Parenting is not only about ‘moms’ and ‘dads’. In fact, if one thinks about it, parents are just the tip of the iceberg: An iceberg where 3/4 of parenting reality can hide beneath our normal awareness. These active dimensions of our stories are both horizontal and vertical. The major influences of our relational field, past, present and future continuously and actively articulate within and upon our communal and individual psyches.
Waking up to these dimensions of our reality brings good news and bad, joy and pain. Often, the knock on the door hurts. Our experiences on the peak of that iceberg may have been quite wounding for many – and never totally sufficient for any. The suffering of wounds and deprivation may foster perseveration on the visible parts of the iceberg’s options and opportunities. Resources of the less visible may remain unknown and untapped.
What is the design here? Is the reality of the wounded or missed connection unavoidable? Or is it simply the randomness of the universe. If so, how is that awareness useful for any of us? What is ‘purpose’ if not within some underlying design where things should or shouldn’t happen?
We evolved together, communally and not individually – in a dynamic web of relations. Each of us is a breaking wave on an ocean of communal stories – mishaps and discoveries. The sea is all who have ever lived, tried, failed, contributed … and left traces and reminders of the living presence of possibility for relation in any circumstance.
Our primal parental memory lives in every cell of our bodies … if we can allow and venture with each other below the surface of the iceberg.
Possibility’s paradox: it creates designs for relation but its reality is never contained within any of its creations. The experience of purpose in life cannot be sustained in plan alone. It is the event of connection fraught with risk … risk of an inherent instability within every venture.
Our primary parent is realized in the mutuality risked in every encounter between us … opening access to the deeper resources of the iceberg: the re discovery beyond set expectations of unforeseen possibilities.
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free persons … believe in destiny,
that stands in need of them
it does not keep them in waiting
it awaits them
they must go to it
yet do not know where it is to be found
they know they must go out
with their whole being
the matter
will not turn out according to their decisions
what is to come
will come only when they decide
what they are able to will
they must sacrifice un-free will
to their grand will
which quits defined for
destined being
then
they intervene no more
but at the same time
do not let things merely happen
they listen
to what is emerging from themselves
to the course of being in the world
not in order to be supported by it
but to bring it to reality
as it desires
in its need of them
to be brought –
with human spirit and deed
human life and death.
they believe, but that really means
they meet.
After Martin Buber
I and Thou
© 2018 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW
All rights reserved
South Garden Press, New York
For thoughts and comments, please e mail to: jdonnellydsw@gmail.com