Tag Archives: heart

Free Weight

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For awhile, I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognize myself; who was that, staring back at me with little wrinkles everywhere, eyelids that are changing, a worried brow, gray hair? For a while, I knew that it was, indeed me, but a me that somehow had changed. Now, they have come together and I see the same old face in my current new face.

This blog has existed for about ten years, and so much has happened in those interim ten years. For a long time, I was good at writing regularly, at night, by myself, in my house. But then ten years ago I got together with the man I am now married to, and my evening behaviors changed. To me, writing is a solitary act. I really don’t like to do it when anyone is home, even with the door closed. I somehow feel that it is important not to be interrupted when channeling whatever this is.

Here I am today, writing stream of consciousness style, so please bear with me. Today is my friend Mary Ann’s birthday and she would have been 46. She died two years ago. She visits a lot, but we can’t talk anymore, and that is what I miss the most. I also miss talking to my dad, as we did during his last few years of life. We had had a lifetime of fights (since I was a teenager, so half a lifetime I guess), that we gave up sometime after I got married and we moved Maw Maw into our house after she had a stroke. Taking care of her made me realize that our lives are very finite and we can leave the planet oh so quickly. I vowed to never talk to my dad about anything important ever again, and we began talking all the time.

Today I am thinking about his first, secret-to-us family in England. What is weird about this iteration of thinking, after now knowing for about 2 months, is that I feel the most compassion for him that I have ever felt. I never could feel this compassion for him in life because he never told us about this thing, this majorly big issue in his life that explains so much. When I asked my aunts about him in 2017 and they told me they wouldn’t tell me, I thought all kinds of things.

I thought he had gotten someone pregnant and his parents were really mad. (Partially true)

I thought maybe he had gotten drunk and wrecked a car and his parents were really mad. (No)

I thought he had fought in Vietnam and had PTSD. (Not true; now we aren’t sure if he was ever over there, but he said he was, so……)

Basically all of the things I thought it could be were way more colorful and interesting than a breakup of a marriage in its infancy, and leaving the infants that came along with the young marriage behind, never to see them again. It’s just so damn sad.

Lately, sometimes, I get so sad. It’s like something is literally hanging around my neck with a weight. What’s in the weight? I don’t even know. Is it just me? Am I a melancholy baby after all? It would seem so. I used to be more fun though, I think. Why is this weight so heavy and how do I lift it? I don’t want to feel this sad and anxious all the time; emotions so overwhelming and a general feeling of no one liking me. And coupled with that, a crazy desire to keep everyone happy so that I don’t say things when I am angry or sad or irritated or when I need to. Those two things must be intertwined; some ouroboros that is.

Earlier I was talking to a friend of mine who lives in Texas and we were talking about how reflective the 40s is. This decade is wild and whack. I don’t understand how the shift is perhaps a bit more money in the bank, or perhaps an investment (house) or something, and then people start to die? Right now, I think this trade off, this change, this phase, level-up, or whatever you want to call it, is bullshit.

I also accept that everyone dies and literally they have to die at some point. It just seems that it is weirdly becoming a regular part of life, and I am having to adjust to it and “deal” with it, and try to understand it and be at peace with it. One of the things I learned when Maw Maw lived with us is that death doesn’t scare me. I think I knew this, as I when I got very sick in high school and didn’t die, I think I chose to no longer be frightened of it and be open to it all the time. When Maw Maw was dying, a day that I haven’t written about yet, it was very weird and mysterious. Watching someone leave the planet “is NOT like in the movies” (I said this over and over at that time).

Why can I not seem to get out of thinking about Maw Maw, my Dad, Mary Ann, and my friend Kate (who died this past summer). I am shaken by Kate’s death; I always thought she’d end up working for the federal government and be interviewed on 60 Minutes or something. Mary Ann I just miss. My Dad I just miss. Those two were my phone people; I spoke to them almost every day. I haven’t had my phone people in over 2 years, and I miss them. Maw Maw I miss, but she makes me smile and laugh. She was old and she was ready to roll out. I just miss her, again, because it would be fun if she was here and we could watch a movie. They just seem to live in my mind right now; I am not sure what to do about that.

