Often, when my heart is broken, I don't know what to say.
Often, when my heart is broken, I don't know what to say.
On the shootings in Colorado
Please do not interpret my silence on the recent shootings in Colorado as complacency, as ignoring or minimizing this tragic and unnecessary loss.
I am holding it all inside of myself, while also, at the same time, protecting myself and honoring my own need to create distance from things that would otherwise overwhelm me. I am holding and holding it all in a field of blessing. The only way I know to integrate such things.
Blessing all involved, including the one who seems (on the surface) to be at fault. Yet he alone is not at fault. He is the outcome of a culture of projected fear and hate, lies and confusion. A culture of collective pain that keeps causing itself more pain in an endless wheel of self-inflicted pain.
The pain this event has caused,
the pain that caused this event,
the pain the pain the pain.
This is not a space for politics. This is no one person's fault. This is unintegrated, unexplored, unmetabolized pain seeking relief - pain that, in an act like this, seeks to distribute itself around. Pain that we are all carrying now.
As a world. As a people. As individuals.
This morning, a line from Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare keeps coming to mind: All are punished.
The line is from the final act. Romeo and Juliet have taken their own lives. Their parents, the warring Montague and Capulet families, have gathered in the square. The Prince is addressing the adversaries as one. they are one - a body of loss.
"See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate, That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love! And I, for winking at your discords, have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished."
In this manner, the Prince informs the men and women, fathers and mothers, that they have killed their own children, and that the instrument of that murder has been Romeo and Juliet’s love for each other.
This particular speech seems to me to fit this particular loss, where a gunman walks into a place of rainbows and joy, a place of freedom and dancing, love and celebration, and opens fire.
Hate attempting to kill love.
Fear attempting to kill joy.
The delusion of an 'enemy', an 'other' who must be eliminated before we can feel safe.
All of us carry this delusion together.
Share your prayer AND also your vision for a better way in the comments. If you received this by email. click on the title and make your way here.)
In this time of loss and grief, of mourning and taking stock, offer your prayers AND your vision for a better way. A vision to dissolve the delusion.
Speak to us a vision that a prince or a princess, a king or a queen might speak to their people, a vision that is also a spell, potent and powerful. A spell that opens a new world, that reversing the blame and shame that keeps this cycle going.
Here’s mine: All are blessed. All are blessed. All and everyone of us is blessed.
