No More Spills

I'm seeing too many people fall down lately, I don't want to see this anymore. It's sad and disturbing. I saw so many kids fall at the Harmony Playground last week, and today an older woman who was walking off the paved path tripped over a tree root hidden under some leaves. It took her a while to get up but she was ok. she kept explaining how glad she was that she fell on her left arm, because she had broken her right in a fall a few months ago and it still wasn't back to normal.

She had a beautiful head of fluffy white hair and round dark eyes. Her name was Dorothy and she has a grandchild at my kids school, so I guess I'll see her again. I looked up the meaning of her name for some reason. Dorothy means gift of God.

Seeing so many falls in the park leads me to think about the fall of man from paradise. And I have strong views about the meaning of that piece of scripture. I think the fall symbolizes human shame, and I think people are still falling all the time, from their innocence. And we don't just fall, we push each other. For example, a little kid scribbles naturally, with great joy, until an older kid comes along and informs him that what he's doing is ridiculous and foolish. So then that kid looses the ability to enjoy what naturally flowed from his being, he is told it's not good enough. Maybe he should color in the lines. Maybe he should use fancy dayglow markers. Maybe he should use computer software. Just click in the shape with the paintbucket. The problem with that, it's dead.

Is this why God was so angry at the fallen angels in the apocryphal text, the Book of Enoch? These angels, called the watchers, led by Azazel, gave mankind weapons and cosmetics and magic, and in doing so created the expectation that the human race should improve itself. That our basic being, created by God, was imperfect and needed betterment. We aren't enough just as God made us. We need plastic surgery and pilates. We need support hose. We need antibacterial wipes and vitamins. We need consultants, SUVs, liposuction and nuclear weapons. In this scenario, we don't create from a love for beauty, we create from our hunger for more power and position, it comes from fear.

After these Angels gave mankind those 'gifts' and bred with comely human women, they created a race of giants who were ravenous, and though they ate and ate could never be satisfied, so they destroyed the world in their endless hunger, even ate each other. This sounds familiar. I am convinced that book was written for our time in history. This is the price of the denying the shame wound, that feeling that we aren't good enough just as we are, but have to make endless improvements. We have to use technological magic to improve the quality of life, when in truth, life ended at that moment of that fracture, that first moment when we became divided from ourselves, because someone fed us the poison of shame, the evil of contempt, which is more contagious than any virus.

So how do we transcend this condition? Carl Jung had a lot to say about it in his way. The task of individuation requires putting humpty dumpty back together again, healing the wounds that divided us from ourselves, from the native person we were born to be. Pema Chodron's buddhist approach involves simply remaining present to discomfort and watching it instead of reacting to it, and using that to become compassionate with ourselves and others. Shamanic practice involves performing soul retrievals to bring back lost parts of the self, pieces exiled when we bore painful criticisms and traumas before we were strong enough to nurture ourselves through the rejection. And the Christian doctrine of forgiveness brings us to a place where by forgiving others we can't help but forgive ourselves for being who we are. And once we have elimated that poison of contempt and defensiveness, the world really can change, very, very quickly. The door of heaven swings open.