IMPERFECT Lady

I am allowed to feel...

I lose control of me, when I feel I have lost control of others, and it puts me in a very immature action, where my voice gets higher and higher the more I feel I am losing.

 

What I can’t understand is why I want control in the first place, when life is showing me I have none, nor will I ever, nor is it mine to have.

 

Being a mother tests this in ways you would normally not have, or perhaps it is in relationships too, but for me it is in mothering where I lose it.

 

I lose my decorum or any spiritual idea of being in love, peace and joy…it evaporates quickly and in its place rages an out of control woman who wants control of the uncontrollable.

 

My son’s life is saturated with folks I would rather he keep his distance from, and this fills me with anxiety that explodes unexpectedly for both of us.

 

It seems so simple to him, let me be with my friend, let me work for a cheating man, let me hang with friends from a cult like religion, just let me be.

 

And to me it seems I am knowingly allowing him to engage with folks who are confused at best and due to this fact alone, will not hold his best interest at heart.

 

Yet my hollering is not helping…and I have no other response.

 

While I lay in bed after he happily was off again, it came to me to let him go, as he is long gone already.  He has always been there; he hasn’t left just because I have.

 

I somehow missed this, that when I left, I felt I pulled them all out…even when and if reality and life are showing me different. 

 

I fear losing them, and instead they are already gone.

 

I guess I didn’t want to know I walked away from the crowds and places they are comfortable in.  I didn’t want to know I left my children there, but I did.

 

I raised them with the ideas and thoughts and beliefs of the cult like religion, being comfortable around dysfunctional people, and now I appear like the madwoman as I rant in fear because they still enjoy being there.

 

I seethed in hatred for living here, for that bunch still having an influence over my children, and I knew that my hatred was directed at me.

 

That what I rail against is not about them, but about me.

 

I hate me for the dysfunction I brought to my children.

I hate it when they show me over and over what I taught them.

I hate to see it and I hate to own that it came from me.

I hate that while I became aware, I can’t change my children, I can’t stop the train I put them on as children.  I hate that I now must find peace in allowing them to be where I planted them.

I hate that I have no control, that I can’t rip them out of the dysfunctional gardens I planted them in and transplant them in a space that is much more kinder to their souls.

 

I hate that I have to watch them grow there.

I hate that I am aware in moments like these.

I hate that loving someone means letting them make choices that are not like mine.

I hate that I hate that which I cannot change.

In hating it keeps me from accepting, but accepting at times is a hard pill to swallow.

 

I am granting me time to hate…like a mourning process.

I am allowed to hate until I accept.

I am allowed to not like that which I don’t like.

I am allowed to feel out of control, when I am out of control.

I am allowed to feel...

Living Life.

Today I was able to see the overall appearance of being broken and being the only repairman to fix me. 

To see my life like a broken clock, and have the clock actually doing the repairs while still telling time, to be changing the insides while the insides were still being used; their intricate pieces falling together to make me who I am, without rendering them useless or forever ruined beyond repair.

It seems literally insane that those of us from dysfunctional homes are the ones to get us functional, and we are to do this while living life, raising children, going to work, and navigating friendships and relationships. 

To know you are broken and all mixed up and yet it is from that state you have to be the one to right yourself, to swim out of the swirling waters and find the calm sea and learn to stay there.

What I first became shockingly clear about was how broken and upside down and backwards I was. It was a miracle I was functioning as a human being.  And it is from this inside out and backwards state that you begin to make corrections. 

It honestly is like being a broken clock and making repairs on your self from the inside out, while remaining in working order.  Even though it was tempting, I just couldn’t fall apart! 

There were literally times where I felt that what they were asking was far too much. 

As the changes are happening inside, I can go from a little lost girl who needs a mother to mothering my own children, from being in need of nurturing to nurturing, without a breath of space between. 

Life situations will bring to surface old working aspects of me to be worked on, and I can be overwhelmed by sorrow or indignant with anger and fear…I can be an indignant mother or a wounded child…and I also have to get the message while being upset.  

Be the broken part and the solution.

Situations arise that will bring forth that which needs to be healed, and at times, I get tired of being broken and being the fixer too. 

Today the swings from old to new are swifter, but in the past, I could linger for days in a quandary trying to figure out what was wrong, what was being asked of me in order to return to inner peace.

 My old clock ran like a top for dysfunction and I am reworking it now to run beautifully on peace, love and joy.

 Using the same moving parts, I am getting them to respond differently.

This has been a full time job and one that is best done in the middle of a full working life, for it is there we can fine tune our instruments to get them responding properly.  We have live living breathing humans to help show us where we are not, where our thinking and beliefs are broken. 

Each time I respond in fear…I have found another broken piece.  At times it seems that this work is never ending, for the more I fix, the more there seems to be broken. 

I fix the inside and then have to go and try it out in relationships on the outside.  

It is one thing to change your beliefs, it is another to then use them in real living color, to set forth and be that which you just discovered.

My old clock was energized by falsehood and this new one runs on truth.

As much as this boggles the mind, I have also experienced the same confusion with my emotions and feelings. 

It is incredible to have great gulps of sorrow for losing an old piece, to enormous clouds of peace settle in its place as the new arrives.

It seems I have been forever within a moving and changing landscape, and it then occurred to me this is living life. 

 

 

To be me...perfectly.

There seems to be a time in life, where you get off the karmic wheel of your childhood, where you finally come to the end of the road where old beliefs, thoughts and ideas run dry, where you have uncovered, discovered, and recovered all parts of your self.

 

And you have decided what stays, what goes, what has value or no value, what is something I will use in my future and what is best left in the past.

 

As each old thought and belief came to surface, I had to replace it with a new one, one more suited for my self and was often less comfortable for the ‘other’.

 

Most of my replacement ideas, thoughts and beliefs are much more flexible and fit my spirit. They are filled with potential growth and expansion, unlimited space for creation.

 

The purging of my old self was difficult and painful at times and extremely liberating as well, the dying and rebuilding co-existing, the undoing and the re-doing.  Each loss I mourned came with a new birth.

 

Just as they flip houses, I flipped myself, changing me from a worn out pattern into a more creative one.

 

I can’t imagine getting left in the old mind patterns and beliefs, stuck and unable to step out line, locked by fear and unable to shake off the chains of conditioning.

 

I feel at times I have forgotten from whence I came, and have a hard time remembering the darkness with so much Light, forgetting what it is like to live under the shadows of others, never finding your own spot in the sun...

 

My thanks all go to the Universe whose wisdom I seen in every lesson, gift and miracle, and who synchronized it all.

 

As I continue forth with my awareness my artist’s prayer is;

to remain faithful to the wisdom of my body,

to always pay attention to the gut feelings,

to stand with the truth no matter the cost,

to have faith and follow my own feelings,

to reach towards new experiences fearlessly,

to be a student of the Universe,

to accept all lessons with grace,

to never lose sight of what is,

to find my purpose,

to know who I am,

to be me…perfectly! 

From the Cocoon!

The Artist’s Way, while it is inspiring for Art, it is also bringing forth an artful self.  It is finding the dark spots where we lost the art of living, the art of being, the art of individuality, where we conformed into roles that are in direct competition to being a creation from self.

 

A self that lives behind the roles.

 

A self we set aside years ago for a variety of reasons.

 

This is the self we will find if we continue on The Artist’s Way…the path leads to self.

 

I have been disrobing from roles that made up most of who I was, and underneath was a girl who I didn’t know.  It is this girl who has been struggling to come alive, against the adverse conditioned mind.

 

This conditioned mind puts fear, guilt and shame along my pathway, sprinkled with false claims of a gloomy future, IF I dare make a new choice, explore and discover a new way of living.

 

I have been jousting with this mind for 6 ½ years now, seeing which one of us will win at each turn.  Even having the fight is a great improvement to the capitulations of the past, where I didn’t even to fight.

 

Now I have two separated ideals/beliefs/thoughts and desires vying for the chance to live as me.

 

I feel a huge percentage of me is now onboard with the self and just fragments and pieces of me are still tangled up with the mental mind. 

 

The Artist’s Way is working to unhinge those parts as well as strengthen and ignite the ones already free!

 

I feel a huge part of me is flowing with the energy from the field of Art and pure potential, unlocked from the constraints of the mind.

 

Like a butterfly almost cleared from the cocoon!

Keep Me Down

As I did my yoga after work, a frivolous task I labeled it, since I opted to do this instead of a domestic chore or something of a higher priority, I just went ahead and took the liberties of time for my self without thinking too deeply…just quickly changed and started the CD, before a list of other things jostled this idea out of my head.

 

Even calling it frivolous seemed odd, but yet right, that I was cheating responsibility and jumping into frivolous. 

While in yoga I pondered this word and what it meant to me and how it was that I called doing something that was good for me frivolous. 

The yoga that I do is very hard and requires my utmost attention, it is working very hard to restore my body to great health, and I called it frivolous. 

It then came to me; it wasn’t the yoga that was frivolous, but the usage of time.  I was using time frivolously by taking care of myself. 

 I then felt deep sorrow at a girl who thought it frivolous to care for her self, to be with herself doing something that benefits her greatly, and she feels its frivolous.

 I looked up the meaning of frivolous to make sure that I had it right.

 

1.                     not worth taking seriously: lacking in intellectual substance and not worth serious consideration.

 

This is exactly the meaning I had in mind, I was not worth taking seriously or with serious consideration.

I know that this has been my greatest negative pull that seems to be tied by a rope of great width, that keeps holding me down, a belief that is strung through each of my cells.

I have claimed that my biggest hurdle is that I am too responsible, and yet what is more true, is that I am not worth taking seriously or using serious consideration.

I take life and others needs very seriously, but my own are considered frivolous not serious.

I felt pushed upon the mat by the sorrow of understanding, that it isn’t the things that are frivolous, but that I am not worth having them.

My world is very short of frivolous, from the time I spend, to the items I pass by, for I can’t drum up a reason to bring them in.

Flipping frivolous to serious has been a long six years struggle, to upend this belief and get me into serious consideration.

Even though I have been serving me lots of time, big chunks in a day to be used for just me; from writing, to yoga, to art, and blogging, to unraveling my past.  I have been yanking and pulling on this ‘frivolous’ thread, kinda sorta believing it  was serious work, while not completely sold.

The tables turned today, I can see that what I have been doing is putting my self on the list for serious consideration going against generations of voices that have been trying to keep me down.

 

It just is.

This week in The Artist’s Way, we are looking at money, how we spend it and what we think of it, and she is challenging us to seek being frivolous. 

 

As I wrote about Money in the morning pages, it came to me that in my childhood, money was definitely an issue or the lack thereof, but we blamed the money, when in fact the culprit was my parent’s beliefs.

 

We may have danced around the fact that there were too many children, but we never forced the issue as to why so many children when you can’t afford them?  Money took the blame, when in fact they lost control of themselves within the churches rules.

 

When you have no control, you tend to blame things or people who make your life miserable, when in fact if you pulled yourself back into control, money and things would lose their power.

 

They are only powerful when you are not.

 

As I also wrote, it came to me, that there was no space to be frivolous, for there was barely money for the basics, and it was drilled into me, that if you were frivolous, your basic needs would go unmet.  And it feels like life and death, for it was very close.  Being the second oldest, I lived through the harshest years of way too many children and not enough cash flow…and within me now, being selfishly frivolous means someone will go hungry.

 

The flow of power is not up to the money, but it lies wholly in our beliefs.  We put our experiences into money, money doesn’t have an agenda, it just is.

 

 

Disguised as kindness.

The word compliment and its twisting definition is trying to find true meaning in my head, for I feel that compliments are an outside expression we are trying to own, like hand-me-down self worth and self esteem.

 

When I looked up the definition I found this.

 

“Something that fills up, completes, or makes perfect.”  

 

Or

 

“An expression of praise, admiration, or congratulation. An expression of esteem, respect, affection, or admiration; especially: an admiring remark b: formal and respectful recognition.

 

The first meaning seems odd, that ‘something is going to make us complete or perfect and fill us up. I know that this isn’t possible, that we can’t fill up another person or complete them in any way. 

 

And yet compliments are noted as being kind.  Really???  How is it kind to pretend to fill up another?

 

If I give you a compliment how do you wear it?  How do you then bring it inside and own it as your own meaning.  Isn’t it second hand?

 

I then thought that the truthfulness or the authenticity of the compliments lay within the receiver not the giver.

 

The state and condition of the receiver makes all the difference in the world.  If your self worth and self-esteem are wanting and you are not whole and healthy, than compliments are desired to make you so. And this leads to the compliments being more powerful than you.

 

Compliments come from other people and they usually come after we have done something, so then this makes us work to gain our self worth, we have to do something to feel good.

 

I used to work hard to gain pieces of my self worth, to be perfect, for I had very little sense of self inside, I needed their opinions and expressions to show me who I was, in their silence I disappeared.

 

As I dropped the folks who used to give me their expressions and praise, I also dropped my need or desire for what they felt about me.  I then was able to feel first hand about my self.

 

Isn’t there a ‘backhanded compliment’?  What is does that mean?  Is that an unkind compliment or one with an agenda?  Is it a compliment that has a hidden meaning?

 

To me, if compliments are meant to make you feel better then they are dangerous, for you have to first feel great in order to receive them and then you don’t need them for you are full already.

 

They seem like ego mist to me…something the ego feels is good for us and that it lies within others and not within ourselves…something we can’t ourselves grasp or hold on to, yet others seem to carry for us.

 

Another co-dependent chain disguised as kindness.

 

 

Paying Attention to each part of me.

In the Sun Magazine they have a section where they give a word or two and you write about it. This month it was called Paying Attention.

 “Whenever my husband talks to his mother, brother or sister – on the phone or in person he sits down. This irritates me because I wish he would multi-task.  It also makes me jealous because I wish I came from a family of people who gave each other their full attention.”

