Day 86 - I Miss You

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 86 March 26, 2012

I Miss You

We live in an estranged world. Everywhere I go I meet people who are estranged from the ones they love, or loved. I often think, “oh you poor person, what happened that you would become estranged from the one you love?” That is until I hear the story of anger and pride and hurt that causes the person to be willingly and passionately estranged from the one they love. “Well that bleep, bleep, bleep did blah, blah, blah to me! I’ll forgive them and welcome them back into my life when they get down on their hands and knees and come crawling back and admit what they did and say they are sorry and, and, and, . . . . . . .” Now I think, “oh you poor person, how sad that your own ego and pride and immaturity would allow precious time to pass when you could be together with the one you love”.

Ok, you are hurt and I am hurt, and we all get hurt. And Ok, you miss who you love, you miss your mom, or you mom, miss your daughter. You mister, miss your gal so much it hurts, but no more than your ego and pride hurts, or it would be you who would go crawling back on hands and knees, even as an innocent victim. Come on ever body, no matter what happened, no matter who did what to you or how or why, let’s pick up that phone right now and reach out in our humble martyrdom and make things all better. I’ll just wait right here.

Waiting.

Still waiting.

Yup, still here waiting.

So how did it go? Are you all happy again since you got to hear her voice again? Is everything better now since he is on his way over? Don’t tell me, you didn’t call did you? You just hid over there by the phone so I would think you did it right? Uh huh. Well, I have been in that situation, and all of us have, so don’t feel too guilty that you and your problems are greater than you and your solutions. Yes, I am saying that no matter how wronged you are, no matter how innocent, the ego and pride and hurt of your estrangement is your problem, not the one who is guilty or wronged you.

Our hearts are the homes of humble and accepting Love, no matter what happens. Our egos and prides and hurts are in our brains, high up above and long after our hearts. It is your heart that is longing and missing, and your heart that needs reconnection and reconciliation, but it is your brain with its system of justice and memory of ouches that overrides the needs of your child’s heart. So how can we heal our own problems so that we can overcome our estrangement? The main issue is that we don’t want to. We revel and gloat in our righteous indignation and need to hold a grudge. If feeling pain and indignation were measured as a sexual fetish we would orgasm every day, we revel so much in our need to maintain our estrangement. The first step towards seeing and touching and being with the ones we are mad at is to want to see and touch and be with the ones we are mad at, more than we want to get off on being mad at them. Once we decide that, then we can begin to heal our problem. If we are still saying “no, it is their problem”, “no, why me?, that is not fair, they are the one …”, then we are not ready, and we have not arrived at our humility and healing.

In order to heal ourselves and return to the humility of our hearts, we must first truly feel the pain of what happened. This need not be done in the presence or with the knowledge of the person who wronged us. We must feel our own pain and process our own pain, and integrate our own pain into our own self, and in doing so the buzz of the blame and grudge give way to humility and forgiveness and to the pride-less-ness of reconciliation. We all mistakenly believe that we have felt the pain of being wronged, but we clearly are hiding inside and directing the pain outwards into ego and pride and hurt as defensive mechanisms so that we don’t really hurt. In actuality we are dearly “suffering”, for feeling the pain is healing and not suffering. Suffering is being between a rock (what they did to us) and a hard place (our inability to feel the pain), and so we suffer. We need to pick a safe and private time and place, hopefully with a person with whom we feel safe, and we need to “lose it”, and “break down”, and we need to “fall apart”, we need to allow the anger and rage and sadness and sorrow and tears to come, and we need to finally grieve the event that happened. When we arise after a very deep cry and a period of true mourning, the event that happened to us returns to just an event, and the person who wronged us returns to just a person that we love and miss.

Estrangement from a loved one is a defensive mechanism where we blame others for our own problems. We shore ourselves up in righteousness and prideful indignation so that we don’t have to hurt or cry or feel bad, and in the process we trap ourselves in awful pain which actually distracts us from pain which is much deeper deep inside of us. The vast majority of our real deep pain is carefully repressed and not even conscious. We hold deep grudges against our own mothers and fathers that we cannot even remember since we imagine that the pain is just too much to bare like it was when we were children. Then later in our lives we find Patsies and Scape Goats that we place out hurt and judgment upon without realizing that even if they are triggers, they are in truth innocent of the real pain that we are feeling inside, caused by others, a long, long time ago.

