My mother was moved to rehabilitation for her hip yesterday. It looks like a great place. Wish us luck! Please forgive the lack of editing here. If there are glaring boo-boos, I would appreciate the heads up, though!
Erik: You know what, Mom? I kind of find it funny now that when people—just the spiritual people—it tends to be just the spiritual people—when they say they have a disease or a cancer that they’re being punished? “Oh, I have this breast cancer because I’m being punished because I couldn’t’ love myself. Okay, maybe that’s two percent that that’ll make sense—
Jamie (laughing hard): he just laid a bunch of f-bombs.
Erik: Jesus Christ even got into that f-bomb and some other words.
Erik laughs. I have the feeling he’s just pulling our leg, though.
Erik: Really? What part of the granola spiritual world is there, “you’re rewarded and now you’re punished”? People have really gotta get off that boat! Mom, what do you think we can do to help get away from it? How can we present it?
Me: Sometimes I think it’s easier for people to say they’re being punished instead of doing their homework and try to really get down there and figure out what’s going on.
Erik: So the term “punishment” is just an excuse for them? That’s so fucked up in the head!
Me: well, it’s a lot of work to try to figure things out! It takes courage and perseverance. Okay, next one. How do children who suffer from severe illness—how do they manage to endure their suffering as well as they seem to?
Jamie (giggling): Erik’s mouth is just wide open! You can tell he’s about to start laughing but he refuses to.
Erik: Really? Mom, you can answer this quicker than I can. Kids are masters. They’re fresh from the whole energetic world. Their pain is not taught to them the way adult pain is. They take it the moment. They don’t take it as a punishment; they don’t take it as, you know, “This is my life forever.” They really know how to stay in the moment.
Me: Yeah. And, no, I could not have answered that as quickly as you could! I couldn’t have answered that at all!
Erik: C’mon. You’ve seen kids and how they handle stuff! They’re like tiny little angels. They get through cancer with a smile on their face every day.
Me: Yeah, that’s true. Because they always have hope. They’ve not been taught to lose hope.
Erik: Yes. They haven’t been tainted by us, by adults, by society. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just get in our brains and just erase—
Jamie (laughing): He shows it like an eraser on the tip of a pencil and goes, “EE OO, EE OO.”
I laugh.
Erik: Yeah, just erase that one part where we were taught that this is how it should be. You know what’s fucked up is that they’re trying to do that shit—erase memories. They’ve succeeded at some of it, so they have it. It’s a laser and it fries the areas of the brain that’s associated with the trigger and the memory. Then, you can’t recall it anymore. That’s it. Gone.
