Category: family

this part is new for me.

balancing within the holy, in times of chaos and the anticipation of knowing that nothing is what it seems, and discernment is fundamental in any forward facing moment.

_{“the holy relationship is a phenomenal teaching accomplished, it represents the reversal of the unholy relationship. Be comforted in this; the only difficult phase is the beginning}.

_{For here the goal of the relationship is abruptly shifted to the exact opposite of what it was .}

^{A course in miracles}

I have asked for my relationships with everyone and within everything to be Blessed and Holy. I have asked and sometimes found myself pleading when it comes to the universal space of my youngest son. For the space of him has changed so dramatically that it is almost unrecognisable to who I have known him to be before this moment, to who he seems to be existing here as now. It’s a questioning space that we find ourselves in. Him and me. It seems we represent some opposites, some conflicting ideas and notions of things, actually of almost everything and a relationship at this point can at times seem unhealthy, and unholy in its essence.

It could seem that its not good for him or for me. It could seem that it shouldn’t be this way, this hard, this confronting in the details that can at times reach way outside the lines that we think are there, the ones that keep us both safe and comfortable and in a place of what we would consider to be acceptable and at times can raise hard questions, the kind that you could never have imagined having to ask yourself, its usually in the thick of something big and you wonder how this possibly could be for you? where is God in the thick of this seemingly unholy experience? but then you remember,

What he has, is for me. If it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t be here.
So you hand it over, you give it to God.

^{The invitation is accepted immediately. At once, His goal replaces yours. This is accomplished very rapidly, but it makes the relationship seem disturbed, disjunctive, and even quite distressing. The reason is quite clear. For the relationship as it is, is out of line with its own goal, and clearly unsuited to the purpose that has been accepted for it.}

_{In its unholy condition, your goal was all that seemed to give it meaning.}

_{Now it seems to make no sense. for once the unholy relationship has accepted the goal of holiness, it can never again be what it was.}

^{a course in miracles}

My son has always been more than a story of just a boy. He’s a reflection of wider things. It wasn’t always obvious, the noticing was a slow unfolding, a deliberate and gradual recognition not for him but for me. It was my awareness, my willingness to expand that was necessary before the seeing could come, not ordinary seeing but seeing from the wider spaces from which he was reflecting and then, well, everything became like puzzle pieces falling into place over time.

Right now, the puzzle pieces aren’t fitting anywhere not that I can see clearly anyway.

It seems that whatever is happening out there is always happening within him. He’s a continuum of energy of sorts, with no gaps, like the Möbius strip.

And right now the world, what’s out there, is seeming like madness.

He’s a mirror for the madness.

It reminds me of something Sophie Strand, poet and ecological storyteller  considers when she speaks of fungi, in particular the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which is a type of fungi that takes over carpenter ants, infects them, and coordinates their behaviours so dramatically that they effectively become the fungus wearing the costume of an ant so that by the end of the experience you don’t know if its an ant or a fungus. And it has me wondering who is doing the thinking for this boy, I call my son, that has changed so dramatically from where it once innately was.

Sophie goes on to say what’s got her thinking here, she questions what if things can think us.. “What’s thinking me?” What if this boy, my son who has always been a reflection of wider spaces has allowed himself to be borrowed, to be used as an instrument, willingly given permission to be used as Sophie would say as “a mouth piece”.

That is our predicament. I wonder what my son is the reflection of now, what has he allowed himself to be borrowed by?

Right now, the worlds reflection seems to be so concentrated and focused on the more shadowy side of things or maybe its just that there’s so much light that what has been in the dark, hidden in the shadows is now visible for all to see. It seems we are in a time where the innate energy of everything is being obscured and what we are being led towards is so much in the unknown. It seems that the Truth of things is not obvious anymore, maybe it never really was, nevertheless we are being called forth in a time where discernment is imperative.

my son, is a reflection, a body containing all of these things and discernment for him is no longer easy, his Truth is seeming obscured by the misconception and I wonder has he let himself be borrowed or used in someway that is not for his highest good.

So I ask, for help, for guidance, and I hand it over. This seemingly unholiness of our relationship in this moment, this undesirable space we have found ourselves, as a mother and her son.

Whatever is going on in the world and sometimes wider spaces than even that, somehow can make its way through this being I get to call my son. It doesn’t really matter the layers and details of his experiences or how they are so expansive in phonomen. It’s there for seeing, for ones with eyes to see that is.

I realised some time ago that I have an agreement with my son. His struggles are my struggles to own and bare. We cannot undo the entanglement of him and I, there is no choice no other way, not for him or for me and I will not let him fall.

It easy for me to feel helpless in helping him. His troubles are heavy, not pretty, complicated in design. There’s few who would truly be able to comprehend and hold the depths of his reality, when it doesn’t fit the grand narrative.

But support doesn’t always come from the places we expect they should. We rarely get what we are needing from such places. The help we are needing is larger than that. There’s only one place it can be called forth from, so I pray. I pray in such a way that my call is heard, every word, every late night whisper, every deeply rooted, sometimes agonising plea for guidance, for his protection, for help, I know is heard. I know because it’s in my bones. This is a story of faith and lives within lives within times over lapping times and spaces. All interchangeable all seemingly seperate yet perfectly connected.

He’s young, but only from small perspectives. His life is larger than anything I could ever know, I’ve always known that. I’ve always recognised his layers of other worlds other times and ones he has been. His spaces have always been occupied by more than the singularity of just himself.

Sophie Strand I think I’ll go to my favorite and it’s very simple and it’s not even really a myth, but I was very interested that when you actually go back, so a lot of what we take to be Christianity are Romanized rewrites of the rewrites of the rewrites of you know, it’s a game of telephone, through many different generations and languages and cultures. But if we actually go back to the Aramaic, to the ecology of Galilee, to the time period, the socio-political pressures, we can realize that Jesus’s parables are actually really anti-imperial and ecologically radical. And that they’re much more interesting than when they’re deracinated in this translation. And so one of my favorites is, you know, he says, “The kingdom is like a mustard seed.” And you know, when it grows, all the birds roost in its trees, it starts out as a little seed. And of course, having been mistranslated and uprooted from its time period and its location. It has lost all of its radical, wild meaning, its scintillating meaning, but the truth is that at that time period Jesus would have been talking to farmers who were losing their land and needed to be able to produce effective crops to pay the taxes to the Romans so they wouldn’t die. And in fact, the Romans were moving. The Roman operation was a commercialized agricultural state. So what it did is it would force people off of their lands and seize their land, so that it could turn the land into profit making monoculture actually, so that, you know, your complicated kitchen gardens would suddenly just become a green crop to feed the Romans. And so mustard greens at that time period, were actually an incredibly pernicious invasive weed that would destroy crops. So to say that to a group of farmers was a terrifying thing to say, that the most important thing, the Kingdom of God, it’s not to come. It’s not something that’s abstracted from the earth. It’s not in the future. It’s right here right now. And it’s the weed that you hate the most, that interrupts your ability to participate in the empire, in the commercialization process, and to feed your own family. And that has seemed to me to be like an absolutely radical koan, you know a japanese riddle that you sit with and try to understand because it’s very tricky to unravel what it actually means. And so for me, I’ve been looking at the parables that we have that come to us from Jesus and saying, like, how do they teach me to look at my own environment and look to the beings who I’m afraid of for information on how to actually digest the empire?