IMPERFECT Lady

A letter to them.

Byron Katie has what she calls, A Judge Your Neighbor Worksheet. (Byron Katie,  thework.com )  And on that sheet you are to be as petty, and judgmental about someone who you feel causes you stressful thoughts.

 

While rereading the message my sister wrote, I told my brother that I feel once again all that hurtful energy is like a boomerang and it will go right back to her.

 

It reminded us of the ‘judge your neighbor worksheet’.

 

We then decided to replace all the you’s in her letter with I’s.

 

Any place where she was directing hurtful or seemingly hurtful energy to me, we turned it around.

 

Here is an example;

 

You want to replay that sad little tune to keep yourself connected to the sad horrible life that you were given and wow do you sound enlightened!

 

So, if you take the you and switch it with I, it will read as follows;

 

I want to replay that sad little tune to keep myself connected to the sad horrible life that I was given and wow do I sound enlightened.

 

And here is another; Yet the people who truly know you and your "story" don't really see the example that you say you are. I think your lack of involvement speaks volumes in where you really are.

 

Yet the people who truly know my ‘story’ and me don’t really see the example that I say that I am.  I think my lack of involvement speaks volumes in where I really am.

 

It is really easier to reinvent who you are to people that don't know you? Sorry but I am not buying the bullshit -you can peddle that to other "enlightened souls".

 

It is really easier to reinvent who I am to people that don’t know me.  Sorry but you are not buying the bullshit –I can peddle that to other ‘enlightened souls’.

 

Hateful or angry letters written to another really are about you.

 

Some may say that this is my way of making it better for me or that I am in denial of my interactions.

 

In the beginning when the energy systems seemed to be bringing me hate, anger or just plain unhappiness about my actions or the lack thereof, I stopped engaging or even sending anything back.

 

I simply didn’t have the energy to defend or try to change their minds.  And I guess so hurt that I couldn’t go in to that system trying to explain myself.

 

So, what I thought was to get other letters written in anger at me and see how they too flip back to the sender, how it shows more of who they are.

 

Ok, here is another letter that I never responded to.

 

“you decided WITHOUT talking or discussing anything that I was no longer ‘worthy’ of being your sister.

 

I decided WITHOUT talking or discussing anything that you were no longer ‘worthy of being my sister.  (Ouch.)

 

It is easy to LISTEN to and SPEAK to only those who reflect and confirm your beliefs.

 

It is easy to LISTEN to and SPEAK to only those who reflect and confirm my beliefs.

 

I think it is comical that you actually believe that your actions are perceived as rational and that those you INTEND to hurt are bothered by your bizarre behavior.

 

I think it is comical that I actually believe that my actions are perceived as rational and that those I INTEND to hurt are bothered by my bizarre behavior.

 

You NEVER faced him nor did you speak to him.

 

I NEVER faced him nor did I speak to him.

 

Where were you the day he faced the judge?  How dare you act hostile to any of us when you sit in your home and judge.

 

Where was I the day he faced the judge?  How dare I act hostile to any of you when I sit in my home and judge.

 

You stopped listening and reaching out when you couldn’t CONTROL the responses. You can die right and alone or you can decide that all of us are worth loving no matter what.

 

I stopped listening and reaching out when I couldn’t CONTROL the responses. I can die right and alone or I can decide that all of you are worth loving no matter what.

 

Isn’t it astounding to see the actual turn around that Byron Katie speaks about?

 

Of course my sisters would have to be willing to question their stressful thoughts about me in order to see that those thoughts are really about themselves.

 

I do have to do one more turn around on my mother’s latest letter.

 

“My memories are only mine.  No one can take those from me.  May you find acceptance and peace in the past.  What is is.  No amount of screaming, shouting, crying can change that.  I love you, always have and always will.  You are my beloved daughter I continue to pray you will come to accept me with all my faults and failures.”

 

My memories are only mine.  No one can take those from me.  May I find acceptance and peace in the past.  What is is. No amount of screaming, shouting, crying can change that.  I love me, always have and always will.  I am my beloved daughter, I continue to pray I will come to accept me with all my faults and failures.

 

Wow, isn’t it simply amazing in its tragedy?

 

The volume of the anger that is directed at me, I am the target, there is a bull’s-eye on my back okay, my heart and they are free to lob arrows of anger anytime they feel the impulse.