When I think of my Dad right now I just wish I could tell him that it’s ok, we know, and we just wish he would have told us because everything is fine. It happened so long ago, before he had even met my mom, and I know that no matter what happened, it was not an easy decision and I am sure he didn’t want to make it. My Aunt Margaret told me about his white wedding, and how beautiful it was, everyone in white dresses and my Aunt Helen was the flower girl. She told me she has photos somewhere and I so hope she can find them. I have a hard time imagining my dad as a 26 year old person. How was he ever that young?

I wish I could tell him that it’s ok because it is. It explains so much, almost everything. It explains why we came to the US, and why his family didn’t know that. It explains, perhaps, why we fought so much. Did he feel guilty every time he looked at me? Did he feel guilty all the time, ashamed, anxious, afraid, and did he transform those feelings into rage and anger? (Seems so). It seems so sad, what a waste of time and energy. My mom said that she would have welcomed the boys into the family, but who knows if they would have wanted that, or their mom. I know that with Cody’s situation with his baby mama, she was (metaphorically) driving the bus and made it extremely hard for him to see or have partial custody of his son. It took many thousands of dollars and hours of time to secure those rights. But, he did it, he chose to fight for them. Why didn’t my dad fight for his boys?

I can only imagine how sad he must have been, and that is how I have compassion for him. I wonder if he knew it wasn’t working when they were living in Scotland and found out they were pregnant. I wonder where they moved after that. Did they own their house or rent it? Was it near my grandparents or her parents or neither? How much was he working then, and doing what? I know that he was a cigarette salesman at one point down in Devon/Cornwall, but was that before when he first got back from Australia, or between Outward Bound and Noble Denton?

It is such a drag that I probably won’t know the answers to many of these questions. The tragedy of this story, or at least one of the big ones, is that the boys’ mum died the same year that he did. She died still with his last name, after all that time.

I feel better after writing a bit. Please bear with me as this all comes pouring out. I am so scared to let it, but it feels like a weight lifted when I do.

Grief, again. Grabbing hold of my heart and squeezing it in a vice. Some people describe grief as being shaken by a wild animal, but mine is a cold squeeze and I feel like I can’t scream out even though I want to. If I scream, someone might get mad at me for being too dramatic or sensitive or overly-emotional. If I scream, people might know and worry or be mad at me for making noises in quiet places. I said this to my therapist two weeks ago and just remembered it:

“If I look at it, then I may be sad forever.” Where does that come from? When I say it outloud or read it, I know that it is some part of my brain trying to trick me. I can’t be sad forever, and how would letting this out make me sadder? Perhaps it’s the weight? It doesn’t want to let go?

No More Leaving

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No More Leaving
 
At
Some point
Your relationship
With God
Will
Become like this:
 
Next time you meet Him in the forest
Or on a crowded city street
 
There won’t be anymore
 
“Leaving.”
 
That is,
 
God will climb into
Your pocket.
 
You will simply just take
 
Yourself
 
Along!
– Hafiz

 

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post and since my discovery of what had been bothering me all these years. I feel as if some dark glasses or horse blinders were torn off my eyes and thrown across the street when that discovery hit me. It is so strange to me that we can tell ourselves these stories about ourselves for so many years without actually being forced, by our minds and hearts and new experiences, to reflect upon them in an active way.

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For the last several years, I have been looking into the effects of traumatic experiences on myself and on others. I have discovered that many of us, especially as we get older, in our mid-thirties for example, have developed elaborate defense mechanisms and intimate pitfalls. So many of these are not obvious to anyone, even ourselves, until, if we are lucky enough, our eyes are opened and we can re-open the Pandora’s box of emotions to see whether what is in there is serving us, anymore.

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When I think of the delicacy of the human heart, I like to think of the Egyptian mythology of, when one dies, that one’s heart is measured against the weight of a single feather. I do think that the human heart is just that light, just that easy to shatter. But, the other side of the coin is that we, too, are remarkably resilient, like the trees that I spend so much time gazing upon. Despite the myriad fractures and sometimes breaks in the surface of the heart, we keep on keepin’ on, living from day to day, month to month, year to year. Perhaps the scarification of those fractures are what the defense mechanisms are, the fears, the caginess, the aversion to risking one’s poor, suffering heart.

