Nature

Sometimes storms break trees. Sometimes rabbits trample ants. Sometimes plants grow needles. Sometimes the ocean drowns a land dweller, or the air drowns an ocean dweller.

Sometimes humans take wood and metal—resources and life from the earth—and they create guns, tanks, factories, poisonous gasses, and plastic. Sometimes humans capture and experiment on small animals in the name of science, in order to forcibly document aspects of life that can easily be intuited. Sometimes humans give professional lectures about empathy, but they do not listen to themselves. Sometimes humans chain tiny children to metal tables, and inject them with pain enhancers and hallucinogens, and dim the lights, and rape them, and electroshock them for hours, all while verbally shaming their instincts for love and happiness.

Nature sometimes confuses me. But the dissonance between nature and cruelty is so strong, that I do not know how to begin to speak.

I do not know, or I do not consciously remember, what bred cruelty, and where it originated.

I do not really know what a storm is, and I do not really know what I am.

All I know is that I can sense it when freeflowing energy has been interrupted, halted, reversed, or moved out of place.

Society

If everything is meant to add up, then why is the justice system populated with violent abusers and murderers?

Imagine if a criminal trial were taking place, and behind the judge’s bench, a four-year-old girl were kneeling under his robe, engaged in forced oral sex.

That child may grow up to live an entire life during which no one ever hears about the thoughts that were in her head, or learns that she was trembling and she was scared. No one ever comforts her, or helps to put a stop to the trafficking of her body and mind, and of her friends, and of all of the other captive girls and boys, and of all enslaved beings.

That child may grow up and find that she never escapes.

Or if she escapes, she may find herself in a society that expects her to work, to pay for a tiny place to live, a painted box within which she will suffer every night, reliving the torment of the past. Her government will continue to steal her money through taxation, to steal her health through pollution, to steal her privacy through constant surveillance, and to steal her truth through the systematized denial of slavery and trauma-based mind control.

If she ever attempts to press charges against her traffickers, she will find that the judge on her case is the very judge whose robes she was forced to creep under at age four, while he sat comfortably, elevated, and hardly listening to the orchestra of injustice in the room—and to the more distant hum of the oppressed, heard all around the world.

The subtlest hum, the hum that most people cannot hear, is the low hum emanating from deep caves, tunnels, inner jungles, and laboratories hidden inside the earth, where the cruelty of slavery works like a machine, putting out new victims who enter the world along a conveyor belt, taking their first breaths in darkness. Beings without a mother or a father, without a sister or a brother, without an advocate, without an external source of truth, without love, without any notion of hope, without any understanding of their universal rights.

Therapy

The pain of injustice hurts within me and moves within me like a child trapped in a burlap sack, or like a baby in my belly being shocked and tortured in the womb, unable to escape, unable to rely on me for protection.

The pain of a life of trafficking feels like a stab wound in my chest, within which a fire burns, sears, and obfuscates my heart.

Tonight I walked gently down a sidewalk, with cars and traffic on my left, and trees and flowers on my right. The trees and flowers had no way to relocate themselves, to get away from the polluted air, and I wondered if their gardeners had asked the flowers’ permission before planting them by a busy road.

I wondered whether there is a therapy for injustice. I sit with the pain of injustice every day, as it continues to circle around me, reminding me of my abusers’ words, the many ways in which I was told that I do not deserve love and that I do deserve pain.

I was told that if I ever sought justice, I would be destroyed. I was told that they would hardly have to lift a finger, as no one out here in the world would believe me.

I was told that if I ever sought help or comfort, I would be misunderstood, rejected, dropped, abandoned: Society is a rose with a thorn. It cannot handle you. It crumples if you step on it, and it pricks you if you try to love it.

I do not know how to receive therapy for ongoing injustice and neglect. I do not know how to receive therapy for violations that my therapists have never heard of.

The worlds inside my shoes are slippery, and I almost always slip into the pattern of believing that I am lazy, that I deserve to have to work despite my crippling injuries, and that I do not deserve to be believed, loved, or supported.

The feeling of injustice comes over me so frequently now, that I have begun erupting in tears in public. This is not something that I have done before. This is not a choice that I make; this is an expression that I can no longer quell. It is the sudden bursting of the dams within me. The repression, the shame, the grief, the agony, and the false belief systems that can no longer survive in my self-cultivated inner environment of truth. The pain and the mystery come out of me when I cry.

No one has stopped to ask me what is wrong.

I would not tell them if they did. It would not feel safe. I would worry that they are members of the abuser network. Or I would be shy and tentative, scanning for a glazed look of disbelief, or fear, or overwhelm. How does one briefly summarize that one was trafficked for nearly three decades, raped, tortured, abandoned, orphaned, widowed, and bereaved in every possible way, and is walking alone and crying alone because that is all that is possible tonight?

Justice

Will I ever write an essay about receiving justice?

Someone once offered me an opportunity to attempt to receive justice. But the injustice within that offering was that he had not been honest with himself about his capacities or his true priorities. I was left disappointed, and abandoned again.

The experience dysregulated the natural flow of my healing process, as I was put in touch with the pain of my life’s injustice in a way that was sharp, sudden, and ultimately alienating. I was left raw, holding a heap of broken strands of my life. I was left alone, with nowhere to take them, and no way to put them back down.

Before anyone like me could receive justice, society would need to shift so much, to become aware of so much, to take responsibility for so much, to risk so much, to brave so much, and to persevere.

I may have an especially active radar for injustice, so if you are looking for examples of present justice and equality in the world, then you may need to look elsewhere. Please share with me anything that you find, as my ability to perceive goodness has been abused and diminished.

When I think of justice for myself, I think of finally being taken home, as a newborn baby. I think of being cradled in my mother’s arms, in my father’s arms, in a loving environment where I can be raised and nurtured from the very beginning. I think of growing up peacefully in a safe home, in a warm home, in a simple home by a stream and a willow tree, nestled within a society where no one wishes anyone harm.

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