 

Confused people feel that by changing the actions of others ‘outside’ of them that then their lives will be better. 

 

If they can only manipulate us by screaming and belittling us, then their worlds would be better.  It is all about them.  It literally has nothing to do with me.

 

They are not caring one iota what I need, feel or want, who I am, sincerely ‘not interested.

 

Even though the letter was sent to me, it was a letter to them.

 

 

 

 

I have nothing to make you stay.

My sister’s words bounce off the walls of the now empty room where a family used to reside like a hollowed out cavern absent to love and life.  Dead.

 

Each time a family member walks up, seeking to reconnect I turn the light on, open the space, and ready it up with hope and the potential of renewal, eager to see if they will stay.

 

I am not sure what it is they are expecting here, what preconceived ideas fill their heads, but when they see my place is filled with me, they leave.

 

I am uncertain what they hope to find, what part of them they think I hold, but all I have to offer them is me. Isn’t that a line in a country western song?

 

In the past I had a magic family room, I could turn you into the best sister by not looking or hearing or watching your actions, I could delete and erase parts of you that were unkind; now the magic mirror is gone. 

 

It must be shocking to feel the absence of magic, the void where pretend use to lie and instead of the delusional mirror, there is the reflection of you. 

 

I know for it is just as shocking to me too.

 

You enter alone, you fill the space, and only you.  No smoke and mirrors to trick me into seeing a loving sister where there stands one ‘not that interested’.

 

I love that inside of me there is no trickery, no false ideals, no pretend place, but instead reality is shone even brighter.

 

My voice is able to speak what I need to say, to ask what I need to know, and I have the inner fortitude to witness your answer and to withstand the disappointment as I shut the light and close the door.

 

There was nothing inside me you were interested in.

I have nothing to make you stay.

 

 

 

I can no longer call you sister.

Remember I asked my ‘second sister’ who requested to be my friend, why;

 

Here is the message that I sent her it was short.

 

Beth Jukuri November 8 at 7:39am

I am very interested in knowing why you requested me
on Facebook.

It has been a long while, and it puzzles me now.

I have a blog, and that will let you know if you really want to be my friend.
www.imperfectlady.typepad.com

 

And today, November 11, I opened up my facebook to this message below.

 

Oh my god too funny. Maybe it is just as simple as you are my sister...but then after looking at your "imperfect lady" blog...ok, not that interested...guess you want to replay that sad little tune to keep yourself connected to the sad horrible life that you were given and wow do you sound enlightened! Yet the people who truely know you and your "story" don't really see the example that you say you are. I think your lack of involvement speaks volumns in where you really are. Is is really easier to reinvent who you are to people that don't know you? Sorry but I am not buying the bullshit -you can peddle that to other "enlightened souls". I don't mind the fact that we don't agree but to throw out the entire family for not being on your "level" -just sad. I hope you change your mind and decide that the love of sisters and brothers who too have been through this aweful mess -yeah surprisingly I lived this too-is worth far more than the approval of strangers! Good luck with your life and I am happy to see that your children and even your husband seem to be aware that family doesn't just go away because it is uncomfortable to acknowledge.
Sorry that "imperfect lady" is going to be the legacy of your life. I just want to be a perfect me in this imperfect world. I have chosen to let god handle the punishment and moving on with forgiveness in my heart. My life is so much bigger than allowing for my parents to define the person I am. Sad that we can't just be sisters just because I love you. Always will. I miss the laughter that we all used to share. I am not interested in being in your club-there is enough misery and hardship in the world. I refuse to join it!
I truely wish you the best. If you decide you are interested in my plain old life and want to be a part of it, you will always be welcome. I love you-your sister

 

I am not sure how to respond or if, and I am even wondering if you already blocked me, for you are ‘not that interested’.

 

But if I do get to respond, it would be this. 

 

My lack of involvment does speak volumes and my blog matches those actions, it is the words or the lyrics to my “Sad little song.” 

 

And I will always be connected to that horrible sad life I was given, I can’t make up a pretend one, or erase it or put it away.  Where I go, it goes.  Some days are sadder and many are way bright.

 

It is always shocking even when you are expecting the brush off, the turn away, that it still strikes deeply.

 

That damn little spark that ignites, a flicker of hope, a dash of optimism, explodes and lingers as its ashes rain down inside deeply, again.