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It is like crystal, like the petals of a poppy: translucent, and easy to bruise.

I think the sadness of being out of touch with one’s emotional pitfalls comes from the realization that most people are genuinely good, and want to love and care and protect and enjoy one another’s company. It’s almost as if adults live in the center of a long, winding labyrinth with doors along the way. All the doors must open, eventually, and whatever obstacle that lays beyond them must be acknowledged and explored. For if not, I would imagine, you end up rather like someone whose fears have become her/himself, and the real person inside is just lost.

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“An unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates

 

Be Honest

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What a loaded phrase.

What a practice. Can we, any of us, be truly honest with ourselves and with others?

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” – Virginia Woolf

Lately, I have been trying this out: this idea of being myself. I now understand that who we are, or what is important to us, is shifting almost constantly and therefore, our expressions of such self will also shift and change. For most of my young life, I felt like I should portray myself in one way, and hide everything else. I think I learned this from my mother, and from growing up in an immigrant family where success means everything and feelings are swept under the rug, or into the corners of coat closets.

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I have some strange health problems, that probably started when I was sixteen. I inherited a strange genetic immunodeficiency disease, most likely from my father’s side, that is named gammaglobulinemia. It manifests in many ways, mostly in my predilection for infections and constant arthritic-like pain in my hands, wrists, and hips. During my senior year, I had to take a rest cure for almost six months, and spent my days watching movies and eating scrambled eggs, wondering what would happen. During that time, the illness expressed itself in its most intense form to date, but here and there, it pops up, as if to remind me of my own delicate nature. I forget, or shove away, my actual nature almost on a daily basis, as if putting forth a calm and strong and independent persona will chase away the inconsistencies, the weaknesses, the sadnesses, the things about myself that I am afraid of.

A few weeks ago, I chose to do something different. I chose to go to a good doctor and to talk to people about how I feel on a daily basis. It is a huge change for me: previous to this, only those closest to me knew about my feelings of being in my body. Very few people know that I experience chronic pain that limits the way my body moves and feels in space. I took a chance recently and spoke about it, and realized, just as a I realized last winter, when I shared my life story with close friends in Maine, that those who care about you don’t hate you when you express weakness, but rather, they see you as more human, more like them. Today I sat in the woodshop and talked about my friends with another friend and talked about how I have an autoimmune illness and that’s why I feel sensitive a lot and have been going to to doctor a lot since the fall. My friend sat there and asked me, “so…your bones hurt all the time?” And I explained it: how my wrists, hands and hips hurt constantly. He told me that it was strange that someone who works with her hands so much has so much pain, and I told him the truth, that activity is one of the only things that helps with it. He said, “well, I suppose you would have given up on it a long time ago if it was the other way around.” I smiled and said, “well, I wouldn’t have been able to give up on it.”

I supposed there are great risks in the opening of the heart. What happens if people lean into you too close and pierce it, sometimes not in an act of malicious vengeance but just peering too close-in? I spoke with a studio-mate the other day about divorce and its long-lasting implications, and about how I feel at peace with it all finally, as if it happened a long time ago, a time I can’t really fully identify with anymore. She told me that her divorce is still taking its toll, ten years later. So we agreed that all of us experience loss, grief, decisions and their implications, in different ways, and no way is wrong or right.

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I feel like being honest and opening my heart, perhaps for the first time, is a great form of risk-taking, but it conversely feels empowering and creates a sense of confidence that I don’t think I have felt before. It’s a feeling as if my old pair of LL Bean shearling boots are on my feet all the time and that my toes are safe and warm inside sheep-y softness. Of course, self-doubt remains. Questions are tossed in my mind that range from: will they like me? What is wrong with me? Why am I so odd?

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I suppose, here, at the age of 35, living in my beautiful little house in Austin, Texas, that I am finally identifying with my special-ness, something that I was afraid of because I grew up in such a way that taught me that expressing my nature was wrong. But now, in baby steps, I am seeing that, what other people have said to me for years, might be true. Maybe I am an okay person.

