Be disingenuous. Be inauthentic. Tell them lies and then show them the truth: you are not capable of love, human bean. You are only capable of dealing in sorrow.
I can teach you how to love. It’s not as hard as you might think. It’s pretty easy, once you figure out why you do the things you do.
Do you believe you deserve to be happy?
Do you believe you deserve to be loved?
If you answered NO to either of these… why not? Really think about it. What is it about you that makes you think you don’t deserve it? Did someone else tell you that you don’t deserve it? They probably have, if not in deed then in words. Probably many, many people have told you this. It’s so ingrained at this point, you accept it as true.
It’s not true. All beings deserve unconditional love. If you love someone, they will give you their best self. They will hold themselves accountable and be responsible for their actions. They will step up to the plate and take some swings. When they strike out, they’ll go to the bench and tell themselves, “You did great! You really showed up today!” They won’t criticize themselves overly much, focusing on how they failed. It’s quite frequent that a batter strikes out, you know. They can’t let that get them down: they have to keep striving. Keep moving forward.
What we call love these days is actually thinly veiled hatred. If you feel the impulse to be in control, to override someone else’s desires, or to change the other person, you aren’t loving them. Your one and only responsibility is to inform them when they are hurting you, when they are crossing a boundary of your core values. These values are inherent and we are born with them. They’re what make us different from each other, honestly. They are the nature part of the human soul.
We do not nurture each other properly, on the whole. We tell people they’re unlovable unless they get all As on that report card. If you don’t stay skinny and attractive enough for my incredible vanity, I cannot love you. If you don’t do as I say, you are wrong, even if I do not do as I say. Don’t imitate me because I hate me, in other words. Listen to me as if I’m a god and then I’ll show you paradise. Give me all your attention or I won’t give you any of mine. I’m jealous and I’ll take it out on you.
How many times have you heard all these, if not more? How many times has it been implied that you have been weighed and judged and found wanting? Those people hated you. They never loved you, not even if they said the words “I love you.” Once you can see their hatred for what it is, you can decide not to hate yourself alongside them. You are different. You are unique. You are you.
How many people have you dated or been friends with that moved a goal post on you? If you do [something], I will love you. Now that you’ve done [something], you must now do [this new thing that is more demanding], then I will love you. Then I will treat you as an equal. But wait, that’s not all! Now you have to bend over backwards and cater to my every whim. That’s when I’ll love you. Not a moment sooner. In fact, I won’t even love you then, I’ll just smile and pretend this is happiness, having you on a leash and telling you to sit.
That’s not love. It’s hatred.
Only when you are free to be yourself without judgment, without hostility, without criticism… that is when you are loved. When a woman communicates you are hurting her but isn’t telling you how to change, she is trying to love you unconditionally. It’s her way of saying, “I’m in pain. Stop giving me pain.” You’re supposed to be sensitive enough to the woman’s needs to want to change. To want to be a better person. If they aren’t telling you what you need to do to be a better person, that’s unconditional love. They trust you to decide the correct path for the both of you and proceed to work on yourself. And they expect you to do the same with them. If they’re hurting you, tell them it hurts and wait to see if they try to break the habit. If they try to end the cycle of misery.
Any action that is not hurting an individual cannot be condemned as if it is wrong. (Please note: individual does not equal HUMAN.) That’s another important thing to note here. For instance, being a homosexual is not wrong. As long as your partner is not encountering rape and the actions between two people are mutually agreed upon, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not what I do, but my path is different from your path. There is nothing wrong with your path being different, either. I hear of (and experience) a lot of people having fear and dissonance in their lives because they are queer in some way and they are afraid to tell other people.
They’re afraid because there is an established pattern of resistance to change. Change is life. To embrace change is to be fully alive. To resist change is to die a little inside. Every time you die a little inside, you heap more negativity upon the vibrational rift that has enveloped the Earth. You are part of the problem instead of the solution.
If these people were not afraid of themselves or each other, they would be able to love. I’ve heard of a spectrum that is categorized as FEAR <—> LOVE. It’s a scale. If you’re afraid, you’re not being loving. If you’re loving, you’re not afraid. I prefer this scale: HATRED <—> LOVE. It’s the same scale, different word. Same premise. Nothing changed except I prefer to indicate that fear is a form of hatred.
We are taught to fear. We’re taught so many forms of hatred. Some of these behaviors are vestiges from a more trying time in human history. “Zomg, a spider! SMASH IT!” Well, okay, yes. Some spiders can really hurt you. That’s why we do it. We recognize creepy crawly things and then we destroy them because we don’t know better. I would posit it would be better for the entire world if we just learned the difference between the 10-15 types of poisonous spiders out of the 2,000+ kinds of spiders in the world. In other words: our method is overkill. We’re squirming around for no reason, afraid of these eight-legged creatures, all because once upon a time you might die of a spider bite. (Hello, anti-venom at the hospital! Lifesavers, I tell you.)
We are taught to fear bugs, too. Some of them make sense because they’re either quite pesky (gnats) or they’re capable of carrying diseases (cockroaches, flies, mosquitoes.) This fear makes us more apt to stay indoors, I believe. It’s stupid since they can all get inside, but whatever. Typically, these bugs aren’t going to bother you, if the balance of the land around you is not disrupted thoroughly. If there is no standing water, there are fewer to no mosquitoes. If there’s no spoiling carbohydrates, cockroaches won’t come near you. Flies… well, they’re insidious and thrive no matter what is rotting in your garbage can.