If your dad or cheating husband or child or friend that wronged you and caused the estrangement got hit by a car right now and was clinging to life in some hospital in the outback of Australia, you would be on the next plane with tears in your eyes. Let’s save a step and skip the hospital part, and let’s just lie down and weep and mourn the terrible hurt that we feel, and hopefully follow it backwards to similar and bigger hurts that are really behind it all. Then we can show up at their house instead of the hospital with a smile on our face, and say, “hi, I missed you so much, and I can’t stand to be away from you anymore. Don’t worry about what happened, I have grieved it and am past it, and I just love you and want to be with you”.

I’ll just wait right here while we all do just that.

See you tomorrow.

www.dear-roe-the-muse.com

youpersonalmuse@gmx.com

Day 85 - The Courage To Fail

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 85 March 25, 2012

The Courage To Fail

Today I am going to have the courage to fail. For many, that sounds like a definition of masochism. No one it seems wants to fail or likes to fail, and so we limit ourselves to reduce the risk of failing. I met this guy named Bo, I guess his name was short for something, and it wasn’t until I found out his last name was Ring that I realized he was Bo-Ring. The guy was in fact me, and I realized that I was boring because I was afraid to fail. When I finally met the Wizard Of Oz and was given ample courage to risk not being boring, I began to fail at just about everything. One day I used considerable courage to climb the ash cinder cone of an active volcano in Guatemala, and it took me an entire day to ascend a mere 2000 feet. Every time I took 3 steps up the ash, I slid back 2 and ¾ steps. The process was actually infuriating, but I was loathe to fail. It occurred to me that each 2 and ¾ step backwards was a repetitive failure to ascend, and that I was only moving up the cone ¼ step at a time. I took the challenge as a metaphor for life and living, and when I reached the top in tears, utterly exhausted, I like to think that I adopted a small child that I call “welcoming failure”. You might say that the success of the ascent was a triumph, but with no food, little water, and a descent of most of the night in pitch darkness without a light, and in the cold rain, reminded me of the relativity of the stubborn will not to fail, while failing in the process.

It truth, life and living is boring except for our failures. I like to call life “memory making”, and the better the memories, the better life is. Our failures are our earmarks in our life, and our failures separate our life into stages of adventures that later become our best stories and memories. We also have wonderful memories that are soft and sweet and cuddly, but if you ever listen to stories of high living around any dinner table, we are rarely proud and boisterous of our soft and sweet and cuddly times. Life tends to blend into a flow of blah-da, blah-da, hum-drum, except when our frequent failures punctuate this time and give us that indispensable reality test. Of course failure is not supposed to feel good and be special and wonderful, and we all tend to be embarrassed and regretful and resentful of our failures. Corny or not, that is the best thing that could ever happen to us. Mr. Bo-Ring goes in for name change when he spends a lot of time embarrassed and regretful and resentful, and I am a living testimony to demonstrate how making a mess of things and a fool of yourself is not boring at all.

No one really sets out to fail, or wants to fail, or likes to fail. Ironically we fail at far more than we succeed at, and so we are so careful to not embarrass ourselves or let ourselves or others down, or have regrets, and so we become Mrs. Mun Dane. Others actually choose not to be gamblers or drunks or perverts as a fetish, but instead professionally take on a myriad of projects and interests that never succeed or are finished as their fetish. We can actually have a masturbatory fetish of feeling good about the impetus, yet bashing ourselves for our worthless-ness in our failure to complete. Failure is the test of our metal throughout our lives, and we can love the neurotic feeling of never being more than soft metal.

Mommy and Daddy are our prototype successes and our initial, proverbial failures. Mommy and Daddy are neurotic, and despite being our heroes, they have some really big blind spots. Mommy and Daddy did not have an ideal marriage or sex life or adventuresome life, and if they did they did not have exciting careers and healthy friends, and if they did, they did not love us or have time for us, and if they did, they were not very good achievers. A parent that is an all around gymnast of healthy successes and failures, with appropriate quality love and time for us is in fact Mr. Bo-Ring and Mrs. Mun-Dane. If those are our parents, then we should be happy with our blaze’ average, and also recognize how our lives as an average are overall pretty so-so- I-guess-not-so-bad. But lives of taming lions while wives divorce us, and having the best dad in the world when he wasn’t in prison, are the extremes that make our lives robust in story at the dinner table.

