Spanish purity is a real pity

”Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” -Matthew 7:3

    One thing my mental health background helps me to understand is that we are all individually, familially, and communally needing to repair, refine and maintain a dignified lifestyle. Nuevomexicanos have plenty of repair to continue with while paradoxically needing grace from the punishment inflicted by the intruding realms. This typically means a growing Anglo presence. The idea of Anglo itself is a complicated concept. Much of which propagates a mythology of race reinforcing a European farce that motivates people to segregate, compare, and weigh. The aspiration for some type of purity that allows some people to situate themselves with power might always have a place in humanity. I haven’t reached a point in my life where my profits are more important than the communal wellness. This is idealistic. The term I like to use to describe this orientation is communal, because conservative culture has ruined any ability to use socialist neutrally. To be a better person I feel I need to look critically at me, my family, and my belonging systems often. 

    The current injustices towards Mexican heritage by conservative organizations, is the speck I am wanting to remove from a brother’s eye. The American conservative want to dismantle several systems that I find vital to my culture, prosperity, and understanding of liberty. Ethnic studies and affirmative action are among these. The basis for their position against these are complicatedly sensible from a theoretical position. For example, it isn’t helpful to use race as a distinguisher and equally it isn’t clear how racist discrimination and bigotry are rare enough to trust a merit based value system.The part I have concerns about are the lack of barriers around prejudice and corruption. If we don’t acknowledge these factors and scan for them we are propagating the imperial tactics that divided the melanin rich peoples from positions of power and safety from exploitation. The large grey area here is having a mature normal criteria for identifying toxic traits like prejudice, oppression, bigotry, cheating, corruption, lies, and deception. We want to legislate like we are not bigoted.  We want to civil empowerment like we are fair. We want to regulate like we aren’t corrupt. We want liberty like we aren’t greedy. This dissonance is rolling around in my head.  What is far more clear are ways in which I resort to these corrupt modalities. I feel I try to keep my grey areas small and steer clear of convenience. One that I have recently gained clarity on is a belonging system. I have championed for years being New Mexican, and I have not processed thoroughly the positions of privilege that my heritages have leveraged. 

    The prompt for these ideas stem from not being able to reconcile how family members could align themselves with a person like Trump. I have been holding this dissonance emotionally and contemplatively. Abortion laws seem to be the de facto reason, but beyond that there are still some concerning indicators that point to other potentially menacing symbols. The labels New Mexican’s choose hint at a lingering infection of the mind; we still carry the germs of racism. When we subtilely choose a label that favors a Spanish purity, we unconsciously align ourselves with the legacy of whiteness as power. So before I can ask the Federalist or Confederate American to remove the speck from their eye, I feel a need to give attention to the plank in mine. This is the Chicano way of holding the both/and. The art of the mestizo, we know how to hold the liminal tension found in competing truths. Or better the convenience of situating ourselves between the myths and lies.   

     Research around this topic explores the significance of a Euro purity, whiteness, and political power as key factors in the use of labels that Mexican descendants choose. Discourse on this topic presents how the identity politics has been materializing for over a century. New Mexico’s transitional periods from a Spanish colony to a Mexican province, and then into the eventual US take over have highlighted the leveraging of an allegorical Spanish purity. This theme shows an alignment with a racially safer European identity. John Nieto-Phillips writes about the beginnings of a caste struggle for Nuevomexicanos/as as their power was depleted under United States (US) rule (2004). Nieto-Phillips writes about the origins for Nuevomexicanos/as demand to show Spanish purity as an effort to establish a standing in the American social and civic platforms (16). As Nuevomexicanos/as leave the colonial period of dominance, Martha Menchaca details how land loss becomes a key motivation for the early identity struggle of Nuevomexicanos (246).  The theme of social relevance grows during this period.

    A trend begins for Nuevomexicanos indicating a grasping at European identity to plead for equality with the Anglo American (Nieto-Phillips 16). The generations that experienced a Mexican nation, around a quarter century, experience a widening wealth gap (Menchaca 271). Research helps to describe the early events that created New Mexico’s divide between the have and have nots and perspective on not embracing a Mexican label. Where Menchaca and Nieto-Phillips shape an understanding of civil conditions, there is a menacing topic of lynching of Mexican people that research has not been widely written about. The civil systems that Menchaca has written about skirts a more violent ethnic prejudice, white supremacy, and a “tantamount to state-sanctioned terrorism” that existed (Carrigan et al. 416). The power dynamics for the Nuevomexicano reverse going into US rule, and the embryo that will be a Chicanx identity forms in the womb of the region we now know as the borderlands. And here comes the “Hispanic” identity. Laura Gómez explores the origins of the term “Hispanic,” forming a confluence that begins to link the allegory of purity, caste-izing, land loss, and terrorism with an incentive to be more tolerated (52). Gómez reveals how the Hispanicization is the sanitization of a more radical form of label like Chicano (45). A throughline is observable in this tiring and bleak attempt at colonial purity and evolution to a modern submissive quality still needing to show belonging. Along with belonging there is some desperation for success or slanted form of prosperity.

