When It Rains Naïveté

It seems I’m naïve. I was floored to the deepest depths of disbelief over this past weekend when I received a response (to something that requires no specifics) that went like this: Well, if they were dangerous they’d have been taken off the market.

It was spoken in absolute sincerity. It was not a joke. It was not sarcasm. It was someone’s truth.

It was a moment where I didn’t know, as they say, whether to shit, run or go blind.

So I did my best to share my perspective, offer resources, but dropped it, for my voice was being wasted.

In any event, I sat with the experience, to digest it as I continued some busy work. When the reality of the words finally got through to a place where I could feel their meaning, I cried. And I’m not a crier. Yet, when it rains from within, there’s Medicine to be made.

This is a sad, sad world where there’s still so, so many who accept without question that the commodities they purchase – from food to floor polishes, soaps to toothpastes, medicines to air fresheners, fertilizers to herbicides, and so on – are perfectly benign because they line the shelves of our frontline shrines of capitalism. Given all the information out there, this blind faith simply does not compute in any part of me.

In any event, sitting with the Medicine of this experience gave rise to a phrase that I’ve noticed resurfacing. A phrase that truly irritates me. I feel a visceral response to it. It saddens and angers me. And in this moment, as I document the Medicine of the experience, I realize my reluctance to challenge its use (or to even share the phrase here). My reluctance rests in the fact that I witness it being used by folks I know and care for.

And it’s this weird, counterproductive, counterintuitive compassion (or is it fear?) that is nourishing, in part, my newly realized naïveté. And that’s not Good Medicine.

So I pull this naïveté closer so that we may get intimate. I feel that disquieting sense of dis-ease, of discomfort, and it’s not reassuring. And as my discomfort waxes, Naïveté takes shape, and she pulls me closer, holds me like she cares, and dares me to consume and transform her.

And this, this I realize, much to my ever-familiar dismay, is the next Medicine I’m called to manifest and take in tempered doses.

The healing and the evolving never pauses. Damn it. And bless it. And get to work.

Peace.