DISCOMBOBULATED.
Ruminations on polarity.
On the fourth day after Easter 2026, during our morning walk through the neighborhood forest paths of southern Portugal, a sedan crammed with a family of four stopped on the gravel road in front of my dog Slava. The woman in the passenger seat, a fully made-up dirty blonde in her sixties dressed in shiny florals, lowered her window, her golden bracelets dangling.
“Hello. We’re looking for English speakers?” she asked, turning her body to face me.
“I speak English,” I replied through a smile. Portuguese is cryptic to me.
“We are spreading the Word of God … would you mind if I gave you this pamphlet?” the woman asked, handing me a three by five inch colorful print.
“Sure, I’ll take it,” I answered, and took it.
It read: “Is living without pain or sadness possible?” A shortened verse from Revelation 21:4 followed, illustrated with a color photo of five people, each representing a voter category — ecstatic, diverse, healthy faces having a blast in a group stock photo shoot.
“Do you read the Bible?” the woman asked.
“Hmmm. I never finished it. It killed me; hundreds of sons and daughters and their names I couldn’t possibly remember. I bought the Youth Bible to better understand it, but I didn’t finish that one either,” I replied, squinting.
“Alright. Well, if you have any question you’d like answered, any at all, ask and the Bible has the answer,” she said, ready to raise her window.
“I actually do have a question. It’s been bugging me for days now. Here it is: let’s say we, humans, do create heaven on Earth — a world of only love, harmony, balance, truth, beauty, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, and so on. Do we really want it that way, or would we end up wanting to kill each other out of boredom after a while? Is polarity natural, or are we conditioned to believe it is?” I asked, brows up.
“Here, I found it, heaven on Earth, in Revelation 21:4,” the man behind the wheel said, leaning over his wife to see me. He read the verse from his tablet, like Moses would: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
“We have to go now, but visit the website. Everything is there,” the woman said, finally pulling her window up.
Dust flew from behind their car as they took off. I must have driven Jehovah’s Witnesses nuts.
As Slava and I returned to our rustic Algarve rental, I glanced at the flyer. Its question was whether we could live without pain. Mine was whether we wanted to.
I had a particular pain in mind: knowing my mother might die without understanding the damage she caused by never healing her own mother wound. On Abraham-Hicks’ emotional guidance system scale, powerlessness I felt was at the very bottom; only despair was lower. Feeling anger and rage was an improvement, yet when I did, guilt came riding right in with them. No matter how far away I traveled, it shadowed me like a freshly hired waitress. Recently, I wrote a letter to my mom explaining my pain, and she gaslit me. Again. Here I was, two thousand kilometers away, carrying the pain and sadness, crying in synch with the sky — nonstop, for three months.
Chirping birds had the answer, but I couldn’t understand them, so I opened myself to the possibility of the Bible giving me one. With my eyes open wider than Kubrick’s, I landed on the religious website from the flyer, and turned on an audio version of Genesis. The beginning of the world was the beginning of separation and contrast — light and dark, sky and sea, land and water, male and female — suggesting order, balance. Hell, in the Garden of Eden, God planted the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, making polarity intrinsic to all existence. I skipped the biblical dynasties, and went straight to Revelation 21:4, to John’s vision of God’s promise to eliminate all suffering.
I closed my eyes and thought in movie scenes. The Invention of Lying came up, with its painfully unvarnished world disrupted by a man who discovers he can lie. The Beach, where paradise collapses once humans get bored of bliss. Fight Club, where Edward Norton’s character beats up Angel Face and says, “I felt like destroying something beautiful.” Batman, and what a bore it would be without the Joker. Alex’s vogue ultraviolence in A Clockwork Orange. Were we slightly violent ourselves, or had I just watched too many movies? And what happens when real people are given permission to do whatever they want?
I went back to 1974 Naples, Italy, where Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 performance at Studio Morra tackled the same question. She stood still for six hours, offering herself as an object, and taking full responsibility for whatever the audience chose to do. Out of 72 objects on a table, from flowers and feathers to knives and a loaded gun, all were used. People touched her, cut her clothes and skin, and someone even held a loaded gun to her head, but thankfully, others intervened. Something is rotten in us, and not just in the state of Denmark, I thought. Someone had also stopped the man with the gun.
Yoko Ono had a similar performance in Kyoto in 1964, titled Cut Piece. She asked the audience to cut away pieces of her clothing while she was sitting. While most participants were polite, there was that one man again, who threatened her with scissors. I’d love to ask him: “Didn’t you just dress up nicely, and only go to town to see some art?”
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I thought of books on utopia; Huxley’s Brave New World, Lowry’s The Giver, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and how avoiding pain evokes another kind of pain.
Across sacred traditions, suffering is treated as pressure that awakens discipline, humility, and spiritual maturity. A human being who never encounters suffering may never be fully formed. The Buddhists pray for challenges, for that pain where the gold is. Pain always brings birth. Of life. Of courage. Of humility. Of growth. Of stamina. Of wisdom. Of discernment. Of Eminem, Nikola Tesla, Viktor Frankl, Oprah Winfrey, Tina Turner. Of J.K. Rowling, Walt Disney, Bethany Hamilton, Michael Jordan, Frida Kahlo, Toni Morrison, Marvin Gaye. Of “the great Ludwig Van,” as aforementioned Alex called him.
My pupils dilated — my pain was never the problem. I’d learned to live with it. I took pain like Play-Doh, and turned it into something delicious, like the French, who call bread pain and spread the mixture into sourdough and éclairs, sour and sweet. The pain that is ours is the pain that can be transformed through love, insight, creation and healing into beauty, the twelve virtues of the heart, art, and growth. This transmuted pain makes compassion intelligent, it refuses self-destruction in the name of love, whilst the pain we take on for others, out of guilt and obedience, is corrosive. That pain is suffering, and suffering is optional.
