+++++++++++++++++++++++

I have been outside piddling around in my garden doing activities that need to be done but are on the lazier end of work.  I have known since I created the newest flower bed on the east side of my house that the tubing I used, given to me by a neighbor so I used it with consideration of ‘repurposing’ and conserving $$, was too stiff and too old to hold any pressure and instead cracked and leaked.  I knew I needed to replace it with new tubing, but doing anything with the irrigation irritates me!  So I postponed the repair and just now finally DID it!

In that process — and because I am INTENSELY involved with thoughts about writing my book — I learned something simple that connects these two jobs.  What I did just now was REPAIR a ruptured and faulty section of my irrigation.  What I am doing as I write my book and tell my story is repairing the ruptured and faulty parts of myself as I repair my life story!

I am following two story lines as I book-write.  One is my mother’s and the other is mine.  These two stories have been so intertwined, meshed and fused together from the time my mother was in labor with me that distinguishing between her story and mine is an arduous and at times excruciating process.

I realized just now as I replaced the faulty irrigation line so the drip will work correctly that the ONLY tool I actually have to use in order to distinguish between my mother’s story and my own is THE TRUTH.  Her story is a lie.  My story is the truth.  And as surely as M. Scott Peck writes in his book, “People of the Lie” I will be able to make the minute distinctions between story lines that must be made by FEELING MY WAY ALONG IN MY GUT!!

Bless his cotton socks, that’s exactly what Peck is saying.  We know EVIL because we can FEEL it in our gut.  It dawns on me this morning that the other side of this — MY SIDE — is that I can tell THE TRUTH the same way:  I feel it in my gut!

Because I Netfilx stream lots of British TV shows I am becoming more and more familiar with their term, “sorting things out.”  They use it a lot.  That’s what I am doing, sorting out the truth from the lies as I write this book – and although the POWER is in the TRUTH I hold to no delusions that there isn’t incredible power in this world all tied up in EVIL.

Because I understand the spiritual truth that God exists and is good, and that what humans might call the devil and evil only exists when God and good is absent (shadow without light).  The LIGHT of God’s love is real.  The shadow of evil and of hatred is the absence of that light.

++

As I prepare to continue responding to the next question #4 my daughter has given me for this book, I am spiritually waking myself up for that task.  This is not an effort on my part that will be a success if I am sloggy or half-awake or only half paying attention.

I am approaching the Great Divide.  On one side will go GOOD and on the other side will go EVIL.  EVERY SINGLE THING ABOUT BOTH OF MY PARENTS’ RELATIONSHIP WITH ME WAS EVIL.

I am naming that with a clarity and power that has alluded me before today.  It is not mine to judge their souls.  That is God’s job.  I am naming WHAT THEY DID as evil.  All of it.

Now how that evil came to permeate and contaminate each of them as people is not my business.  Humans have that special dual nature:  animal and spiritual.  God wants humans to chose to live according to the spiritual where all goodness and human virtues lie.  But humans have free choice and choosing to act worse than an animal is our free option every moment we breath.

The BEHAVIOR of my parents was evil, belonged on the dark-ignorant-selfish side of human nature — whether their choices were made consciously or not.  When enough trauma happens during earliest stages of development the resulting adaptations and changes can so remove a human’s ability TO ACT CONSCIOUSLY that the automatic animal-survival-based INSTINCT to survive runs the show at all costs.

It doesn’t matter to me whether the evil happened consciously or not at this point.  It is my concern that EVIL is what my parents did to me.

So in thinking about the ‘warrior’ comment yesterday to my ‘hero’ post I have been facing today my inner WHINER who wants to just quit fighting and relax in the glory of a job well done and battles well fought and won.

“Give me a break, Linda!” I tell myself.  “Who are you kidding?”

The evil that exists in this world, with all the combined force of the life force that is tied up within it, is VERY REAL.  Enduring as a hero in the moment with no thought of the future except to survive that moment is one thing.

Giving a damn about the future of US ALL is another.  Fighting against ignorance is a battle I will not escape fighting as long as I am in this body.  Acknowledging infant and child abuse and then fighting against THAT GREAT EVIL is what I am about.

“So on with it, Linda!  No matter how intense, no matter how difficult, no matter how much you might rather have had a different life, this is the one you got and the one you are living.”  Within THIS LIFE I have everything I need to make something beautiful out of something that was evil and ugly nearly beyond imagination.  And that task is what I want to be all about.

+++++++++++++++++++++++