We really all need to decide if we want to have our cake. Cake is good. Or we should decide to eat our cake. Eating our cake is good. Both are exciting and full of the extremes of success and failure. If we do decide to try and eat our cake, and also have it too, we must be prepared for a watered down life of the average of ½ the eating and ½ the cake. You can’t run away and join the circus and not expect and welcome failure, and you cannot watch Ringling Bros. on the Tv and play the woe-is-me-I-wish-I-would-have-joined-the-circus game. I have a long history of being odd and having sordid fiascos, and I like to think that these are the colors that I earn in my life. I hope that I am not always indulging in my masochistic fetish of the “too much” or the “too often”, or the “oops”, or the “oh shit”, but if I am, then maybe I am not having failures but I actually am a failure. What we hope and plan to do divided by what we are proud to have accomplished, times what we fuck up, define who we are and how we live. We earn colors in our arm chair loving our children, while watching others earning colors taming the lions that we are watching on Tv, who are estranged from their children. One may be boring or mundane, but no life is without value or contribution.

The healthiest thing we can do is metaphorically hit that yellow brick road in one way or another and keep on making those memories, and keep on earning those colors. If we envy the lives of others it is time to walk in their shoes and earn their lives, and we will soon suffer unprecedented failures, just like them. And then we take the next step towards Oz, and we will fail again, and then we face many nice and wicked witches (say hi to them for me since we are well acquainted), and we fail again. In time failure becomes just 2 ¾ steps back down the confounded mountain of life, and we are undaunted in our ascent up the ¼ that is priceless to us. We are in fact failures and we should be proud of it, and each new day we sneak out the back door with just one more grain of sand to melt into the crystal vase that becomes our life well lived.

Onward wooden soldiers we go into the fire. It is the only way to make a beautiful sculpture. Enjoy everyone, even when you don’t, for you are not boring or mundane. You are you.

See you tomorrow.

www.dear-roe-the-muse.com

yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com

Day 84 - Hate As Simply Pain

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 84 March 24, 2012

Hate As Simply Pain

I have been thinking a lot that we need to talk about the feeling of “hate”. When we feel hate we are feeling passionately, so let’s talk passionately about hate. Let’s bring our hate home to us where it belongs, inside ourselves. Hate can be so strong and so painful all around us that it begins to take on an aura all its own. Hate begins to behave like it is a thing all its own, like Love is a thing of its own. That is indeed an ironic idea, since it is us who behave with hate, and hate is in fact no “thing” at all. If hate is a thing, than we are the thing of hate. We are things of Love and can never be things of hate even if we feel or express hate, and hate is merely a passionate feeling of unhappiness.

You might hear or think that hate is the opposite of Love, but that is a mistaken idea since the opposite of Love is Love. Love is still Love no matter what you do since Love is a feeling and an action and a thing, and Love is everything. Hate is a sad little thing felt and expressed by sad people, and hate is merely passionate dislike. Hate is an angry little thing felt and expressed by angry people, and hate is merely extreme aversion. Hate is a hostile little thing felt and expressed by hostile people, and hate is only extreme hostility. Hate is a sad little detest-full feeling felt and expressed by detest-full people, and hate is merely extreme detest. We all feel sorry for hate and hateful people in our hearts, and we feel sorry for ourselves when we hate.

We all use the term to be “in Love”, and in one way or another all of us are in Love. Among the many things that Love is, love is a state of being. When we are no longer in Love, we are still Love and in Love. The lowest common denominator of all life is Love, which also happens to be the highest state and standard of being possible. Love is everything. We don’t really use the term to be “in hate”, yet all of us are in hate in one way or another. Hate is simply a passionate feeling of intense “against”, and we are all passionately against something or someone. That is ironic since even though hate can be a temporary state of being, hate is nothing more than a symptom. Deep in our hearts we all feel a level of dis-ease, and mal-aise, and the symptom on the surface is hate.

