Dreams, heat, betrayal, and dignity after the end

Amazing how our dreams will acknowledge and announce whatever we cannot / will not during the times we are awake ...

This heat! -- It definitely affects one's capacity to think. Both my thinking and my speech stutter when the heat is so grinding that I catch myself panting like a dog. It's gotten me to wondering about people who live in regions that are this hot most or all of the time -- and people who are making war, suffering war, in those places. The atmospheric heat is added to by whatever people are firing at each other -- bombs, missiles, Molotov cocktails ... I wonder if bodies that exist in perpetually hot places come to act like they're running a fever ... and I wonder what the heat does to their brains.


I wonder about soldiers whose uniforms pretty much seal them in; soldiers who bear the weight of all they must carry ... soldiers whose helmets heat up their heads. 


Inescapable heat -- does it craze a person; make his blood boil with rage?


Wondering if exposure to relentless heat becomes a traumatic injury to the body, the blood, and the brain. Trauma, in part, is an experience of 'no escape' -- and we know that excess heat can derange, exhaust, and kill a person -- 

Betrayal = relational treason. The harm done is tidal, demolishing a person's relational capacities with one strike to the heart. All that one has known as home: presence, protection, loving enfoldment, the sense that one matters ... All of it axed by another in an instant. Betrayal is a killing thing unless the one betrayed can quickly do the same: amputate the betrayer away from his or her life. There is no return after betrayal ... There is only a world, bereft of that other primary presence; an alien world, where a beloved has mutated into a predator. The one betrayed must cut off his own heart from the one who betrays -- a double, possibly mortal blow. Heart hacked at by a loved one, and then by oneself -- paradoxically, in order to survive the first blow.

How can one go on after betrayal? By loving oneself: ferociously, protectively, in extremis, no matter what the harm done. Betrayal attacks our essence: our soul. We are seen and treated as worthy of naught -- and if we believe in that sight, if we believe that we are here to be contempted by others, we will die to all good; we will die to relation; we will rot in our skin.

Dignity in the ruins of belonging: this is what saves us. We must see the wreckage as sacred, and rebuild ...