Look again … with fresh eyes

Both light and shadow are the dance of Love. ~ Rumi

As you evolve your consciousness, you can re-evaluate your past. There is something about the vibration, or frequency, of your consciousness, that literally acts like a lens, a karma lens perhaps, that filters what you see. In other words, on first observation, it might seem that angry people are just plain mean. And from an experiential perspective, they can seem that way. A “truth” of sorts. But evolve yourself, and then look again, and there is a whole other story to tell.

My father was a very intense man. He had a fire for God anchored in his core. When he spoke of God, he would well up in tears. He had a very fierce faith. He easily made the top local church officials look like slackers. The church officials never welled up with strong emotions when talking about God.

My father was very intense in another arena. Anger. When he got mad, he could cut you in half with his eyes. He never hit us physically. But he would sear us with his intensity. He had the emotional demeanor of a 5 or 6-year-old boy. The family would all be very cautious about not setting off Dad. If he did get triggered, you tried to disappear. You couldn’t make yourself small enough.

These were my general perspectives of my father, for the first 60 years of my life. I am 61 years old. For the vast majority of my life, I had a sense of my father that seemed real and just.

Enter new information.

A few months ago, I was posting about my father on social media. And my cousin chimed in. He wrote just a few paragraphs about my father, on a whim really, that has changed my whole perspective of him. I now look at my father in a completely different way. My lens has changed. My ability to perceive “reality” has been turned on its head. My consciousness changed, and how I see the same events has changed too.

What my cousin told me, that I didn’t know until just recently, was that my father was a Sergeant in the military. I had known he fought in WWII in the Pacific Campaign. But I didn’t know he was a Sergeant. I didn’t know he had trained over one thousand men. That he had fought in the majority of brutal battles on the Pacific Island. He was a Sergeant over an artillery platoon. His guys fought so hard, they literally wore out the artillery. In the battlefields, over 900 of the 1,000+ men he taught, died. For many of those naive young men, he watched that happen firsthand. I know my father had a very compassionate heart. It must have been brutal to take on the “care” of the new recruits, only to see them go home in a body bag. To watch them give their lives in very brutal ways. The horrid brutality of war, in your face, day after day, week after week, month after month. Without adequate time or space to process any of it. Without the ability to let up, at all. To fight the fight, day and night, throughout the entire campaign.

No shit … my father was intense.

There is nothing there to forgive. Dad, I salute your ability to show up … at all. I have a thousand hugs for you now. I sacredly hold the space for your rage. For your pain. For your sorrow. It was never about us, the family. My mother married a train wreck. A strong man who had been through hell. And got up and went through it again, over and over. The tenderness she craved was lost before she ever met him. What a (soul) challenge to marry such a scarred man, where the scars of war cut him so deeply. What a noble space to hold, without any hope of a soft and tender return.

How may times has this same general story played out with those from my generation? War, as a narrative, has been woven into the very fabric of humanity for many thousands of years.
 
We have a lot to heal in the collective. When we see bitter people, angry people, scared people, we are looking at the ripples of our past. Our collective past.

Humanity is ready for a new narrative. For a new paradigm. And it will come to pass. If you want to heal the world, heal yourself.

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
~ Rumi

Love to you on this day.

Les