I Am Blessed By Those Around Me

From The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.

There is hurt and there is love.
They roll us though the days
like a turtle down a hill.
All we can do when on our back
is roll one more time
and head for the sea.

This is known as making amends, a simple yet enormous act of integrity that restores trust, and trust, after all, is the soil that holds the roots of humankind. Without it, life on Earth begins to eat itself dry.

There's nothing more important than trust and you don't need, necessarily, to be a spiritual or a deep person to understand that. You simply have to look around you... observe people - observe nature... think of all those people that have to go on 'team building' excursions with their work. Trust is such a big part of our lives, that I think, sometimes, the danger is that we can start to take it for granted and often don't realise that it's a perceived betrayal of a trust we didn't even know we had or were participating in that makes us hurt.

There are no degrees in trust, it's an absolute. You either trust, or you don't... you can't trust someone a little bit - or trust someone in some ways and not in others. If there's any doubt, then you don't trust, and without trust you can't enter into a meaningful relationship with anyone. I think that's the difference between a friend and an acquaintance - trust.

For example, we trust our friends to know us, understand us, and what makes us tick; to know the kind of things that will upset us, and to be able to know our emotions, and we trust in ourselves that we will do the same for them. As a friend though, we also trust that, should we feel the need, out of love, to speak an honest that we know will hurt our friends, they will understand why it is we speak and that they in turn will give an honest response and will do the same for us. And we each trust that in such cases, afterwards, our friendship will remain unbroken.

We couldn't do that with an acquaintance. We wouldn't. We might know the acquaintance reasonably well... even very well, but the trust is not there, and without the trust there can be no love - not in normal human terms... the closest we can come to that perhaps is compassion, which can exist as a love without trust, but which is infinitely stronger when both exist together.

But to live as a loving (compassionate), trusting being is by no means easy... oh with our friends, perhaps yes... but with all others, all life? That is harder... and I believe that is the spirit in the meaning of the Wiccan phrase:

Perfect Love, Perfect Trust

to meet each moment of each day of each season, of each cycle with the openness to love, and trust, in the face of a lack of either from some of those we meet is truly what makes the difference between going through the motions of life, and living life to the full, without fear of the pain that we will without a doubt suffer.

It doesn't mean we have to bottle it all up though, and I'm coming to see that that may have been at the root of my mistake... in bottling up the pain, in not trusting those I knew I could trust to hear me - to turn me over when this little turtle had fallen on her back - I let the weight of it all just grind me into the earth until I couldn't get up any more. Took a while for me to reach out too - but now I have, and of course, those I trust were there for me all along, and I didn't see it.

In that I betrayed their trust... and in amends, I offer myself open and trusting - happily wounded - lovingly healed.