The Fire

I’ve sent my children out into the world this morning. They’re out there without me, more and more as the years go on. Most days I do it and I go out into the world without them and we all do as we need to do until we come back together. Most days it feels fine but today it feels heavy.

Today I don’t trust the world to be gentle with them because today the world feels anything but gentle. It’s been building and it’s been a number of things. Most that are happening in your world too, a couple that are happening closer to home for me.

It feels like raising these kids to be gentle out in the world is more important than it’s ever been and also more terrifying than anything I’ve ever experienced. To go out into a reactive, aggressive and volatile world gently, softly and with compassion feels like the only thing that might have a chance of shifting the way the world is and feels right now.

Many of us are doing just that, have been doing just that consciously and purposefully. Taking the bumps, the push back, absorbing the pain at times in our stride, at other times feeling it, working through it even if temporarily buckling under it.

It feels worth it, even in the hardest of those times now because I’ve seen what comes of sticking with it. I’ve seen and felt what is always, always on the other side of those painful bumps. I’ve felt the way it shifts and what is waiting for us all on the other side of those shifts when they accumulate. I’m ok with my pain now. I’m ok with feeling it all, accepting it all, allowing and surrendering to it all. I’m willing to go gently, softly compassionately and vulnerably out into the world knowing that I will be met with the opposite more often than I will be met with the same.

Can I send my children out though, to face the same? Can I now sit with the pain of their confusion, their conflict, their discomfort when the world out there doesn’t match or respond in the way I’m asking them to respond? Can I ask them and support them to stay gentle and soft and walk into a sharp, aggressive world full of spot fires ready to blow?

What is the other option? To add to the sharpness and reactivity, to give up and fall into contributing to it as well as to deny the world the shifts, the ripples that these three small people could bring over the course of their lives? How could I do that in good conscience? How could I deny them the option to choose?

So we go gently, steadily, curiously and compassionately out into the world. Expecting that we deserve to be met with the same and also knowing that it will not always, not even usually be the case. I continue to do that each and every day and I allow them to watch, to absorb and to decide whether they will walk into the fire with me or become it.