“To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards of us all.”
-Abraham Lincoln
Donate, protest, keep sharing, exposing and doing what you can. Do the right thing, don’t look away.
That is the top half of freedom. The bottom half hides in a dark well, looking up. Another kind of protest, a quiet conviction FOR something, a belief, a knowing that burns truth and passion into your soul. The thing, or things, the parts of yourself that fascinate and excite you, and scare the shit out of you. The heartfires you want to pursue, the love you want to surrender to, the power you want to inhabit. But you’re afraid to admit it and say it out loud, especially to yourself. Because once you do, you will have to do something about it. It commands your attention. And you know that if you ignore it, you won’t be able to live with yourself.
Eckart Tolle said that his life changing moment came when he heard the words “I can’t live with myself any longer”. The awakened question appeared, “who is the ‘I’ that I can’t live with?”
Who is the ‘I’ that’s talking to the little suffering self that I think is me?
To feel that ‘I’, that voice, the entity that’s watching, is to know it surrounds you and IS you at the same time. That voice, that feeling, knows who you are and what you’re here to be. It speaks louder and feels stronger than who you’re not, while the skittering monkeymind self runs around in a junkyard, trying to drown it out. It bangs on cans and spins circles in the garbage with distractions and arguments. But the “I” inside and all around is incessantly still and patient. It only wants your emergence out of illusion. And it won’t shut up, ever.
The trials of life, and resistance to them, of giving up and starting over, and over again, through it all I begin to hear more of what this other “I” tells me. Especially when what it’s saying pisses me off; because dammit I can’t escape it. The truth has a funny way of backing us into a corner. It nags you in the back seat, and floats around in your depths. Pull it up and to the front, let it breathe fresh air. Fight, thrash and cry with it. Your tears unleash it and will calm you down. The feelings felt, the words finally spoken, this other “I” moves in and takes charge.
Drive where it tells you, take the lid off the well. There’s nowhere to go but beyond what you were. Hidden in dark water, asleep in the dirt; you’ll wake up to the sky, in the garden.
Lia Wilbourn 