277) The Children Remember: Toxic families, and how and why they resist change, growth, and healing
Children always remember. While adults spin their self-justifying stories, make their excuses, give their false wisdom about '“seeing the best in everybody” and having “good Christian values,
the children remember the stark, experiential truth….
73) Dear Ancestors,
Dear Ancestors, thank you for this chance you’ve given me, to live. For the songs you passed on. The babies you nursed at your breasts, taught to walk, and speak, and play, and fish, and build, and love, and read, and forgive. Thank you for your courage, the sacrifices you made in the wars of your time. The wisdom you discovered in silent meditation. The poems. The traditions, dances, beautiful creations of art and worship. Thank you for the recipes you passed down through generations of care-takers labouring over hot stoves, for the endless mouth-watering concoctions we coaxed from the abundance of water and soil and sunlight. Thank you for the luminaries who inspired all who came after, to strive for the Good, to love unto death.
8) Gobble Gobble
When you face loss, which we all do, and the loss is one that you feel with the full gooeyness of your heart, and you sit and weep, tears dripping freely off your face….and that feeling inside? That aching, burning, desperate, gasping desire to do ANYTHING to go back in time and change how this has turned out? That feeling is one of the worst feelings in the world.
And gratitude is the gift that it brings. All you have to do is unwrap the soul-crushing, heart-splaying agony that it is wrapped in. And then, my friend, gratitude can be yours.