How shall we receive our children's love?
Dear Soul,
photo by Mieke Campbell
Dear Soul,
I have just witnessed an act of cruelty. I had no agency to prevent it. All I could do was hurt for the one who undeservingly received this wounding.
When the field of stars offers to resonate just once with the rarest of shimmers, how could anyone feel justified to snuff out this magic by ordering the child not to look up?
Yet my anger is incapable of changing what has already been done.
Cruelty likes to pretend that it is the knife edge of wisdom, that it comes to teach us lessons, that it’s here to tell us about “the way the world really works.”
But it’s all a lie.
There is never an excuse for a direct strike at the heart. The only lesson to be learned is contained within the womb of the wound, a lesson about the resilience of love.
You, cruel one, inflicted pain on a child. Yet you received that child’s love in return.
Born screaming and repeatedly shitting their diapers, the only thing our children do is love us. Cooing and wondering at the moons of their mother’s eyes, love is their infinite fascination.
Squishing their voices into the small confines of language, they declare their love loudly.
Mastering the movement of their bodies through play, they embody love’s pure potentiality.
Dear soul, these children are running a gauntlet that we could never imagine.
Yet they still fight to love us.
Day in and day out, they brave an ever expanding whirlwind of contradiction unlike any other generation has ever known. They brave the temperamental weather patterns of our anxieties, never knowing when the Gods of their house will share bounty or throw down bolts of lightning.
Yet their instinct is to love us. They know we created them in our image. They know it in their bones even if their minds become confused by the malnourishments we have offered them.
Please help us, dear soul, to see ourselves again in the mirror of these young and widening eyes that stubbornly insist on seeing the best of us, that point us back to a vision larger than ourselves and our tiny little lifetimes.
They will give us this gift by any means necessary!
For those that doubt the resilience of love, witness this child with her head high only moments after being robbed of starlight. She still stands ready to love you after all that you’ve done.
Somatic Inquiry is a practice of deep listening that takes you below the level of your thinking mind and into your body where your compass is always oriented towards well-being.
April 24 & 29: Cultivating Relational Harmony through Somatic Inquiry