Two weeks ago, I was eating a goodbye breakfast at Magnolia with my friend Martha: she was moving to Houston in anticipation of moving to Washington, D.C. One day she will be an ambassador. Anyway, I ran into a friend who I hadn’t seen since I left Austin years ago. This friend and his wife and soon-to-be baby moved into my old house in Hyde Park after it worked out so that I could offer them that little place for the same rent that I had paid. They still live there, and he was very vocal at how thankful they are to have it. His daughter lives there, too. A tight fit in that small house with periwinkle kitchen walls and a veggie garden in the back.

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Heart Over Head

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Spring solstice arrives
Lighting the flames of true love
While Pelicans dive

From the I Ching Weekly — reading for the week of March 16th, 2015

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It has been a narrow passage
All is opening
Spirit hails love
A joyous returning

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When a wound has become infected it will not heal unless the poison is removed. This is your condition now. You have been in battle and now you are returning. A bit battered and deeply tired but you are returning and are mostly in tact.  It is your ego that has taken the hits and is feeling the wounding. The ego would have you retreat and be with shame…don’t go for it….there is no shame and no blame, you are human after all and this is part of the process to wholeness and light.

On this return it is simplicity that will salve the wounds and heal the spirit. Old relationships too are being made ready to be healed as you come back to the source, the primal mind, made free of a troubled ego.

It is as if the tides have changed and the tide of change that washed away what you built, desired and cared for is now bringing back the very things you thought were lost. This is a joyous time and a time to celebrate in humility and grace.

These are the winds of change you have felt would come, they have. This time the winds carry no danger, they carry promise; the promise of love, abundance and stability.

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The great forces of Gaia can at one-minute blow winds that devastate the landscape, feed fires that blacken the earth, then comes stillness wherein there is the miraculous returning of life. These are of the universal laws of life and death, leaving and returning.  All is in natural order. You stand now at the point of the freshness of return while behind you lies old useless patterns of behavior and convoluted associations that have been fraught with difficulties.

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Thinking and analyzing will not have summer return in winter; now it is to either trust the energy of returning or get embroiled in an unpopular and unsolvable puzzle of obstacles on a road leading nowhere. So it is with your situation now. Don’t think it through, this is not the time to analyze your situation, you have done that and you are exhausted from it. Give yourself, and those around you, a break.

There is occurring not only a return to clarity of thought and vision it is also a return to innocence; time when what is now returned to your field of energy will inspire creativity and confidence.

Surrender; let this cycle of gradual progress toward love and success happen with no thinking. Know that the coming tide moving you inevitably forward is unstoppable. Let it happen. Allow yourself to ride this wave to the shore, arriving refreshed and rested, not tired and weak from effort. It is your choice., it has always been about choice.

The necessary re-birth will be realized not by pushing forward through the jungle of old patterns and promises. The energy will be found by returning, by following the breadcrumbs left on the path so you could find your way back to from whence you came. In you was a knowing that seated somewhere in the recesses of your monkey mind, the primitive sense of wisdom, where you knew this time would come.

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Your ever so gentle and intuitive primal mind swathed in innocence will guide you back to where success and abundance is waiting for you. When you get there it will feel familiar like remembering some lines from a poem you read or was read to you as a child. It is in that light of innocence where you will find the power of the creative and the strength to bring to completion and welcome that which you most desire.

Don’t be surprised when you find members of your tribe coming your way to fill the gap of aloneness that you have been feeling. They could not find you before; you were behind a wall of self-involvement and judgment that obscured your authentic self. Open your heart and minds ear to the returning souls and beloved ideals; talk story with the tribe; let yourself be loved. You have been so damn good at giving and fixing; now is the time to LISTEN and to receive.

Your mind has been busy and noisy not able to hear or see which way to turn, where to seek the knowledge necessary to extricate yourself from the hold the ego had on you. Now in this returning you are being shown promising bypaths to where self-knowledge will be found and it is this self-knowledge that holds the key to your freedom. Freedom to love and be loved, speak and be heard and the gift of coming to stillness where you can listen…fully listen to the coded sounds of nature as she speaks to you through the perfumes of nature, the calling birds song, the flowing waters and the beating of your true loving heart all in harmony with the sentient beings of this, your home planet, Earth held in the loving grace of Gaia.

Take to heart these words this week:
Be love and teach peace

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