A Tale of Two Kingdoms | Part 3 | Children of the Empire of Love
“Love seeks one thing only:
the good of the one loved.
It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves.
Love, therefore, is its own reward.”
“Tell me how it feels”, I asked him, tucking his little hand into mine as we snuggled under the starry-quilt on the giant couch, “when you are around someone who has beautiful energy.”
My nine year old son scrunched up his little nose in deep thought for a second, half closing one eye as he dug deep to find the right words.
“Like I’m full of golden bubbles, light and frothy.”
“Excellent”, I reply. “You are doing so great at listening to all the marvelous things your body is teaching you.”
“Now”, I say, “Tell me how your body feels when you are around someone with tricky or unsafe energy.”
Again, the adorable nose-wrinkle. The gaze drops, I watch as he tunes in.
“Like my blood has gone really heavy. Like I can’t lift my arms and legs like normal.”
“Amazing.” I say. Squeezing him tight. “That’s how it feels to me too. Sometimes my stomach twists as well.”
“Yeah!", he exclaims. “Totally, right? I get that too.”
He grins widely at me. He is a water boy, this one. At home swimming with seals, surfing in the big waves, diving off the back of his dad’s boat to snorkel around and explore the reef and the creatures who call it home. He is floaty and strong and fearless. I watched him jump off a cliff into a black-water gorge pool when he was four. One time when he was five, my mum took him to the local swimming pool and lost him. Fifteen terrifying minutes later when the pool had been emptied and all the life-guards were scanning the bottom trying to make sure they hadn’t missed a drowned child, all the swimmers had been lined up against the walls to be counted. And that’s when she spotted him. He had swum up to a water-polo team comprised of much older kids who had immediately invited him to join their team and play along. Someone had given him a water-polo cap and he had blended right in, although the kids were heaps older than him. Just another kid wearing a water-polo uniform, watching a Grandma and all the lifeguards running around looking wild-eyed for a missing child. When she told me the story later she was still horrified and coming down from the fright of her life. But all I saw was the funny side.
This boy is well into his apprenticeship, learning how to work with energy, how to map it, locate it in his own body and in others’ energy fields. We play around with telepathy, with energetic exchange, with healing modalities, with mindfulness and prayer and quantum exploration. None of this seems strange to him, it all fits neatly into his worldview and perspective on a loving God who has designed a liturgical and ordered universe, in which there is sorrow and delight in equal measure. He is, in fact, a healer in training. And I am teaching him all the time. Recently when I knew he was going to have to encounter someone who has deeply manipulative energy, I realised I was going to have to give him a primer on setting energetic boundaries. Because he is already a healer, he will walk into a room and instantly gravitate to whoever is down or sad or anxious, and start unconsciously transmuting their energy and feeding it back to them as levity, joy and grace. This makes him an excellent target for spiritual vampires, and so at the tender age of nine, I had to teach him how to navigate them.
“You know how it feels when someone around you has tricky or unsafe energy? You can see them coming, right?”
“Yeah, totally.” He replies. “I can feel it when they are still a ways off.”
“Great. Now I want to imagine that your body is a castle, and that you have a moat that runs all the way around it.” I gesture out around my own body, indicating a generous personal space. “In your castle, you have a draw bridge which you can put down, and bring up. It is your draw bridge and only the people you want to come into your energy field are allowed to cross over it.”
He nods, he’s with me.
“Now I want you to imagine you see someone coming, and you don’t want them to get all the way into your castle where they can leech out your lovely energy and replace it with their heavy and sad energy. What you do, is you pull your drawbridge up tight, and you run upstairs to your balcony. From there you have a perfect view of all the countryside for miles and miles. And you can wave to the person who has come to see you from your balcony! You can call out, ‘hello, its nice to see you! how are you?’ And you can do all of that friendly interaction from your balcony. And they will never know your drawbridge is up, because they can’t see it.”
He nods again, “Yep, I get it. I can totally do that.”
A week later he returns from a brief moment where he has been alone with someone who is well known to him, and me, who has energy which is heavy and tricky and sad. He sidles up beside me quietly, and picking his moment, whispers in my ear, “I did good mum, I kept my drawbridge up nice and tight.”
Those of us who were born before 1999, were raised in a universe where matter is king. We understand a physical universe, and some of us were told there is a spiritual element to life, but that the two were somewhat removed from each other.