 

To be left standing outside again.  To be left misunderstood, and for your words to ring false in their truthfulness upon their ears.  Shouting you are not one of us.

 

It is sadder still, they blame me.

 

She doesn’t acknowledge to herself that ‘she is not that interested’.  I did not turn away from her.  How do you make them see their own actions?

 

My blog showed you who I am and it is a good for you to know that you are not interested in me, it is good for me to know too.

 

It is useless to try and create a friendship with that base.

We at least need to begin with mutual respect, with willing ears to hear, and an open heart to feel.

 

As you walk away not interested, so do the seeds of friendship.  I reject your declaration of love, love doesn’t walk away uninterested. 

 

Love stands here in truth, and love gives you free will. You chose your stance, I honor that.

 

As you walk away, please forgive me, I can no longer call you sister.

 

I will never call you home again.

I just finished watching the webcast, Say You're One of Them with author Uwem Akpan's on Oprah.com  The book has short stories from the view of the child. 

 

At the end of the webcast is a young man from Rwanda, Corneille, who survived the genocide who was 17 when his whole family was murdered.

 

He mentions a song, “I will never call you home again’, that he wrote.

 

I then went to youtube to hear it. 

 

I understand the sentiment, of how it can not be called or even felt as home, for home depicts a place of warmth, comfort and familiarity, and the last time he saw Rwanda it was mass murder scene, it took from him all his family and every thing he owned.

 

In the song he sings,  ‘the last time I saw you….and that is how I remember you……Please forgive me I if I never call you home again.”

 

As I reflect on his lines, I can’t help but replay mine.

 

The last time I saw my parents, they were not parents, and I can only carry forward my last memory. 

 

Don’t they say that about restaurants, that they’re only as good as their last meal?

 

It is so crucial to always remember that we are judge upon our last action, and in the case of my parents, it is his trial, the way he acted, the way she acted.

 

The last time I saw you, you were in an orange jumpsuit on the front page of the paper, with the words, Criminal Sexual Conduct.  That is how I remember you.

 

The last time I saw her she was adamant about her rightness about his wrongness, so very right at being so very wrong.  That is how I remember you.

 

Please forgive me, if I never call you dad again.

Please forgive me, if I never call you mom again.

Please forgive me, if I never call you home again.

 

I will never call you home again.

Writing the Story of You.

Yesterday I heard Don Miller who wrote a book called, “A Million Miles, a Thousand Hours. He speaks about what would the world miss if you were to die?  He also stated we grow from places of conflict and that there are times when we have to lose greatly in order to gain.

 

As I look back, I can see where my greatest gains came with my greatest losses, and where I grew up.

 

The question of what would the world lose if you were to leave now, intrigues me.

 

What dreams or aspirations would be left undone?

Who would not be helped if you were to leave now?

 

He relates our lives to stories, and how we are the main character, and it is up to us to keep the story interesting or at least keep our character interesting.

 

What draws you into a good story?  Maybe the same type of character is who you desire to be.

 

As the story of me continues, who will become, what lessons are still to be learned, what places of fear or weakness do I still have to conquer?

 

What can I do today to make my life more interesting, to affect others, to add something that is needed?

 

There are certain things or avenues we can pursue that will have great changes on us as the main character.  Don’t you love to read about a person who stretches of the box, who takes a leap of faith, who even if afraid jumps anyway!

 

Overcoming the blocks that keep us in a humdrum existence, to expand yourself by adding a new skill or maybe even by doing something unusual for you.

 

How to be a great main character…..imagine it, dream of it, and then dare to take the first step!

 

Who would you be if you were pushing the pen writing the story of you? 

 

What a Grateful Sound.

Iron John, by Robert Bly.

 

Gaining a Four-Legged Horse

 

A remarkable detail that leaps out of this scene and demands some interpretation is the three-legged horse that the boy finds in the stable.  This three-legged horse doesn’t feel like good news when we see it standing there, and it obviously feels worse when one rides it.  We might look at what a horse could be in such a story as this, and what the difference might be between three legs and four.

 

“Four” is complete in that it stands for the four-gated city, the four directions, the four rivers of Paradise, the four seasons, the four letters of the Holy Name, the four horses of the sun carriage, and the four strings of the sistrum.  The old rhyme goes:

 

One for sorrow,

Two for mirth,

Three for wedding,

Four for birth.

