Heart Reading … Day 40
A bad letter to my dead father about the patriarchy.
Dad, you were mean to mom and I never sided with her emotionally (my throat is suddenly in extreme pain). I refereed many fights between you two and would often tell you you were wrong about whatever — but I never gave her my heart the way I gave it to you. For that I am full of regret.
You were an asshole. And when she became an asshole on par with you it was she who suffered the aftershock and the fallout. [My sister] just called me back and I shared this “exercise” with her; and [after she told me about her friend’s misery I] said her friend likely makes so many awful life mistakes without reaching out for help because she doesn’t know what trust, love, and support feels like.
Anyway, I think/feel that regret is what weighs the heart down; missed expressions of truth along every spectrum of interpersonal communication. And breathing, re-spiring with each other as we communicate is the way I have found the ability to speak openly. There are tons of missed expressions day-to-day that queue up inside, wishing for a kind ear…
The point of this “pen to paper” is, I guess, to say how embarrassed I was of my father; his Donkey Kong playing and “pico paco” name calling. I wonder if Pedro ever let himself feel anger at my father. And I wonder if my father ever let himself question his own father’s racism.
The new world order seems simple enough to me:
- Take guns away — and the American love affair with them.
- Tell the truth about inequity, poverty, access to food, water, housing, education, employment…
- Eschew extravagance.
This is where I left off that short and impatient letter to my father. It’s bad, all over the place, and wholly incomplete. Though I do like these three basic steps toward order.
I spent many years trying to help my father feel and heal from the tragedy he brought upon me and our family when he absent-mindedly killed my little brother by running over him in the driveway with his 18-wheeler. If I wasn’t a child myself when I saw this, I might have hated him and pushed him away from me. Who knows.
What I do know is that this tragic experience created so much confusion in my life that it set me on a course of intense discovery, which has led me to question repeatedly how in the world the world — in all its glorious bounty and beauty — could be quite so fucked up.
The absent-minded way in which heterosexual religious males, who have muscled their way to authority the world over, have brought tragedy upon me and our global family is truly hate worthy. But the child in all of us, along with the maternal, feminine, earth-wise emotional intelligence in all of us, knows exactly what to do with our collective pain and suffering.
The critical action is to do all of the transmuting, transforming work together. NOW.
