You write so beautifully about your pain and suffering. Although with the true heartfelt expression of how it is and was in some way the suffering is lightened, for do we not often make these experiences worse by our rejection of the pain due to an incapacity to deeply bear with it, providing both testament and witness to it?
What struck me most in your sharing was the way a mother absorbs her child’s pain and struggles, her love makes her ache due to that bond and out of her wish for her child’s peace, freedom and happiness. If we genuinely love someone we ache for them and beyond the desire to ‘fix’ should be the desire to accept where they find themselves due to their own issues, feelings, needs, sense of limits and choices To take this away, to denigrate or admonish it is a violation and it’s not love which involves the true acceptance of another person’s vulnerability, challenges, limitations and humanity.
Your writing spoke of our need to be there and sometimes to stay silent it spoke of opening our hearts to another’s suffering without trying to change it or making the mistake that it’s up to us to fix or heal it This to me speaks of emotional maturity. And then sometimes we need to walk away knowing we are not capable of this either being human finate and fallible.
We can have the awareness that some things are outside of our ability to fix, resolve, change or cure purely by an effort of will. Somethings we must just bear with, patiently calmly and with courage, until they alchemize. Like the lion heart of that little Tiger your Mum gave you when as a youngster you too were isolated, sick and in pain that kind of bearing with involves an extension of our soul sometimes into dark spaces. I just hope she was there for you then too, to hold your hand and to tell you that in time you would find the ability the courage, the resilience and the fortitude to bear with and through it all. We cannot always soldier on, there are times we falter and fall but with the right support and fuelled by the power of unconditional love, in time we often find the way to rise and try again.
For Ben
Emerging From The Dark Night 