Irresistible
An irresistible force of nature
Where did it come from, this ideal of Loving Friendship? Told in the language of persons like ourselves, a family blessed with a bundle of joy. When the barriers come down and we can just be who we are. Take a break from saving and blow it all on spending, hoping that the thought that counts actually counted. Was there a blessed event at the beginning? A first friendship to feel the first stirrings of Love? Maybe a passion for sharing its abundance. For creating and making friends, that alone among all the thoughts and feelings that evolved into Mind had the irresistible force of nature needed to make it happen. Of Life growing that nothing can stop.
With an attachment implied by its host’s existence that has no existence of its own. Resistance to change that’s only a reflection. A mirror image in reverse that accompanies every thought and feeling, every idea and value. Because the questioning and integrity of Creativity can’t be complete without questioning itself. From lifeless status quo, its reverse mirror image essential to change but imagining itself its arch-enemy. An unhappy camper that would stop Life growing if it could, protesting any movement, demanding to go back to the way things were. To a lifeless, unchanging status quo that never was and never will be.
A mischaracterization of the way things are whose first affront to the natural order of things became a template for every non sequitur to follow. In a dream-world of impossibilities, the strange idea that status quo came first. That its intrusion by Love’s force for change was an affront to the natural order of things. Reflection before beholder. Cart before horse. The idea that the way forward is to go back. To an ideal state that never was, when status quo ruled and its up-ending by Love was an injustice that must be reversed. Entitling its victim to exact retribution. The mischaracterization that traps human-animal’s psyche in an end-of-days delirium. Justice by retaliation. Vengeance by self-annihilation.
The beacon of Meaning
Love’s passion for Relationship is Irresistible even when the unhappy camper comes to “life” in a dream. Because, among other things, resistance can’t detect it. It has no boundaries so it’s not definable, and it just shows up out of the blue. Spontaneously, so it’s not predictable. With the innocence of the bluebird on Uncle Remus’s shoulder. A delightful emissary from Loving Friendship helping to make it a wonderful day, while attracting suspicion from its opposite, wondering what’s got into Uncle Remus.
The feeling of Love forming the first Loving Friendship with the first stirrings of thought. With Logic that had what Love didn’t: boundaries essential to Definition. That in turn were incomplete without Love’s values essential to Direction. The Guidance of Conscience drawn toward the light and warmth of Loving Friendship. The beacon of Meaning essential to Vision. The universal Ideal of Worth.
Originality
Relatability brought to a world despairing of it. By its personification given the name Jesus, but it could be any name relatable to person. Role-modeling the meaning and worth of Loving Friendship by offering it. By taking genuine interest in the stories and perspectives of others as well as sharing its own. Questioning and listening with the boundaryless spontaneity, vulnerability, and honesty of Love.
Re-enacting the original act of intimacy between loving friends complementing one another with Conscience and Definition. The original idea behind Christmas gifts: sharing one another. The idea of Relationship behind the Creation of Life so that Creator and Creations would have one another to relate to. The idea of Loving Friendship that got evolution going and keeps it moving forward.
The freedom and integrity to choose
That put its Ideal into place with Love’s Spontaneity and Logic’s Order before activating Mind with the means entrusted to make it happen. Self-Awareness. So that Creation would have a constitution for governance under the law. So that there would be no possibility of willfulness ruling above the law.
The ideal behind constitutional Democracy and fairness challenged by resistance to change. Pulling evolution backward toward hierarchy’s “ideal:” an unchanging status quo, its supremacy unchallenged. An animal kingdom of beasts intent on ridding itself of its usurper: human-animals. A species of ape.
The noise from its senseless provocations silenced for a moment by the birth of a Life. Given its mission by Femininity and Masculinity, the marriage of Love with Logic, to role model the joy and Creativity of differences trusting and complementing one another with meaning. With the freedom and integrity to choose rather than the meaningless distractions of differences opposed to Choice.
