Folding the Laundry

Family relationships and laundry.  That's what I've really got here, to be honest in the day to day.  And both are heaped high, endlessly wrinkled, sometimes stained and torn, in need of sorting, folding, tending, care.  Perhaps it is no coincidence that the laundry sits here, in a room with an altar, incense, sacred stones.  It is inescapable mess, though I might certainly desire an escape. Romanticism is both my gift and my curse, while the simple Zen of folding my salvation- that which brings me back to the present moment..

I don't know if it will ever go away. Tonight I lost my temper and yelled at the kids who were speaking disrespectfully. I felt awful afterwards.  Generations of disrespect and bitterness don't dissipate overnight, and I know it is up to me to stop passing along what has been passed on.  Guilt is getting me nowhere.

Love your future self, a friend of mine has said, and I imagine mine confident and loving.  I imagine mine radiant and whole; she is not some other, but the very self at my core. Her love runs deep.

I don't know if this struggle to fully love and embrace the deep self will ever go away; if it did I suppose I would be enlightened!  It strikes me that in one day I can go from an all-pervasive sense of serene well-being and confidence to feelings of brokenness. But perhaps I can get that deep peace back without turning a blind eye to my faults.  We are all broken and whole at the same time, and our wholeness can only exist if we embrace the broken pieces.

I know this, and still resist.  I am sorry, I say it out loud.  But I am also fantastically wonderful and alive.  These piles of laundry will take time to sort through, and layer after layer the work seems just endless.  But I don't have to do the work all at once.  Little by little, I clear the space, and find here in this room a deep, forgiving and radiant peace.

This is no far out dream;  this is my reality.