It's Not Supposed To Be Hard

The last couple of weeks I've felt sort of like Sysyphus (did I spell that correctly?). Not the weight of the world, but some pretty heavy stuff of my own has been rolling down since I last wrote here. Lessons, lessons - is that all there is in life? But, as my friend Bill says, what if that's all we're here for anyway - what if we only THINK it's not supposed to be hard?

In a nutshell -

* I'm learning, from spending time at the home of a woman in hospice care, that I push myself harder than my body will allow. Now, if you know me, this won't come as any big shock. Sure I come by it honestly - having had to suck it up and make do early in life - but nowadays my body say's "uh, uh" when I think I can do something that is stressful for six days in a row. The upside - one night last week I gave myself permission to sleep 13+ hours. It was marvelous.

* Because of the training I've been doing (seven weeks) at the Center for Women & Families I've been getting a LOT of practice in listening. Yeah, this frustrates me, a lot. I LIKE to be heard, and the little girl in me WILL be heard. But I've become aware that, if I just sit with her protestations that SHE HAS SOMETHING TO SAY TOO, then eventually what she needs to say separates itself from what she just wants to throw out there. This takes a lot of silent sitting time, and listening to what others are saying. I'm getting better at it too.

* As always my wonderful daughter, Sarah, is one of the best and most loving and efficacious teachers I have. I finally got to visit with her this past weekend (it hadn't happened since June!) and also got the chance to just observe and feel joy about how Sarah moves in and through the world. The dance that takes her through her days has its own music, and ranges in her body with such a uniquely Sarah sort of energy. I can't take credit for the fabulous woman she is, but I can recall that I always encouraged her authenticity, and allowed her feelings - even more readily than I would allow my own for all those years. I learn so much about loving with Sarah. And we shared a delicious Sav's Atketke (now I KNOW I spelled that wrong) salad while I was in Lexington.

* Writing is easy - it's submitting your writing to contests or for publication that's hard! But I've almost got all the entries ready for the Green River Writers contest - whew! - and have been developing some new work as well. I think my poems have taken a turn somewhere - my voice seems to be shifting. Maybe it's because I'm getting more confidence IN my own, true, voice all the time! I'm trying not to push, to let it develop, to just WRITE without judging. Hard. But empowering too. Fierceness and courage - at 58!

Hmmmm - did I say life was hard? These don't sound so onerous after all.

Uncertainty

Throughout my educational experiences – a bachelors in English/Political Science, a masters in Library Science, and finally (so far) a masters in Psychology – I’ve been fortunate to have teachers who referred to books, articles, plays, music, and art. I’d jot down titles, authors, ideas in my notes during class – telling myself that, when I had time, I’d get around to these works. Mostly I didn’t pursue them. Life and commitments would become more important. Or maybe I just got lazy.
But since completing the requirements of my most recent degree I made a point of going back through all my notes, making a list of every reference. It covered five pages. For the last year I’ve been trying to get to one or more of these suggestions each month.
I’ve been lucky, not working full-time, to have the time for this. Lucky too that I needed to try to maintain the connection to the school and the people – the totality of that experience that permitted me to grow in ways I’d never imagined before. In attempting to hold on to this growth and encourage it to continue, by reading the books and articles, by searching for the music and art, by journaling on my responses to it, by including the images in poetry and prose, I’ve been able to continue on this path that feels right for me.
I’ve started to understand lately that, although I began this project as a search for certainty, as a way to confirm the connection between myself and the school, the teachers, the folks in my cohort even though I am geographically distant; what I am receiving through my reading is a continuing connection to uncertainty. That’s appropriate, and really should come as no surprise – since the crux of the program and the process of learning and living in it was about opening to the uncertainty that lives in each of us.
The gift – one among many – I received from entering the fifteenth cohort at school [if you’re interested in exploring go to www.meridianuniversity.edu ] was of accepting the unacceptable – of appreciating and responding to the uncertain, the fearful, the dependent, the needing person that I am. In the acceptance and response I find, we each find, that all those aspects of self that we have been taught and acculturated to hide, to see as weak and undesirable are really the gifts we have to offer to the world.
Right now I’m reading two titles from my five page list that beautifully and elegantly address uncertainty. One is “The Field Guide to Getting Lost” by Rebecca Solnit. The second is “Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life” by Irwin Kula.
In “Yearnings” Kula refers to a story I’d never encountered, not having been raised in Judaism. It’s a Talmudic story of how God created and destroyed ten worlds before the one we have now. Why He destroyed them – because each was disappointing, not what He had envisioned, an utter failure. What a different vision of God! A God who was, Himself, uncertain – who desperately needed to get it “right.”
Even this world (in our times wouldn’t it be labeled World 11.0?) that He made, He nearly also destroyed. Yes, the one we have now didn’t seem up to snuff for its Creator – was nearly thrown on the trash heap. But the Talmud tells us, says Kula, that God paused. He thought about it, and realized that just because He had created it did not mean he could predict or control it. Even God had to live with the uncertainty that what He did was “good enough.”
God paused. And because of that we have everything from the Garden, through the apple, the flood, and all the way to where we are today. Hmmmm.

