Today’s Words:
manipulate
feeble
ahead
oatmeal
involve
incidental
grace

Grace is this fundamental concept that was missing from my consciousness as a child. I’ve had to learn it, slowly, haltingly, with great effort. What is grace? It is that which is the nature of the Cosmos and life itself: a gift. Something freely given, but which you cannot contrive to receive. More abundant that you need if you relax and let it flow into your life, and frustratingly unavailable if you do not trust it.

As a child we traditionally learn this from our parents unconditional availability, but I didn’t have that luxury. And yet as an adult, I could learn that the field itself supports me.

I wonder about that. What was the wound, and what was the healing? Does any unmet need, if it is unmet long enough or deep enough to be very very painful, create a wound - around which scar tissue builds? If so, then healing would be necessary in order to let new love in - ie to let that need be met in present time. Because the scar tissue, the defenses, keep the pain in and the love out. What an odd reaction. What an odd way of protecting ourselves. I’d like to have a discussion with God about the schematics here.

It makes me wonder about something. Our body has a lot of self-healing mechanisms. But our mind’s self-healing mechanisms seem to need social interaction in a way that our bodies self-healing mechanisms don’t. I mean, it’s a scale of course, as our body and mind aren’t really separate. The mental part of healing also seems to require interaction. Which makes sense of course. But it’s amazing how our cultural myths about ourselves make it seem like we ought to be able to heal in a vacuum when that is actually not true at all. What a strange myth to evolve. It’s almost like the myth is one of those scar-built things, protecting some wound in the social fabric itself. Hmm.

Anyhoo.

Grace is like mercy; undeserved, unasked for, but there nonetheless.

This is what I miss in the “Law of Attraction” stuff. Abundance is not something you wrestle from the Universe through effort. Grace is what you experience when all else falls away. When you release the striving, the ego, the white-knight, the entrepreneur, and the advocate, grace is what remains. The rose does not visualize more light from the sun. The rose accepts what is given, and turns toward the light.

And yes, the rose eventually dies. And there are more roses that bloom. But knowing that it will eventually whither does not sour the rose for the light.

Yet we are not roses. We have capacities for manipulation. That is not wrong either, for aren’t we just another plant in the garden? Yet still, we are the only plants that seem to cut ourselves off from our own sources of nourishment, because we become attached to them. With knowledge of good and evil comes attachment to good and aversion to evil. The Tree contained not simple knowledge, but the ability to remember, to plan, to string events together and label them “good” and “evil”. The ability to abstract.

Or perhaps it’s just survival skills run amok. The evolutionary advantage of learning is clear. Perhaps all the myths we create to explain our existence are just a byproduct of the evolutionary gift of memory and imagination. Perhaps we’re just another species.

Who knows. I know that I enjoy ice cream and building websites and cuddling. My mind is growing feebler at justifying more than simple effort for simple things. Part of me wants to involve myself with grand schemes, and part of me wants to divest my thoughts of whatever lies ahead and curl up in the moment.