    This research reveals a persistent need for control, authority, and influence through the epochs. These traits have tumbled around with paradoxical traits like harmony, dignity, and collaboration. There are Nuevomexicanos/as gravitating towards a Hispanic label and their association to the label Chicanx is not clear; it is still tumbling. Both carry responsibility to self-govern their potential to diminish the dignity of the people who use them. More importantly, each has potential for pursuing ethnic advocacy.  In the underlying history these labels still have a responsibility to help repair atrocities inflicted and endured. Gómez posits that these newer labels are “infused with political meaning,” despite not being clear in what the meaning is (55). What is clear is that there are paradoxical, maybe a less romantic term might be competing, regardless, there is a splitting that is leading to an ongoing split around becoming more agreeable to Anglo systems. The tug of war between a Hispanic elite, more conservative and in alignment with power and a Chicanismo that wants a more communal modality to chip away at the deviance of misused power, might be exactly what the colonial machine intended. It is not clear how to approach the lynching of Mexican descendants.  I have resolved that the cultural identity tumbling is not slowing down soon. The impacts of Hispanicization on the Nuevomexicano through a frustrated lens looks like the choking to death of a querencia. It is confusing because it could also be the opposite from a more hopeful lens. Neither label has obvious footings in these two perceptions. The newer label of “Hispanic” complicates the comradery that might be needed and raises more questions. Is solidarity between these two labels essential to the health of the people that use them? I would say to Hispanics:

“Feel free to identify as white while responsibly resisting the urge to turn it into any form of supremacy”

 

Work Cited

Carrigan, William D., and Clive Webb. “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928.” Journal of Social History, vol. 37, no. 2, 2003, pp. 411–38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3790404. Accessed 26 June 2025.

Gómez, Laura E. “The Birth of the ‘Hispanic’ Generation: Attitudes of Mexican-American Political Elites toward the Hispanic Label.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 19, no. 4, 1992, pp. 45–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2633844. Accessed 10 July 2025.

Menchaca, Martha. Recovering History, Constructing Race : The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans, University of Texas Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unm/detail.action?docID=3443170.

Nieto-Phillips, John M. The Language of Blood : The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New                            Mexico, 1880s-1930s / John M. Nieto-Phillips. University of New Mexico Press, 2004.

            EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=5665a9f5-2deb-377b-b84d-78ecac91c9d8

Hispanics in Panic

How to deal with the Hispanic causing panic? Being New Mexican usually affords you a dog in the fight about how Spanish one is. This post is not about the measurable traits to help with this argument. This post is about my understanding of how the Mexican descendants in the borderlands, the North American Southwest, demonstrate heritage acrobatics to draw a phantom line between an Anglo heritage and a Mestizo heritage.  The idea of identity itself is phantom and only a frame of mind. The two words Spanish and Mexican qualitatively not only divide a mindset, but these contrasting signifiers ripple through in Nuevo Mexico’s politics, prejudices, and myths.

Most Hispanics aren’t white supremacist. White supremacist in this context is the belief that Anglo-euro white persons are superior to all other heritages, often using race as a criteria for this belief.  This post is also not about breaking down the semantics for what can be seen as white supremacy. I use this as a basis for describing a cultural divide amongst Mexican descendants in the borderlands. The fallout of the Treaty of Hidalgo, was a promise through a “sporked” tongue. This is the type promise where the agreements were implemented with the bigotry and system rigidity that ensure quick unraveling of any promises, and with an invisibility that left Mexicanos screaming with no one to hear.  The agreement was implemented in a way that provided loopholes, negations, and forfeitures in a manner that skirted the line of evil, while blowing past dignified. This was a colonial carry over from imperial tactics, but mainly just dirty.