 

Three, on the other hand, falls a little short.  A three-gated city is not impressive as a four gated city, and a planet with only three directions would seem odd to us.  Dawn, noon and sunset add up to three parts of a good day, but night is left out.  Fall, winter, and summer would not be acceptable to farmers, for they need spring. So we have to think that something important is gone.

 

As for the horse, its associations range over heaven and earth. The horse has reminded human beings of ocean waves, of the dead, of thunder, of sexual energy, particularly sexual energy of men, of the Great Mother, for Lady Godiva rode on a horse, of glory and kinship, and of divine energies, such as the four horse of the Apocalypse.

 

The horse, when contrasted with its rider, reminds men and women of the animal side of human beings, and of the body.  The rider stands for the intelligence or intellect or mind, and the horse stands for the animal desires and instincts and energies that have their home there.

 

I am going to consider the fourth leg as a shamed leg.  I assume that the boy’s animal body has been crippled by shame, his hobbledehoy walks so because it has a shamed leg.

 

We have already spoken of shame and its power.  Shame can come in from many sources; from parents who deliberately shame us in order to make us more controllable, from addicted parents who shame us as a side affect of their own addiction, or from peers who shame us to get rid of some of their shame.  Asking a parent for a response and not receiving it cause enough for shame; we can ingest a shame-bound parent, and receive shame by inheritance; every invasion, whether sexual abuse or physical abuse, produces in five minutes shame that lasts for thirty years.  Simply making up a false personality to please our parents can generate shame for a lifetime.  The shaming we receive from irritable school teachers, manic Catholic priests, or our own internalized perfectionist increases the store of shame that gets poured into our hollow leg, and each drop of shame increases our commitment to isolation.  We attend secret meetings of apology, submission, resentment, and collaboration.

 

When we were very tiny, our horse had all four legs, and it joyfully lived in whatever sensualities it could gallop to.  By the time a child in our culture is twelve, one of the legs at least will be crippled by shame, whether it lives in a ‘dysfunctional’ household or not.

 

None of us knows at twelve how to heal our horse of shame.  The story suggest that a boy’s horse needs to be brought to an older man or mentor, or, lifting a scene to the imaginative level, it needs to be brought to the Wild Man. We take the nag out of the barn, where “the older boys” have left it for us; we ride to the edge of the forest; and then we ask the Wild Man for a better horse.  We know we have to return it, but just to experience what it would be like to ride a horse without a crippled leg even for a few minutes, is worth it all.

 

           Robert Bly

 

I love how he shows how our damaged psyche is like riding a cripple horse, how shame damages the leg of our body, how we then are crippled.

 

Imagine the impact we can wield to another human?

The power of words and how we use them, the way shame is for controlling the other.

 

I know that my words and my tactics as a ‘crippled mother’ myself, crippled my kids.

 

As I heal my shame-crippled leg, I will no longer damage my children, and hopefully work at healing theirs.

 

To hear the sound of a healthy horse galloping away as  your child leaves home, what a grateful sound.

 

Keeper of the Door.

The Warrior Inside – Iron Man by Robert Bly

 

The warriors inside American men have been weak in recent years, and their weakness contributes to the lack of boundaries, a condition which earlier in this book we spoke of as naiveté.  A man six feet tall will allow another person to cross his boundaries, enter his psychic house, verbally abuse him, carry away his treasures, and slam the door behind; the invaded man will stand there with an ingratiating, confused smile on his face.

 

When a boy grows up in a ‘dysfunctional’ family (perhaps there is no other kind of family), his interior warriors will be killed off early.  Warriors, mythologically, lift their swords to defend the king.  The King in a child stands for and stands up for a child’s mood.  But when we are children our mood gets easily overrun and swept over in the messed up family by the more powerful, more dominant, more terrifying mood of the parent.  We can say that when the warrior inside cannot protect our mood from being disintegrated, or defend our body from invasion, the warriors collapse, or go into a trance, or die.

 

The inner warriors I speak of do not cross the boundary aggressively; they exist to defend the boundary. The Fianna, that famous band of warriors who defended Ireland’s borders, would be a model.  The Fianna stayed out all spring and summer watching the boundaries, and during the winter came in.

