Two Steemians I like very much tagged me in their respective posts: @wanderlass tagged me in her post on positivity and @futuremind tagged me in his post on gratitude, which contains a powerful list that may surprise you if you check it out . This is an interesting exercise, thanks for thinking of me. I'm grateful to have friends like you two on Steemit 🔆 🔆 🔆 .
I have had this in mind for a while now (I hadn't forgotten :), and, since both taggings occurred around the same time, I had intended to combine the two ideas into a single post. However, I have not been feeling very positive of late and have not been able to collect my feelings enough to express what I am grateful for in life. Late last night I walked amongst the woods and the hills, high on life, and ensconced in the moment. Some of the ice melted. I'm having another go at writing, let's see what emerges 😌.
When I think about it, the following three categories of experience have brought a great deal of positivity (eventually) to my outlook on life, and I am very grateful for having had them:
- Animals
- Being 'Mixed' Up
- Alienation and The Forgetting
Animals:
I grew up in a world devoid of animals. There were zoos of course, and pets in other people's houses, plus the strays on the streets – but I knew little of who or what they were! As a child, I would've liked a pet but it was out of the question. I had never lived with or become close to an animal until shortly after I turned 40. Although well disposed towards them in general as well as being vegetarian (now mostly vegan), I did not always feel at ease around animals - I didn't know how to behave or communicate with them. I had been bitten by a dog when around 7 or 8 years old, and that had had a psychological effect which I did not shake off until relatively recently.
Animals have now been a very close part of my life for five years, during which time I have (for various reasons, it seems) experienced only flutters of genuine human warmth, but unlimited and unconditional animal friendship, love and guidance. The emotional support I have received from animals has sustained me through many dark periods – and I shall extend this acknowledgement to Gaia in her Natural-Motherly entirety – plants, mountains, running water, tweety birds and the toilet spider that looks down at me as I sit enthroned - all have contributed in unfathomable ways. I have always experienced some discomfort receiving and accepting love and affection from other humans – barriers added to since childhood, complex inner dramas, sensitivity to the fake. Animals have helped me find a way through, and they also permitted what very few other humans allow another human to do – to love them freely and unconditionally!
Three individuals stand out in this regard.
Little Mr. P
In Aug 2013, I had a very special flatmate who arrived with a cat. This was my first real contact with a non-human being and I lived with them for a full year. Mr. P represents animal to me, for through him, I was able to understand the nature of human-animal relations in a manner that had not been accessible to me before. This was a revelation and produced a dramatic shift in my perception and consciousness. Mr. P became my closest friend (I think only animal-lovers will understand how this could be :) and I was repeatedly blown away by the level of communication, support and understanding that occurred between us. I would need a separate post to go into the dynamics of our relationship, but no spiritual teacher could have pin-pointed deep and hidden control issues within me more accurately than he did, or with a greater demonstration of patience, tolerance, wisdom and love. It helped and transformed me at a profound level, and I am reminded of an Eckhart Tolle line from his book 'The Power of Now': I have lived with several Zen masters, all of them cats. It has now been four years since we last saw each other, yet my phone wallpaper remains a photograph of Little Mr.P.
Ronnie (Rhonda)
When I moved in to my current place in April 2016, I lived with Ronnie (Rhonda), a 50kg, 12 year-old German Shepherd. We bonded quickly and I discovered the delights of human-canine interaction with that gentle and loving old granny. I groomed her, and massaged her arthritic joints. I came across books on animal communication, and a very interesting one called 'Dogs NeverLie About Love', by Jeffrey Masson, whose observations I was able to experience in action. Rhonda died in December 2016. She appeared to me afterwards during my days of mourning, tall and upright at my shoulder like the Wolf she really is, wild again and free of her ailments, promising me her continued love and support.
Shanti 💚
In March 2017, Shanti came to live with us as a 4-month old puppy. I lost myself in the fascination and delight and utterly entertaining joy of young animal life, such as I had never before experienced. Shanti is 18+ months now; we're great friends and really love hanging out in each other's company. I groom her endless fluff and we invent some very fine games in the garden. She appears scattered all over the barge-blog with her doggy poetry, our beach outing, our fox encounter or when she butts-in every now and then.
It is harmlessly ironic that in my childhood logic I used to think that all cats were female and all dogs were male. When I eventually got to know a cat, Mr. P (my name for him) turned out to be male, and the two dogs mentioned above, Ronnie and princess💚Shanti, are both female!
Other Animal Friends I'd Like to Thank
Being 'Mixed' Up
As a sensitive and self-conscious child it wasn't easy being of mixed parentage - Scottish and Indian. It meant having the characteristics and physical appearance of neither (actually both, but I only found that out later :), and constantly having differences pointed out in a manner that may often have been just teasing, but produced a deep sense of exclusion in my developing awareness. I experienced a compounded sense of rejection, felt accepted by neither one side nor the other and perceived separation and exclusion everywhere. I reacted to this by going away traveling to lands and linguistic regions where I was a foreigner anyway, where I was unknown and therefore unlabelled, and where nobody who knew me, knew of my whereabouts.