I thought of my mother, of how I carried her pain as my responsibility while numbing my own to the point of attempting suicides. Of how exhausting and arduous the nonlinear process of forgiving is. Of how putting myself first feels strange, unfamiliar, wrong. Of how I am being both vulnerable and self-compassionate now that I am experiencing sovereignty and freedom for the very first time in my life. Of how I still purge stuck emotions when I hold long Yin yoga poses, and how the tears I keep releasing loosen tension in different parts of my body until they suddenly become flexible, elastic. Of how I surrender to pain, let it pass through me, and let compassion rise. Of how surrender allows pain to be overtaken by light in no time.
I understand Revelation 21:4 as a possibility within consciousness, not a promise about a future world, Heaven on Earth not being disappearance of everything I disliked, but acceptance of all that IS. Like, darkness showing me where I need light. Anger where I need a boundary. Pain evoking my desire for tenderness. Bitter chocolate and light, creamy vanilla ice cream coexisting in the cone, each bringing out the taste of the other in perfect blend. I understand that in my own life, but understanding it on the world scale was another matter.
By early November, we were back home in Andalusia, Spain. After seven tumultuous months, something had loosened. The pain still came up, but it no longer stayed. I could feel it, process it, and let it go. On the morning of November 4, I woke before the alarm. I pulled up my blinds — pitch dark outside. After my usual Reiki-infused meditation in bed, and a walk in the neighborhood forest with Slava, I sat at my computer. My milky coffee spread its aroma throughout the living room and warmed my hands as I cupped the mug. Then I opened Instagram.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so happy scrolling through it — the Democrats had won control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, despite Musk’s nearly half-billion dollars in political contributions. It was the Blue Tsunami that woke me.
This honey to my eyes was actually the cherry on top. I’m not big on following political events, but the algorithm knew I’d be interested in several other pieces of news before this one. In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Flávio Bolsonaro. In Serbia, the student-backed opposition defeated Aleksandar Vučić’s ruling party after fourteen years in power. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc fell eight short of a parliamentary majority — not a finished transformation, but an opening.
I’d been getting goosebumps all week long, celebrating with the people I watched celebrating. But part of the celebration was for selfish reasons — I’d proved myself right. Look at what the contrast had awakened.
Earlier in the year, my own life seemed just as hopeless as the political situation on the world stage. I had kept ruminating on the lessons I was supposed to learn. I’d been following Abraham-Hicks teachings, that contrast helps us clarify what we want, and fine-tune our attention towards it. That “delicious contrast”, as they call it, exposes the horror of made and tolerated choices, but it also provokes into discovering the power we thought we didn’t have. How can we see the stars without the absence of light? How can the Americans appreciate Obama if there’s no Trump? Sure, some contrasts are brutal, but the bigger the contrast, the clearer the desire, and the greater the win.
Not that we needed the cruelty, but now that it was all over our beloved planet, what were we going to do about it? We watched people’s neighbors being taken away by ICE, people in Brazil’s favelas being killed in police raids, protesters in Serbia being beaten by police, Palestinians in Gaza being driven from their homes by Israeli forces. The planet being gang-raped, the list of endangered species growing by the hour, floods, fires, polluted oceans. Enough. I have a voice. I have a vote. I have friends, neighbors, family. I can show up and defend the Constitution in whatever way is available to me. I can organize, take action, do whatever I can to motivate others. Believing in our own power being the ultimate ignition point.
In Croatia, we say kap koja je prelila čašu — the drop that made the glass overflow. Not necessarily the biggest drop, just the one after which the glass cannot hold any more.
People reaching their enough.
The Old Earth autocrats, Putin included, had counted on keeping people frightened, exhausted, divided, too busy surviving to object, and distracted by war games. What they hadn’t counted on was the rise of human consciousness on Earth. Their expiration isn’t only a matter of age, though many are in their senior years, but also about the old ways reaching their end — greed, and the lack that feeds it. Ego accumulates; soul releases.
The divide is Old Earth versus New Earth: what we need to leave behind and what we need to help build. Old Earth is oil money — drilling into the poor Mother until you puncture her heart, calling it growth. Inequality, force, abuse of power, war as profit. Dividing people, then selling yourself as their savior and protector. For Old Earth’s farewell-party hymn, I’m cranking up Beck’s “Loser.”
New Earth is peace, sustainability, equal opportunities, personal development in service of the greater whole, and shared resources. It’s soul-oriented yet grounded and stable. It means remembering that other species live here, too, and that we might become wiser by learning from them. In a wolf pack, the wolf at the front breaks the trail through deep snow, making the journey easier for those behind. In the Old Earth human pack, the powerful clear the way for themselves, and leave the vulnerable to struggle.
But wait — was I at peace because my consciousness had changed, or because the news had finally delivered something I liked? What would happen the next time it didn’t?
I thought of my mother again, and of how long I had waited for her to understand before allowing myself to be free. I could do the same with the world — wait for every election, every government, every human being to give me permission to feel all right. There would always be another condition.
Perhaps that was the part of Heaven on Earth I had been missing. I could let contrast clarify my desire without focusing on the hurt. I could care about an outcome letting it rule my life. I can enjoy the good without clinging to it or attaching my joy to it. In other words, I can accept everything as transient as it really is, and avoid suffering.
I thought again of the question on the pamphlet: “Is living without pain or sadness possible?” I don’t believe so, but once we reach a state of consciousness in which we stop treating pain and sadness as proof that life has gone wrong, we enter that proverbial Heaven on Earth.
This, too, shall pass. The bitter, and the sweet.
For now, I’m licking both in my cone.
