dionna, 1991. (Photo credit: paul posadas)
The blue dragon lifted her head from near-sleep. She knew. Pouncing onto the rocky ledge gave her the advantage. No one would challenge her. The fresh corpse was for her alone. As she ate the remains of Dionna, the red dragon who had never flown, the memories of Dionna infused her. The blue dragon in this had saved those memories and would live them into the forwardness of time.
Why is it that we repeat the mistakes of our forefathers? It would be nice if we could somehow be able to capture their hard-earned life experiences. If dragon lore were true, perhaps.
In Papua New Guinea, Congo, cannibals on the Disneyland Jungle Cruise and who knows where else, eating brain to preserve the life force, save your daughters or avoid the mistakes Dad made gets you a bad and yucky disease called, kuru. Nothing good comes from eating brain.
And so the blue dragon, whose scales shone in the morning sun, began to tremble and seemed confused over the years. Her brain got holes like a sponge and she laughed at inappropriate times.
We just cannot get a leg up on wisdom and experience. We are not made for it. Each of make our own mistakes, have to work our own fingers to the bone, and other knowing clichés that in this case just are the darn truth.
What blue dragon and kuru are trying to tell us are that the agenda Love has for us is not to build up experiences like some sort of mental tower of babel. It is not about the mistakes. It is about our life experience.
We cannot help but wonder, though. After working in psychiatry for these many years, I wonder what a joy it would be to give that experience, knowledge, skill of practice and such to my daughter some day. Ah. As if it had its own life force, passing it on to my daughter feels like a bit of immortality.
When I die, just eat my frontal lobe, darling. Not the limbic system.
We are meant to live. In that living, we inevitably repeat foibles and build up muscles and manage to survive all kinds of suffering. In that living, we are beat up and rejected. We are perfect. We are flawed. We are marvelous.
Maybe the agenda is not to get it better with each generation or to get it right. Maybe the agenda is to live.
Question: Have you ever been frustrated at how quickly your gains in life will be/are lost? What is the agenda of your life? Please tell us your story.
Self-Care Tip: Live life with a quality-experience agenda.
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