My earliest memory. It’s late at night. I’m sitting on my father’s shoulders, riding home from a happy evening with my parents, and my aunt and uncle. I’m just over 3. I know that because my sister isn’t there, and she was born when I was 3 and 4 months.
My father says, in the silence, “Soon you’ll be too big to ride on my shoulders.”
It stuns me. Too big. I cannot imagine being too big to ride on my father’s shoulders.
Probably he was thinking of the baby soon to arrive.
I don’t know.
I didn’t say anything. But I remember the evening, a warm summer night, the dark street.
It’s been a long journey since then, still very much continuing.
And I’ve decided to write a bit about it, and about what’s going on with me now - hopes, struggles.
Where to start?
Maybe with something that is core to my being. Being puzzled. So many things have puzzled me - like that I would someday be too big to ride on my father’s shoulders.
And now, I’m puzzled, wondering, questions, searching about the forces against us - the people (and quite possibly also non-people) who don’t care about us. That’s saying things way too mildly. The word evil comes into my mind. But the image I get is cartoon evil - Cruella de Vil. And I know the the forces against us are utterly different from that.
There have been so many puzzles - so many passionate interests - in between that evening, riding on my father’s shoulders, and now.
It was a puzzle to me - that the earth was round and not flat - and that we lived on the outside of the world, not the inside, and did not fall off.
And then people. Millions of puzzles - intense questions - about people. Like why do social movements that sound so wonderful - like the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution - , end up with so much horror.
It took me a long time before I became aware of the extent of the horror - like of the Gulag Archipelago.
The puzzles live inside me, sometimes for decades, until I come to a solution, anyway to something that feels like a solution. Often I come to bits of solution - like the built-in human belief in happily-ever-after one-step solutions. They make us very vulnerable to anyone offering something like that. Poison apples.
So many puzzles - massive questions - even now.
In fact, I have never faced more deep complex puzzles and have also never learned more, than in the past 3 years.
How can what is happening be happening?
For instance, there are a massive number of possible charges against the occupant of the White House. None is brought. And Trump facing indictment.
How is all this possible?
Some of the answer is obvious. Powerful evil forces, bolstered by lesser forces, like greed and fear and unwillingness to see and laziness.
Often I have a firm conviction inside me, that the puzzle can be solved, and even that my efforts - all of our efforts - contribute to putting the puzzle pieces together.
I think of my father. Such a deep inner quest to do good. Such a strong experience of evil forces stopping him.
Now the quest is to continue, with so many steps leading us to so many discoveries.
Posted April 4, 2023
Thanks Elsa. Magic to glimpse so clearly into your early years.
Any current questioning, querying & wondering is, I believe is our collective souls awakening to a terrible evil stalking the world. The collective consciousness is undergoing a Great Awakening.
1Love to & for you, & the world too.
What a journey, It is said that for every problem there is a solution. And our joint quest it too find it