Change of Venue

I don't trust epiphanies, sudden revelations, or even the so-called breakthroughs that seem to accompany peak experiences.
Certainly I've had my share of moments of insight that seemed to provide an answer I've been looking for, even if I didn't know I was looking for it. But upon reflection I've been able to see that I'd been preparing to receive the answer for some time, and that the universe's lessons had been giving me pieces of it all along.
And, really, it seems as if those flashes of insight, those moments that seem to give an answer to some cosmic $64,000 question, often aren't as satisfying as we always think they'll be anyway.
Maybe it's maturity, or maybe just letting go of some of the existential angst over the years, but it seems like the older I get the more I appreciate the experiences in life that bestow questions, rather than answers, upon me. It seems that it's in the times when I have no certainty, nothing that could remotely be described as an answer, the times that generate questions inside - those are the times and experiences from which I learn the most.
I'm in one of those times just now, one of those places I just hate being in.
The overwhelming and incessant heat of this summer has forced me to an acceptance of my own physical fragility, but, at the same time necessitated an enhanced self care from which this body I've often resented has gained great benefit. My dream journeys have shone a light on being lost, on the fear I've tried to keep a secret from all - including myself - that craziness is somehow a built-in component of my psyche. Yet those dreams have also helped me see that the daily, conscious, journey I'm on is right - for me, even if others don't get it.
Questions abound. Answers are in short supply. The choice between madness and insanity.
I've spent most of my life swimming against the current trying to push everything to get where, and what I wanted. At those times when I ran out of energy I would tread water awhile, still determined though to get where I firmly believed I was supposed to end up. A lot of water up my nose and gasping for air - but would I quit?
Now? Well, I think I'll try floating. Let the river take me where IT wants me to go.

Yeah, baby

What could I POSSIBLY add.

Having Tantrums

Yesterday Rosie threw herself on the floor, kicking her tiny feet against the carpet until one Velcro-fastened shoe flew off, bucking her short torso in waves and circles, moves that a break dancer works months to master. The biggest, loudest meltdown of her fifteen months seemed to pull the plug on her mother’s energy – and before breakfast.
If you’ve had a child, or been around one on a daily basis, and that child has been powerfully, absolutely loved, adored and wanted you might have seen such a tantrum. If that child has been in your care you might well have stood there – watching, thinking you ought to stop it. You may even have wondered if there’s something wrong with this kid – or wrong with yourself as a parent. Toddler tantrums are scary. Guilt is a mother’s constant companion – whether the child is easy or challenging.
The reality is that all children are challenging. Especially when they’re as young as Rosie, the life force manifests powerfully and primitively, taking over their tiny body that wants, wants wants – whether it is attention, control, or breakfast. I don’t know about Rosie, but for most of us, I think, the sudden explosion of anger is a way to lay down the gauntlet, a challenge. A tantrum is an overwhelming force against what we perceive as an immovable object in our path. The object can be outside of us – in the form of a parent who is saying “wait.” Or it can be inside – a need to find out what will happen if I scream and hold my breath.
The reality is that we’re all this challenging. The child, the keeper of the powerful and primitive life force , lives in us no matter what our age. We find this out at times when we receive one of “God’s kisses” – when we are cut off suddenly in traffic, when the stress and responsibility piles up at work, when we’re standing helpless watching our child have a tantrum.
As adults we have, hopefully, learned not to throw ourselves to the floor and kick and scream. But sometimes – tell the truth now – don’t you want to? I do. Sometimes I’ll settle for muttering “asshole” or flipping off the driver who cut me off. But equally will I fantasize, or dream, about laying waste to the landscape or the person. Even more – I’ll feel this need to just lie down on the floor and howl when it all piles up around me and I get tired of trying. I imagine just lying there, having my nervous breakdown until someone comes and rescues me.
Of course I don’t. Even when I permit myself to cry in frustration, when the stresses of life pile up, I do it in private, or in therapy, with a trusted other.
But I can imagine the relief, the pure visceral experience of letting loose - allowing my libido, my life force to erupt, getting back to the basics of human experience, testing the waters of life, to see if they will hold me.

