I just read a quote:
You are not here to change the world,
the world is here to change you.
Shantideva
This might get at my biggest issue.
(And my resistance to a Common Core.)
Today.
$500 car repairs.
a broken washer at a time we cannot afford nor deal with a broken washer.
7 PM and a mom with dementia.
Who has been cooking eggplant for five hours on a grease fire about to happen, and three trips for us to the store.
Who is so stubborn it's hard
Not to lose it.
It's here to change me.
Why is it that when I make a detailed grocery list even stating brand names and things like :
Kraft cheese slices, American, in plastic wraps,
I still have a spouse that fails to get several items, or that, gets "diet" when it is supposed to be regular...
generics
thus totally wasting that purchase and...
he's seen as really "a saint" for going to the store, mean mommy ungrateful b*tch, when I've been forced to do it for thirty years, with babies, after long workdays, and no one wrote me a list.
Or said, "That's so great of you."
I'll be in a laudry mat tomorrow.
A lot like I was years ago.
Because my husband ruined the clothes, it was another of my female duties, and then he lost them if he went and brought them home damp because no matter how many times I said they feel dry if warm but need X amount of time in a dryer he felt it was great to pay less and have a closet full of must.
Is it spelt must?
How do you spell mildew?
Why did Ram Dass sound like a four year old on learning he had a 53 year old son?
What an inconvenience on my spiritual path?
Forever on the beginning?
Why is being human successions of failures?
It's been a long itchy day. I've got a rash all over.
It's a red burning mess.
And a woman in her 80's insisting on running a huge grease fire kind of project no one can watch but me, and I'm trapped in a smoky haze of her inability to accept the limits of her age.
Changing the world.
By baking the bread.
That no one noticed.
The problems you describe are endemic to democracies. To the best of my knowledge, the founding fathers meant for the Constitution to be the law of the "land" not the house. Ergo you may have to instill the notion that the Constitution ends at the door and those who wish its protections should seek refuge on the other side of the door.
ReplyDeleteWhat I am suggesting is a form of benevolent fascism. You must become a dictator and instill fear in the citizenry--no subjects that remain with in the walls of your citadel. Do not issue requests, shout orders. Offer no kindness. Carry a large stick and non-fatally smote those who defy you. It may not work so well with those suffering dementia, but the lesser beings will soon learn not to cross her ladyship.
You have an unenviable situation. Keep a fire extinguisher handy.
Sometimes I just need to SAY something.
ReplyDeleteLater all my bread got eaten and people settled into a better state. Or a quieter one...however I've been reading and thinking about how in a second you are back to square one. And....yesterday reminded me of that.
Later in the day I saw a program with an artist and a Buddhist monk on a public channel-it was about creativity but also about balance and harmony in life. And I thought of the day.
You use much politer language than I would in similar circumstances.
DeleteWell I thought about how silent I was for soooo long.
DeleteThat was one of my main defenses.
Then 15 or so years ago I met a person I confided in. Who went on to later here to use my energies, and then take that trust and having her own issues distort...and to take it for granted and make conditions beyond my capacity....anyway I started a blog and I talked, no one had really ever heard me. And that's been a mixed experience.
Art was different because it was more coded-feeling went there-my thoughts went there-but when I talk here...it's tough to figure out how to explain something.
But I'm working on "obligation" actually and this piece on some level reflects that. I read an article that said it was the ten truths of love.
http://www.ktvq.com/news/10-things-you-might-not-know-about-love/
Now we have the neuro-science I suppose. One of the points, I think the first was all love is conditional and carried expectations and obligations. It is true in my family of origin it did.
I think I experienced however much outside of that.
I am also concurrently reading about defenses we build young to survive situations that later become character "defects" in that they are used when the situation changes. Patterns that distort us.
I don't know.
My circumstances yesterday was challenging me emotionally- I was thinking about that waking.
How my defense was silence.
And how I am inclined to isolate.
How when I did reach out and speak to deep feeling in a real way-others used that to damage me. Or it wasn't noticed really and I understand why. Or how recently it was deployed to set me up to stop my displaying children's art, my lessons, thoughts on teaching. And how that silence allows people to do wrong things...but maybe I didn't really learn how to demand things be done.
I was thinking of change too.
Humans must be here to work on frailty, on compassion, on their understanding of love-that was defined on line as ALWAYS conditional and always about obligation.
That I think is what gets caught in the net around love-kind of like a defect, or a scar....but I find myself upset over the same patterns, the same expectations the failure to think about it...and my own pettiness.
Anyway in some of the material it said the defects all fall out of fear, and that the behaviors are all around not meeting that head on-falling instead into the defenses.
Mom's afraid of dying and it's difficult to deal with her stubborn insistence on using anger or controlling-but surely I can get that...try to get that......in turn I'm responding with avoidance and with the resentments I have.
Cycles that are making love conditional. And I can change and learn.
http://www.ktvq.com/news/10-things-you-might-not-know-about-love/
It's not how it is.
But they claim my meanings are just my conditioning, I'm not sure of that.
The ten things I need to know about love are
1) It's all we have that we know is worth doing.
2)It does endure. It lasts. We don't know what endures. We are temporal.But....I will not concede to this article.
3) It is poetic.
4) Science cannot describe it.
5) Words do not contain it.
6) Lists on the internet are not definitions, they are ideas.
Love is not an idea on the internet.
7)Love is in actions.
8) It is in time and space. And Out of time and space.
9) Ah I realized, it contains it's opposites.
10) Perhaps I'm going to go walk.