I’ve listened to stories from all walks of life, and thanks to the gift of the internet, from all around the world. I’ve asked questions in solitude and working out for myself that I never should’ve, and I’ve learned to resolve them all on my own. Between me and source unmediated. The more that others have come at me, or fallen away from me in my personal life, the more the need for that relational trusting has illuminated the importance of it. Personally and as one tiny window into the shadows of the collective. There comes a time, therefore, when the stories of others must fall into resonance with one’s own lived and inherited experiences, or something doesn’t measure up. And maybe that’s all I am for others, but I am enough and more for me, and I am at peace within if that’s all I am for anyone outside of me.
In perfect timing synchronistically, the Celtics just won the NBA. And in the celebratory parade a t-shirt reading ‘Don’t stop believing’ surrounded by Celtic symbology within modernity took center stage. But it still too is what it is, the symbology that is, meaning modernity owns not a lick of it. I could write a whole book about the layered meaning of that moment for me, literally and esoterically, but this short mention will have to suffice because that’s how life works for all of us or could at least. Of deepest irony for me if you actually knew anything about me in a life-long sense, I cried tears of joy for that moment. Just like that, I understand how a bystander could cry tears of joy for a sporting outcome.
Heritage matters. It’s fucking beautiful. And I hate that we live in a system so devoted to the insistence of its undoing’s from fear-based extremes. No amount of healing in the world means much of anything if we can’t be honest about the complexity of the world being the result of the sum of the world’s heritages near every step along the way. No amount of healing is lastingly honest if integration of all scales of existence mattering cannot be a part of presence and conscious existence.
And I’d disappear for that end. Not because of, but also because of a fucking t-shirt in the right place at the right time. If all that can matter in presence is individuals in every here and now moment, or coveted parts of the tree of life without all limbs being granted room to too matter from their own perceptions, integrations, and self-love, if integration of actual wholeness of the tree of life is intolerable, I can accept the rulings of the adjudicators of this given moment in time and simply go my own way in all ways. Though it is far simpler because the takers don’t seem to stop taking and I will face what I have already faced about such realities all alone.
Far more than me have done so for far longer than my single life. Every one of my ancestors that came to America surely could relate with traversing those sadness fields in the face of a cold global world convinced of its heartfullness. Their strength lives within me. They no more deserved their displacements than I did the transgressions that came into my life. And life goes on and there’s always something to smile about if one humbles their self enough, isn’t there?
