A fire, yellow and dancing, burns behind glass doors. Kindling’s become ashes under stacked logs in wrought iron of one-inch widths in the shape of a first-quarter-moon on short legs. Beyond the window, unseen, icicles stemmed to the gutter, if loosed, could harm but this morning were dripping and beautiful.
I am standing where I see a daughter walk by near me keeping her eyes straight ahead purposefully not looking at me. She is the one I think of as ice. Her behavior is to become silent when we disagree. The other is fire: words rapidly delivered with force coming through her physical moves. Her disagreement breaks out of confinement.
There was a time when I read book after book, my mind opening like a hungry mouth to information that was new and made sense in a different way from how I had lived, which was to take behaviors personally rather than see them in categories. James Redfield’s adventure story with spiritual insights in The Celestine Prophecy was one.
Of Redfield’s nine insights, the most helpful was the sixth that explained how people react when they need to control. Of the four ways—threatening, questioning, withdrawing, and poor me, I had immediately recognized myself as a repeated questioner when I couldn’t get another to agree with me. With later spiritual training I would understand that I didn’t need that agreement in order to feel happy.
My ability to recognize the difference in my daughters’ behaviors had been an early step toward my understanding, helped by the sixth insight, that while they hadn’t needed my agreement, for each had her own inner authority, their different behaviors were to change me. This was unlike my control behavior then that came from my inner fear.
My realization is, “It may be easier to understand behaviors by categories rather than by details that may appear inappropriate when in reality they fit a model common to most people.”
I am standing where I see a daughter walk by near me keeping her eyes straight ahead purposefully not looking at me. She is the one I think of as ice. Her behavior is to become silent when we disagree. The other is fire: words rapidly delivered with force coming through her physical moves. Her disagreement breaks out of confinement.
There was a time when I read book after book, my mind opening like a hungry mouth to information that was new and made sense in a different way from how I had lived, which was to take behaviors personally rather than see them in categories. James Redfield’s adventure story with spiritual insights in The Celestine Prophecy was one.
Of Redfield’s nine insights, the most helpful was the sixth that explained how people react when they need to control. Of the four ways—threatening, questioning, withdrawing, and poor me, I had immediately recognized myself as a repeated questioner when I couldn’t get another to agree with me. With later spiritual training I would understand that I didn’t need that agreement in order to feel happy.
My ability to recognize the difference in my daughters’ behaviors had been an early step toward my understanding, helped by the sixth insight, that while they hadn’t needed my agreement, for each had her own inner authority, their different behaviors were to change me. This was unlike my control behavior then that came from my inner fear.
My realization is, “It may be easier to understand behaviors by categories rather than by details that may appear inappropriate when in reality they fit a model common to most people.”