The children who were born after 2000, will labour under no such false dichotomies. For them, matter is just a form of energy, and they understand intuitively that the whole universe is energetic in its nature, fluid, adaptable, changeable, and a field to co-create in. These kids are born with hardwiring that just doesn’t exist in adults. They are far more sensitive instruments than their parents who appear to them to be lumbering out of the dinosaur era. Uncomfortable medical procedures, emotional dynamics, family patterns, schooling demands - all of these weigh much heavier on their tiny shoulders than they did on ours. Unfortunately, because there are some things which change and some which stay the same, children are still just children. And so their communication methods, particularly in their early years, have a limited range. Crying, screaming, tantruming, toileting dis-regulation, sleep disturbances, food refusal, selective mutism - these are the only ways our tiny humans can communicate with us about what is intolerable to them.
As they get older, and start to develop some language, it gets slightly easier. But in the main, I think my generation has done our children a huge disservice by not giving them an intuitive language with which to communicate to us. We have pointed them back to the age of matter, which is how our parents raised us. We have answered their demands for rationales for our limit setting with ‘because I said so’, which is what was said to us. We have parroted back to them the same recipe we were handed for success; “finish year 12, get a good ATAR score, go to Uni, study Engineering or Medicine but for gods sake don’t do a useless Arts degree.” They blink innocent eyes at us laced with suspicion over their LED screens blinking with opportunities to earn bitcoin while they are at school by setting up virtual communities coded with specific algorithms.
I’m out here in the trenches with the rest of you. I’m not here with answers or formulas or hot takes or excellent tips. After spending my early career life working with at-risk teenagers, I know all too well how quickly the metrics can slide and we can lose them, and I know how simple some of the remedies are. What I don’t yet know is how the alchemical grace between my boys and I will play itself out. I’m making it up as I go along.
Kids and pets - never gets old. Here is my youngest and his beloved kelpie who lives on our friends farm now.
I don’t know much, but I do know this one thing. These kids who were born after 2000, they were not built for the Kingdom of Empire. They are Kingdom of Love kids and anything less than that will sicken their souls, minds and eventually their bodies.
Their bullshit radars are second to none, I kid you not. This ‘do as I say not what I do’ business that the boomers slid by with, just won’t cut it. They are not even a tiny bit interested in tradition, or history, or in maintaining the status quo. These kids are here to shake things up, and to hold us to very short accounts for our choices and behaviours. They are a generation remarkably well suited to revolution, as a whole. Which is a good thing. Because they were born into one.
The reason I opened with the story about the castle analogy is because I am here to tell you my one parenting strategy. I only have one. But its a good one.
If you have been reading my work for longer than about five minutes you will realise that mostly what I tend to bang on about are things of the spiritual nature. I don’t tend to speak much in this space about parenting. Here is where they tie in together for me, here is why I have poured every last iota of energy and focus and intellect I have into my own healing and integration and spiritual growth and learning how to stay connected to Divine in every moment.
My greatest fear is that I am going to screw my kids up. It always has been. I have been terrorized by that fear a long time. Until about a year ago, when I finally arrived into my own spiritual authority. I’m not scared of this anymore.
Here’s why.
I believe my kids are good gifts from a loving and good God. I also believe that we are serving higher Divine Soul Covenants together. There are things we can only learn from each other; me from them, them from me. This is why I began this series with Divine Soul Covenants, because I was heading here. To talk about parenting. Divine Soul Covenants take on many different forms, to be sure. Soul Mates, Twin Flames, Priestess and Heirophant, Karmic Partners, Wounded Healer and Patient, Mentor and Student - but Parent and Child is by far the most common. Because I have worked very hard on my own connection with this loving and good God, I now have certain expectations about how this parenting thing works. You see, what I now expect, is moment by moment assistance in this parenting project. In a very direct, concrete way. I don’t pray anymore, and that is a subject for another post. But the short version is, I also don’t disconnect anymore. I have learned how to live with my soul in constant communion with the Godself-Soul.
There is a part to this story which I haven’t told you yet. And it goes like this.
About five minutes before I told my son that analogy about the castle, here is what happened.
We were making plans.
And in that moment, my son discovered that he was going to have to have contact with this person with dodgy energy. His face fell, and he looked at me silently with a desperate plea in his eyes. “Really?” His eyes were saying to me. “Please don’t make me do this.”
In that moment, my old self wanted to just rush in and change the plan, remove the obstacle from his path, reassure him that I would be with him, or fix it up in some other way to remove the challenge. All of these impulses, though coming from a place of love, would have left him, ultimately, crippled in the face of a similar situation in years to come. All of those impulses were ones I developed inside the Kingdom of Empire. They are impotent and useless in the Kingdom of Love. Instead, I bought myself a couple of seconds.
