It doesn’t belong to you, personally

When those you love become lost, their behavior is not who they are.  If they become enveloped in darkness, they may not be able to produce anything but darkness.  They may try to draw you into it, using your love as the tether.  They may direct life-or-death, world-ending statements at you, because their pain makes them believe their very life is at stake.  Until they deal with their own pain, negativity will exude from them in all directions.  See it for what it is, an outward expression of pain.  It doesn’t belong to you, personally. 

Saving Virtue

I dreamed that I made my way through a rainy, crowded city to the public bandstand, where I had previously placed piles of our (mine and my daughter’s) clean, folded laundry.  Only the top layer of laundry was wet from the rain, so it wasn’t the total loss it could have been, but we had to figure out how to save the laundry and prevent the need to do it over.  We knew we couldn’t balance the piles of laundry if we attempted to carry them.  So we donned all of the clothes simultaneously and wore them away from the bandstand, toward dry quarters.  If dirty laundry is a metaphor for vice, then clean, folded laundry is a metaphor for virtue.  Virtue is not for public display, but to be worn like clothing.  We can’t carry it around like a parcel; we have to take it on.