 

But a typical child has no such protection.  If a grown-up moves to hit a child, or stuff food into the child’s mouth, there is no defense, - it happens.  If the grown-up decides to shout, and penetrate the child’s auditory boundaries by sheer violence, it happens.  Most parents invade the child’s territory whenever they wish, and the child, trying to maintain his mood by crying, is simply carried away, mood included.

 

Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside the house.  Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame.  The child concludes that if it has no sovereignty, it must be worthless.  Sham is the name we give to the sense that we are unworthy and inadequate as human beings.  Gershen Kauffman describes that feeling brilliantly in his book, Shame, and Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason in their book, Facing Shame, extend Kauffman’s work into the area of family shame systems and how they work.

 

When our parents do not respect our territory at all, their disrespect seems overflowing proof of our inadequacy.  The slap across the face pierces deeply, for the face is the actual boundary of our soul, and we have been penetrated.  If a grown-up decides to cross our sexual boundaries and touch us, there is nothing that we as child can do about it.  Our warriors die. The child, so full of expectation of blessing whenever he or she is around an adult, stiffens with shock, and falls into the timeless fossilized confusion of shame.  What is worse, one sexual invasion, or one beating, usually leads to another, and the warriors, if revived, die again.

 

When a boy grows up in an alcoholic family, his warriors get swept in the river by a vast wave of water, and they struggle there, carried downriver.  The child, boy or girl, unprotected, gets isolated, and has more in common with snow geese than with people.

 

The snow geese, treading, blowing Dakotah snows,

Over the fence stairs of the small farms come,

Slipping through cries flung up into the night,

And setting, ah, between them, shifting wings,

Light down at last in bare snowy fields.

 

The drunken father pulls the boy inside.

The boy breaks free, turns and leaves the house.

He spends that night out eating with the geese.

Where, alert and balancing on wide feet,

Crossing rows, they walk through the broken stalks.

 

Robert Bly

 

It is no wonder that such a child, when a teenager, looks for single rooms, maternal women, gurus, systems, withdrawals, “nonattachment.”  When he is older, thirty or thirty-five, he will still feel unprotected, and be unable to defend himself from other people enraged at their own unprotection.

 

Every Adult or older sibling who wants to enter the child’s psychic room does so, because it is as if there is no doorknob at all on the inside of the door.  The door moves freely in, opening us to improper intimacies that the mother may insist on, to improper belittling the father may insist on, to sexual fondling any older child or baby-sitter may insist on, to incest, physical or psychic.  The door moves freely, we could say, because the doorknob is on the outside.

 

I think it’s likely that the early death of a man’s warriors keeps the boy in him from growing up.  It’s possible that it also prevents the female in the boy from developing.  We know that Dickens for example, endured a horrendous childhood, and we also notice that his female characters tend to be sentimental and girlish. It’s possible that these girlish beings are projections of his stunted interior woman, whom his warriors could not protect from the violence all around him.

 

The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years.  “I am a victim,” he says, over and over; and he is.  But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions.  Most

American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses.  And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors look like, or feel like.

           Robert Bly

 

This is wonderful for me to read, especially when I now have a doorknob on the inside, that I revived my inner warriors, that by having boundaries it means you have a warrior manning the line.

 

As I wrote the word ‘line’ it came to me that my husband accused me of drawing a line in cement, not in the sand, that once that line was there, I was adamant about it, there was no moving that line.

 

Guess my inner warriors stood guard.

 

Imagine I have a knob on the inside, and I can ask ‘who is there and what do you want?’

 

 My warrior is front and center as my sister ambles up to the door.  I am comforted knowing I have warriors once again.

A door on my inner psychic room, or my soul’s castle, how awesome to be the keeper of the door!

 

 

 

What will be the reply?

A broken family, what does that mean?  Maybe it would be easier to describe a not broken one.

 

I have another sister that requested me as a “friend” on Facebook, can that really happen?

 

We are broken sisters, our relationship is severed there is nothing there right now.

 

We are two islands with an ocean of disagreement between us, can a bridge really be made over the sea and what would it be made of, pretend?

 

What would a bridge of pretend be like?  Wouldn’t we both have to pretend to be someone other than who we are to get along?  I am way not interested in a game of ‘pretend sisters’.

 

We are two girls whose life began in the same home, we each experienced similar, but not the same ride, as we grew up and then left. 

 

We shared parents, but we no longer share the response to life, we do not act the same given the exact set of circumstances.

