Tap, tap, tap

So I keep working with this concept of replacing the need for vengeance with love. Guess what! It's working!

The more I let go of my fear and loathing and respond to Brenda (not her real name, but time I gave her one) with loving kindness, the more frequently I succeed. Lately, I care less about her behavior toward me, and a whole lot more about my behavior toward her.

Lately, I see her more as a human being who is trying as best she can to be the best person she can.

Trust me: it's not easy. Baby steps are giant leaps compared to my micro-steps, but you can measure the distance all the same.

One big help the past couple of weeks is Life Coach Wanda Tucker's First Aid for Trauma technique.

This is something I need privacy for--I can't stop wherever I am and do it on the spot--so I have to take a few minutes to get away, but it works!

When I am hurt or betrayed and the tooth-grinding, eye-squinting, stomach-churning anger rises, I step behind closed doors and tap.

Try it! Let me know how it works for you next time you feel hurt or betrayed or just plain out of sorts.

Welcome the children

In an Ordinary world, people rarely do violence to one another, emotional or physical. The strife revealed in Love as Retribution and Wounded Dog are unheard.

Is this possible in our world today? Consider:

• In the world of Ordinary, people of child-bearing age take care to conceive only when they are certain of their desire and ability to nurture their child with tenderness and love. Every birth is cause for high celebration. Every child is cherished.



• Ordinary children are nurtured not only by their parents, but by all the villagers, each of whom feels responsibile for the well-being of the children.

  Because they were raised, themselves, in loving homes and a supportive community, the adults have full capacity to provide appropriate care. No child need fear the misguided—or worse—adult. There are no "funny" uncles or aunties in Ordinary.



• Children and adults in Ordinary are encouraged to explore their individual creativity, to develop their highest talents, and to share their creative work with the world. Work is play.



• Children are taught responsibility from an early age, and even the smallest children share age– and skill–appropriate chores. This sense of responsibility carries through a lifetime.

  While each Ordinary inhabitant contributes her or his best skills and knowledge—people who love to cook work more in the kitchens and bakeries; people who love to teach or build or garden work more often in classrooms, construction, or the fields—everyone rotates through chores in all other disciplines.

  This ensures respect for all the labor required to maintain the village and meet the needs of its people and their animal companions.

The children, receiving carefully considered attention, instruction, and ample love, learn early to respond to others with compassion and love. Cooperation, respect, and understanding are as natural a part of their lives as air and breath.

In her book Sent by Earth: A message from the Grandmother Spirit after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Alice Walker tells of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso:

The most important thing that happens in a person 's life is that they be welcomed when they are born. If they are not welcomed, all their lives they experience a feeling of not quite having arrived. There is anxiety. There is unease.

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in their book Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything, suggest provocatively that legalized abortion so cut the incidence of unwanted children as to instigate an unexpected and dramatic drop in crime of all types throughout the nation, stunning researchers and government planners alike.

They attribute this dramatic drop twenty years after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision to the single fact that women ill-prepared to support a child emotionally, physically, and financially now had a choice. Fewer unwanted children were born. The cycles of poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, and crime were interrupted.

While there is much to be said on both sides of the issue of abortion, one thing is certain: In societies around the world, where children are loved and desired from conception, nurtured by their communities, and offered ample opportunity to explore their talents, crime and strife are nearly non-existent.

Could it be possible that bringing only wanted children into the world, welcoming them joyously, and consciously meeting their needs day to day could change the world and bring about world peace at last?

What do you think?

Wounded dog

So I have been working on this concept of love as retribution. I'm not doing as well as I would like.

Days I must see the woman who seems to enjoy hurting me, I visualize greeting her with a smile and kindly thoughts. The smile does not come easily.

My pulse quickens. My palms sweat. I feel anxious. A little trill of fear runs down my spine. What has she planned for today? Spitefulness rises like a snake, and I feel false, forcing a smile I do not feel.

The minute-by-minute effort to replace anger and pain with compassion is exhausting. I resent the need to spend my energy this way.

What foolishness! She wastes so much of her own energy, and what can it possibly gain her? What reward does she find watching me struggle with my personal ethics--watching that first hit of pain, followed by teeth clenching, eyes blazing (I am prone to a bit of Irish temper), then the effort to seek peace in my soul and bring it to my face, my body, perhaps to bridge the space between us. Does this give her such pleasure? She smiles, a funny, twisted, small smile, and turns away.

Love can heal. I have seen it many times. I have seen it with this woman. Simply returning her hatred with unspoken love, a prayer for peace, a vision of her as a child beloved of Spirit, has brought a generous smile from her face, warm and true. And momentary.

In my resentment, now, I want to hang onto my "righteous" anger. Anger protects me, keeps the wounds fresh, reminds me not to trust again, not to extend myself only to be rewarded with betrayal or worse.

Still.

I quiet myself.

Breathe.

I acknowledge the ragged breath, the unhappy thoughts. Let them go.

Ask for guidance.

Several days this week, in that still space, Wanda Tucker's advice came to mind (see her comment to Love as Retribution) that wounded individuals who attack repeatedly are like a dog hit by a car. You've seen it, too. In his agony, the dog strikes at every helping hand, lashing about, running blindly into objects, hurting himself the more.

The image of the terrorized dog arrests me. I don't understand how a rational, well-educated person can enjoy hurting others (I am not her only target), but I can understand the impulse of a crazed, injured animal.

