Butterflies and Death

My husband is the love of my life and the love we share is what is enabling me to know myself, and my true heart, for the first time, ever,  in this life.

This is important to me because where I come from, my "family of origin" being the popular term now, there was very little love..,very little...consciousness--very little...sobriety! It's impossible to live a conscious life when one is loaded. It is impossible to think of anything but yourself when one is loaded. It is impossible to love well when one is loaded. I know this first hand. 

Most alcoholics and addicts believe they are hurting no one but themselves--I also know this first hand. But the evidence supports a different truth. Alcoholism is one of the only diseases that kills people WHO DON"T HAVE IT. But it takes sobriety to wake up to the fact that no one person is operating in a vacuum. Alcoholic or not, we are all connected--and that's not some goofy spiritual rigamarole-- that's science.

For his generation, and later generations, Ray Bradbury popularized the concept that the smallest action, however seemingly inconsequential, can have a massive rippling effect and change realities that appear to be completely unrelated. One of his early stories is about a time traveller who steps on a butterfly in the past and alters his present irrevocably. I am sure that Bradbury was not the first human to grasp this concept--but he may have been on of the first modern writers to put in in a piece of popular literature. 

We are not alone! No matter what you would like to think! What you do matters--no matter how much you wish it didn't!

We choose, every day, what it is we put out there.

Some might call it karma, some might call it original sin--some might refer to it as "the golden rule" and others "the golden spiral". Some think it is "woo-woo" and others see the scientific facts that support this concept. But make no mistake, it take MORE effort to deny this--they we all effect each other--than it does to simply tally up the simple evidence that surrounds us every day.

Growing up I chose Rage and Violence and Anger and Blame to be my Gods--this served me and I will not shut the door on it. But it is an exhausting way to live and I cannot do it anymore. Today, I choose Love. But the only reason I have the CHOICE TO CHOOSE is because of the massive amount of work I was willing to do. Somehow, through something greater than myself, I obtained willingness to be torn down to nothing, to be eradicated almost fully, until I was stripped of this false self, and was able to allow a new wet and screaming  skin emerge and grow into a person capable of receiving--and well as giving--love. 

I was listening to an old song recently--a popular one I am almost embarrassed to admit I know--but the opening line means something different to me now that it did then. I used to think this was a expression of regrettable devastation--that, if he could, the artist would undo the damage done. But now I see it as a celebration of losing something impossible to put down on your own--something that has to be torn from your grasp--claw marks and all---so that a new life may emerge. A stronger, wiser more loving life; a more loving you:

"As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I take a look at my life
and I see there's nothing left..."

This is good news.