Lately, the early morning hours have brought me into a deep state healing. Gently, lovingly, full of awareness, pure, and clarified. Every morning, compelling me to describe these experiences for all who reflect on such things.
I had a meta experience this time as I was the 3 or 4-year-old child, I was the now me, and I was the woman interacting with the 3-year-old, a not me. Omniscience is this viewpoint,I believe. I was watching a familial interchange amongst 3 generations of women.
From the 3-year-old, I saw this woman, known to me as the mother or at the least, adult caregiver, and desired to do her hair. She was so beautiful to my 3-year-old eyes. Yet, I wanted to be the beauty shop lady and so, very gently, I started to trim her hair around her face. She went from stillness to completely animated and told me very specifically that I was a fucking whore for messing with her.
From me, within this woman, I looked to this child as she began to stab herself in the forehead and eyes with the scissors, wholly believing that she deserved to be blinded for making such a grave miss take about this lady. It must be true. She cares for me, so it must be true.
From me, as this woman, I grabbed the scissors when another older woman walked in. Not to stop the child, but to fix the rest of my hair around my face. As I chopped and cut and hair started falling away, leaving me with another artful design, I also justified to the other woman how this child deserved what was said. In which the other lady said, not one thing.
From me, the observer, I witnessed the child dim her life light, accepting what she has been demonstrated as her truth. How she immediately responded, in this case with self-inflicted physical harm.
From me, the observer, I felt the power this caregiver wielded toward/over the child, and her defense walls as well, and her history. Oomph, the child within her covered in cobwebs and left buried somewhere deep and dark within, as if there was a basement, long unused.
From all this perspective out poured the love for each innocent child misinformed. The compassion for the pain, the wounds, visible and invisible. The awareness of the denial, the lies, the cover-ups and the resignation. Generation to generation. From each father, each mother, each daughter, each son, from cousins to aunties, to uncles, as one.
Where do we go from here? How can we illuminate forward through the eyes of the innocent child? How can we wipe away the cobwebs to reveal the neglected innocence?
As I was shown, I was or am the child, I was, or am the woman, I was or am the mother, I was, or am the grand caregiver. Or, would caretaker be more appropriate here? A caregiver is my intent, caretaker, the distortion the cobwebs create.
To illuminate, I must look within. I must. For myself, as the innocent, reflecting the other generations' pain and the wound, the dis guise. I must look within. for where I buried myself, whether or not I ever wounded a child with the weapon of my words. If, by taking so long in my life to understand that a child may have remained unseen to me, as I passed by, their selves, hidden in plain view? I must illuminate for others to see, to recognize that they, are me.
A daughter, a son, within each and every one of us is the child. Each innocent shaping from what their senses show how to be. The children of the generation before birthed to the children of the generation before. Family, tribe, neighbors, communities, states, nations, countries, the world. We are all the children.