Gretel’s Pause
Off cuff, I wrote this a year or so ago… tangential but you might get something out of it. It’s interesting to me that it feels dated now… yet written just a year ago… are we actually evolving?
Gretel’s PAUSE
It has occurred to me that most of us are still engaged in a couch-comfy trust, resistant to any peace-of-mind-robbing hesitation (pause) to believe everything we are “officially” told, (like conformity is the cost of belonging), to stay aboard the floating barge… for the tides out there in the mysterious ocean shall be hard to tread… why jump ship when the ship’s hull is warm and the company is good and social media is all we need to stave off loneliness and Amazon satiates our need to suture our indefinable wounds with…. New STUFF! (Keeping the flow going, we begin to feel this new stuff is a staple, something akin to food, without which we might perish!).; after all, the consumer industry itself took our cold lost hand and led us out of the forest to the candy hovel and said eat! Eat! I love you! I am but a kind-hearted protector. Now rest, you must be exhausted from your perseverance, I am here watching you keeping you safe! Now close your eyes! You were abandoned, lost, but now you are found! Rest my babes, let me tuck you in. Safe and sound. But when Gretel awoke she found they had been tricked! Her doomed brother would be the feast that fuels the beast and she it’s slave. What set them free? Gretel’s moment of PAUSE. Quiet, sobering epiphany. What harnessed that pause into action? Gretel’s fearless conviction to preserve the only thing, the ONE AND ONLY THING, she knew to be profoundly TRUE: the love she shared with her brother. She was very brave, as she had just been traumatized by her evil step mother and complicit father’s abandonment; yet she resisted emotional response, resisted fear, choosing instead to harness that energy and mind towards the “outwit-ance” of the WITch. She CHOSE to not be a sheep. THIS is the only “truth” that matters. Let’s keep our wits about us… do not trade them like cash for your golden ticket onto the glamorous barge. For the barge is the candy hovel. And unless you are a Gretel you will become fuel for the beast. What is the beast? Well, after all is said and done it is… you and I. And we collectively shall be accountable for our own misguided demise.
Don’t be afraid to… jump ship… or at least, meander out the plank to gaze at your reflection… and REFLECT. (You don’t even have to tell your neighbors!). Like Gretel just when the old hag/witch seemingly innocently asked her to light the oven’s interior pilot, it occurred to Gretel that compliance would place her in the literal line of fire, and as she hesitated in that moment of “pause”, the epiphany, like a saving grace, rushed in and washed away all her misguided contentment and trust, so she was left only with the sordid, ugly, TRUTH.
It only takes a millisecond to turn your world upside down. The epiphany is not always a welcomed visitor. For it does not solve the problem… it is the thing that triggers you to SEE THAT THERE IS, OR MAY BE, a problem. It does not come with a map to guide you through the problem, and at first grasp, you may even GASP, as it simultaneously hips you to the terrifying realization that everything you “knew”, everything you were accustomed to, everything that had become easy and reassuring, is suddenly and irrevocably verging on absolute and catastrophic anhilation.
Threatening The demise of your existence as you know it… As perhaps you even liked it. You absolutely did not want this prophetic epiphany to come storming through the doors of your awareness like some rogue wave, destabilizing the foundation of your goals and success. Perhaps even grabbing your precious values-set, your moral code… the throne on which dignity and conviction sit! Much like museum treasures on a pedestal with artificial illumination angling its contours towards its “better side”, to reap the most adoration and influence it possibly can from visitors to the ‘museum of you’. After all, harkening back to Adam and Eve, our nakedness is humiliating. We cannot make friends with it, we cannot bear it, it must be shrouded at all costs! Nakedness=humiliation. All this leaves you reeling in the impossibility of what you suddenly and irreversibly now know.
The “pause” we feel (when we are at least paying attention) just before we consign ourselves to climb aboard the ship of our leaders’ promotion, just before the influencers convince us they are spokespersons for the intergalactic round table, positioned inside the orbs, here to “fix” the damage we’ve caused, (then leave us to do it all over again??! lol), that PAUSE that grips us without warning, when it is allowed to remain for a moment more, becomes an epiphany, and often a disruptive threat, loosening the rungs of the primordial ladder, the “tool” of our upward mobility, leaned up against the horizon of our ultimate goals… which is to canonize ourselves as individually unforgettable; thus, more often than not, we dismiss that nuisance called “pause”, in favor of retaining the progress we’ve made thus far, especially if our ladder-climb is high up enough to glimpse the glory of our success. But when we choose to turn away from our “pause”’s we are very possibly assigning ourselves to agendas we truly cannot and do not know, down here in the foggy soup of orbs and drones and fires and thrones and pandemics and wars and too much waste and consumer exploit and a government promoting more of the same? While adolescent dolphins wash ashore with their sonic processors blown from the inside-out (an image we cannot erase or escape, so indelibly impressed into our souls it is…), we cannot barely contain our dismay and disgust withOUT allowing “pause” to further imprint these indelible horrors upon our psyches. It comes through like graffiti along our ladder rungs. Bright and cautionary… hard to ignore but we do. By keeping eyes on the prize!
Sounds like a deplorable cynicism? My portrait of the current state of humanity? It is a lonely place to be… the bottom of a ladder whose rings all snapped in half with your fateful decent. But remember Jack? And the beanstalk?
Fairytales are extraordinary advisors when you have the courage to foster your “pause” and reap FREEDOM. The profound kind. Baring no resemblance to today’s promoted portrait of what it means to be FREE. Your ladders are a mirage.