The Shield, the Sword, and the Turtle

(This is a piece from earlier this year, but as it seems to be resurfacing and someone asked to hear more about this, here it is again, this time in english..)

A passage from over-responsibility back to innocence

For a long time, I have been studying one question: why does the world respond to me the way it does? Why the attacks, the violence, the polarity? Where did my shield form, and how could I ever put it down?

I never truly believed it was “my fault.” But repetition breeds guilt, and guilt became the core wound. When the world feels like it is constantly attacking, two things grow inside a person: extreme guilt and extreme readiness.

I have not carried “the pain of the world” in some romantic way. But something in me carried the belief that everything depended on me. Not because I thought I was special, but because if nothing depends on me, then I am completely unsafe.

This was existential over-responsibility. A survival strategy.

My sensitivity has always read the field, but I confused reading with controlling, understanding with obligation, sensing with fixing. And when a human being stands in an internal battle stance, even unconsciously, the world responds to that stance. Not because anything is deserved, but because nervous systems speak to one another. Held power can be felt. Readiness can be felt. It is subtle, but real.

This is not guilt. This is physiology. This is field dynamics.

I had been carrying a shield and a sword.

The small one inside me, the one who wanted to play, had her hands full of weapons. Not because she was aggressive, but because she had learned that only readiness could keep her safe.

Then one day I saw her clearly: a child slowly dropping the weapons, uncertain and disbelieving, looking around for playmates.

This was not an idea. My body understood it. I do not need to live in constant readiness. I do not need to manage the field. I do not need to carry everything.

And then came the turtle.

First as a symbol in the images I was creating, and then almost literally, when a turtle came to lay her eggs near my threshold. I thought of the mythical World Turtle, swimming through the cosmic ocean with the earth resting upon its shell.

The world does not rest on my spine. It rests on something greater.

The turtle came carrying a teaching that I am still unfolding. My task is not to carry the world. My task is to be part of it.

Over-responsibility had made me strong, but it had also made me alone.

The turtle began teaching me to slow down. At first, slowing down seemed almost ridiculously simple compared with the complexity of everything I had been trying to understand. But over time it became one of the deepest practices of my life.

Because when I stopped moving so quickly, I began to notice how much of my movement had actually been anticipation. How much of my attention was slightly ahead of the moment, reading, preparing, predicting, adjusting. Even when there was no visible danger, some part of me was already responding to what might happen next.

And slowly, something extraordinary began to happen.

As I stopped preparing for life, I started meeting it.

I began discovering the difference between vigilance and presence. Vigilance looks at the world and asks, What do I need to protect myself from? Presence looks at the world and asks, What is here?

That difference has changed everything.

When I stopped organizing my relationship with life around an expected external threat, there was suddenly space for something I had barely known before: a relationship with life itself. And with myself. A relationship that was no longer primarily formed through defence and anticipation, but through sincere curiosity and love.

The shield had protected me for a long time. But eventually I discovered something strange behind it: another kind of protection entirely.

My open heart.

For years, that would have sounded almost absurd to me. How could openness possibly be protection? Surely protection meant becoming harder to penetrate, more prepared, more discerning, more defended.

But the deeper I went, the more I began to understand that an open heart is not the same as an unprotected heart. It does not mean having no boundaries or allowing everything in. In fact, the opposite began happening. As the shield became less necessary, my boundaries became clearer. I no longer needed to defend myself against everything because I could feel more clearly what was mine and what was not.

This also changed my understanding of the sword.

Aggression was never the enemy. It was restrained life force, boundary energy that had not been allowed to move naturally. When aggression is not integrated, it becomes constant readiness. When it is integrated, it becomes a clear boundary.

The sword no longer needs to remain drawn, but its intelligence remains. It becomes discernment and choice: the capacity to say yes and no, to move toward something and to leave something behind.

My power is not in fighting. My power is in choosing.

Somewhere in this process, I began understanding the turtle differently too. Her slowness was never passivity. She was teaching me another relationship with time.

There is movement that comes from fear of what will happen if I stop, and there is movement that arises because life itself begins moving through me. The slower I became, the more accurately I could feel the difference.

I began calling it active waiting: listening without disappearing, waiting without abandoning choice, allowing life to reveal its direction while remaining fully here to meet it.

The turtle does not need to know the entire road. She needs the ground beneath the next step.

Perhaps that is also why her home is carried on her body. Safety is no longer somewhere ahead. It is no longer something the world must provide before I can soften. It becomes a relationship I inhabit.

And from there, curiosity has gradually begun replacing vigilance.

This might be the most profound change of all.

Curiosity has always been the force that kept me alive. It kept asking me to go deeper, beyond guilt, beyond victimhood, beyond explanations, until I could find what was actually true.

And the truth was never that I was guilty.

The truth was that I was ready for battle.

For a very long time, I looked at life partly through the question, Where is the threat? Now another question is becoming possible:

What wants to meet me here?

That is an entirely different world.

And strangely, it has brought me closer to innocence than any attempt to heal myself ever did. Not the innocence of someone who has never encountered darkness, but an innocence that has walked through it and no longer needs to expect it behind every corner.

The small one inside me no longer needs to carry weapons in her hands. She can look at the world with curiosity. She can touch it, play with it, love it.

And perhaps this is what I misunderstood about protection for most of my life. I thought the shield was keeping my heart safe. Eventually, I had to put the shield down to discover that the heart itself was the safest place I had ever known.

Not because nothing can hurt me there, but because I am no longer leaving myself in anticipation of what might.

I can stay. I can feel. I can choose. I can respond. I can love.

When the shield and sword fall, the hands are free. Free hands can touch, create, play and build. The power that was once bound to defence becomes available for creation, relationship, participation, life.

My task was never to carry the world. My task is to be part of it.

And after all this time spent preparing myself for life, I find myself becoming genuinely curious about it again. What is here? What wants to happen? Who might I meet? What might we create?

The child looks around for her playmates. The turtle keeps walking. The heart remains open.

And there is another day coming, with adventures I know nothing about yet.

What a blessing to be alive.