Being normal is dangerous and life threatening.
I failed a lot. The floor that had supported me for so long in my life, began kicking dust into my eyes and tripping me.
I suspect I needed a new floor.
I imagine now as if I am still alive, and I ask myself if I want to fall into my blame and violence, or if I want to lean into and then leap from — a completely new floor? I’m going to call it gratitude.
The old floor supported me to defend myself from an unfriendly violating world. The new floor supports me to find new ways of perceiving others … and of perceiving my world …
As I walk this new floor … I find that I need new ways of perceiving my world. I need new lenses so that I can see that here, I will learn to love more and to have deeper understanding. I will become vulnerable … to a new kind of ‘voice’. I will know that I am not alone, and that I can surrender to the everything and nothing of which I am a part. I can lean. I can receive.
Einstein is standing as he contemplates … and then walks closer to the president to continue …
Barack and Michelle, you are presently seen as a problem. Some are still committed to your failure.
I kept looking in my life time, for that unified theory because I wanted to demonstrate something I knew to be true … that everything is connected. I failed at that. I think mostly because I wasn’t connected. It was all actually a part of me. I couldn’t find the unified of myself.
You become a part of seeding a new kind of world — as you have the courage and the daring … to look deeper into who you really are … so that you are able to see the bigger picture, at the same time that you are aware of the immediate one — so you can go beyond the logical and rational, to the irrational and the uncertain of knowing — so you can move beyond wanting to validate yourself, to focusing on where you are going, on your hopes and on what is possible … on your visions born of the future…
It is normal to see things as being ‘outside’ and unrelated to us. It doesn’t work, but it is normal.
As we wake up, our realizations can come from nowhere. It is within or between — the nowhere/nothing — that we can discover who we are.
It is in this moment that I realize — I am here because you are all a part of who I am. I am not separate from you. I am a part of you, but it is up to me to embrace this, not you.
And the truth is that we are all a part of everything. We are part of the bigotry, hate, guns, torture and murder and sale of dolphins,
the gunning down of those who have less significance in the normal definition of who matters, the dismissal of women’s rights with their own bodies and how much they get paid for their work, the fight to take away gay and lesbian rights to marry …
another words to be recognized as being a part of what is considered ‘real love’ in the current society, the decision of whales
to kill themselves rather than watch their fellow community of whales being butchered by Norwegian fishermen. We are part of the unspeakable horror induced by the ISIL terrorists primitive slicing, ripping, mortifying,
disgracing, and tormenting of innocent and beautiful lives, and then — there are elephants … who morn for their dead,
who have a complex language of communication, who can express a kind of empathy — who are being tortured and massacred for sport. Bob Parsons, Go Daddy’s CEO… has this as his sport.
We are not separate from this. This is why it will never work to blame and try to conquer others, no matter who they are. It just will not get us where we want to be.
It will be the greatest of your daring and your courage, to reach deep into yourselves … until you don’t know who you are … Because it is only there, that you will find the resolutions and solutions … it is there that you will discover little bits of that which you haven’t fathomed.
As you embrace bit by bit of that which you haven’t fathomed of yourself … of life … and beyond, you will also realize that you are a part of the beauty, wonder, innocence, joy … of life.
You belong. You matter.
What I’m hinting at … is that we are all far more than we pretend to be … and there are only a handful right now who even attempt to grok this. It is too frightening. And what do people do when something threatens them? They try to make it disappear. They try to humiliate it. They dismiss it. They will do most anything to get the threat out of their space.
Individual power and the power of individuals coming together as a group to support their right to freedom, with responsibility, can threaten society, certain cultures, and especially fanatically exclusive religious or political groups or self-servicing autocratic governments … These dominating factions will respond in ways that attempt to eradicate the self-confidence and voice of their followers and citizens so that they can remain the controlling force.
What they don’t realize is that it was never meant to be this way? We were always meant to do this together … to bring our uniqueness together to create something more than any of the one of us …
Such things as — imagination, intuition, perception, deep feelings, tenderness, gentleness, trust, self-confidence, and true joy — threaten to diminish the ‘power over’ of those attempting to dominate, control, and manipulate through their fanatical religions and political groups, and oppressive governments.