Our deep feeling of dis-ease is a sick-ness. Any and all people that feel and express hatred are passionately and extremely sick. We are all psychologically and emotionally sick to one degree or another. The sick-ness that causes the feeling and expression of hate as a symptom is primal trauma and primal deprivation, and the rage of unfulfilled needs. Deep in the heart of all hate and haters and hatred is boiling and festering primal trauma. The feeling and expression of hate is a vulnerability and frailty, an immaturity and a cowardice. Every person has the ability to feel and process and integrate psycho-emotional pain without spewing outwards or onto things or people, but the hater is weak and uses other things and people out of survival of self.

The power of hate is that it self fulfills and clones upon its own sickness and weakness. Hate begets hate that begets more hate that propels more hate upon more hate that festers more hate. Here is a remedy: Hate begets more hate that begets LOVE, that happens to interrupt the poor feeling of hate and then pain surfaces and can be felt and grieved, and then Love returns. Hate is a only temporary state of “very, very, very, very, very mad. And any very, very can be soothed and healed and assuaged to peace, with Love. Hate is such a sad little child that was neglected and bashed in the face, hate is such an angry little child that was denigrated and subjugated and diminished. No child wants to face the agony of their own sick and hateful parents, and instead we fume outwards like seething volcanoes upon innocents, so that we don’t have to face our own misery and suffering in pain.

Hate is like the darkness all around us with no sun and moon. It pervades and prevails, and it creates a paradigm that is so intoxicating for its easiness that we elevate it to the status of Love’s opposite. That is until one miniscule candle of Love is lit, and miraculously the darkness is no more, or ever was. Hate is beautifully and unquestionably curable all the time. Hate is just waiting for the crescendo of the realization of internal strife to reach the heart and tear ducts where tears may fall and sorrow and internal emotional rage may reach our true issues that we harbor within. We are all saying inside, “Until you love me, I am so angry that I must hurt you so that I don’t feel so hurt about how you don’t love me”. It is sad and tragic that we pin this upon innocents so that we don’t have to admit that it was pinned on us.

There is no “other” that we hate. We hate ourselves because our parents hated us. There are no issues of race or sex or class or education that we hate, we only hate ourselves for what our parents hated us for in our race or sex or class or education. We are simply in terrible pain for what happened to us, and it happened to us by our parents. We continue to idealize and worship and “holy grail” our parents out of need for our own survival, while we hate the parents of all others who are the “other”, and are of a different race or sex or class or education than our own. It may not be a very eloquent expression, but “shit does run downhill”. Our hate is simply a result of what happened to us by our parents, or if it was not at the hand of our parents, our parents held the responsibility of our Love in their hands, and they failed us.

No fetus or newborn infant in history has ever hated, or been in sin, or been anything but loving and perfect. Our hatred is a learned response simply passed down from hate-full people, and weak people, and cowardly people who could not take responsibility for their own pain and issues. Is it not time that we reject the whip that whipped us before we whip others, especially our own children? Are we not more than our sad and angry parents and grandparents? Can we not trust ourselves and our own hearts to Love instead of hate? Yes. Yes. Yes, and Yes. Are we not ashamed of having become simply patsy victims of the paradigm of hate of our parents and our societies? Our hearts say yes, and our hearts know what to do. And I trust that we are all doing our best to counter the sad and silly, little angry hate. Let us Love and let us love hate until it comes back home to us.

See you tomorrow.

www.dear-roe-the-muse.com

yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com

Day 83 - Good Day

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 83 March 23, 2012

Good Day

Good day everyone. Even if you aren’t having or don’t even want to have a good day, I still wish you a good day. My good day is different from the g’day that you hear every three steps in Australia, for I’m not just greeting you, I am wanting to remind you that today is a good day in your life, and an important day. Each day that we live is a step forward, hopefully better and beyond yesterday’s step. Even if today’s step is a step backwards or behind, that in itself is a good day, since you noticed it, and now you can do something about it. I say good not as the opposite of bad, since we all long for good days and not bad days, but more of its quality and value to you. With this perspective, even and especially bad days are very good days in the quality and value that they offer our lives.

A good day is really a point of reference, and good and bad are actualities that are relative to our feelings of appreciation and gratitude. A really good day for really old constipated people is any kind of bowel movement, even if painful or loose, something that does not occur to the average teenager. A good day for a teenager is to hold hands and stroll with a date for the first time, and strolling with your partner of 70 years when you are 90 and arthritic is also a very good day. A good day for a Muslim girl longing for Western freedom is to walk the streets with her face unveiled for the first time, something that would never occur to the average Western woman. When we have a good day, we feel so conscious and appreciative and grateful for the feeling of what is good about the day. When we are conscious of what is bad about our day, we are having a feeling of un- appreciating and we are feeling un-grateful for our day. In an ironic way, we are also valuing our experience our bad day by noticing it, and this is a unique kind of appreciation, and perhaps even more fruitful for us and our lives.