Traveling was a diversion from the whole identity crisis issue. I had never been able to force myself to fit in with groups, and on the occasions that I tried, it felt even worse afterwards. This sense of alienation led me naturally into introspection - I wrote diaries for many years - and I tried to make sense of the world from my individual, rather than a group perspective. This has been an excellent outcome for me IMO, and although I still have deep issues with groups at a social level, I am no longer confused about trying to fit in. I no longer seek a sense of identity in the external - indeed my life experience in this regard seems to have pushed me away from that form of security seeking, which I now understand to be intrinsically divisive (the existence of a 'group' necessitates an 'us' and a 'them' state of mind, often with the need to 'put them down in order to make us feel good'). I used to feel I was just drifting in a world of meaninglessness, with nothing to cling to. I still have nothing to cling to, but I have discovered significance.
Had I not had the opportunity to deeply explore the experience of being an outsider, I may never have looked inside to discover the beginnings of who I really am, or begun to shed the self-applied labels of external identity seeking (job, nationality, possessions, beliefs etc. ad infinitum). There were some other great benefits of mixed parentage too! Access to two different worlds, two languages, two cultures, exposure to multiple perceptions. This allowed a generally broader outlook on life to develop, and it softened the message of despotic absolutism each child is indoctrinated with: The world is the way we tell you it is. Believe, accept and don't question!. By having experience and familiarity with different ways of expressing the same thing, or approaching the same issue at a human level, a sense of relativity was allowed to develop. This was accompanied by a certain empathy and the ability to see that multiple points of view can exist coherently together, none of them absolute. It added to a growing perception that beyond appearances, there is actually more unity than division in the bigger dance of life. But it was extremely painful and confusing at first and the positive message took a while to percolate up and into my conscious awareness. Indeed much that I am now grateful for languished unappreciated in the suppressed recesses of my mind until relatively recently, after I turned 40.
Alienation and The Forgetting
A sense of alienation is related to what I have said above about being of mixed race. As stated, I could not feel part of a group and I constantly sought reassurances of acceptance from my immediate family (and later with romantic partners), with whom I never felt a sense of belonging. When I think about it, I have only really very rarely experienced this sense of belonging that I am trying to describe - the heights of being in love, precious stolen moments with friends or family, or special substance-assisted highs. When physically present in human social situations, a complex mental dance has always clouded the issue with me and I was rarely able to relax and express myself. But then I was at least partially seeking identity in external form. I had forgotten. My first 40 years were about experiencing the forgetting to the extreme, such that alienation and separation could be explored until the time came to stop. I had no idea what was going on and wondered mistily if I was my body, my mind, my thoughts, my actions, my behaviours, my responsibilities, my duties, my pain, my sorrow or anything else or any other experience or facet of 'myself' that I could possibly derive and contrive meaning from. Was anyone else like me? Was real communication between beings even possible? .......but there was mainly emptiness, numbness, and I never was able to figure it out with the mind! I had also forgotten how to feel my feelings, and the dead-ends I encountered are therefore not surprising.
The beginning of the remembering was triggered by the stopping - the pause; a moment of deep submersion in the drama of pain and loss, when the mind, utterly exhausted with the repetitive circularity of it all, ceased all activity for a moment. Until that moment when the mind went quiet, and I was able to experience this, the ceaseless mental chatter dominated utterly. This chatter was full of the intricate and speculative details of the Forgetting - the dance of false and illusory external identity. Perhaps I do not remember anything much, yet I do now know that I had forgotten, and thus, there is the open possibility of learning, of awakening that lies ahead. The closed world I had practically given up on - the increasing sense of drifting meaninglessness burst into a world of colour and significance. I could discover my own path and I discovered that I needed no external authority to tell me how to find it. I realised I was unique, and at the same time, no more and no less than any other being. I could now start accepting myself, and from this position of non-comparative inner self-worthiness, I began to understand my life experiences and to see how smoothly they slotted-in together to form a coherent picture that I was now better able to decipher.
How beautifully liberating the switch of perspective from the cold, zombie-like world of alienation and forgetting. How beautiful to now know that what one has experienced and played with, is nowt but an illusion, a masterclass of experiential learning and growth; not the disease infested swamp of dominant and random negativity it had once seemed inexorably to be. What a sense of relief, what peace, what gratitude has flowed out of this turn-around for me!
I am infinitely grateful to know, through my own validated experience, that there is expansion and that joyous discovery does not cease; that all the tools are every ready and available; that there is no going back to the old and the spent; that no external being can have power over me at the inner level unless I give permission - which I can always revoke! I am grateful to remember again that I am spirit, a formless being of light, having a human experience and playing with form and the Forgetting in a multi-dimensional dance of inter-connectedness and expression. Once again, I am beginning to re-experience the joys of remembering that there is no separation between 'I' and the Universe. I/We am/are ONE - Dream and Dreamer, Observer and Observed, Creator and Creation 🕉 .
Thank you for reading
Namaste!
🚣