This is where the Mexicano people likely consummated the Corsican relationship between Chicano and Hispanic. It served the newly acquired “American Citizens” a naturalized chance at running the prosperity obstacle course to retain their land, rights, and dignity. Many of these land owning Mexican descendants saw the landscape of this obstacle course. They learned from watching squaters, false claims, vigilante justice, and susceptibility to unchecked white crime. They learned how important it was to claim “White” as a piece of safety equipment.  New Mexicans found themselves at the mercy of the American’s appetite for all things profitable. 

The paradox here is the wealthy newly naturalized American citizens likely used similar tactics in their past to acquire their capital during the conquest. So the capitalist encounters a more vindictive capitalist and we have two bullies finding new ways to keep their power. The Mexican with much more to lose transforms themselves from Mexicano into something distinguished, Hispanic. The New Mexican northern Mexican villager who somehow had a direct flight from Santa Fe or Albuquerque to Spain. One of the very first Southwest Airlines  “gotta get away” deals. Joking aside, elite Nuevomexicanos among other politically motivated people used their Spanish lineage as a litigation tool.  

Nearly 200 hundred years later we have people who hold tightly this same Spanish purity myth.

I offer me.

As I recognize my life’s tank dial, move closer and seemingly faster than ever towards empty, I accept how pain and love complement themselves more than ever.  I love that I feel pain free and simultaneously respect how pain filled life has to be.  My youthful self mildly glamorized a pain filled self perception and romanticized some struggles. I romanticized my story stirring up pain, replaying thoughts of hardship. I think through the years I have learned to value the reflective strategies that help me assess my pain; translate my pain versus indulging. My Catholic faith with its many flaws, provides me with tools that help me understand when and if my pain is phantom or real. Both my romanticized manifested pain and real wounds are impactful. 

The phantom pain lead to the stirring up of anger pangs, and the real pains hurt so bad I am led to anguish reminding me they still needing healing. I also get to taste the pain, regardless of its ontology, and can better determine if the pains are necessary or in vain. The strategy I feel most essential to my encounters with pain is embracing paradox.  My capacity to scan for paradox is a tactic my Catholic faith instilled in me. It is literally a believe system of contradictions where holding a concept made of competing truths is fundamental. In  the context of pain, it is the movement to find a balance between fear and trust. I have to hold the avoidance of pain with the absolute inevitability of pain, like a person who has to breathe in while going under water, building up a panicked eagerness to breathe out.  The paradox isn’t the breathing, the paradox is the desire to be where we don’t naturally belong to get a taste the forbidden, at the risk of drowning; we find a way to have both. There are tiny opposites in every paradox creating small revolutions of meaning. At the same time there is a consequential tranquility laying down a stillness. The struggle and or the dance to seek out this idiosyncratic balance is what I call a Chicano style. Finding a personal balance between two competing intrapersonal truths and offering that awareness as a contribution to the everyday interpersonal existence, a Chicano Style. Most healthy cultures have a similar system. 

I think there is something revealing about the mestizo attitude that encourages gravitation towards pain. My pride in a Nuevomexicano (Mexican-American) heritage gives me the bedrock to let my pain filled experiences flow right into a humility that my elders prepared me for. Hard work is the place where pain goes to be planted, beads of sweat cool the tempers, releasing tears dripped from the grief, hydrating my seeds of passion. Seeds of passion that were fanatic in my childhood and adolescence. Seeds of passion that were economic and political in my early adulthood. Maybe the social justice curiosity is how I have learned to deal with my pain.  Social injustice is the way for my pain to be externalized. How I approach the externalized is how I feel I will heal the internal. If I let the greedy American infuriate me with their disregard for my heritage or perceived dignities then I cannot learn about the defenses of those material imbalances of land, water, money, laws, comforts, rights, or culture. This is where my faith guides me into paradox. The greedy American is in pain, and maybe more pain than me. Their insatiability is the strategy they’ve learned to rely on to ease their pain. I have that same insatiability in me. The paradox is seeing myself as a greedy Chicano, while also defending myself from the toxicity of the greedy American. My peace of mind has to be found through the hard fight of treating my inner insatiable and building up a harmonious internal sense of enough. Then bring this feature to existence in the form of a Chicano ofrenda to my immediate world. 

I understand that my romance with pain, gave me the emotional state to write interestingly, at least to me.  And at least it felt more interesting as I revisit it.  Now I just feel the paradox. The fire that pain once lit, is now more of an irritating burn. I have found joy in the mediocre.  I can’t write like I used to. I often feel like my thought process is analogous to a cows digestive system. I chew the same topics, swallow, digest, absorb, regurgitate, and bite a few more blades of tragedy.  It doesn’t feel as poetic and color filled as it once did, when I was closer to my pain. I think that balance is easier to choose than preference.  My emotions aren’t as contrasting, making it harder to find the momentum to write. With acceptance comes comfort. I haven’t learned to write from comfort.

