When I was a kid, much younger and far less rational than I am now, I stole a box of cookies from our kitchen and snuck out the back door with it. I remember carrying them in such a way so as to shield the box with my body so anyone looking at me from the house wouldn’t see what I was up to.
At some point, about halfway up our hilly backyard, I thought that throwing the empty cardboard box into the sheep pen was my best chance to cover my tracks. I mean, they eat everything, don’t they? I decided that was my best option. They’d consume the evidence and I’d be absolved from any guilt or punishment. I ended up getting caught. To this day it is a story I am told and there are giggles all around. Sheep don’t eat everything afterall.
I realized this past weekend that we all have done things like this. Maybe not quite like this though I’m sure some have tried, and some have likely had better luck with using goats or pigs or a raging river that would consume the things they didn’t want to be seen.
I imagine an abandoned well sometimes. I think this is the place I’ve gone to hide things. Things I didn’t feel I could share, things I didn’t think would be understood, or believed. I threw these things to the bottom of this well, out of sight, out of reach and hopefully out of mind if I was lucky. I always thought I had been descreet, not letting on that I had these things I felt ashamed of. But sometimes people see you visit the well, and sometimes they don’t see you visit the well but maybe they know the familiar look of returning from the well where dark things were discarded.
And sometimes, though seldom, you can have a conversation with someone about something you threw down there or about something they threw down there. You can stand alongside someone, and maybe without details, share a moment of togetherness, of connection, of not being alone. Because, whatever their dark thing was and whatever yours might have been, you both felt you needed to discard it, where you’d hope no one would see it or find it.
I was thinking today about how beautiful it would be, if those of us who have visited a place such as this to tuck away some dark hidden secret, could stand together. Be together. See that we are not alone. See that there is nothing to be ashamed of. To celebrate the strength, the beauty, the courage, and the resolve that getting to this moment required of us.
And what if, one by one, we drew these dark things out of this place, out of our hearts and our guts and our repressed memories, into the light, and held one another in those painful moments with nothing but love, and empathy, and compassion? How might our lives be different if we held one another up and built one another up instead of tearing eachother down?
When someone share’s something of themselves with you, what is the first thing you reach for?
💙
EverydayOrdinary 