Newsletter 10/11/23
Some time has passed between this newsletter and the previous one. Much has happened since leaving South Africa, and all that implied, and making a new life in Australia. This has been a huge mission, especially at 70 years of age for my wife and 75 for me. Not easy to give up everything and move. I haven’t had time to land properly yet and this may still take some time. I have included a view over our house where we are staying – ours is the one with the red roof.
In the meantime, the Ukraine and Israeli conflict and others still continue. How to address that through story? In a way the story brings us to an understanding of the conflict and its possible resolution, without taking sides. Somehow, as Elders (or at the very least a voice for peace) we need to come to an understanding within ourselves as to how the hatred and the desire for revenge can be transformed into acceptance and forgiveness. This is hugely difficult on a personal level, and much more difficult on a national level. However, a nation is a collection of individuals, so perhaps peace might be possible.
At the very end of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, after the deaths of the secret lovers, the Prince of Verona, says “Through winking at your discord too, I have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished.” Romeo and Juliet’s love had to be hidden because of the bitter feud between their families, who were prepared to duel with each other – even to death. When we acknowledge discord but do nothing to stop it, as the Prince of Verona did, everything escalates. Just as it has in the Ukraine and Gaza Strip, and so many other places in the world. Our difficulty is that there is no King or Prince to step in to limit fire-power. Every atrocity is justified in the name of revenge. We can no longer see the enemy as human and so they deserve everything we can throw at them. At a personal level a divorce court is often no different, where we are often prepared to use our children as weapons.
We have the story of the Moon Palace in which the Feminine falls in love with an ideal in the guise of a talking head. Her father (the old patriarchy) attacks the new ideal ; therefore, in the story, the head rolls back into the deep ocean. Our heroine dives into the ocean to find her love. Once she finds him she asks him to return with her to the surface. The head refuses to do so, until such time as she returns to the surface and sorts out her differences with her father.
As reflected in the story, once we go into denial, we go straight up into our heads and dissociate from our feelings – instead of going back and dealing with our stuff with our parents and the beliefs of the family we incarnated into. When we hold those beliefs as sacrosanct and are prepared to kill one another for those beliefs, then we are in the Moon Palace. This is the palace of dissociation and a distancing from the horrors of our actions. Otherwise, how else could such horrors continue to exist?
The story suggests another course of action, which is to see what is actually going on. To feel something as we descend towards earth. The story says that first we have to feel the heat of the earth with our eyes closed. Once we feel the heat of the earth, we need to let go of the rope and fall the test of the way. It seems that the falling is important here. The risk of letting go of the known (the rope) and falling in the same way as we would fall in love. Falling and allowing fate and destiny to direct our fall and landing; then to face and embrace the world we find.
Our earth is a tiny spaceship in the vast universe. For us, earth is the only space ship we have. Most of us are squabbling about what has only been lent to us for this lifetime. When we die we will leave behind all the sand in this sandpit we call planet earth. What we take with us is our life’s experiences and how we answered and responded to life’s questions.