When we all strive for “good” things and not “bad” things, especially how our overall days go, we corner ourselves into feeling good about good and feeling bad about bad. Unfortunately, when our happiness and overall state of living are cornered in goodness and not badness, we are rarely ever happy or good, since we become dependent on investing in one and not the other, and we rarely ever get what we want. “Today is such a good day. Today the air went into my lungs, and the carbon dioxide came out just right. Today the plants around me did a good job of making me new oxygen”. Now that is a very good day. Any kind of nourishment in and poop out, good day. Liquid in and pee out, also a good day. Today I escaped the saber tooth tiger and made it into my cave, another very good day. My heart is still going bumpety-bump, and I still have the mental awareness that I am alive, and I ambulate pretty damn good for a half century old dude, that is even super good. In terms of having good days, what else do we really want or need?

We humans, even if we are mobile and aware creatures with our health and our basic nourishment, are in no way necessarily having any semblance of good or happy days or lives. The miracle of our “awareness of self” also brought with it the ability to value or appreciate and be grateful, or not, for this awareness. Most of us in fact are miserable most of the time with our awareness of our good lives or bad lives, or we would really be miserable if we ever told ourselves the truth of our situations, and the comparing and contrasting of what we really dreamed of in our lives. We all have so many woes and disappointments to rant or express, and they are all so pressing and important. That is until the bumpety-bump in our chest skips a beat or more, or our air won’t go in and out right, or food or water or poop or pee let us down.

There are many clichés and idioms about good days and bad days and appreciation and hope in terms of having a good day or bad day. I would like to offer one too. It goes like this: WOW. Today I made it home an hour early. The tail wind coming back from Vail at 30,000 feet was incredible. I didn’t know that my twin turbo prop airplane could do 450 knots indicated. WOW. Today I spent 4 hours sitting still on the interstate with a quarter million other irate people on account of the multiple death accident that closed the interstate. WOW. Today I got my ass fired for showing up to work late and hung over again. WOW. And only a month after being promoted for the highest producing employee in the company’s history. WOW.

The truth is that our brains can do all the ruminations that they want, and we can practice any style or amount of control or affirmations that we like about our good or bad or happy or sad day or lives. The actual reality of our selves and days and lives come from our hearts, and our hearts are the hearts of a child still waiting for our metaphoric Merry Christmas and hopeful Happy Birthday, somewhere deep inside us. We can spend a lot of energy speaking of spirituality and belief, and of prophets dripping blood on crosses or sitting in meditation under trees, but the truth of us and those legendary prophets resides and resided in the happiness of the heart. Nothing you and I will ever do out there in our good day or bad, and nothing that ever can be believed on a cross or practiced in meditation will ever change the state of your happy heart or life. Our hearts are storage devices for hope and for pain, and the only way to have a good and happy self and life and day, is to feel the pain and grieve our unhappy hearts.

We are simply WOW, and our lives are simply WOW, and they will be forever, both good and bad, no matter what we do. The WOW is not out there to believe in another, or out there in a practice or understanding or belief. Our WOW is right in here inside us, and how we feel about ourselves in goodness or badness. The beauty of our good day or bad day is that we can know of our own appreciation and gratitude of self or not, and we can alter our circumstances to learn to know our own hearts. We have the ability to heal ourselves and lives. We can change our inner heart state of our inner good day or bad, and we can become much happier and more enlightened than any supposed God or Prophet by appreciating and being grateful for ourselves, and that means all of our selves good and bad, and on good days and bad days.

Today I had a really bad day! WOW. That means that I have a lot to notice and appreciate, and a lot to change and appreciate, so that I may have a good day tomorrow and have a lot to notice and appreciate, and a lot to change and appreciate. WOW. I just appreciate my and life and all things good and bad. Breathe in, plant food out. Food and water in, poo and pee out. Bumpety-bump goes my heart, I’m aware of myself and am doing my best. WOW.

See you tomorrow

www.dear-roe-the-muse.com

yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com