 

What would we have in common except our histories?  Our present and our most recent past is totally the opposite.

 

When truth knocked on your door, you slammed it shut, and continued to treat this man as a father, only. 

 

I on the other hand welcomed it in with shaky legs and a broken heart, I crumbled under the weight of it all, I opened the door. 

 

I brought truth into my home and I looked at it and its damage, I did not shut it out, I did not turn my back, I did not close my ears, eyes and heart to what this truth had to say.

I opened the door.

 

When I opened that door what I didn’t know that I was walking out of our family.

 

And now you are beckoning me back?  Really?

You want me and the truth to come back in your world, when the first time around you could not hear my words, you really are asking me to come back in?

 

I am not that naïve.

 

I did not open this door you did, are you coming out with me, or are you asking me to come back minus the truth?

 

You all claim you seen what I seen, that you understand who your father is, but what you fail to see is how your actions do not reflect that, your actions are that of a loving daughter, not a victim of his abuse.

 

As you sit inside the family with your hand on the door, are you ready to come out, or are you happy to shut the door one more time so not to hear me speak?

 

I stand as a little girl again, one who is outside the family, one who walks with courage to face the darkest truth, but one who longs to be part of a family again.

 

As you open that door requesting me to be your friend, who do you want?

 

You may not know this of me, but I can’t even begin to pretend to pretend to pretend that I didn’t see the truth.

 

When you ask to be my friend, you are asking for the truth, can you accept that?  Is that what you want?

 

You opened the door, what is it you want?

Are you coming out? 

 

For I will never walk back in to the home of abuse, neglect and pretend it is called love.

 

A little girl waits. 

 

What will be the reply?

 

My Walled Garden.

 

 

More from Iron John, by Robert Bly.

 

“If a man or woman has been sexually abused in childhood, or has lived in any form of a ‘dysfunctional family,’ he or she will need sooner or later a ‘heaven haven.’  The story says that each of us needs it.

 

The walled garden is a shelter from the world, and a place to recover your broken trust…..A walled garden also is a place to develop introversion.”

 

Rilke says:

 

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough

    to make every moment holy.

I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough

just to lie before you like a thing,

  shrewd and secretive.

I want my own will, and I want simply to be with

   my will,

as it goes towards action,

and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times

when something is coming near,

I want to be with those who know secret things

or else alone.

 

“We could say that in the walled garden, as in the alchemical vessel, new metals get formed and the old ones melt.  The lead of depression melts and becomes grief. The drive of success, an insistence tin, joins with Aphrodite’s copper, and makes bronze, which is good to make shields and images of gods.  The enclosed garden then suggests cultivation as opposed to rawness, boundaries as opposed to unbounded sociability, soul concerns as growth for the soul desire opposed to obsession with a generalized greed for things……

 

In the garden the soul and nature marry.  When we love cultivation more than excitement we are ready to start a garden.  In the garden we cultivate yearning and longing – those strangely un-American feelings – and notice tiny desires.  Paying attention to tiny hardly noticeable feelings is the garden way.  That’s the way lovers behave.

 

The enclosed garden is a right place for lovers…..

 

Garden work may begin unexpectedly.  An illness that confines the sufferer to a room for weeks may be his enclosed garden. An accident may bring it on.  Thoreau, on the other hand, chose to live for some months in a cabin he built himself, and he and his cabin and Walden Pond were his garden.  He knew very well that he had become a lover, and said, “A match has been found for me at last: I have fallen in love with a shrub oak.”

 

Some men entering the garden begin by getting up at 5am, and keeping an hour for themselves each morning before work.  A father, in order to do that, may have to resist his own insistence that life belongs to his work, his children and his marriage.

 

Making a garden, and living in it, means attention to boundaries, and sometimes we need the boundaries to prevent caretaking from coming in and occupying our time.

 

I am too tiny in this world and not tiny enough

Just to lie before you and be a thing.

 

Addiction to perfecting, as Mariann Woodman reminds us, amounts to having no garden. The anxiety to be perfect withers the vegetation.  Shame keeps us from cultivating the garden.  Men and women deeply caught in shame will, when they tend their garden, pull out both weeds and flowers because so many of their own feelings seem defective and soiled.

 

What do we love so much that we want to protect it from strangers?  That is a good question for garden makers.

