Examining Suffering Through Tessa Lena's Kaleidoscope
If you haven’t read Tessa Lena’s work, I highly recommend it. I find that she has me examining big and little pieces of myself and my world again and again until I can find the beauty in them.
Her latest is one of many pieces of writing that I have loved reading.
You walk straight, you zigzag, you fall and rise, you get a lot of help from the universe and from good people. Occasionally (or often, if you are doing something important or have a strong potential to heal a chunk of the world), proverbial Bad Witches try to mess with you ruthlessly and interfere with your progress—and the trick is to stand up straight, to pray for guidance, to never-ever-ever in any way betray your dignity, never lose faith in your destination of joy. To love yourself completely. To believe in yourself completely because you are not a bystander, and your work matters to the world A LOT. You are learning how to be a victorious warrior against the Bad Witc.. hes so that you can keep them at bay, and so that there may be peace.
And as you do all this, somehow, in the process, your intellectual identity falls off, you don’t even notice or remember the times when it controlled you, and you become an arrow of love, a messenger of your soul.
I so appreciate how she gives meaning to the haphazard clumsiness of our journeys (mine anyway)… how she finds beauty in our very human experiences.
This also resonates:
We, modern people, are very much like cells that are born into a body overtaken with metastatic cancer. We only know how to be a part of a sick body and, based on our immediate practical experience, we ascribe our starved state to “just how things are.”
But no. This is only how things are for a cell that exists in body overtaken by metastatic cancer. This is not how things are by default. This is how they are now. And we are in a journey. We are swimming through sewage collectively, and we’ll get to our destination faster if we keep swimming forward and keep our eyes on the prize (getting home, washing off, and forgetting all about the crap).
Trying to remain a healthy cell is no easy feat. But it helps to be surrounded by others.