I experienced a mealworm explosion from my garbage can this week. About three dozen mealworms had an exodus from the open bin, crawling across my floor brazenly in search of food. I was ill-prepared for this, I must say. I’d just woken up and I was on a mission for coffee. I was in my most vulnerable state, impressionable as I was still shaking off the sleepy headed feelings I end up having in the morning. I walked into the kitchen and noticed something squirming at my feet.
Thankfully, I was wearing flip flops, so there was no real danger of them touching me. But honestly, do you think mealworms carry diseases when they come from my garbage can? They don’t. They can outside, in the wild, but not from my own garbage can (unless I threw away a dead bird or rodent, y’know?) (I didn’t.) So anyway, there’s these two mealworms racing toward the oven from my refrigerator. I’m standing there, wondering where the hell these things came from, because surely it wasn’t under the refrigerator.
I took a look at the garbage can, a few feet further and yonder, and saw nothing amiss. I hadn’t yet seen all of them because they were hiding. “Huh. Maybe it’s an isolated incidence,” I think, as I get over the creepy crawly speeding along. I get a bleach wipe, lay it over the buggo, and press down. CRUNCH. “Ewwwwwww!” It popped and I was deeply disturbed. So, for the second one, I laid the same bleach wipe over it and stomped it with my flip-flop clad foot. But that’s not all! No, no. There was a third! I got that one, too, with another stomp.
To my absolute abject horror, there were dozens more just behind the garbage can. I only found that out after watching one start to crawl out of the garbage can itself, quickly hoisting itself up inch by inch. Those suckers are fast, it turns out. Quick thinking had me run to the bathroom, retrieving a spray bottle full of a bleach and water solution. Bleach ought to kill those suckers, I thought. Quickly, I had hoped. I don’t like the idea of even a bug suffering for hours and hours until it dies.
Thirty, forty sprays later… still alive and kicking. I have a mini-meltdown because there are bugs in my kitchen! Aggggh! I sprayed them all again and again. I left a puddle in the middle of the linoleum flooring, just in front of the refrigerator, because for some reason they wanted to make way to the stove. (I’ll admit, there’s a fucking mess over there. Maybe they knew that somehow.) So here I am, observing mealworms running into the puddle, then going in circles, soaking up the bleach water — which, most assuredly, is destroying their carapace — and then in the end turning around to go to whence they came. In fact, many of them tried to get back into the garbage can after I sprayed them with this poison.
How smart is that? Mealworms going back to where they originated when the environment became hostile. Do you think they had any recognition of the garbage can itself? I really doubt it; they probably only know the path they took to leave the food they were born to eat. Then again, maybe they called it home. Maybe the mealworms were schooling each other as they sat together by the dozen behind the garbage can. Maybe they were busy trying to get As on their report cards.
I feel bad for being a mealworm mass murderer. I mean, they didn’t ask to be born in my kitchen. They didn’t ask for poison water puddles to summarily burn them to death. I should have killed them all in a more humane way, but after killing three of them that way, I couldn’t bring myself to continue to be personal about it after the first one exploded under my fingertips. I’ll probably go through the wringer on my way to Hell in a hand basket.
Or maybe someone knew we had to kill other creatures to stay alive. I didn’t really need to kill them, but they didn’t really need to exist in my house, either. It’s catch 22, really. I could have relocated them to the outdoors if I was even more quickly witted (and willing to deal with creepy crawlies on an even more personal level.) I couldn’t handle it, sadly. So I did what humans do best: I destroyed them in an impersonal manner so I wouldn’t have to overthink how I was ending life after life. So I wouldn’t have to feel consciously guilty over each and every death.
Not an ounce of love was in that solution of bleach and water. At least the three I killed by stepping on died very quick and humane deaths in comparison. I showed them mercy, an aspect of unconditional love. God, I’m really sorry I poisoned your creatures for my own comfort. I gave them hatred so I could be more comfortable and it is wrong. I took lives for my comfort. Just for comfort. Was it really hurting me to leave them alive? What did they do to deserve that? They were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I was the wrong me for it. Three wrongs don’t make a right (but three rights make a left.)
I fell down on the job, Sir. I hate myself for doing it. I acknowledge I’m a limited being, living up to my limitations in stereo. I wish I was a better being. I’m working on my compassion for all creatures, great and small. I truly hope you won’t give up on me for this mistake. I’ll understand if you do. They didn’t deserve that and I remember our exercise in humility, all too late, of course.
How would you sentence a mass poisoner? I don’t remember exactly what I wrote down, but I do know it means my next lifetime will be spent paying reparations. I’ll probably be forced to clean up poisonous content until I die of it myself. (Oh wait, that sounds a lot like my current life. Hmm…) I’ll take whatever lickings I earned and try to do better, whatever comes my way. I am resilient and resourceful and I will always do my best.
On the flip side, human bean, let me tell you one thing: to allow the bugs to take over is also the wrong answer, though we really ought to build our caves underground instead of above ground, where they need constant maintenance because of the environment. I’m sure we could figure out how to keep our doorways clear of rain puddles and snow if we put our minds to it. The only reason there were mealworms (and maggots, undoubtedly, as we had a fly explosion) in my garbage can is air conditioning and summer garbage stink.
And one more important thing to note: maybe those bugs were always meant to die that way and they were previously human beings that mass poisoned the Earth and this is their justice.
Then again, maybe I’m just a ninny that wants to make myself feel better about a mealworm genocide in my kitchen.
What do you think?
Angel-Sansara 