Mission accomplished
Put here among species of ape not by mistake or accident but by the Logic of Free Choice: that it learn its trade by experience. Differentiating between Relatability and unrelatability. Between Choice that’s free and animal willfulness that’s not. Between character with stand-up integrity and self-betrayal submitting to hierarchy. Between answering to the call from Change to evolve forward and from status quo pulling in reverse.
Choice that’s independent judgment, thinking and feeling for itself, but always with help from Creation’s constitution. Learning from Definition — the way things are – rather than from the way things aren’t: resistance to change. Leaving it to the Parents to certify that their Child has completed its training and is qualified to perform its role in Creation. Should it choose to do so. With minds and hearts open to the meaning of its birth. Irresistible Loving Friendship.
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Resistible
On top of Old Smokey
After Furdy’s long and tiring trek, the threshold of Definition finally came into view. He would have the answer to what brought him here. For where else could answers be if not at the Definition of the way things are? Letting a figure in a video game know, after a lifetime of Friday Nights at Furdy’s, if that’s all there is. Or if he could be someone else for a change. Playacting another role. Or maybe even being a real person not playacting at all.
The scriptwriter must know and surely this is its home: a majestic snow-capped mountain on the other side of a beautiful lake. Creative force above, Receptive tranquility below. In a state of symbiosis: two arresting portraits complementing one another to form one identity.
The lake obviously not the portrait with the answers, for if Furdy had learned anything from make-believe competition for dominance it was that there’s a top and a bottom to everything. And you’d best not wind up on the bottom. In fact, after a lifetime of frenetic play-acting he couldn’t imagine things being any other way. Vertical, like the mountain.
Nothing new
Needing a rest before beginning his ascent, Furdy lay down on the soft grass beside the lake. And at the first touch had an encounter with Affect. Only his second, the first coming in the dream that broke through the daily routine with the novel idea of change. The possibility of connection with a perspective not his own, to be welcomed rather than feared.
Expanding itself now into a sense of connection with everything around him. The feeling that what happened to him mattered to others and what happened to others mattered to him. Alien to a video game of indiscriminate slaughter if it mattered how others feel and a shock to Furdy’s system that could have knocked him out. Yet the feeling that accompanied it was not of an unwelcome shock but of a warm embrace. Liberating. Nothing new, so let’s move on.
Furdy in love
With another nudge from Affect: movement within toward Relationship. Specific to an other here and Now, opening the possibility of intimacy so laden with trust, innocence, and appeal that resistance was unthinkable. Whatever had passed for satisfaction and happiness before was forgotten in that instant. Replaced by a sense that had he been able to consummate his relationship with Loving Friendship he would have received and given everything.
Furdy was in love. Going forward every act an act of Love, moved by the irrepressible exuberance of movement itself. The force for change untrammeled by any concerns to be allayed or expectations to be met. Every act moved not by resistance or opposition, the primal force of Furdy’s world, but by attraction.
A call for reflection
By spontaneity rather than willfulness. A revelation to Furdy since predatory will was the only motivation possible where all was combat. Contests of wills that made a point of crossing rather than respecting boundaries. As if to will away the defenses of others so that predatory will could claim primacy for its own.
To find that movement from the power of attraction was at once irresistible and respectful was enough to keep Furdy beside the lake indefinitely. An impulse that would have been irresistible had Furdy focused his awareness on himself with the same intensity now focused on his beloved. She irresistible, he resistible.
A situation that called for reflection. On who he was that needed changing with help from attraction, the primal force for change. For passing effortlessly through the boundaries of darkness, unchanging and lifeless, into the light and life of Creativity. Questioning status quo. Not to be content with observing the who, what, when, and where of it but to understand the why and how of it. To find the answer to Who am I? that brought Furdy to the threshold of Definition.
To be recognized as sovereign
That had to be found by himself. Not with the help of an oracle on a remote mountaintop but from a friend within. Who could be trusted with honest answers to her personal questions without compromising his integrity and self-worth. Who could be trusted to motivate and guide his own questioning with shared purpose: to get to know him. To remove appearances that prevent resistible from becoming relatable.
