“The Tibetan’s say there are four ‘immeasurables’: loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity.
May all beings have happiness and the cause of happiness.
May they be free of suffering and the cause of suffering.
May they never be disassociated from the supreme happiness which is without suffering.
May they remain in the boundless equanimity, free from both attachment to close ones and rejection of others.” -Tricycle
All of us have the capacity to bless others, but those who are deeply drawn to emotionally needy ones need to make sure that they have met their own needs first. And, how do we deal with emotionally needy people other than ourselves? How do we bless someone without letting religion slip into it? I struggle with these things.
The reason that I have problems with it all is that I have problems mothering myself, first.
Once, I thought a child, another,
or another,
might be reason to stop the want
for something more than a miserable
marriage. One by one, I planned them
just when my next lackluster loneliness
crept up on me like a stalker in the night.
It was never enough. There was just less
and less of me.
Then I thought it was Simone Bouvier
that first made me want to be here.
"Revenge!" I cried and set about
stiletto-heeling it to Women’s Issues
Faculty gatherings. I had a purpose.
Purposes have a way of falling down
when seven kids are dragging at your hem
and leave full handprints on the back of your
waist-to-floor skirt. When they let go,
the apron strings hung desperately
useless as those University readings.
All I had was myself; the child, the single parent
mother, to mother herself. It was me
against the world, to fend off falling
feelings of fatalism without borrowing
someone or something else to hold me here.
When it was, exactly, I cannot say, but one day
I woke up and realized I am all there is
for me and for anyone else who were mistaken
about my strength in overcoming myself.
I knew, by God, I was here and here was all I had.
©Carol Desjarlais 1.2007
This was written a few months before my life absolutely turned blank, at the loss of my soulmate.
I am one who will always reach out, no matter what is going on inside me. I am compassionate and kind and I feel joy at other’s joy, but I do not do it equally because I do not do that all for myself.
See, I have to tell you that I spent most of my life not believing in a god as it was explained to me. I was a baby when the first ungodly thing happened, then again at 5, and how does a child so betrayed believe in a \higher Power. Throughout my life, I tired. I really tried because I felt so evil because I had those things happen and then I stopped trying. I had my own little spirituality, my own core values, and I set rules up for myself. I was desperate to be okay and I never was until I made a break, totally, from everything I knew and went to university as a single parent mother. It was there that all the things I had developed as spirituality came to blossom. I learned more and more about the First Nations’ ways that I had been exposed to as a small child, in such beautiful ways. I stopped labeling my Higher Power as God and gratefully, and with great relief, began to call that Higher Power Creator... not a patriarchal figure. I will forever be grateful to my Grandfather’s best friend, Rufus Goodstriker, who began the teachings while they were visiting and fishing. I had a great deal of exposure to First Nations in my best friend, Annie, and her mother, Kate Manyfingers. I know I had been guided to those great blessings in my life that led me to something beyond beautiful… to my own soul and to know I did not need any mediators in order to know and grow it. When I made that break, I truly flowered and it all made so much sense to my empathetic soul… a life of service, of kindness, of compassion, of love and joy that I never thought possible.
And, so here I am, with great gratitude for who I have become/who I AM becoming, in spite of it all…flaws and frailties and all. It does not matter if anyone else loves me. I love myself.
I do believe my life flows from this stream:
“do ut des”—I give so that you will give.
©Carol Desjarlais 1.5.23
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