I wonder if this is a type liminal space that might help with saying goodbye to this world.  Does balance fit with acceptance?  Is acceptance an illusion that is really just expressing the condition of being option-less.  I once relied so much on my grandparents.  I relied so much on mothering from, of course Mom, and fortunately my Aunts.  I felt such hurt from the lost or missed time with an attentive father. And yet I had the attention of loving people,  I found perspectives that highlighted my pain and that I nestled up to. My pain was a fuel for my movement, pain was my rhythm.

I am losing my family and friends. I think this would bring on a sadness that I think I would channel into these perceptions to propagate the same outlets.  I’m not sad in the same ways.  I am a sad that feels as if it skipped straight to acceptance.  I am curious about my comfort with solitude.  What is it about balance that allows for an apparent comfort for being alone.  My life still feels meaningful but equally it is definitely feeling less certain.  I still want to live.

Life is still teaching me.

You can’t assassinate closeminded-ness, only heal it

 As much as I have worked through hate for Donald Trump I have not reached the depths of wanting him to suffer.  An attempt on his life was made.  A young adult, perched himself on a rooftop overlooking the event space for a Trump rally.  While Donald was performing, the young man took aim and fired a long distance rifle shot. The young boy unleashed the next round of spectacle and delivered tragedy and disappointment on us.  He has doused the flames of discontent with more malice.  I look back at the event and see how its chaos is a good reflection point for me.

What happens next will inform us about who we are?  I’d like to spend time on the we in question being the us as a country, but I am stuck on the we as a political mechanism.  I hope there is humanism in the situation.  I hope I am surprised by Donald’s responses.  I hope I am surprised by the sympathy that comes from our civic leadership.  I am ready to work through the opposite and typical bipartisan extremes.  I wonder how we will reflect on the symptom of violence as a preferential response to disagreement.  I am expecting the typical marketing spin, immature exploitation of the circumstances, the propagandizing of it, and the lack of curiosity for how we continue to rely on ending each other.

It seems appropriate to start with myself, for retrospect.  When I first heard that he was shot at, I didn’t believe it. That quickly transitioned to skepticism that it was likely staged. Then as more reliable sources were reporting on it, I felt shame for my own lack of sympathy for the man.  I feel disappointed that I didn’t have a strong sense of concern for his security.  I am asked to love my enemy, and this revealed to me that I have not evolved in this area of my faith.  I am ashamed that I even felt some feelings of redemption for all the asinine things he’s said and done.

I don’t want him as my President. I do want him humbled.  I do wish him justice for the hurts he has caused and I do compassionately feel that he deserves love.  Without letting go the anger and disappointment for who Donald has been, I can hold lightly the humanistic love for him and the suffering he must thrive in to have motivated a young man to hunt him down.  May I grow from my shortcomings and may we all analyze our responses.  My work is to enhance how I we see my enemies.

Immigrating Without Borders

    As a child, approaching adolescence,  I immigrated from Albuquerque’s city life to a quieter Santa Fe.  Santa Fe is 50 some odd miles north of Albuquerque along the Camino Rael; the same byways of the original Spanish colonizers.  Santa Fe is the town of my formative years.  The place where I walked lonesome afternoons on the beaten paths through its arroyos, until I warmed up to the other curious meanderers.  In meandering I found amigos, carnales that passed the time filled childhood afternoons in similars ways as me. Santa Fe became a place where I would rush my homework after school to maximize the day light I had to play pick up basketball, baseball, and football with the barrio kids.  The desert mountain refuge that allowed me to ride my tank of a street bike on seemingly endless dirt trails, winding through chamisa fields and piñon tree mazes.  It was in hind sight a major blessing because it shrunk my bad influences.

    Santa Fe is the mountain town that can move, when necessary, with a city’s pace.  Santa Fe in the 1980’s was a place that gave me an expanded understanding of New Mexico’s lifestyles.  It also opened my eyes to people of different cultures.  Santa Fe gave me more opportunities to see integrated spaces than Albuquerque.  It is also a city that has lived up to its slogan, “the city different”, and is even more different now as I see through middled age eyes.  The streets are nearly the same.  The buildings mostly familiar.  The smells resurrect youthful memories.  The people, the ambiance, the attitude are all impactfully different.  The most accurate way of describing this feeling is to say that I am an outsider in a place I once felt I belonged to. 

