Power and Love
I weep for George Floyd and his family. I weep to hear he called for his mother as he lay dying. I weep for people of colour who hourly daily are subjected to racism, exclusion, and violence. I weep for our First Nations people in Australia and our disgrace in their treatment. Then I feel anger, I don’t condone looting, but I understand it, understand protests, people marching, crying, and the imperative to speak out.
Caroline Myss in her usual inimitable way has an understanding that goes to the beginning times in America, where the nation was founded by rebels, where the slave master paradigm existed and flourished. She asks us to look at how each of us treat others, how we dis-empower others, how there is a need to be superior, to be right. What is our POWER relationship with others, with our selves.
Where we are unjust to others and ourselves. When and where do we give away making the right decisions for ourselves. The choices we make about our lives. The power we give to governments, churches, institutions. We all need to be alerted to making healthy, respectful, and equitable decisions for our lives and our interactions towards others. Do we speak up for others when we see mistreatment, abuse, neglect. Do we turn away, look away, continue to walk on with our own lives.
In my mother’s and my memoir, it is about not remaining silent, never letting our warrior woman – man sleep. It is about surviving, where our inner core of strength propelled us to be rebels, otherwise to live with such pathology would result in annihilation of our spirit and a very damaged psyche. It is the inner core, as Victor Frankel says remains intact. My mother’s and my inner core saw us through these hardships, as children and then later in our life, from that inner core rose the ability to see suffering and determination to right the wrongs.
Yet to daily encounter trauma, being fearful, because of the colour of your skin, is to annihilate. This is murder. The ultimate evil.
It is finally about caring with an open heart, mind, and spirit. Love and respect giving solace and being a salve in these times.