I think I finally have the answer.
My answer, anyway. Maybe that’s an important distinction. And I knew that answer lived in my bones for a very long time before my mind caught up with it.
A few weeks ago, I wrote to you about something that had begun changing very deeply in me. After years of thinking of human life as something we came here to endure, learn from, transcend, graduate from – or whatever word you want to use – I began to feel something entirely different.
Reverence.
I found myself bowing to the human experience. Not because it’s easy – Jesus, no! Because it isn’t. We come here vulnerable. We forget. We love people who can leave us. We live in bodies that hurt and age and eventually die. We make terrible mistakes. We lose what we love. We disappoint each other. We get frightened and confused and sometimes completely lost.
And still, somehow, we love. We dare to, anyway, after everything we experienced.
That began to feel sacred to me.
Then almost immediately after I wrote that letter, I came across something very ugly on Facebook. A whistleblower had died; his widow was grieving. And ordinary people were attacking the widow with a level of venom that stunned me – so much hatred, accusations, and even death threats. A mob feeding itself on collective permission to hate.
And I thought – SHIT!
You said you bow to humanity.
Here is humanity.
BOW!
I couldn’t. Not to that.
So, I asked you the question that had been bothering me for a long time.
WHAT DO WE DO WITH EVIL?
And you answered. Oh, did you answer!
I received so many thoughtful responses to that letter. Some of you believe evil has to be confronted and mercilessly eliminated. Some believe our attention feeds it, and that one of the most powerful things we can do is stop giving it our life force, turn away and put that energy toward goodness instead.
You wrote to me about child predation, shadow, alien conspiracies, choice, spiritual contracts, trauma, the nervous system, and what happens to us when we spend too much of our lives watching for darkness.
One friend sent me such a thoughtful response that I couldn’t answer her right away.
Not because I disagreed with her. I just wasn’t finished with my swan dive into the whole evil darkness thing.
I sat with her email for three weeks. I read it, thought about it, put it away. Then something would happen and I’d think about it again. I’d go back and reread parts of it.
A lot of what she said felt true.
If I spend my life staring at evil, studying it, getting outraged by it, trying to understand why people do terrible things, eventually I’m not simply observing it anymore. I’m carrying it around in my body. My nervous system doesn’t necessarily know the difference between watching danger and actually being in danger.
And at some point, evil is living inside me rent-free.
No, I don’t want that.
I agree that we have to know our own wounds. I agree that taking on another person’s suffering as if suffering with them will somehow save them isn’t helpful. And I absolutely believe in putting our life force into what is good. Love. Creativity. Beauty. Friendships. Animals. Gardens. Children. Work. Laughter. Making things. Being kind. Feeling alive.
Starve evil. Feed what is good. Sounds great, yes…
And still, something wouldn’t settle for me.
I kept coming back to a very ordinary situation.
What if someone is being hurt right in front of me? What then?
Do I turn away because I refuse to feed evil with my attention? Protect my peace? Tell myself everyone has their own Soul journey and maybe this belongs to theirs?
No.
Something in me kept saying no.
And then a few days ago it became so obvious that I almost laughed. I had been asking the wrong question.
Maybe I don’t need to figure out what I should do about evil.
I know what I am at my core – LOVE.
So, what would LOVE do in the presence of evil?
LOVE WILL PROTECT.
It was that simple.
If I bow to every Soul, then EVERY Soul has value to me. Not only the beautiful ones. Not only the people whose behavior I understand or approve of.
EVERY SOUL!
So, if one human being is hurting another and I have the ability to intervene, I don’t think love asks me to stand there contemplating their respective Soul journeys.
Love protects.
Obviously, it protects the person being harmed. Their body, their mind, their dignity, their right to be safe. Their right not to have somebody else’s rage, fear, hatred, greed, sickness, whatever it is, imposed upon them.
But then something else came to me. Love protects the perpetrator’s Soul too.
And I need to be very clear about what I mean by that because I DO NOT MEAN protecting that person from consequences.
Almost the opposite – I mean stopping them.
If I really believe there is a Soul inside that human being too, why would I quietly watch while they keep doing something that takes them further and further away from it or possibly, even harms it?
How is that love?
Sometimes loving someone means saying, Enough! Or it means standing between two people. Or exposing the lies somebody desperately wants kept secret. Removing the child from harm. Leaving the marriage. Telling the truth when everybody in the room would be much more comfortable if you shut up.
Sometimes love says, you do not get to do this! And doesn’t move.
I think many of us, and I certainly include myself here, have confused love with softness. Somewhere along the way, we distorted the meaning of powerful and beautiful words.
Compassion became endlessly understanding everyone, including those who keep causing harm. Forgiveness somehow came to mean continued access to us. Being spiritual became not judging, not interfering, rising above, finding the lofty perspective while something very real was happening right in front of us. And peace? Peace became keeping quiet. Avoiding confrontation. Not making anyone uncomfortable.
But love isn’t always soft – ask any mother!
There is a kind of love that is absolutely ferocious. A mother sees something coming for her child and she doesn’t stand there wondering whether paying attention to darkness will feed it.
She moves – her body knows before her philosophy catches up – to protect!
And I wonder if this is something we have forgotten how to do for each other.
I see the aftermath of that all the time in my work as a shaman. People don’t usually come to me because everything is wonderful. They come carrying pain. Fear. Shame. Things that happened years ago that their bodies still remember. So much of what I work with was inflicted by another human being, and very often by someone who was supposed to love and protect them –a parent, a partner, someone they trusted. Someone who was supposed to be the safe place.
