Being Real

standing on my head said... why would we choose separation? so we can spend all our time working to let go of the illusion of separation? now i know why i feel like a hamster on the wheel!

I wanted to choose separation or non-belief for years. I didn't want to accept a god who allows what happens in the universe. I guess I wanted justice and I don't get that from a belief in god. Yet I do believe and at a point I remember well I did choose to believe. At that moment the hamster wheel stopped. Now faith is second nature. I accepted somewhere along the line that injustice is part of the the way the universe works. Things happen to good people for no good reason. I can choose to accept that or choose to deny it. It's easy when everything is going well, Everyone you love is happy and healthy. Kindness and compassion for people around the world is seen in daily events. But something always happens. A loved one passes away. natural disasters; Tsunami, Earthquakes, Sinkholes, Flooding. On and on the list grows. Man' inhumanity to the planet, to the people of the planet to our neighbors to strangers on the street.I for one get angry with god. Let's face it, the universe is pretty well fucked up. And not just by the actions of humans.

And yet you still have faith in me. you turn to me with the expectations that everything is somehow going to be all right. That Your loved ones may be absent but they are not lost. That the poor and down trodden will have their turn to reach for the brass ring. You feel that along with my presence and you except in faith that it is true. With no evidence to base that belief on other than you want to believe it. Why Michael? Why not accept the atheist position that there is no God? While you say that our conversations our figments of your imagination you still believe that in some sense you are indeed talking with a being that transcends your meager life. Why? 


  Hope. Hope that in some future I will be able to spend time with my  brother. Time we didn't get this time around. The same with my father and Grand Parents, and others I have loved and lost through the years. Hope. Hope that mankind will be able to solve it's problems. That we will be able to walk in the sunlight of your love as friends, as companions with love for each other and kindness toward all creation. That's why I believe. Because I feel that possibility whenever I reach to touch you. Whether I'm reaching out in anger, hatred or love. I feel that compassion and I know, not just hope, but know that everything will be fine. I don't know when but I know it will happen.

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. 

But the Skin Horse only smiled.

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams