Just musing

I am in a reflective mood right now...wondering how and where in the world my life is going. It seems as if my vision and goals for my future...ones that I created years ago have been realized and I need to get some new ones. My hopes for my life and my career...well...much more needs to happen. My desire to write and be published is ever present. My desire to create new life a the center is ever present. I need a retreat for myself, by myself...to design, to generate new thoughts. and to find a way to get more women into the group. This women's group has been my baby. I thought of it and gave birth to it and now am tending it as it grows into its 11th year. I thought over ten years ago that it was possible to build a nurturing community of women who lived and believed in interconnectedness and care for one another. Many members have moved on and when each one does, my heart hurts. I know that people hear and grow and the direction of their life changes, but my heart still hurts. I take their leaving personally, as if a part of myself is going away. We have had such good times together. We have shared many intimacies. We have entangled ourselves in each others struggles and joys. So for me, to be that intimately involved with another, I think of forever-ness. When someone moves on...I cry. I do not know if the women who have moved through this group even know how they have touched my heart...my soul...over these past ten years. Each week, each retreat, each day of reflection we swam in soul waters, naked with each other. We explored the meaning of life from a depth and breadth that not many people get to in a lifetime, let alone each week. But now I see, everyday life does take over. I thought in my eager naiviete that I kept alive all these years that I/We could somehow maneuver through and out of everydayness and create a world...a world of deeper meaning, to live and dwell in and to have different conversations. I did think it was possible. But yet again, as so many other times in my life, I meet the monster named disillusionment. Yes, bubble bursting time. POP! POP! POP! Secretly though, I do think it is possible to create a meaningful world and life, just I can't seems to find may people who can live there and sustain themselves there with me. Everyday, madness, pulls and tugs...racing, shopping, being disconnected, listening to the news....not wanting to enter the mist. So we stay absorbed in modernity...absorbed in our neurotic patterns....we've come through our struggles and surfaced on the other side, so now we can go back to living life the exact way we did before those struggles captured us. What do we think??? Since the struggle is over we can just continue to operate in the same old way we did before and think we won't run into the struggle again??? How crazy are we???

Hovering like a Mist

Shame...it hovers like a smokey mist, like LA smog, like a hanging relative breathing out garlic and onions from last night's meal. Blow out in a wind, drive electric cars, use scope, listerine or peppermints, yet no matter how you try to dissolve it...there it is hovering, lingering like a bad dream.
Starts early on when we are open and vulnerable."Shame shame shame on you" emanating from that ominous finger pointing at us from that smirksome face. We don't even know what it means, just that there is something scrunchy about it.
Hiding out, finding out, then afraid to tell. We all have learned to cover over our beautiful faces.

To E with Love

I have been involved in a woman's life long distance. I have met her joys; lived her anxieties; mourned her losses; understood her struggles...and... from miles away....prayed, loved and sent her light.

Now, like most of us she embarks on a new journey.

Funny how so often we pray for change, adventure, new things, and "Poof" like magic it appears. The Painted Lady at the carnival inviting us into the fun house, into a ride into the darkness where odd and sometimes bizarre images pop out. Some of us come out laughing and others come out crying. Life is like that-a concoction of joys and sorrows conjuring up an image of a laboratory with all sorts of beakers and maybe, just maybe cauldrons bubbling, boiling and wafting smoke.

The Painted Lady calls us. We think she is just a muse for the carnival. Little do we know she is the Goddess of the 'dark' taking us to those places we dare not go on our own. She willingly accompanies us when we summon her; and summon her we do when we embark on journeys into the unknown.

How do we face the unknown? We have all been taught, practices handed down from the ages to proceed toward the unknown with trepidation. Yet, when Dorothy followed the yellowbrick road to OZ and finally met the great and powerful wizard, she discovered through the help of her animal friend that the great and powerful wizard was just a simple man operating a smoke machine.

Isn't it funny how, sometimes, simple men operate smoke machines??? Just a thought.

Now, the message for Dorothy was that her truth, her home, lived within her.
"Believe in yourself, imagine your home, click your heels three times and there you will be,"
said he.

Or, for a more religious version,
After the whale spit Jonah out on the shore, the Angel of God, a Painted Lady, I believe, pointed and said, "Ninevah is that way!"

So Ms. E, your journey has begun. Put on your goddess ware: blue eyeshadow, bangle bracelets, and your tie dyes, remember to take your zills and shuffle your fip flops to Ninevah..........and while you're shuffling...Remember the Truth of Your Soul!

Birth Stories

I just renewed my involvment with the Joseph Campbell foundation. An interesting process since when I went to sign in I found out that someone named "Jjazzlady" something or other from Australia had my user name. What a surprise to discover that another half way round the world has my user name...only on the internet. But anyway, after many failed attempts, I managed to become an associate and journeyed into some posted discussions. The one I found interesting had to do with Birth Myths.

