Well, I got what I deserve tonight. One of my guilty pleasures is finding a few blogs that deal primarily with the gossip and controversy on the web - the "hip to be cynical" group. One of the links (and I won't link to either, since promoting them is not what I wish to do) mentioned something like "If you laugh at this, you'll roast in hell", intimating, of course, that what one would read was devilishly funny. Now, I've got a evil streak, and a good wicked laugh is fun! So, I clicked....
The link was about a young person who was visciously bigoted against the disabled - and was explaining how horrible it is that his school has mainstreamed handicapped kids there. They disgust this person, and he finds these children laughable. The situation which is supposed to be soooo funny, is about one child trying to help a wheelchair bound child, but they wind up falling. The girl in the wheelchair, it's explained, is so handicapped that she can do nothing but fall on her face. The writer of this event found it terribly funny and had no embarrassment whatsoever at laughing at this injured young girl.
Reading that, filled me with a baffling feeling that probably only a parent who has lost a child will understand. My daughter had a severe disability and died at a very young age. When your child is lost to you - is dead - there are times when the aspects of your body, mind, and heart seem to lose touch with reality. The body goes through the inner workings to take flight, because the heart is screaming at it "Get up! Move! Go to her! Help her!!". The Mama Bear is growling, "Heaven help you, you little prick, I'll tear your throat out if you laugh at my baby." Arms aching the profound ache of wanting to hold their child, but only able to hang limp and ineffective. The demon within is hollering "Cast a spell on that evil creature! Make him have an accident - make the people around him laugh instead of help him! That will teach him!!". Even the spirit within that seems very tiny and a bit lost at this point, is trying to whimper something about feeling sorry for such a callous, insensitive jerk.
The mind is trying to pull it together - urging the body to settle down - there is nowhere to go - even if I could cast a spell on that fool, he wouldn't get it - selfish people never do. They only see things from their point of view. Heart and mind, stop screaming.... Holly is dead - that little girl is in another country, she's not my baby, she's beyond my help - I can only hope that her mother was there to comfort her. That her mother was filled with the grace that only mothers can have, when the world is falling apart around us, to find that peace to be able to comfort our child.
Why are there people who laugh at someone who is injured? Why are there people who hate others because of a disability? Why do they want to exclude anyone? I don't understand. I'll never understand.
But, I do know that I have two very important things to meditate on - one is taking the very good advice of being impecable with my actions - that wasting time is damaging. If I'm tired, I need to take a nap. If I'm feeling a lack of creativity, I need to find inspiration. If I'm in need of refreshment for my soul, I need to meditate. If I need to pamper myself, I need to take a bubble bath.
The second is to look again at the pain I felt as I read that piece, look with compassionate eyes on myself as I sobbed at the cruelty of what happened to that little girl and the association I felt to my own daughter - the connection of knowing that had she lived, she would have been subject to that kind of treatment more often that I care to consider. To look deeply at that pain - understand it, yet not explain it away. We live in a world of opposites and, I believe, that it is only in holding a tension between the pairs of opposites that we can find the experience that transcends the field of opposites.
Begrudgingly, I must bow to the Buddha nature of the person who wrote that piece, knowing that it has opened a window to practice for me, knowing that this person is the Buddha as much as my innocent child. This experience may indeed help me to awaken to truth, and one day, see all beings in that light of compassion.
There is more to say about these concepts, but now is the time to take a hot bath, meditate for a few minutes, then go to sleep.
