Sometimes I think this is a twisted culture where it’s so hard to be who and what we are and to express ourselves naturally with our community. Instead we’re trained to take our essence and modify and package it so we can sell it to each other. It’s not so easy to share our gifts and talents freely in natural mutuality, the system demands that we must make ourselves into products to consume. Where once we’d simply enjoy each other’s gifts, now we devour each other’s branded essence, and in doing so we dismember our wholeness and sever the deep, living contexts and interwoven fabric of our wholeness.
I choose to offer myself in all, to all. I refuse to pick off the most usable, saleable portions of my being to package in plastic for others to buy from a cheap merchandiser at the checkout.
”Souls for sale! – but only the choice cuts please. Keep the rest and consider it worthless. We don’t want all of you, just the highlights, just what the market wants today. We’ve no time for whole human beings.”
We’re all TL;DR – we remain largely unread. The system demands it. Skimming is the best we can do.
So what do we do with the unread, unseen parts of ourselves? If no-one values our wholeness, why should we? So we push what’s left into darkness, into shadow. Like icebergs, we reveal only a fraction of ourselves to each other. But underneath, in the depths, we are much more, and so much unseen. And so when we get close to each other, the shadows of our hidden underbellies collide, and we don’t know why. We’ve so forgotten ourselves in the rush to present the acceptable, the consumable, the sellable parts.
We need to take time and give attention to know ourselves as deep and wide. Ourselves and each other. We are more than our ‘best foot forward’. We are more than our highlights, more than our unique selling points.
We can’t let the world reduce us to a partial, standardised output. We are the totality of our being. We are fullness and complexity and nuance. We are light and dark and everything in between. And we are worthy. We are all worthy.