So many are terrified of their very own souls. This is evidenced in the oppression of:
women,
gay men,
people considered to be of the ‘other’ or mixed race,
animals,
children [especially girls],
the earth,
beauty,
freedom,
true celebration,
gratitude for the gift of life itself,
vulnerable expression of feelings,
belief in magic,
the wonder of true power.
And when people are frightened by their soul, they may eventually lose their sense of feeling powerful. They forget that they have value. They can lose their brilliance and their spiritedness. Maybe the saddest of all is that their hopes and dreams … their visions can loose their luster … They can become dull. And hope can diminish. They lose their vitality. And then their character can be lessened with greed.
Einstein stops talking as he realizes that he is pacing, almost as if he is talking to himself … Yet, everyone in the Oval Office in the middle of the night is giving their complete attention to him …
He then adds:
No one should be shamed for what they give … or for who they are. We should not ever diminish or accept being diminished.
An awe shattering effect on everyone in the room is created by Stephen King as he suddenly appears from within his dream state, in the Oval Office, directly across from the president.
Stephen King:
I had a teacher called Miss. Hisler, who rolled up a copy of my V.I.B #1 [Very Important Book] and was brandishing it at me like a person might brandish a rolled up newspaper at a dog that had just piddled on the floor. I had just priced my newly self-printed 8 page book to sell at school, for 25 cents, and I had sold about 3 dozen copies. It was my first ‘best seller’.
I was shamed. I have spent too many years being ashamed of what I write. If you paint, write, sing, dance, lead in any creative endeavor … someone will try to make you feel lousy about it. I can still hear Miss Hisler asking me why I wanted to write junk.
I have a feeling that my experience may be similar to what you are experiencing, Mr. President. I guess I want to let you know that I understand. I hate what conservatives are doing to you. I have been concerned that you could be assassinated and I will do anything to help you thrive.
President Obama and Stephen stare into each other’s eyes, as tears saturate the landscape of each of their faces. Their half open mouths drink in the drools of healing liquid.
Virginia Woolf is listening to all of this, in the second chair from Michelle’s left side. Her lips are pressing together so hard that they are quivering. She breaks the silent pause of the others.
Woolf:
I could not powder my nose in public. Everything to do with fitting me into a dress, or to come into a room wearing a new dress – would frighten me; at least make me shy, self-conscious,uncomfortable. I felt shame.
I was repeatedly molested by my much older half brothers, and many inferred that it was I who seduced them. The raw hurt in the recesses of my heart would eventually lead me to drown myself in the river near my home.
In my time, people, especially men, who were dominant in the writing scene, found ways to to diminish the mattering of my work.
Once, I read a chapter of one of my books to a group. This is what I wrote in my diary after the reading.
“Oh but why did I read this egoistic sentimental trash!’
I lost all confidence that I had anything at all to offer anyone.
I then wrote – “there was a sharp sense of the silence after I read my chapter. It started with loud laughter; this was soon quenched; & then I couldn’t help figuring a kind of uncomfortable boredom on the part of the males; to whose genial cheerful sense my revelations were at once mawkish and distasteful.”
“What possessed me to lay bare my soul?”
The shame took over and began directing the cacophony of the chaos of my personal world.
e.e.cummings comes in to the conversations and adds:
The left-wing critics of the 1930s were only the first to dismiss my work as sentimental and politically naïve. I channeled my shame into the intensity of protecting individuality and freedom to express oneself without the confinements of the cultural norms, including even the syntax and grammar I used in my poems.
Maya Angelou, over flowing with feeling, walks over to President Obama, and cups his face in her hands, and gives to him – her poem:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
There is a hush of wise love.
And in his quiet tears of joy, e.e.cummings gently purrs:
-how fortunate are you and i,whose home
is timelessness:
we who have wandered down
from fragrant mountains of eternal now
to frolic in such mysteries as birth
and death a day(or maybe even less)
© 2013-2014, Lyn Marsh,PhD, all rights reserved. You may not reproduce materials without permission from Lyn Marsh,PhD
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
http://hollowverse.com/
stephen-king/ http://www.english.illinois.
edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/ cummings_life.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
