Garden of the soul
Being able to navigate conflict and repair cycles is what allows us as human beings to feel secure; it creates the container safe enough to put unconditional love into. It reminds us that even when we bring our true self to the table that it can be received with enough grace to allow for the continued blooming of the soul. It also requires a baseline skill of being able to receive another person as imperfect and have the compassion and forgiveness to recognize that they are perfect exactly in this moment. Holding both the perfect and imperfect in the same moment allows us to transcend our own programming of what should be and step into the living moment of what is.
From such foundations the interconnected networks grow holding the human being safe in the nets of mutual love and understanding. This interdependent ecology of the soul is what helps us feel whole, what feeds the hungry ghosts, and places us directly in touch with our own divinity and the divinity of those around us.
That is not what we do in this moment. What we do, as we have done since the foundation of this country, and probably since the dawn of time, is deny people the access to even the most basic gift of acknowledgment and then if they don’t meet our standards of perfection we cast them out into the sea of isolation. It says alot about the caster that they are so willing to discard another soul, what it says is they don’t value nor believe anyone values their soul either. This is the legacy and intergenerational trauma of chattel slavery, the delusion that somehow some lives are deemed unworthy by monsters who sold their souls to become the kind of men who found it appropriate to enslave another. We to this day call such monsters captain and follow their lack of intimacy, their inability to honor human life into the metaverse where we will become more disconnected from ourselves and those around us.
We have all kinds of fancy ways we justify casting others out. We can label it boundaries and say we are not allowing toxic behavior near us. That we are trying to maintain this clean room of emotions so we can navigate this terrifying dying planet in peace. As if somehow the planet being a collection of disparate lonely pieces will ever bring anyone peace. The casual ability to treat human life as less than sacred, of unworthy of love, invisible to presence, is the soul of the systems that oppress us. Every time we participate in that system it strengthens and every time we choose love and forgiveness we engage in the revolutionary act that love calls us to open within us. Every time we ghost someone we tell our own souls that we too are disposable.
This isn’t to say that you can never take breaks from people who are impacting your life in complicated ways. It is totally possible to take that break and still honor their humanity, honor your humanity and start to participate in building the ecology that allows us to grow into our divine selves. This requires a brave gardener, a spiritual warrior, to provide the guidance to prune the behaviors that threaten the garden while still maintaining the balance of the ecosystem. It means loving every plant that weaves into the whole because it is the weaving that makes us complete not the desolation.
If my collective liberation is bound to yours, as seems to be the message of every major religion on earth, then it is through cooperation and not casting out that we will find ourselves in the next era of humanity. Such a destiny requires sacrifice, it does require leaving the cages of comfort and binding your destiny with others. Like every show about groups of people, every novel about heroic action, every movie inspiring the misfits to take the impossible mission there will be interpersonal conflict that will be navigated on the way to the greater good.
Impossible missions require impossible acts of love.
Each time you participate in such a love you generate within you a well of wholeness. The more love you pour into the world from your well the more you participate in the sacred act of watering the garden. By creating the conditions, even in your small corner, of brave spaces create the nodes that can network together better conditions for us all. These stacking acts of love have the potential to create great fields of love.
None of this is possible if we continue to cast people out. If we keep reinforcing the message that unless you arrive perfectly into this moment that we are unwilling to see you. Instead what we are building is a police state where we are constantly looking for all the things folx aren’t doing to our “standards” and using that as a justification to not offer the basic humanity required for the soul to take root. Haven’t we had enough of such states?
I know my soul has long struggled to take root in this soil. There are not enough nutrients in the soil for blooming and mostly I get stepped on or pruned. I learned my lessons from the air plants and fertilize my soul with the kind of universal love abundantly available from the shifting winds. I bask in the sun and yearn for a world where our roots are safe for interlacing. I catch the seeds of other such souls and whisper secrets of new earth into the morning dew. I find myself boundless like the dandelions, a secret wish into the world that the gardens my daughters grow into are bound only by love and the magic of being.
