Angels and monsters

Are you an angel, or a monster? Is there a context in which you might switch from one to another?

In a naive world, we might think that people are one or the other. That we are nice. Good.

That it is the others who are bad. “Othering” gets us off the hook of responsibility every time.

Our current pop culture propagates the myth of good and bad, the hero and the villain.

Yet it is not so simple. Every one of us has the unreconciled parts of us that could, with a slight push, move into the zone of bad, nasty, evil, monster. Get to know that part of self in order to be sovereign to it.

If we find ourselves seduced by the argument that we are the good people, the right people, and it is the others who are bad, we might pause and consider how our righteousness is built on shifting sand.

To respond to an action with an equal and opposite reaction is simply to keep the game going, back and forth. Both sides becoming more insistent they are right. Righteousness increases the polarity until it becomes untenable.

In order for change to happen, we need to shift ninety degrees away from the force. Aikido knows this. In the Bible it says ‘turn the other cheek.’ Ninety degrees. (Oh for those who posture as religious, Christians, whatever..to actually apply some of the teachings and lead by example.)

The ninety-degree turn is the principle of Precession. The very same principle that keeps the Earth. Moon and Sun in relationship, neither flinging off into the galaxy nor imploding into each other.

It is the same principle that enables life.

We might grow up and learn from the greatest teacher of all. Nature. We walk over her every day, too superior for our own good to look at that which sustains us and has worked without us for billions of years.

Neither angel nor monsters. We are both. Our journey is to let the one we care most for lead in our whole life, bowing as we do in humility to the other force that seeks a different path.

Photo taken May 18th 2021