Acknowledging his resistance and honouring his instinct, I told him I could see he didn’t like the idea we were planning. I got up to make us both a cup of tea, and whilst stepping through the familiar routine of getting out the cups, measuring the tea leaves, filling and boiling the kettle, and digging out the strainer, I was having a terse, fast, immediate interaction with God. No words were exchanged, it was more like really intense eye contact. That’s how I mostly communicate with God these days. If there had been words though, they would have sounded something like this:
“Listen up, you know full well what he is up against, we both do. You know what this same dynamic did to me over the years. I’m useless to him right now. Instruction time. Pony up. You gave him to me, you better give me something that he needs right now for this moment because I’ve got no idea how to help him prepare for this.”
And because of original grace and original goodness and original blessing and because God indeed loves my little guy and wants him to become strong and resilient, the castle analogy just floated, fully formed, straight into my mind, ready to be used. By the time I had flopped back down onto the couch with a hot brew for us both, it was there, ready to be pulled out and played with and experimented on. He loved it. He grasped it immediately. Of course he did. It was a tailor made solution given to him, by God. I didn’t come up with that on my own, or read it in some awesome parenting book. I don’t want you for one second to think that was my own smarts or intelligence at play. These kids require parenting strategies that our own smarts and intelligence have not even begun to map yet.
You see, my only parenting strategy is to ask for help when I need it. Which is multiple times a day. Strength, grace, a new tactic, a cooled temper, a funny story, the right facial expression. All of these are given to me at the exact right moment for two reasons;
because I know I need them and
because I ask and expect to receive.
Pretty simple, hey?
So there it is, my big secret revealed.
All this stuff I write about, all this work and excavation and therapy and investment into cultivating a rich and fulsome spiritual life, you now know my reason. I’m motivated to do this work - when push comes to shove - because I have two other humans who rely on me to show up with them in their lives, and I know that I know that I know I cannot do it the way it was done for me, or the way I used to do it before. I deeply suspect I would be a lot lazier if I thought I could get away with it.
But I can’t.
These Kingdom of Love natives require the mold to be broken and re-poured for them. Raising them is the greatest adventure of my life, and I want it to be fun and good and true and real for all of us. I don’t want to go through it teeth gritted, eyes blinded by my own shadow, back hunched waiting for the shit to hit the fan.
The beauty of this arrangement is, because the onus is not on me to be “doing” the parenting, I’m a lot less tired these days. My only responsibility is “being” alive, present, fully attentive to God, self and them. When there is stuff that needs “doing”, I get direct instruction. Just in time. Like manna from heaven, daily bread enough to get us to bedtime.
And let me be crystal-clear about this. I do not get this direct instruction because I am some sort of special spiritual snowflake. I assure you, that is not the case. That is not how this thing works. That is what I’ve been writing about for over a year now. It works like this: unconditional love holds it all together, and we get to belong inside that love if we are brave enough to acknowledge our need for it, and allow our ego to die. Its simple, but its not easy. On the other side of that, lies real connection. Real intimacy. With ourselves, with others, with God. Inside that intimacy are things like expectations for excellent castle analogies on the fly, right when they are needed. I’m off the hook, really. The apostle Matthew records how Jesus talked about taking his yoke upon us, and learning from him. A yoke is a kind of harness which connects a pair of oxen who are ploughing a field. Usually a more experienced ox is paired with a younger one in the yoke, to train it up. So in this analogy, we are to understand that Jesus carries the heavy part and we just get to walk along side learning. That is my one parenting strategy. Keep watching and learning and let God do the heavy-lifting.
Our delightful evening routine, once the dishes are done and the lunchboxes are packed for the next day, has become this.
The boys head out to the trampoline, and bounce away whilst having secret conversations. There is often giggling. Sometimes there is a wrestle. As I’m wiping down the counter and squaring away the last bits and pieces of detritus in the kitchen, they start calling out “Mum, come out here and bounce!” I will put them off a couple of times, before eventually making my way out of the kitchen and out under the starry sky. Inevitably, while I’m still hauling my ass up onto the trampoline, they will ask me, “Got any hot gossip?”
“Sorry guys,” I reply, night after night. “My life is so boring. I got nothing. What about you? What’s the hot news from school today?”
And that’s where the juice is. That’s where the hilarious conversations that go on for the rest of the night begin, where the weird things we have to Google later get tabled, where the plans get hatched for talking to girls, where last minute things get remembered for the next day. Its where we play and connect and laugh and get grossed out and where they always end up getting so tired that they hurt each other accidentally and invariably I piggy back at least one of them back into the house for showers and stories and bed.
These days I sleep easy knowing that these Kingdom of Love natives that I get to share my life with are in the beautiful dance of Love with their Divine Origin, their Higher Selves in conversation with the polarities of divine masculine and divine feminine in my own Higher Self, and I just get to be part of the mix.
We are all loved so much more fully than we’ve ever dared to imagine.
They are gonna be alright, all we need to do is listen deeply….