Tales for the journey: Sam's Garden (Healing negativity)

Sam lived in a little house that was small, but all his own. Every day the sun shone in at the window, but the glass was so dusty he could hardly see out. He didn’t care, because as long as he had his fiddle he could play until his heart raced with pleasure and longing for something he couldn’t quite understand.

Sam woke up one day and saw that his garden was unkempt. “I have neglected my garden. I really should do something about it,” he said. He went out into the garden and he saw the bindweed and the lawn rough and un-mown.
He asked his father to help him. He said, "My son, when you were young I tried to tell you how to make your garden grow, but you did not listen. You must do this yourself. I can lend you some tools if you like.”

So Sam went home that day with a spade and hoe. Sam pulled at the bindweed until great swathes of it lay on the ground beside him. He cut and pruned and hacked until the garden was piled high with rubbish. “Now the place looks even worse!” he cried. “How can I get rid of this rubbish?”

His neighbour Dick called over the wall. “Let’s have a bonfire!” shouted Dick, and in a trice the weeds and twigs and brambles were burning and smoking and sparks were blowing high into the sky. Sam took out his fiddle and played until the mess in the garden was forgotten.
Weeks went by and the garden was just as he had left it. The spade and the hoe were left out in the rain. Already rusty, they rusted still more.

A certain tune began to hum inside his head. It lay at the side of his mind just out of reach. He paced the floor and wondered what the tune was, what it meant, but it would not come to him.

A healing path (3) The Black Hole - betrayal

In the Black Hole, which is the story of the death of your womb twin, is also the story of your twin's brief life, which could be measured in hours, days or months, depending on what happened.  The trouble is that a promise was made at conception, that there would be two, but then there was one.

That sense of a disappointed expectation is a betrayal. It's a sense of being precipitated into an alien world for which one is not  equipped.  Betrayal breeds resentment in the betrayed, and when life betrays you, there can be no other response but to resent life itself.  Life has been cruel and you have been hurt by the simple act of being the sole survivor.  That is a raw deal indeed.

Healing (28) Healing negativity

There is a grey cloud with me always. It hovers just out of sight. It does not lie within me, but outside of me. It is Other. It is a brooding, silent presence of mystery, it is sadness and desolation. In it there is no hope, no joy. All my life I have tried to explain the cloud that haunts me by pretending it is part of me. I have walked a way of inner emptiness. I have quelled all desire and yearning. I have used all my inner strength for this sacrifice. I have surrendered all these things and handed over my life. I have become nothing, without feeling, without desire. I am grey. I have become the cloud.

Pride, is it said, is the father of all sin. I would put it differently: it is the father of all negativity. Pride is the deliberate concealment of shame by denial. This careful concealment is a fearful, rigid, negative and deadening place. Sometimes negativity is mistaken for something other than pride, but if we take a close look we will find pride there.

Fearful
If you deny feeling shame then you are blinding yourself to the consequences of your actions. You may do this by pretending that the shameful thing you are doing (or not doing) isn't happening. Alternatively, you may pretend that the thing you are doing (or choosing not to do) is nothing to be ashamed of. Either way exposure is to be feared.