Blog 716 – 08.08.2017
Inside Out You’re Turning Me

And is that not always the object to put our best self forward. “In a world…”, as many of the great adventure movie trailers begin, “… turned upside down and outside in, someone is trying to put things right.” It is a tough and often thankless job but true heroes do not do it for the praise. To me, it is a very sad picture indeed to paint the True Hero of our souls as a pathetic and puny person always needing to be praised and thanked. That is not how it works at all. Love does not need to be thanked, praised, or even acknowledged – Love is still Love. The thanking, the praising, the acknowledging are all for us for they are the keys to unlocking our cell, freeing us from our our bondage, and turning us inside out.

Sometimes we think ourselves impossible to love and so that is how we see others. The truth is that we only know anything about anyone else by what we come to know about ourself. The truth is always deep inside us and that truth our own ego and others would try to hide from us. Someone has said, “Believing that you are blessed is all you need to know.” All the rest will come to you. The lie is that we think that we screwed it up or that we or anyone ever could. Oh, David, you sad and confused little man. Think so? But I am smiling because I know a secret. The more the world and problems and even people that I love try to turn me inside out the more I thereby discover, greater is what is in me than what is in the world. The important thing is that the you that you are on the inside is the very one that needs to live on the outside so you and all the world can see how very much there is to love.

There was a sweet little animated movie that came out last year called Inside Out. In the movie the emotions of a young girl are graphically depicted. Our emotions are the outward expressions of our inner feelings regarding how we are experiencing life. As such they are signals to us where we are and where we need to be in our journey. The character Sadness reminded me so much of my little girl Emily who died at aged thirty-two just five years ago. During the month of July, I call it the month of Emily, I posted most of the month an episode from a book that I wrote about her titled: Emily – A Little Girl Who Sang Her Song To Anyone Who Came Along. I took the title from a song sung by Nora Jones called Seven that Emily sent me on one of her famous mixed CD’s. The song begins:

 “Spinning laughing that’s it
To her favorite song.
A little girl with nothing wrong
Is all alone.

Eyes wide open
Always hoping for the song.
And she’ll sing her song
To anyone that comes along.”

In one episode in the book I tell of one of my last visit with Emily in her beloved Washington D.C. area. We had lunch in Old Arlington, one of her favorite places and as we walked the small town after lunch she showed me the train station where she said she liked to stand playing her guitar and singing to the people boarding and getting off the train. Some would put tips in her open guitar case. At her first telling me I was sad at that picture in my mind of my lonely little girl singing her heart out for strangers and tips but it has since become one of my most comforting memories of Emily. She was a wonderful Mockingbird singing her heart for all of us always inside out.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White