Now, for anyone who knows me, me and myth are synonymous. Life is a story. Humans are living narratives...authors of our existence (except when we let others author our lives). Yet, nonetheless, we do the writing. We star in the living drama called our life. We set the stage; find the props; call forth the other actors; write the script; direct, edit; and otherwise produce our 'realized narrative' called "My Life". Many acts to this play..or..chapters to the book....the metaphors are endless. (I personally like to jump betweeen several at one time.)

So, I responded to a discussion on birth stories as folllows:

I think birth stories, myths are the template for life, at least for my life. I have heard and lived the birth story told to me by my family...one of excitement, anticipation, and joy over my mother's delivery of me. One of no pain experienced by my mother due to the doctor's use of forcepts...and many other 'enlivening' details. This story helped me to carve out a life of being a "goddess' in process which has been a very rich and exciting life adventure.

Then I grew into adulthood and discovered cultural myths i.e. the stories told and handed down with all cultural judgments interwoven about unwed mothers, teen preganancies, adolescents having babies. My mother had just turned 19 when she delivered me...18 when she got pregnant. Wow!

I had an ah-ha moment that has lasted for many years. I have come to understand with much more depth, and I must say, at times, some anguish, the intricacies of our relationship...my mother and I...when these 2 myths met.

Pondering........

I sit here today looking across the front field at the pond as I have done for all these many years and I ponder. A pond for pondering....how about that! The trees, the grass, the early blooming plants and weeds growing together this spring as they do every spring, inviting me into their new growth and creation. What form will they take this year? What new growth will emerge? What weed will I pull out only to be surprised later, through my lackadaisical weeding techniques that I've plucked the beginnings of a mid-summer blooming giant white phlox.

It seems I've been learning this lesson for a long time....how to slow down and wait for the full creation. Often what appears to be a weed at first glance, transforms into a splendid display in the fullness of summer.

Residue of my mother's training, I suppose. The race for thoroughness and efficiency often overwhelms and kills a mid summer bloom. Sounds like one of those proverbs that people quote. However, I have searched to find my own pace, my own discernment, my own voice, my own thoughts, my own ideas, my own creations, my own mistakes, my own shortcomings, my own errors over these many years I've spent on the face of this earth and truthfully it has been quite an enlightening process. Some parts felt like the trip down the rails after the roller coaster crested, I must admit, but nonetheless enlightening.

To sort myself out from that which I absorbed from my family of origin and culture has been an adventure. I remember when I lost all my hair during chemotherapy seeing for the first time a scar on my scalp that I received from being burned with hot grease when I was ten months old. How about that! To see a part of myself that I had never seen before after.....48 years.

I viewed the scar through my "Mother" eyes. It was horrible. How this infant girl must have screamed when she was burnt. The size and depth of the scar told that tragic tale. I wept for that ten month old baby who was me. I wanted to run back and scoop her up, hold her and rock her and ease her pain. She and I were one in that moment. This breast-cancerous, chemotherapy generated return to my infancy allowed an embrace, a meeting, a union. A time traveling moment that allowed me to see first hand a piece of my early life of which I had only heard stories. I was transfixed.

Over the years many times, family members, friends, therapists worked to pluck this memory covering it with other story versions and other people's perspectives. Some even credited me for having the determination, curiosity and impetus to climb up and pull this skillet filled with hot grease down upon myself, (quite an accomplishment for a 10 month old). Fortunately, the phlox kept growing and bloomed for me that mid summer morning I looked into the mirror as clumps of deadened hair fell to reveal that white blossomed scar.

Today, I write

Today, I write...wow... to say that sparks something inside of me that has been waiting to come alive. I have written much over the years of my life...my thoughts, my visions, my feelings. Most of my early writing had to do with pain and anguish over unfulfilled relationships. So much of my life energy spent on trying to figure out what I was doing with this or that person. Thankfully, I am a learner and was taught much through each of my relational experiences and can see how I grew and changed in the process.
Life in the early wisdom days seemed so wrought with thoughts that just kept bumping up against a pre-ordained reality like a bird flying into a freshly windexed glass. Splat! Dazed! Dropped! I had the hardest time trying to understand how others thought; how they made sense of the world I lived in which never made sense to me. All around me the same kind of simple minded...one level...dualistic...fault finding...looking for the lack on the surface of everything....kind of thinking. I remember being a new first time mother, listening to the doves sing their morning identity song...."Who? Who?Who?"...and my response came as wisps of tears falling onto my sweet baby's cheek..."Yes, Who?" So lost was I in those moment between young budding woman and mother that I surfaced not for some eleven years. I found out later from Marion Zimmer Bradley that I really had been captured by the Faery King. Like Morgaine,I had a wonderful experience, yet I knew this was not my home......