Family of Merged Energy by teZa Lord

Some of us haven’t much immediate family left. A cousin here or there. A distant sibling who rarely connects on a deep level, everyone keeping things “copasetic,” trying to ignore the obvious, crushingly heavy elephant in the living room. No one wants a bad feeling to rear up and destroy what little family one has left. That’s the thing. Whenever problems of any sort arise, whether in a family, an individual, or a nation’s divisive psyche—when conflicts aren’t dealt with directly—good feelings fester and go sour, often turning into resentments, and what was once genuine all-inclusive love erodes to becoming a meager sense of obligation.

The Birth of the Blended Family Concept

Some of us sadly have had to face what it feels like to have our so-called “nuclear family,” the mother/father/parent/sibling/blood relatives that we grew up with, fade away, become emotionally distant, awkwardly clumsy, even estranged for any variety of reasons. Death itself is often the culprit that severs close ties within families.

Certainly, during the Covid-19 pandemic, many families have suffered loss, adding to the list of miseries that tear families cruelly apart.

This makes the concept of a blended family even more real. The withdrawal of love and acceptance within my own clan has prompted me to re-think our human world as the blended family it truly is. Not some distant, philosophical vantage point: a blended family is as close and real to me as healing relieves one from enormous pain.

The blended family of humankind means more to me than the ideas I’ve shared in previous writings, essays, and nonfiction books in which I describe how homo sapiens are becoming inexorably mixed, evolving into a new and better form of humankind. This transformation is already happening, most emphatically. Social norms are relaxing, and people are crossing previous barriers of race, religion, and culture, becoming a truly blended family in all ways.

Yet, for some of us, a blended family means much more than merely (merely!) the universal blending of the human race.

A Blended Family Replaces Emptiness

In life, everyone faces loss. Like most people, my first experience of this was with the death of beloved grandparents. I felt the emptiness of losing loved family members, even though, of course, older folk are expected to die before younger ones. I felt the emptiness of grief, as any person does whose blood relatives are assumed to be the “only family” one has.

How could I think to look at other humans as part of my universally blended family? This was never presented to me as a possibility.

As I matured, loss was replaced with possibilities, as grief does when it’s allowed time to heal. Gradually, my world expanded. I became aware of other connections to share with people, besides the obvious ones of bloodline and cultural sameness; the quirks and oddities that make each of our nuclear families so special—to each of us. First, my interests shifted to groups of like-minded folks who weren’t in any way blood relatives. Then came a life-altering discovery.

The Spirituality of Humans as a Blended Family

Since discovering my Truth, my own “comfort zone” of spirituality, I have been diving deeper into what to me is the “real essence” of life. Inter-connectedness is what Spirit is sometimes called. The Oneness of all is more real to me than my now-fractured nuclear family. Some people call the focus on spiritual matters a personal choice. But, for me, there is nothing more worthwhile, or equalizing, to experiencing that all living creatures share a commonality, not just our nuclear blood family. This heightened sense of awareness, of a shared universal consciousness, is often and simply called by the name of: the One that has no second.

This Oneness, therefore, is a blended family of another nature than the combined biological “mixing” of differences within the human race.

I am most comfortable experiencing life as an endless opportunity of a next, and the next, inter-mingling of feeling at One with all in existence. What started off, in my youth, as a “sense” of Oneness has now become my solid reality: our universal blended family. Living with this blended family concept of Oneness is the result of having spent many years, decades actually, pursuing what I recognized at first glance was the height of what life could offer me: true happiness and spiritual fulfillment.

Nature Is Our Blended Family

As a kid, as soon as I could, I began running away from the trapped feelings I experienced, in which it seemed my entire nuclear family had locked themselves. When I started to explore making art, I found this a perfect way to “escape” without having to keep running away. I could use my imagination to go as far as I wished, in creative endeavors.

I wanted to experience the heights of joy, of adventure, of possibilities. The feeling of being connected with all others. The blended family of humankind is the ultimate pleasant sensation. It is a complete surrender to feeling in tune with all and everything. This happened to me earliest in life by being in Nature. I’d find a quiet spot in a meadow, feel the sun on my shoulders and the top of my head, and just sit. For long stretches of time, I’d smell the flowers, watch the grasses, feel the breeze through the tall trees’ leaves, and hear the chirps of birds and buzzing of insects as my senses opened to Oneness. All around me, I was surrounded by my blended family.

You can find my new audio book, Zen Love: The True Journey of a Blended Family, at Amazon! Also available in trade paperback and as an ebook.