We love to pass judgments. He’s good. She’s bad. She’s extra-good. He’s super-bad. I don’t find these classifications to be fruitful or accurate.
Show me a “bad” electron. Where is the bad tree? When a tree’s roots grow in a particular way, they do so for a reason.
People, too, have reasons; we just don’t see them. We are not privileged with access to the intimacy of their consciousness. We cannot see their lives from the inside.
But what if we could? What if we knew—knew exactly—what caused other people to make their choices, to be in the positions they’re in? The understanding that flows from inhabiting another consciousness is one of the great joys of being a writer.
It is tempting to return wrong for wrong. To send bad energy out when we feel bad energy come in. But it’s a trap. Try, just as an experiment, to send good energy out when you feel bad energy come in. See what happens. ✨
Tomorrow will be made from the energy we summon today.
I was in traffic earlier today. There was an absurdly noisy truck beside me, billowing black exhaust, his engine far too loud for my ears. He passed me; I passed him; he passed me again. Eventually it dawned on me that I could turn down a side street and be rid of him! A gorgeous, tree-lined side street with a canopy of purple blossoms.
I am free. Yet how often I give away my freedom, or forget that I even possess it.
I respect freedom so much that I do not like to give other people advice. But I will make an exception. Do not let the world—our wonderful, weary world—embitter you. Keep your heart sweet like a strawberry. If you let the cruelty of others harden your heart, no matter how much good happens in your life, you won’t be able to feel it. You might be sitting in Paris at a café with a whipped-cream latte and a plate of the world’s sweetest peaches, but you won’t be able to taste them.
It’s cliché, yes. But maybe we should try a little harder to have compassion. What if we’re all the same ocean—the same consciousness—in different cups?
I think: I am Alethea, I was born in 1969. I lived here, then I went there, and I did that other thing. I think about the story-line of my life often.
But what if I’m wrong? What if my identity is not linear at all? What if my identity is Now—everything? And your identity is Now—everything—too? And not just you and me. The moon, the stars, the trees, the peaches. The purple blossoms arching above. Paris in the late-afternoon light.
Postscript:
“Show me a bad tree”—as I typed those words, I was of course reminded of the passage in scripture where Jesus curses the fig tree. It’s such an odd moment: first, that the Christ would curse anything. Second, that it would be a tree. What could it possibly mean?
Perhaps this, too, was a lesson; we have just been reading it from the wrong direction. We have to read it backward: It is the tree that Jesus curses, that on the reverse trip, does not give him any fruit.
I encountered a similarly unusual treatment of time in a mystic’s diary, He and I (Lui et moi)—my favorite book. I don’t have my thumb on the exact passage, but somewhere it says something along these lines: Mary’s heart was so pure and her prayers so powerful that she helped to hasten the birth of Christ.
This confused me. I knew that in order to prepare the way for the Christ, Mary’s conception had been immaculate in her mother, Anne’s, womb. How could her actions have reached back and affected her birth?
This would only be possible if time “runs both ways”—if past, present, and future are all happening simultaneously.
We leave, we might say, the day of our birth in the past. But, in truth, perhaps every day we are born again.
