I remember the feeling of waking up in my grandmother’s orchard house as a child. The fragrance of coffee and breakfast exciting the air. The hum of grown up voices in kitchens and living rooms. The song of their laughter. The glow of grandmotherly and grandfatherly love warming the house in measure with the hot desert sun, and the sun warming the sweet apples, and the sweet apples perfume leaking in through an open window. A deep rest in my little body waking up to the sunlight and the wild free feeling that summer brought, the anticipation that days would be filled with play, and sweet exotic orchard fruit falling off trees. Lake wafting on breezes. My grandmother’s hands baking in the kitchen, helping me craft a tiny pie in a tiny dish to match hers. My grandfather singing me the Miss America beauty pageant song when I came out in my outfit for the day, making me feel adored. Bright orange winged Monarchs fluttering amongst the Marigolds as if the petals had come to life. Hands to hold.
Heaven. Not in the colloquial sense, but a feeling of absolutely safety love, freedom, wonderment. Ripe and small like a happy cherry.
I can look in the room now from another angle, and I can see other things, that shouldn’t be there. Other stories I have heard over the years. Other lenses I have donned that skew the picture. I learned to see pain and suffering and loss and failure.
A good man swindled.
A family legacy sold.
A last visit when I was told I could not pick the apples, and yet I picked one last apple, and when I got in trouble I pretended not to know. But friends, Oh I knew. And something in my little sweet self was like “to hell with this, you can’t take my grandfather’s livelihood and purpose away” and I picked that little apple out of proper defiance and solidarity.
Vodka in the breakfast juice.
Cancer.
Death.
My aunty crying at Christmas dinner.
My sweet granny twisting her wedding ring.
And more stories.
A childhood of foster care.
A missed voyage on the Titanic.
A homestead.
Unspeakable hardships.
A bit of an English castle baked into a pie.
I’m going to share something today that I don’t want anyone in anyway to confuse with what I call toxic positivity. This notion that focusing on only the positive solves everything, creates more positive, attracts more positive, and outsmarts all bad feelings.
Toxic positivity tells us that we are heroes for overcoming, for chinning up, but instead of resolving pain, it has the effect of growing it, by running so fast in the other direction that we give it more power, and we don’t listen to what it is telling us.
We tell ourselves that it is scary bad wrong or shameful to feel something painful, and we slap on a smile like a mask in hopes that we can at least get a gold star for being good at being happy.
Feeling sad, or scared, or angry, or lonely does not mean we are unhappy or that we have failed happy 101.
It means that something is not working for us, and we have the opportunity to fix it. But the glitch or disconnect or break has already happened, so taking it personally and heaping onto our bad feeling some shame and judgment is only going to lock it in.
Your pain is real, in the sense that it is communicating a need, and it needs to be validated and answered with love, compassion, attention, support, and sometimes even practical loving action.
Really sit with my disclaimer for a moment before I get to this next bit.
You are not broken for feeling things, the part that broke needs attention, it’s an emotional wire that needs untangling and doesn’t mean you are a bad car.
BUT here is the rub.
Suffering, or what I call the pain and suffering cycle, is learned.
It’s the meaning we attach to pain that doesn’t allow our pain to heal and that creates new pain.
Think of it like this.
Pain is a question. Is love real, am I loved, am I loveable, am I okay?All versions of the same thing.
If you are a child and you fall down and don’t understand what happened and you feel scared, and you are embraced with warm arms and reassurance your fear resolves. Suffering happens when your fear, your question is not answered; if you are told to go away, or suck it up, or called clumsy.
Then in addition to your “pain” you now feel shame. Your hurt is your fault. You have been blamed, and blame creates a state of attack. When we feel falsely accused we defend, and by defending we make the accusation more powerful and we create counter attack.
You think I’m clumsy, well you should have been helping me.
You think I should have been helping you, well you should have been nicer to me.
Blame spreads like a virus and creates a war.
What you end up with is a world of allies and enemies. An adversarial system.
Let’s think for a moment of a metaphorical war of the ages. Way back in some very unclear history, there are all kinds of stories about two groups wronging each other. BUT no one can clearly establish who wronged whom first, whose was the greatest wrong, who took arms first and so on. Maybe both groups took arms at the same time. Maybe both took arms on account of a mutual mistake. A misperception. All we know is that the only way to end the war now is to both put down the arms. To declare a truce. To end blame.
Now imagine this war happening inside of you. Your emotional self, or spiritual self, or simply your INNER WORLD.
