A dragon teaches boundaries...
What happens when a creature who burns things down teaches you how to set boundaries?....
“Not your problem.” Came a gravelly voice in my inner-ear. I had been journaling and venting about how I don’t like certain aspects of the modern world we live in when Emerald, the water dragon, appeared in my mind’s eye...
“Seeing something doesn’t make it your problem. That’s your cultural training. If someone has a car sitting in his driveway with a flat tire would you feel like it’s your problem? No, you wouldn’t. But if the car was on the side of the road with a flat tire would you feel differently? Yes, you might, but you need to understand that is because the man would be in crisis. Having a car break down while in transit can be an emergency to varying degrees and as Storm tells you when people are in crisis it’s good to just help them out. This would be the case in this scenario. But when the car is parked at home it’s their problem, you intuitively understand this. Many of people’s emotions are ‘parked in their driveway’ as well. Just because upset is in someone’s face, well, it’s parked in their driveway. Seeing it there doesn’t make it your problem.”
“Some learn to become concerned because they are worried the other person’s emotions will grow and they might be emotionally attacked when the other person becomes upset.
Many struggle with co-dependent tendencies in today’s culture, these are mostly born out of the need for self-preservation. I suppose that’s what people do when they cannot breathe fire to defend themselves.” Emerald let out a huff of frustration.
“It must be a pain in the tail,” she said as she flicked her own in fast, agitated motions like a frustrated cat. “Perhaps it would be better if we taught people to breathe fire.” She chortled to herself. “Only some of them though...”
“You must learn to look, and you must learn to throw away. Much of what you see must be thrown aside as irrelevant to you. If you are in a store you do not buy most of what is there, you only select what is useful to you.
-Likewise you will notice that people may be feeling this or that, throw most of it away, it is not your problem.”
“People are responsible for their feelings and for their healing, when you help them it is a generosity. You do not owe them any healing. Relationships often do this because you love each other. But often the things that love does organically turn into cultural expectations...”
“-Now, simply because you are friends with someone it is expected that you will have a certain level of love, and that the love will present in specific ways.”
“Love is not so easy to pin down and predict, it is just like the wind, it blows when it wants and on the paths it chooses. It is hard to predict where the wind will blow and when.”
“You have love for someone but it may present as making them coffee one morning and sitting with them reading a good story together another time. Some nights you hold them when they cry, others you take them somewhere for a surprise. Love and inspiration are very similar, in fact it is right to say that love inspires you into actions, but when and what those actions are, is difficult to predict. Yet that is the beauty of it, living things do not need a 9-5, or the same supplements and diet plan for every day. You do not need so many grams of protein each day and so many vegetables. No, one day you need a lot of protein to build something one day, and on another you need less. Having a baseline to keep you on a relatively healthy eating habit is a good idea and it is a good baseline.
“But living things are not that simple, if you work hard you need to drink more water, but physical work is not the only thing that varies within a person. Likewise love intuitively knows how to dose a person and with what, but you’ve stopped listening to that.”
“Instead you treat the body like it is a robot that needs to be fed the same thing everyday, yet your output is unlikely to be the same, unless you are also acting like a robot. This is why you have internal systems to speak to you about your needs, yet your culture attempts to make everything the domain of the mind. They do so because they wish to be a mono-crop themselves, to only develop one thing (the mind) and they wish for that to be enough. It is simpler that way but the laws of nature battle against such behavior, and that Little One is the real reason why your culture is at war with nature. Because they do not want to be mature or developed, they want to be a one-trick pony, and when nature pushed against this derangement humanity pushed back.”
“Advancements do not have to war against nature, but that is how you have currently built them. There are other ways to do such things...”
Dive date: March 3 2022
Lunar: 1 day after the dark moon. Possibly the visible new moon depending on weather conditions.
I once watched a video where a psycologist talked about the importance of choosing who we offer the gift of empathy to, empathy is good but we must guard our hearts. Some suffer because they are innocent victims and others because they have made foolish choices. If we allow ourselves to feel for just anyone we will essentially bleed out, empathy is a gift we should give to those we love, and where it is appropriate.
In a world of bleeding hearts how might we set better boundaries that allow our hearts to flourish?
Written by Willow Lothlórien