The Watery Essence of Soul

"We may worry about death but what hurts the soul most is to live without tasting the water of its own essence."
- Rumi
Today I sent off an essay - the topic: how growing up in an alcoholic home has "made me who I am today." Whether or not it gets published, and it looks as though it might be included in a book of other such essays, writing this was one of those learning experiences that we often look back on, and shake our heads, say "damn - what was that about!"
I had dream visits from my father -dead for nearly 25 years - and my mother - dead for 4 - in which their displeasure at my audacity in writing about this topic was clearly communicated. Odd thing was that - in the dreams at least - I kept my composure, and generally just felt sorry for them. Now THAT'S progress. I won't try to pretend there weren't tears during the writing or that it was easy. On the contrary, the gatekeepers - those voices/personas/presences that try to keep us safe by discouraging us from taking risks - were tuned up and pulling out all their tricks during the writing.
But, you know, once you get a bit of recovery from any emotionally traumatizing experience, at least a modicum of experience that reminds you that NOW ISN'T THEN, a bit of emotional padding around those places that have been so tender from wounding, then it does seem that the gatekeepers don't have so much power. Or it isn't so devastating as it used to be.
Once again, please don't think for a nano-second that I've got this figured out - or that I'm gonna start using words like: whole, healed, certain, or even fully loved. But it does seem that each experience builds on those gone before, that putting the focus on the only person I CAN understand and have ANY hope of helping - ME - actually does help things get less chaotic and make more sense.
My god, could all those therapists and people around 12-Step tables have been right! Who knew.

Containers

Recently I’ve been spending time with the mother of a friend who is dying of cancer, sitting with her to give her husband and son a break from constant caregiving. I’ve also been training to work with the Center for Women and Families, an organization that supports and provides services for those who have lived with domestic violence, and those who’ve undergone sexual abuse or rape.
Certainly I’m subject to feelings of sadness in both experiences, of anger, fear, and even, at times, a sense of despair. But it’s not all these so-called negative emotions. Laughter often arises as I sit at the bedside of the dying woman, as we speak of her son and his dog. And through sharing with others at the training sessions I find validation of my own experiences and recovery. I’m reminded that it’s all grist for the mill of living, that lessons most often come in the form of ‘kisses’ from the universe that feel like getting smacked upside the head by a two-by-four.
When I was still working in colleges, the kids used to say, “it’s all good.”
The intensity of these experiences has resulted in some powerfully interesting dreams, as well as rebellions in my body. You can imagine. Although I knew, going in, that I’d need to take excellent care of myself during these experiences; I hadn’t fully understood the necessity for creating a container for the experiences themselves.
I’m not speaking here of a way to separate myself from the experience. I don’t mean walling off the emotions that arise at the dying woman’s bedside, or distracting myself from the anger I feel when, during the training, we watch a film about children who’ve lived with violence.
What I’m talking about, in creating a container, is creating a way to hold the experience within me, to be affected by it naturally yet without surrendering to emotionality. A safe space in which I can feel what I feel, in which the others within the experience can understand their feelings as valid and worthy of expression, and in which all concerned have the opportunity to receive the ‘kisses’ from the universe that are so necessary to being fully human without feeling overwhelmed by them or alone in them. That’s the sort of container I’m talking about.
Ultimately it’s about community.
Yet I’m not talking about what passes for community in our culture currently. There is no container for experience when most are weak and powerless and the few are in charge – deciding what the majority are to do, even telling them what to feel.
Within the container where each person has safety to let an emotion arise naturally because they understand it will not be dismissed or negated; each is equal. If I distance myself from the dying woman’s fear of letting go, try to assuage her fear or even distract her from it, I set myself up as powerful, because I am not, currently, in her shoes. If I do that I make her into a sort of child to be taken care of. Yet, if I can enter fully into the experience of being with her, of allowing her presence and her emotions to affect me, trusting my own emotional reflexes – not reactions, but responses – we become a community.
Container creation requires risk. In our culture we are encouraged toward strength, or the pretense of it, rather than vulnerability. Trusting our emotions is, for many of us, both unfamiliar and negatively charged.
For most of my life I believed that letting myself feel even the tiniest bit sad was going to result in falling apart completely, until someone would have to call the men with the straightjackets, to haul me off to a padded room in some mental hospital. It’s only been relatively recently I began, with much loving help. and by being open to the lessons life kept offering me, to risk opening and expressing. None of us does this alone, even if we do it in private.
Again I return to the need for witnessing.
I arrived home last night from a training session in which we had explored the question of “why don’t women just leave” when they’re being abused. I opened myself to remembering, cried into my solitary pillow about the years I stayed, the years I wasted. But this private grief does not heal without allowing it a place in my experience, just as the actions I’m grieving have their place. It must be shared, has been at times, will be again when I begin the work of serving others who have inhabited a life of violence. Not that I will, or should, tell them of my experience. Rather, I must try continually to risk trusting the multi-layered and multi-faceted person I am always becoming, risk believing in the safety and holding of the container that gets created whenever and with whomever we share our authentic selves.