There’s a compost bin close to where I live. It’s for the local University garden. It’s a block away and I walk there with my small metal compost bin every week or so. And, when I get home, particularly in winter, I will find burrs attached to my coat. Sometimes a dozen. There’s a plant nearby that, as its seed propagation strategy makes these pods covered with hooks. All it takes is brushing up against them lightly to get them attached.
When you hurt someone, they give you a look. Or you can imagine it. The look is one of hurt of betrayal. You can’t get it out of your mind. That look sends a black burr into your heart and lodges it there. We will build up tumours around those burrs to keep from having to look at them. We will build emotional walls. We will spend a lifetime avoiding ever confronting it. But the thick black shell is there to protect it not to hurt us. It keeps the light-filled inside of it protected. This is what we find inside the seed - not judgment, not condemnation or punishment, not a poison that could kills us but beauty, a lifeline back to Life, the very innocence we defiled not planted inside of us and awaiting the right conditions to sprout.
When we let the innocence and preciousness of the one we hurt kill us, when we let the grief of that break us open, our tears water it. We have to let the beauty of the ones we hurt kill everything that isn’t worthy of it. Sprout it before you die.
Shame is the way that life tries to redeem you. If you betray another at a very deep level, you’ll find the burr of shame at that level inside of you. If it’s at a shallow level, you’ll find it there.
The shell is invincible. It can only be opened by what Mirabai calls the Heat of Midnight Tears. They must be sincere.
We’re terrified to open it. The burr isn’t punishment of the universe, It’s the universe never giving up on you. It’s the redemptive mechanism in action. It’s the revenge of beauty. But you must let that beauty destroy you. When you let yourself see the preciousness of the one you hurt, then that seed stirs inside of you. Your genuine grief and remorse - these tears water it.
Sometimes the best road to grief is anger at the universe and god for making you do this or allowing you to do that or putting the desire or capacity to do it in you.
Sometimes you must let yourself rage.
Sometimes you must let yourself be a victim.
This can be the doorway in that allows you to reconnect with you own innocence in it all.
They weren’t victimized by your evil nature but by your own victimhood and poverty. That’s why you stole from them. If you’re think you’re evil then you’ll never learn more but you’ll either submit or rebel and defend yourself in the way that monsters do.
It’s easy to let their innocence make you feel like a monster in contrast. They’re the victim and you’re the perpetrator. They’re the prey and you’re the predator. It’s easy to essentialize it. It’s harder but more useful to see the long story of trauma and poverty. To see how you never stood a chance. You were defeated by something so much bigger than you had any understanding of at the time. You took it on and thought your defeat was because something was lacking in you. You thought it began with you. If you really saw what you’d been up against and how starving you were at the time…. Responsibility is seeing that and grieving what you never got. This is so hard to see. You can do it without making anyone wrong. Ultimately this delivers you to the question, “When and how did this all begin?” Follow the thread to what it means to be human in the world again.
If you ever find yourself saying, "I should have done better," then I’d have to say, “You poor bastard. You’ve got no fucking idea of what you were up against.”
Compassion isn’t the result of introspection as much an outrospection - seeing what you were contending with. We have no idea, because we think it’s ‘normal’. We think the nuclear family, literacy, schools, jobs, money etc. is normal.
The issue is not that you were defeated but that you thought you could win.
This particularly speaks to me and looks like a classic for the years ahead. I've been reading James Baldwin's collected nonfiction while you've been rolling out with this blog and this is up there IMO with Baldwin.
Thank you so much for this. I think it's the catalyst I have been shamefully and secretly seeking for many years.