I Hate This! I Love This! Thank You!
I’m doing a little tarot throwback to the Two of Swords to anchor my thoughts today. But first, I just got off the phone with my very favorite Tree (and People!) Chaplain who shared the prayer in the subject line: I hate this! I love this! Thank you!
Anne Lammott has a similar prayer; “Help, thanks, wow.” And I’ve heard another one that just goes, “Yes, OK, thank you.” Why these prayers today? Because the world seems like it’s going to shitty shitty shit, like facism is back with a vengeance (noting of course that for black and brown folks in my country it never left), and that our time on this planet are way more limited than we predicted even a few years ago.
All of this filters down into the personal and intimate. Every client I’ve worked with since I began my business has some flavor of “Are things going to be ok…?” Hell, when I go to my healers and therapists that’s generally the tone there too. And so it can lead one to wonder something along the lines of “God, what the f*ck dude.”
Which brings us to the dilemma of the Two of Swords. You see, swords are the suit of the mind, of using our limited wetware computing abilities to try and FIGURE IT OUT. But as one of my teachers recently said, the mind is a machine rooted in the past and I’ll Figure It Out is not a slogan. As in, it can only make computations on what’s happened before because its only material is evidence of what has already been created. The mind can definitely attempt to imagine new things but is actually extremely limited in that capacity. The better machine for that work? Well you can look at the card and clearly see this woman has within her hands something else besides two swords. You guessed it; the human heart.
In the Two of Swords we see a woman who’s blinded by her mind’s attempt to grasp the solution; this sword or that sword, this sword or that sword. The astute among you might notice that two swords are a binary solution, a dichotomy, black and white thinking, and the kind of duality that has gotten us into all this mess in the first place. But move down to the heart and we begin to enter the realm of the compassionate ones, the enlightened masters, and the golden avatars Jesus and Buddha. There in the heart is the realm of the non-dual, of forgiveness, of expansive love, of wisdom, of knowingness, and of peace and resolution.
And of course, the glue that binds all these things together is gratitude. Help, thanks, wow. I hate this, I love this, thank you. Yes, OK, thank you. Do you see? We are, despite all evidence to the contrary, so fortunate to be alive on the planet at this time. We have not just court-side seats but actual jerseys to play in the game of life happening on the planet right now. Some say there are souls lined up for blocks to get into the incarnations we who are lucky enough to be here have right now.
The trick is to shift your perspective from that (totally justifiable) one of “Oh shit….” to “Oh my God thank you…” To come down out of the head which sees only us and them, me and you, right and wrong, black and white, and land gently in the expansive space of the grateful heart. There are solutions there that will astound you. It is filled with vast realms of peace that heal all wounds. It knows where we are headed and can light the way one step, one day at a time. And as I’ve preached many times, it is the realm of Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, and the enlightened avatars surrounding Planet Earth at all times.
So no matter what you encounter today, whether you hate it or love it or are totally confounded by it or feel explosive anger at it, try a thank you prayer. And I don’t mean this in a spiritual bypassy way of every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining. But rather to really get into the heart and into the frequency of gratitude around everything no matter what it looks like to you.
We’ve come to the end of the era of the divisive mind and we need as many people as possible living in the era of the grateful heart. From gratitude we can do all things because we are in the non-dual realm of the heart. From gratitude we can heal all wounds because we are living in the expansive field of connectedness. From gratitude we can find a way forward even if it isn’t fully revealed yet because in the realm of the grateful heart we have an internal light that can never, ever be extinguished.
May it be so.