    I don’t want to write with a victim mindset, and I want to honor the observations I feel now.  The home I knew is tainted.  And I understand that what I may find tainted, others obviously find evolved.  As I walk through the plaza area, I recognize how it is no longer functional.  It isn’t a downtown as much as it is a historic Disney-like playground for touring Texans.  I have to be more accurate and share that Santa Fe’s tourists are clearly comprised of so many more populations than Texans, but this hurt I feel resonates through that mild prejudice towards Texans.  I think it points to the privileged hypocrisy of legislating against Brown culture in its impoverished form but romanticizing its Southwestern spin.  It might be disgust for the best of both worlds they epitomize where they get to despise most immigrant Mexican people and vacation in New Mexican quaint culture sanitized of anything truely New Mexican other than a traditional meal here or there.  Santa Fe has grown into a tourist destination.  

    Of course it is both and.  Many state government offices are nearby and the national hot spot is a gold mine for tourist dollars.  I am talking about New Mexican functional.  I am talking about the New Mexico Rael not the New Mexico True.  I cannot see New Mexican faces.  Even when I think I am seeing New Mexican faces they are really Mexicano faces.  I am writing about this evolution as a way of understanding that the culture and conditions I have aren’t anything I should think I can persist.  The New Mexico I was raised in is going away.  I am proud of belonging to this fading flavor of humankind.  

    I come to this conclusion after some small experiences as an adult.  I can’t know what Santa Fe was like for adults when I was a child and so maybe New Mexico as I know it isn’t going away, it is possible that I am going away.  Regardless I recall this itchy event that sits in my mind.  

    I walk into a distillery.  This distillery is in a renovated part of the city that used to be an empty Rail area.  It used to be a shortcut into downtown at the furthest part of south downtown Santa Fe.  This place is trendy.  It looks like what I remember Denver being.  It is decorated with modern  everything.  The place is nearly empty and I enjoy a pour of a craft gin.  After around 2.5 hours of work, I don’t need another gin, but I also find it surprising how I have not been asked if I needed anything.  I let this observation simmer as coincidence and chalk up the poor service to bad timing.  I rationalize away my typical feelings of being discriminated.  And some of it is that a part of me appreciated being left alone.

    Then my girlfriend arrives and I note the place has filled with happy hour customers.  The wait staff that I encountered are the same people, but entirely different personalities.  I walk to get some water from a water station and look around noticing the people who have filled the front area.  I stand curiously and scan each face.  I gradually have an awareness and some level of feeling stunned.  I am socially disoriented because every patron is Anglo.  I have a surreal feeling of being a visitor.  Not only a visitor but a nuisance because now I have that long lingering self-doubt that lies to me and says mentally that I don’t fit in here.

    I had just come off the mountain and I was not matching the implied dress code.  I quickly speculate that this must be why I’m ignored and the service sucks.  I was in comfortable bottoms, a non-matching mid layer sweater, hat hair, and tennis shoes.  I made a second round of rationalization, and I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe the wait staff didn’t appreciate how I was so casual.  Then a group of scraggly, un-groomed, tennis shoe and torn jean wearing anglos sat at the table next to me and my partner.  I note that they now get the attention of 2 servers.  

    I could no longer do the injustice to myself and realize that it may not be discrimination but the Santa Fe that embraced me is not on this side of town.  I could write another couple of hours taking some emotional ownership for what happened to me in this brief encounter with the city of my youth.  I save that for another day.  I think more importantly I have to continue to see these American refugees as finding a quieter and nourishing place, just like my mom and I back in the 80’s.

    Santa Fe the landscape is not very different and Santa Fe the people are being inundated by the afflicted and possibly fatigued American Rat Racer.  I understand that being aware of the classism this has and continues to create will likely be something I can only write about because hanging on to a New Mexico that resembles me is my romance ready to be steamed rolled by modernization.  I don’t recognize this Santa Fe, and like its gin I am only a recipe derived from its local ingredients, and susceptible to mixing with a variety of ingredients from all over the globe.  I grieve the Santa Fe that raised me, and I learn to be hopeful despite the perceive expulsion. 

Feliz Dia del Doctor Rey

On my favorite holiday, I’d like to revisit some words from Saint King Jr.  Without getting into the details or context of this prompt, let me answer his simple question.  What is my life’s blueprint?   I have years of contemplation.  I have sat with plenty of emotions to stir the heart and force me to consider my constitution.  So as much as I want to get lost in this question I am going to try and keep it simple.

