4.26.15 As waves skirt the shore: Triangulation and Duplicity

           How odd, the land of triangulation and duplicity.

Can you remember being a kid, and trying it out? Forging a quick, heady connection with someone based solely on being quietly against someone else? Some time later, it occurs to us that we would not want to be treated this way, and we decide whether to leave that crap behind. 

           Duplicity, too, can rear it's odd tangled head, catching us off guard, as trust becomes questioned, and we take a new look at that relationship. Fool me once, shame on you. Twice? Yeah, we sit up and take notice, sorting out new information, and adapting our proximity to others.

           My WASPy upbringing was fraught with both, as our lives sometimes are. I remember my grandmother going on to my sister-in-law about the beauty of her hip-length hair, only to turn and quietly mention how disgusting it was. I certainly sat up and took notice. Wondering at the need to say anything at all, if it clearly was untrue. Ah, the subterranean nature of social connivance.

            What a relief it was to discover you could craft a life that taught you how to communicate your differences some of the time. Hold your own counsel on them the rest of the time. That it was possible, of all things, to express your observations or emotions as your own, versus feeling compelled to debate their veracity on the open market.

              Now, when I have encountered both of these odd small poor ways, I am unsuspecting, until they careen along, as they do, and eventually implode upon themselves; as they angrily cannot contain the two distinct worlds any longer. Of presenting themselves one way, and holding a far different sense of things internally. Something always happens, as a last straw, and they turn to you, furious, as if you were the one all along necessitating their twists and turns and vast efforts. They spill their cards with some sort of victorious relief, and there they are, who they were being all along.Finally showing you how they know that things are.

               Pema Chodron speaks of living with an open heart. An open heart enables us to live open, full, and in the real moment of whatever life holds for us, right now. An open heart takes note of observation and emotion, learns from experience, and then stays the course. Of simply what is.

               We rest in what is, and the rancor or disappointment or sense of betrayal comes to its peak, like the cresting of a magnificent ocean wave, and then pulls back into itself, released, as the bubbles skirt the shore.