 “My father traveled a lot on business and left the raising of my sisters and me to our mother.  A consummate multi-tasker, she’d pack meat for the freezer while helping one of us compose a school report.  In the middle of talking to us, she’d trail off: “Get me the…” The radio or TV was usually on, tuned into a talk show...”        Gigi Maniscalchi Edwards

 

Paying attention to me meant if you could keep all the things going, you were paying attention.  Little did I know that I wasn’t paying attention to any of them, but just snagging bits and pieces of each.

 This fragmented view of life is what I was raised with, your focus was never fully intent on one item, behind each thing you were doing, was a background noise of a half a dozen more.

 In a large family there is always something going on or something to be done, there never seemed the time to stop and pay attention.

 Even as I raised my own children, I didn’t stop to pay attention fully and intently on each child and their conversation…I was juggling too many items in each moment of time.

I am getting better at paying attention and focusing on one task at a time, and I can feel my body get anxious when there is too many things going on at once.  And I feel the distracted attention when speaking to someone who is doing things while we talk. 

I prefer the game of one on one, where there is only one ball in the air at a time. 

How sad for my children to be tossed in the air with dishes, clothes, cooking, and things; where my fragment attention was all they ever got. 

My self was one of the things that got lost in the shuffle as well, and I have been learning to slow life down to now start paying attention to each part of me.

 Here is another writing on attention  that caught mine...

“The other graduate students and I at the University of North Dakota drank a lot of coffee.  Whoever drained the last few drops from the thirty-five cup coffee maker would discard the used grounds and, using a long handle brush that we found on the wall in men’s restroom, scrub the inside of the percolator.

 

We were satisfied with how this system was working until the day someone saw the janitor cleaning urinals with the brush.”     Lowell Wandke

 

 

 

Growing Lifeless.

It seems that there is a side of change that continues to catch me off guard, while I eagerly lean towards growth and transformation, I fail to see I am outgrowing friends.

 

My flippant quote that I clung to was, “Birds of a feather flock together…”  I just failed to appreciate that in changing the colors of my feathers, I would no longer feel drawn to being with certain people and then have to seek new feathers that matched the new me.

 

There should be a warning label on all the self-realization books, that by becoming more aware, more truthful, more in alignment with your soul’s purpose, you may lose friends if they are not on the same journey.

 

You arrive to the same group or have lunch with an old friend only to find you don’t sway to the same tune, that your music is no longer in sync…you both feel it and perhaps try and not notice, but eventually the ‘meetings’ become less and less attractive.

 

We are attracted to similar energies and if our energies rise and theirs remain the same, the growing apart naturally takes place, you don’t have to orchestrate it, facilitate it, you just have to honor it.

 

What I have failed to consider each time I get a great hit of new insights and understandings, when I burst forth in a new way, that I leave behind my old energy patterns which match my friends.

 

I also believe that many are stopped on the journey towards living a full spiritual soulful life, is that it may mean leaving behind relationships of long standing.

 

What I also have great confidence in is that many friendships are like a curvy path; we meet and go away only to meet again, for we are all heading in the same direction, but at our own pace.

 

So I don’t see the leaving as in forever, but that our journeys are set at a different speed.

 

What I need most is to pay attention to what I need, what excites me and makes me come alive…it serves no one to sit and idle growing lifeless.

 

She was Me

I had the opportunity to be on web radio, but more importantly the pleasure of speaking with a kindred spirit about my journey, to feel the ease and flow of conversation minus the struggle of explaining.

 

She got me…and I her.  We looked at life through the same lens…from the inside out. 

 

Usually it seems I am the odd man out, I am seeing things from a unique angle compared to others in a room, but this time I felt her looking with me in total understanding.

 

I was also able to see me in a broader way, to realize how far I have come, how my art has led the way, how intuitively I have walked forward and the distance I have traveled.

 

I have been so intent on this step here that I didn’t see how far I walked, how much I have changed and how deep within I had gone, or even how I now appear.

 

It is like working on a piece of art, but not stepping back from it…to remain close and perfecting each tiny stroke, not realizing what you have created.

 

I knew that I had changed drastically, but I don’t believe I saw the beauty in the changes or even the wisdom. 

 

And I was truly able to see the art in me.

 

To see my transformation from patterns and dark colors and rigid lines to being the Lady of my quilts.

 

I am the lady…I can see how we are merging, I am catching up to my lady.  The distance is not such a future dream and far away hope and desire, but that I am living her life today.

 

I am free, I have self-expression, I am empowered, and passionate, I am truth, I am me.

 

In the interview I saw my Lady speaking, and she was me.

 

 
Love her confidence and attitude...and I love that it is within me, has been...waiting for me to embrace it.

 
This is how my quilts hang in a quilt show...they never seemed to match.  The first time I seen this, I cried, for they fit in like me...not the same as the rest. 

 
I eventually was able to recognize that not fitting in was okay...but I still chuckle at

how different my quilts appear next to others...just like me we are in a league of our own.