You asked the question, am I worthy of love?
Your question is a cry for love, reassurance of love.
Blame in any form answers the question incorrectly. It denies and deflcts.
Let me tell you about the butterflies and the wasps, LOL, like the birds and the bees talk, but less sexy.
Although who am I kidding, ending our personal suffering is very sexy if you ask me.
I once had a conversation with a University buddy. I was a burned out law school student at the time and I was admiring his cat lying in the sun, stretching lolling, seeming carefree. I said to him, if I was an animal I think I’d be a cat. Misconstruing my comment as what animal might best reflect my personality he jumped in with vehement objection. You’re not a cat, Erin. I see you as a butterfly. A delicate beauty. I know, I should have married that guy, right? But we were just friends and so that is that. And he was probably more attracted to cat women anyhow. But the funny thing is I always felt drawn to butterflies, even before tattooing became in vogue.
I have also always been terrified of wasps. Not bees, bees are super chill. Wasps are the serial killers of the insect world, I am fond of saying. A wasp flying in the car is serious danger for me. Involuntary screaming and flailing. Flying hot beverages. Breaking suddenly. I know they can’t actually kill me. Thanks Captain Obvious. But I become unglued.
So a few times I have found myself stricken with terror at something winging it’s way into my face, or car, only to find that it’s a butterfly. Harmless, gentle creature of beauty. My spirit animal!
I use these experiences as a technique for undoing suffering. I think of how it looks when you see someone waving wildly at a danger that isn’t even there, because they are seeing something wrongly, through the eyes of fear. And I relate it to offensive behaviour. You accused me of doing something I didn’t do? Well, it’s easier for me not to take that personally if I remember image of myself. That feeling. If I think of humanity running around swatting at butterflies. I am quicker to forgive. Less likely to defend. Faster to help. Stronger with compassion. I can laugh, with, not at.
In our inner worlds we see things every day that we don’t understand. That cause us to ask the question “Am I worthy of love?” And sometimes because we had that grown up who passed on their own shame and we didn’t get the right answer as children, we don’t wait for the answer to come. Or maybe in a big cosmic sense we don’t wait for the answer, because we think it’s less scary to blame ourselves, to blame each other, to blame the world and run around trying to fix it, than to risk hearing the wrong answer to that question.
And that is how fear becomes the teacher and the parent.
That is how pain becomes suffering.
That is how them not answering the text becomes I am meant to be alone.
That is how the passed up promotion becomes a mash of I am underappreciated and I am not enough.
That is how bombs go off quietly inside us all day long.
We are in a fever dream where the hornet stung us. That is a musical reference where the hornet sting precedes the fever dream, but you get me, right?
I am not going to ask you today to solve for Hitler, or Trump, or Putin.
It’s crazy talk to suggest we might solve for bad guys by not holding them accountable.
But you might try an experiment with me.
When you feel confused, or afraid, when you’re not sure of what you are seeing, take one instant of bravery with me, and answer this question before the blame starts firing. You are worthy of love. You are worthy of love. You don’t need to do the 487 things you are about to tell yourself to fix your broken ass. You are worthy of love. You are loved. You are loving. You don’t need to start swatting at butterflies. Even ones that have morphed over the long years of this war of the ages into complicated terrorist dictators.
When someone seems to attack, to threaten to hurt you in any degree, to fail you, to steal your peace, to see you as less than the sexy dynamic and extremely desirable beast that I know you are, try for one instant, so much smaller than a second even, but just that first instant, to look past their flailing arms, their flight of fear. And answer the question with love.
Inside each morning, each day, each cross section of reality is granny’s orchard house. Whatever that means for you. A world where you feel safe, where love is unquestionable and breakfast smells like true love and there are apples for miles, enough for everyone! There is wonder and promise.
Maybe we’ve covered it in a layer of wax, like the children’s art game where you scrape away the black to reveal the colours beneath.
Or maybe we just ran the other way one too many times because we got scared and confused.
We got busy fighting our own personal battle.
Divvying up the fault, working to be enough and have enough, fighting fire with fire.
To stave off that imaginary scary answer to the question that was only ever a question to us.
If we’re all worthy of love, then nothing is broken.
And if nothing is broken then no one’s at fault.
And if no one is at fault, then there’s no one to blame.
And if no one is to blame we can stop fighting.
Ourselves, our lives. Each other.
Butterflies.
If it’s not our fault then we can stop defending and get busier helping everyone else be less afraid.
Love,
Erin