Love is the ability to embrace the total package. Love is partial to the truth but accepts the existence of everything, however vile, however glorious.
In a dream, I walk with my family a few steps behind Donald Trump and his family on the streets of a metropolis. I’m drawn to walk beside him. We are looking for a hospital. Suddenly Trump faints in my arms. There’s a soft puffiness to his body and I feel a kindness coming from him. I also notice that he has terrible breath.
In my dream, I’m drawn to Trump, perhaps feeling the draw of my ego to walk with power, an inflated air. The hospital represents an illness, something in need of healing. As Trump faints in my arms I encounter his humanness, and beneath it all a soft kindness. The breath is what takes in spirit, spirit is air. In this case, the bad breath signals a malaria, a bad spirit, the source of the illness.
And so, can I love my ego self that is attracted to power? Can I love my animal self, the soft fallible body? Can I love my spirit self, the one that sometimes is high and sometimes quite low, sometimes the smell of flowers and sometimes quite foul?
We are beings of goodness and badness—we must live, love, and find a place for it all. Americans are prone to high spirits. We leap ahead for two terms and elect a black man to the highest level; gay marriage, transgender rights become the law of the land. But what about our bigoted selves, our angry selves, our suppressed, primitive, disorderly selves, our miserly selves, our envious, jealous selves, our lustful selves, our rigidly conservative selves? We reach so high in our all-accepting values that we push down and disavow our lowly selves.
Trump swung into power because he spoke directly to our politically incorrect selves, and so he continues, his popularity growing exponentially. Unless we face and come to love and accept our deepest, darkest sides, we are prone to be mesmerized by a leader who unabashedly says what many may feel but are too afraid to say.
We are a composition of good and evil, order and chaos. All parts of us must be lived in some way if we are to become whole beings. Yes, we must love every lowly part of ourselves and give it its rightful place in our beings.
In my dream, healing was called for. The Trump of my dream suffered from a disjointed spirit and body. The bad spirit in his body made for a toxic brew. Somehow the balance was off, the dark spirit having overtaken the body. Nonetheless, the body revealed its innocence, its softness, its kindness.
When, as human beings, we identify only with our high spirits we are prone to a radical shift that will bring us down and dirty into the mardi gras of our self-serving instinctual selves. It’s a law of nature that if we go too far in one direction we will swing to the other side in an equally one-sided way. That’s where we are now as chaos has its turn with the world.
The key is for us to accept all of ourselves, to truly embrace the total package. Love accepts all, all that is. Love knows that nothing can be excluded without a cost, without a loss, without an eventual revolution.
Once we can love all that we are, we can create a new harmony beyond the radical bipolar splits we see around us and experience in our own moods and self-judgments. This is the journey of our planet now, to embody all is love and love is all.
Lovingly,
Chuck