And I can’t tell you how often, somewhere inside that story, there were other people who knew. Or suspected. Or saw enough that they could have asked a question.
Someone looked away, someone didn’t want to get involved, someone decided it was a private matter, or believed the explanation they were given because that was easier. And years later I’m sitting with the person who was left alone with it.
I don’t say that to condemn everyone who didn’t step in. Fear is real. Confusion is real. Sometimes people truly don’t understand what they’re seeing until much later. But dealing with the aftermath has made it impossible for me to believe that looking away is the spiritually evolved choice.
And I know this from the personal side too – not only from my work.
I was nineteen years old, living in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One night I was walking home from a friend’s wedding. It was during the White Nights, that strange, beautiful time of year when darkness barely comes and the streets remain washed in light late into the night.
Two drunk men attacked me on the street. They ripped the jewelry from my body. They beat me until I was left lying there on the ground.
And people passed by.
There were a lot of people on the street and they saw me. Nobody stopped. Nobody came to help me.
NO ONE!
That’s the part I still remember.
I know what it feels like, in my own skin, when people choose to look away.
Maybe that’s part of why LOVE WILL PROTECT landed in me with such force. I’ve seen what happens when protection doesn’t come, and I’ve lived it. I know how long a human being can carry a question underneath all the other questions: Why didn’t anyone protect me? Why didn’t anybody stop?
Sometimes healing begins when we finally learn to do for ourselves what nobody did then. To say no. To leave. To speak when we’d rather disappear. To trust the body when it tells us something isn’t safe. To become fiercely protective of the life inside us.
Because people do turn away.
Sometimes they’re afraid. Or confused. Sometimes they genuinely don’t know what to do. Or stepping in might cost them something.
And sometimes they simply follow the person in front of them – someone else is walking past, so we walk past too.
I understand fear. I understand freezing – my body froze that night in Saint Petersburg. I understand not knowing whether it is safe to physically intervene. I am not asking anyone to throw their body into danger.
But there are other choices.
Call for help. Call the police. Get other people. Stay nearby. Say something. Do something!
Don’t leave another human being lying on the ground because everyone else kept walking.
I know what that feels like.
I was her.
One of the things that troubles me most lately is when we use spirituality as a reason to look away.
It’s their karma.
It’s their lesson.
Their Soul chose this.
Maybe.
I don’t know what another Soul chose before coming here. I don’t remember sitting in some celestial planning room choosing my own life either.
And more and more, I don’t think I need to know.
I’m here now.
I’m in this body. I have eyes. I have hands. I have a voice and a conscience.
If someone is suffering in front of me and there is something I can actually do to reduce that suffering, maybe that’s enough information.
I don’t need their cosmic paperwork!
Now, does this mean I should spend my days searching the world for evil so I can fight it?
God, no!
I don’t want to live that way either.
I don’t want evil deciding where my attention goes every morning. I don’t want to plug my nervous system into every atrocity happening on this planet because some algorithm figured out that if it makes me angry enough, I’ll keep scrolling.
That’s not protection – that’s consumption.
I can starve evil of my attention AND still refuse to abandon someone to it.
I can choose beauty AND keep my eyes open.
I can protect my own peace AND not turn it into an excuse for doing nothing.
I don’t have to carry every suffering person on Earth. I couldn’t if I tried.
But the one who falls in front of me?
That’s different.
Maybe that’s where the discernment is.
Can I actually help here? Can my presence make someone safer? Is there something real I can do?
If there is, love moves.
If there isn’t, maybe I don’t need to sit there consuming somebody else’s horror until my own body is sick with it. Maybe then love puts its energy somewhere it can actually feed life.
I keep thinking about the widow whose story started this whole question for me.
What if, instead of joining the mob, one person had stood beside her? And then maybe somebody else did too.
Not fighting hatred with more hatred. Not hunting down the people attacking her and destroying them in return.
Just… NO! She’s grieving, leave her alone!
I think maybe that’s how love can confront evil without becoming it.
Protect the person being harmed. Stop the person doing the harming.
Both matter, because both are Souls.
That last part has been the hardest and, strangely, the most peaceful piece for me.
Both are Souls.
I’m still contemplating the nature of evil – is it a force? An absence of love? A distortion? Something psychological or physiological? Something spiritual? Some mixture of all of it that I can’t possibly see clearly from inside a human life?
I don’t know.
But I’m surprised to find that I don’t particularly need to know anymore.
Maybe that was the wrong mystery for me to solve.
I don’t have to understand evil before I decide how I want to meet it.
I know what I serve – LOVE. And love protects.
I don’t mean vengeance or cruelty because someone else was cruel first and now I get to call mine justice.
I mean love that will put a body between harm and someone vulnerable when that’s what’s required. Love that tells the truth. Love that can set a boundary and mean it. Love that doesn’t have to strip someone of their humanity in order to stop them from hurting somebody else.
Maybe this is what bowing to humanity actually asks of me.
Not bowing to every human behavior.
Hell no!
Bowing to the Soul deeply enough that I’m willing to protect its humanity.
Sometimes from another person and sometimes from itself.
It took me weeks to get here, and I’m glad I didn’t answer sooner.
Some things shouldn’t be turned into content the minute they occur to us.
Sometimes I need to go quiet for a while and see if I still believe something three weeks later.
This one stayed.
LOVE WILL PROTECT.