When building a structure most projects begin with a design.  The analogy implies we start life with a plan.  And I didn’t, that I know of.  The vision of my structure changes frequently.  My blueprint is not a design of what I hope my life can be, but who I have maintained to be.

 

Who I am maintaining is respectful of who I have been and who I still have an opportunity to shape.  The three core principles Dr King Jr mentions are belief in self, excellence through achievement, and being beautiful.  I cannot say that these qualities have always been apart of my design.  At times I have not had any of these.  These times are rare.  A majority of my life has been holding some of these in scope, and when the spirit finds me, I have all three. 

I am worthy of kindness.  I have learned to add self-valuation slowly.  I grew it out of a desperation to be extraordinary, with the paradoxical balance of knowing I can disappear.  I know the unit of measure here is dignity.  When I think about this quality in terms of who I am, I think it is in believing that I am worthy of kindness.  I think understanding that my appearance might default stereotypically as brown and suspicious; more as a young adult.  Now as I grey, I feel it is tapering and I might be seen more as older.  I have a history of vetting perceptions.  I have learned to function out of a self-concept that forces me to minimize comparison and rely on competency.  I don’t necessarily shine, but I am durable.  I am not invincible, but I will often be impactful.

 

I would like to thank Dr King for helping me to appreciate, once again, the need to achieve.  After an early childhood rooted in aspiration and accolades, in middle adulthood I resisted greatness.  I thought this was a vice.  I can now reframe the idea of achievement as a dignified excellence.  I have a grounding in a family filled with athletes who taught me to practice.  I had a grandpa who said, “measure 2 times, and cut once.”  When impatient he would bark with a New Mexican accent, “Do it right, or don’t do it all”.  Practice helped me understand that being good is only a doorway, stepping into the room and finding the next entrance is diligence.  Practice means learning something so that it can be repeated with quality.  I don’t mix in aspirations or trophies with this understanding of achievement . I think I measure my experiences with the unit of measure of dignity.  The accomplishment is what Dr king might describe as the beauty in my soul.  My blueprint helps me have an endearing appearance, or how I have learned to see my soul.  I don’t check my status as a human, and this helps me practice the first quality and have self-belief.

 

My faith has engrained a communal orientation.  My blueprint is for building a person that must contribute to the greater good of all.  This is key piece to my blueprint.  Dr King frames this as being beautiful. Throughout my life I had the Catholic voices of the profound in my minds ear.  This is a call to sow beauty.  Since the unit of measure is dignity, beauty is not aesthetic, it is nutritious.  The façade is unnecessary, in favor of a soul that inspires.  I was raised in a family that treated me as beautiful.  This allows me to understand how I can steward others.  

I am under construction.  I am still a work in progress.  I am remembering that during the project I must take my eye off the prize and look at the blueprints.

I am not as shiny as Saint Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and I am learning to be just as soundly constructed. 

 

Disappointment, shame, and other vitamins and minerals of the soul

 I came across some emotions as I learned about a family member who shared how they payed for a cleaning service.  Disappointment surfaced in me in a way that I realize is not healthy.  And I know the feeling is an essential aspect to my human experience, a real response from the bowels of my limbic system.  A gut feeling.  I am irritated by the idea that people chose not maintain and clean their home and delegating this life chore to a sub class of people.  I judge and cannot unsee this as an irresponsible act of paying another person to clean me as “serviceable”.  I know this is a judgment on my part, and the pain this concept creates in me is a reminder of the idea that my grandmother’s brilliance was distracted and her creative vibrance was derailed by the irresponsibility of a class of people who lured her away from aspiration, to clean their messes.  Not only to clean their messes, but to clear time so they could find luxurious activities, selfishly satiating their lives.  Is this fair of me to surface these darker emotions.

I don’t want to create shame,  I know the effects of shame and I know how it cannot be synthesized by our hearts.  And it is still useful.  In holding on to this paradox of shame and its utility, I find that it might be a vitamin to our soul.  Something essential to our growth but equally something that cannot be absorbed by us, our bodies.  This is a seed for meditation.

Shame does not seem to be a condition that should be transferred, and even the idea of sharing it might need to be avoided, in favor of transcendence.  The root of all soulful vitamins might be to dissolve the compounds and bonds of trauma, pain, and grief to release the healing, their nutritious cathartic energy of grace.

The healing is mine.  The healing is loving through the disappointment.  The cathartic energy is being able to transcend the paradoxical encounter of shame and the moment, so that I love the other in front of me, before I resort to shaming.