Hatred, gossip, violence, judgment, despair, when I look into them, feel into them, experience them, they all stem from the one thing – fear. Fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough, fear that makes us want to be better than someone else because then maybe someone will notice, fear that makes us want to be worse than someone else because then maybe someone will pay attention, fear that someone else is right which will make us wrong, fear that there isn’t enough to go around, fear that we will be left out in the cold, fear that we’re not loved because, how can we be when there is all this fear?
What I’ve been noticing is how much sway fear can hold. Once it has a story to come alive in, that story can be gripping and tenacious, stories that insist and insist this is how it is and there is no other way. And it really doesn’t matter what the story is, if one dissipates, when fear is the go-to place, another will come to replace it, and whatever the means, whatever the so-called seemingly good reasoning behind whatever insistence is at hand, whether it’s that this country is bad and that person no good, or that we’ve got to fight to get what we want and then hold onto it tight, whatever the specifics the result is just the same, … all this fear making us, us, and them, them and clouding and cutting the connection that is our hearts. Because the truth is, when we are in our hearts there is no room for anything else. When we are in our hearts, fear is known, however briefly, to be the illusion that it really is.
This cutting of the connection, like anything that cuts, hurts. Whether it is in a moment of impatience, or a fleeting thought that is less than love, whether it is in an act of trespass – against someone else, something else, against nature – this cutting, this separation which is the territory in which these things and thoughts can take place, is ultimately a separation from and trespass against me. It is a separation from my heart, from who I really am, – from myself, my spirit, from that amazing calling to simply Be Love.
And what I am coming to know is, these moments or times of separation are not bad or some sort of failure, they are simply the mechanisms through which I can then choose to come home. Where I can choose to let go to the trust that love is the prevailing force, surrender to faith that I don’t have to fight and in all the letting go let in that which I am a part of – oh my – what a thing that is. All I have to do is allow myself to love life and shine.