 

No matter how deeply I go down into myself

My God is dark, and like a webbing made

Of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.

     Rainer Maria Rilke

 

I love the analogy of being in a walled garden.

 

I love that when we seek to know ourselves we have to put up a wall and cultivate ourselves.

 

I truly lived in a walled garden and mended my wounds, my sorrows and tears fell there and helped grow a new me.

 

To put up boundaries and to lean into yourself, going deeply into the dark places to find answers and then to sit with those answers awhile. 

 

In your own world you will find ways to have garden time.

I was blessed to be at home, alone.

My house was my garden and it expanded to the road along the river.  It became my sanctuary, my walled garden.

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

A Big Bubble of Me.

The word LOVE brings with it such energy and Light, it brightens up spaces and brings wholeness where before less than appeared.

 

People walk around feeling so defeated, if they don’t HAVE love.

 

Like Love is an object we can go and pluck out of a store, search and find like a hidden treasure, it remains outside of us, and we hunt like predators to capture it.

 

It steals our peace, and keeps us running in anxiety for fear that without it we will not be whole.

 

This love is like a devil to those who need it, it becomes a drug that we can’t live without, and will do anything to anyone to get it.

 

My brother is sitting with the ‘love’ our parents gave us. 

In our hands we look down devastated, for what we see surely isn’t love.

 

How is this possible?

How did we receive such a messed up version of love?
Is it even a fragrance of love, does it hold a hint of love?

What is this we received from our parents?

What did we go forth and replicate?

 

The love we received was not love.

It is the opposite.

 

I have read numerous times that there are only two ways of living or Being.  In Fear or in Love, those are the only two choices.

 

In my childhood love, fear ran rampant.  Fear of them not liking you, that you were not good enough, that they would leave you, a very clutching manipulating demanding love.

 

It wasn’t free.

You weren’t free.

 

The love of my childhood, the love that I replicated in my own home with my own children was that they had to do this or be that, and I would love them more.

 

I focused on their behavior and how it impacted me, but I didn’t focus on how their behavior impacted THEM.

 

Now I have given them back them selves.  I am no longer interested in owning them for my happiness.  It seems vulgar and twisted.  Like my children’s only role was to live to make me happy.

 

I will be a better mom if you are a better kid! I will be a happier mom, a nicer mom, a this mom and a that mom, DEPENDING upon your behavior!

 

It left me irresponsible for my own happiness.  It left me powerless.

 

But what was even more important it had them looking away from themselves to only focus on me.

 

Their lives were for me.

 

Not only was I powerless, they too became powerless in their own worlds.  A house full of powerless dependent people!

 

It was when I unplugged them all that we each became free.

 

I recall the conversations I had with each of my children, how I was telling them that from now on, their only job in this house was to do them selves.  That they and they alone were responsible for what they did or didn’t do.  I fired them from making me a better mother.

 

As I fired them, I hired me.  I hired myself to be myself.  I hired myself to be a mother.  And I recall telling them that as their mother I was only going to be the consequence lady.

 

That was my one job as a mother.  That every action has a consequence and it is up to me to figure out that consequence.

 

To their benefit they were both excited and fearful.  For no more wasted words would fly out of my mouth. 

 

In fact it still pops up where I forget my role as consequence lady, and I focus more on their behavior than mine.  When I feel out of control, it is usually me.  I am forgetting my control.

 

When I gave them the responsibility of their lives, I got mine.

 

It was a great independence day in our home.

Where 6 individuals were born.

We all claimed our own worlds.

We all can shine as one person, separated and free to be who ever it is we are to be.

 

Sure there are common house rules, but for the most part I celebrate each child doing themselves alone.

 

My youngest is still clutching on to being irresponsible, and as parents our role is to keep placing the responsibility of his life in his hands.

 

In as much as we love freedom, we are more afraid to be free.

 

Free means no one to blame when we are unhappy.

 

Our whole lives are free for us to express or be or do as we feel, and no one stands in the way of us living our greatest life, but ourselves.

 

Once we stop searching outside for love, when we know that it isn’t their job to bring us love, or peace or joy, we can begin doing this for ourselves.

 

Learning one step at a time to be independent.

 

A separated soul, a free spirit!

 

What can another bring to a free spirit?

What does a free spirit need?

 

I love that I am one self- contained unit of one.

 

I walk around a big bubble of me.