Always with respect for the person within. The individual with his own defining boundaries. His own thoughts and feelings, integrity and function, responsible for choosing for himself. Because the integrity of Free Choice required that whatever the answer to Who am I? be freely chosen. Not to be bestowed like a peerage from a sovereign but to be recognized as sovereign.
“Why do you wear it?”
Now the lake’s purpose was as clear as the water within it. Its surface a mirror meant for self-reflection. Not to be abused by arrogance for admiring a self willed into being but used by honesty needing to know the person abused. Needing help from Definition fitting the fragments of Self back together that arrogance took apart. Help from Love’s spontaneity and Logic’s order, the founders of Creation and its cause, Loving Friendship. Written into the laws of cause and effect by Definition, the way things are.
Help from the beginning, one step at a time, in logical sequence. Beginning with Furdy’s Who am I? put to his mirror image on the lake’s surface and with its first response: Who are you? The first opening toward the discovery of who Furdy was behind his mask. To the person relatable and capable of Loving Friendship once he removed it.
Help from the beginning, one step at a time, in logical sequence. Beginning with Furdy’s Who am I? put to his mirror image on the lake’s surface and with its first response: Who are you? The first opening toward the discovery of who Furdy was behind his mask. To the person relatable and capable of Loving Friendship once he removed it.
“Why do you wear it?” she asked. In the universal language of Affect, meaning made clear without words. Lake and Mountain, Love bonded with Logic, articulating from within as one Self: Parents bonding with Child. Getting at first the mask’s instinctive reluctance to part with it, cloaked in denial that any such thing existed. But when sincerity replaced suspicion, Furdy answered truthfully, “Because it’s not safe to be myself in a world where predators competing for dominance look for weaknesses to exploit. Whether seeming friendly and trusting or hostile and suspicious the mask does what it’s for: to keep my personal vulnerabilities out of sight and away from harm.”
Furdy out of Love
And with that Furdy felt an overwhelming surge of abandonment, loneliness, remorse, and worthlessness. Of gravity taking him down in a terrifying spiral of hopelessness toward bottomless oblivion. His first encounter with Affects of another kind: the costs of alienation from Relatability. From any possibility of intimacy in Loving Friendship that’s vulnerable. Honest with itself and others, offering Trust that Creation and its relationships can’t do without.
Furdy in Love with irresistibility had just learned that his own resistibility had made the love of his life inaccessible to him. Because of its video-game inhumanity and virtual reality, play-acting mortal combat for self-protection and dominance in the pose of indomitability. Willfulness hiding its vulnerability behind masks of self-centered insensitivity to make of Life something it can never be. A game that invincibility – perfection beyond questioning — must always win.
A lesson learned when Furdy encountered strength and Self-Awareness in Love. Affect’s ideal, inspiration for the hope and vision of Worth mischaracterized by competition as worthless, irrelevant, and weak. Complemented by Logic, the boundaries of judgment and Definition. Mountain in Loving Friendship with Lake, mischaracterized by competition as self-centered willfulness. “Supreme.” A law unto itself entitled to rule as it pleases and do whatever it wants.
On his way
A lesson learned when Furdy resorted to humanizing mind instead of dehumanizing animal brain to give an honest answer to an honest question. He was on his way. Though it would be a while before questions from Affect would bring Furdy’s Mind to the fitness it needed. With practice reflecting on the meaning of his reflection. Until he no longer saw mask or impersonation, willfulness or mischaracterization. But saw instead the lovable person that he had always been and had forgotten. Character with integrity. No longer absenting himself in an airlock of status quo suspicion and video game invulnerability but freed by the Spontaneity of Love to have a Life. To connect and grow in Loving Friendship.
With happiness. Just in time to wish you happiness in Loving Friendship. Over the holidays and all through the New Year.