Dragging Around An Old Rag

 

 

 

Today’s color is Rose; the flower, is orchid.  Our chaotic world of karma swirls around us like a shawl.   There is constant ebbs and flows.  Each movement, each thought, each deed and word stirs the ether and the ether contains karma.  Only work to keep, at the very least, a balance, can keep light streaming through.  I think what I have called “Service for/to others” has really been about storing up some good karma.

I think I felt so “fringe”, so “not enough”, so rejected, even as a child, that I tried to make the world believe in things I did not.  For instance, I always thought it was me against the world, against god.  I did not want anyone eels to feel like this and so I set about being what I did not believe.  I gave service, I always smiled, I loved.  I gave what I felt I did not receive but had no way to deal with that, even as a small child right up to adulthood.  Most people remember me as a happy, gregarious child (actually, mother called me “precocious”).  They had no idea that I thought I was, in all ways, trying to bring ‘goodness’ to myself.  So, any act of compassionate, kindness, love had a selfish agenda.  I was storing up some good karma.  I thought I was making up for reasons I ha been abandoned as a child, rejected throughout my childhood because I was different (intelligent baby given away, and of course, that translated as ‘not good enough’).  I WAS adventurous.  I was a risk-taker.  I was vulnerable.  That set me up for many scarring experiences.  The karma of it all was that I was greatly loved, and loved greatly; was to come to see my wounds as blessings in that it made me better at my career.  Wounded clients did not have to speak a word.  I got it, right to my own wounded bones.  As well, I, of course, failed in so many ways.  I inadvertently put myself in positions of vulnerability.  I made poor choices from that woundedness.  With karma, it is not the involuntary, unintentional, unconscious errors made.  It takes volition, as the trigger that makes a word, thought, or action, negative karma.  Of course, I did not know that.  I thought every ‘fail’ was evidence that I was never good enough, born ‘not good enough’. 

Many of us are so connected to our unfinished past that we lug it into our present and therefore our decisions are made on past rather than present.  Some of us have surrendered to powerlessness, not realizing that we all have personal power.  What we do in the present is what is the only thing that matters.  Yes, we may have made mistakes.  Who the heck has not?  But those are not today’s, this moment’s mistakes.  By giving into saying “Oh, I always… oh I did… oh, once…”  Those things do not matter other than keep you in the karmic loop.  Eventually you have to try something different to get different results.

Would you, for instance, see someone suffering or in danger, say, “Oh, but I remember you always… you did... you once…”?  Would you?  No!  You would help make a change for them immediately.  We have to learn to do that for ourselves.  What we are doing in the moment is breathing, thinking, acting, and stirring the ether. 

Somehow, we have to retrain the brain to live in the present, not dragging old baggage along with us like a childhood blankee.  Let go of the rag!  We can not accept the good karma if we are living in the past with past karma.  Somehow, let the karma you have built up today to fall around your shoulders like a shawl. Xoxoxoxo

©Carol Desjarlais 8.1.21

 

Omg, I think it’s karma