In that moment, a tiny bit of healing takes place. I release a breath I had not realized I was holding. I take another breath, and another, deeper and deeper. I move a little closer toward compassion and love.

I'll keep you posted on the progress of this experiment in creating peace from strife. I invite you to share your stories. If one person can make peace with one person, there is hope for peace in the world.

Namaste.

Love as retribution

Do you have someone in your life whose mission seems to be to torment you?

There is a person like that in my life.

I have spent hundreds of hours trying to determine what I said or did that made this person decide to be my enemy and an equal number attempting to build a stronger, healthier relationship.

Inevitably, just as it seems we are succeeding, just as I feel we have turned that corner toward mutual respect, even affection, she attacks with a vengefulness that takes my breath and my equilibrium.

Perhaps it is my naivete, but each time I am stunned anew.

And each time, I respond at gut level, whether I choose to show it or not, with anger and a bitter desire for retribution.

Have you experienced something like this in your life?

How do such events, and the emotional responses they trigger, fit with your desire to create a peaceful world?

When I experience that bitterness, that longing to place a curse on the head of the woman who chooses to be my enemy, I feel like a hypocrite.

In those moments, I do not want to find peace. I want to use my intellect and the force of my being to cause her the harm she has caused me.

Then I begin to understand the impulse for war.

So again I pray, as so many times before:

Give me the love I do not feel for this woman. Soften my heart that I may want to love her, that I see her as you do, a child of all that is good and holy, a child beloved.

Sometimes my bitterness is too great and I ask for helper spirits to stand between me and her, to shield us each from the pain and suffering we may wish upon each other, to shower us both with love.

Surprisingly, these prayers work, though I may have to sacrifice my anger and desire for revenge again and again.

Each time I ask for love--and in absence of a sincere desire to love--ask to want to love, I am softened. When I am softened, the situation diffuses, if only that I regain a sense of calm and peace in my own heart.

Sometimes--not every time--but sometimes, she softens too. Once or twice, she has come to me later and apologized, an amazing admission for a proud woman.

In her post What More is there to Say?, Wanda Tucker quotes Goethe:

If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

This is the person I want to be.

I am not alone. More and more people are exploring ways to respond to personal violence with peace.

In her post, wisdom-girl, Michelle O'Neil suggests we thank the people with whom we have grievances and give "up the victim mentality completely."

There are times I am indeed grateful to the woman who torments me, for she has challenged all my beliefs and revealed to me just how deeply my anger can cut.

She is a reminder of the reasons peace must always start within my own heart. Her hatred forces me to confront my political and spiritual beliefs on a visceral level.

It is easy to be at peace in meditation, in spiritual practice alone and with others. It is something altogether different when cut by another, whether through malice or thoughtlessness.

So I propose, after much experience with the phenonema, love as retribution. Try it. Let me know how it works for you. It can't hurt.

Metamorphosis - Time for change

In Tadpole, a child is enthralled with frog's metamorphosis.

Thanks to our love of fast vehicles and carbon fuels, our Earth is undergoing a metamorphosis of its own.

Like so many endangered species--Panda Bears, Snow Leopards, Gorillas, to name a few--the frogs and toads that thrilled my child self with their ability to change from a "fish" to a "hopper" are disappearing at an alarming rate.

One of my most comforting childhood sounds was the cacaphony of crickets, toads, and frogs on a hot summer eve. With every window and door in the house wide open (it was safe then, even on the ground floor), faint breezes slowly cooled tired, sticky arms and legs till they stopped twitching.

Lulled by the breezes, the chirping and peeping, we little ones drifted contentedly to sleep.

My seven-month old granddaughter hears cars racing up and down her street at night, though toward the back of the house, where she sleeps, she can also hear songbirds in the dusky evening and again as dawn approaches.

But will she ever know the roar of frogs and crickets, the whirr of moths against the porch light? Will she smell air so pure it makes her lungs inflate large all on their own?

How were we tots of the Forties and Fifties to know these simple pleasures could disappear forever, that they might not always be a part of our lives, our children's lives, and their children's--part of their going-to-sleep-safe summer nights?

There is hope.

In "A Leap of Faith: Embracing Our Native Frogs," (Bay Nature April-June 2002), David Rains Wallace cites the resiliency of amphibians, whose populations have risen and fallen since the Jurassic period. Bellweathers of our Earth's heated response to our use of fossile fuels, those amphibians not yet extinct have a chance to flourish, if we help.

Which means we have time to reverse global warming.

It's up to you and me. Our leaders are not going to do it. Their fortunes are tied to fossil fuels. It is up to us, we who must put one foot in front of the other day after day, to lead them. We lead by the choices we make.

When we take a reusable mug to Starbucks instead of buying a throw-away cup, we lead. When we insist on Fair Trade coffee, we lead. When we ride a bicycle to work, take the bus, or walk, we lead. When we buy organic produce, we lead. When we recycle our water bottles and junk mail, yes we lead.

But I am only one person. When so many are doing otherwise, what I do doesn't really count.

Yes. What we do, each individual, counts--no matter how insignificant we feel.

Lead by example.

What steps are you taking to reduce your use of carbon fuels? What new step can you take today? Share your steps here--one foot in front of the other--and congratulate yourself on every action, no matter how small it feels.

Lead by example. Celebrate success.