An Award

Some brilliant blogger has taken the innitiative to create Blog Awards. These are awards that are passed from one blogger to another to give recognition to favorite blogs. I found this to be a lovely idea when I came across a blog with an award a few weeks ago. So, I was thrilled to find that one of my readers gave MY blog an award:

The "One Lovely Blog" Award

Thank you MountainMama! I love it.

Feeling

Once upon a time, I lived in a place where it hurt too much to feel. Now that I'm beginning to feel, it's like living inside a tornado. Emotions swarm  and I have to decide which ones are appropriate to express. Because I am so inept at this, I try to deal with my emotions when I'm alone, but recently something has been coming up that I can't keep to myself. It is an intensified love for my kids and my husband.

I was really still a child when I met my husband, although I wouldn't have said so then. I was seventeen and he was at the sage old age of nineteen. And, he saved me. I had one foot out the door and the other in the grave. With no will to live and no good reason to die, I was floundering and waiting until I couldn't tread water any longer and could just give up.

And, oh yes, I am aware of how codependent we were in our need to save and be saved. To me it seemed like the magical fairy tale really was coming true.

Regardless, I've kept sturdy walls up between my real self and any other living thing, now allowing myself to experience the full presence of love for anyone.

Lately, I hear this phrase in my head all the time:

I love you.
It isn't sexual or physical at all, and it is definitely not the casual love one might put at the end of a letter. It's strong and innocent and it fills me up. It's startling. It comes from inside me, but to whom is it directed?
Sometimes it seems to be coming from me and to me
Sometimes it feels like it's intended for a Universal Power, which some call God
Sometimes it feels as if it's coming from God and is intended for me.
And then I suddenly find this little child inside and I am stuck again. Is this phrase from her? Is it for her?
Finally I settle on, all of the above.

The more I feel this love inside me, the more I want to express it to those around me. I'm still learning how to express my feeling. I just don't know how people do it.

But I gave it a shot. I know my husband would be amazed a the trepidation I felt as I readied myself to say the words I've said a million times, but to say them with full knowledge of their meaning and full presence to my heart. I said the words, and he said them back. Was there a moment of acknowledgement in his eyes? Did he feel something... different?

I feel as if I'm building a skyscraper with all the work I'm doing, and it may come tumbling down around me at any moment... but I can tell you, right at this moment, the view is awesome.

Art Therapy

Yesterday I was talking to my daughter about the drawings I do after our sessions and she had an insight as to why they are so helpful to me.

It's kind of a family joke around here that I don't do very well with metaphors. Most people assume because I write and paint that I am good with non-concrete thought, but I really am not. All those expressions that you are supposed to just know what
they mean, like don't burn your bridges behind you or don't put all your eggs in one basket, I just don't get them. I see an image of someone burning a bridge or a lot of broken eggs and I can see how that wouldn't be good, but I don't just make the leap from that to whatever situation it is supposed to apply to.

It was something I first noticed in high school Honors English, probably about my sophomore year. Everyone would read a book and then come in saying the book MEANT all these other things that it never said. I just never saw it that way. Even so, when I write, I am able to create metaphors that make sense to me and to others.

When I get home from a particularly puzzling session with my therapist, the images are in my head before I put the first line on paper. I can see a direct connection between them and whatever concept I am trying to grasp. Even so, until I do the drawing (or sometimes several drawings) I can’t hold onto the concept.

I have since learned that there are people who practice “art therapy”. I don’t know much about this, but it seems to indicate that I am not the only one who has this problem with making the leap between what is said in therapy, and really knowing it.

Here are a few drawings I did after particularly stressful appointments. I would love to know how others interpret them.

Looking Ahead

A friend of mine is turning in the last of her divorce papers today. She is walking away from a marriage filled with every kind of abuse imaginable. The entire journey to this day has been filled with anger and fear. Now that the day is upon her, the day of reckoning, she is overwhelmed with sadness.

It's hard to walk away from the promise of a relationship, one she counted on, hoped through and finally gave up on. All of the "should have beens" and "what ifs" were pouring from her, today, in a tsunami of broken promises.

But no one should live in an abusive relationship. You won't find me writing a lot of absolutes like that, but I can't see any way around that one.

Here's what I wrote to her this morning:

I know how hard you worked to get to this goal, and how sad and scary it is.You did what needed to be done. Now you know the dominoes have all been placed and soon they will begin to fall and you feel like you will just be helplessly watching them drop, one by one.

In reality, you're not "just helplessly watching." Instead, I believe the fear and sadness are exactly what you're walking away from. And, whenever we walk away from something, we are also walking towards something.  

When my daughter left for college, she was so sure of herself, so confident, so ready... until the minute before we were actually about to drive away and leave her there. Suddenly, my incredibly confident and dynamic daughter started vomiting, which was followed by tears of embarrassment and finally complete, exposed fear and grief. Her true feelings were finally out. She was scared to death!

Of course this shouldn't have been surprising. She was barely seventeen. But she has always been very independent, and I just took her self-assurance in stride as part of who she was. 

In the minutes after she started crying, I held her as I had when she was very small. She said, "I don't have any friends here. I'm going to be all alone."

My reply might sound kind of hoaky in the light of a new day, but she has remembered it and brought it up more than once. I said, "Sweetheart, you have friends right yere. You just haven't met them yet."

Corny? Yes. But also exactly what she needed to hear.

So that's what I want to say to you. You are not just walking away from something, you are walking into your new peaceful life, and heading towards relationships that you haven't even imagined yet.

I don't know, yet, how my friend will react to my note, but I hope she will find some comfort there, and carry that into the days ahead. There is still the court proceedings ahead, and there will be custody issues and more hassles even after the moment when she is officially divorced. But in time, I'm hoping she will look to the horizon and walk towards what's waiting there for her, and will never look back.

Resource Energy

When I act from my adult – when I connect to that part of me inside that knows how to nurture and protect me, the part that feels connected to God and the universe - then I really can handle anything.

 One day I will live in that place all the time

Nurturer, Protector, and Divine

Sunflower Dreams

February 21, 2012

I'm deleting the text of this post as I write it into my memoir. I decided to leave the two images I included in the post, and not delete it altogether. The reason for this is that I value the comments from my readers very much. The comments are still visible, at the bottom of the post.

Memory in a Bubble

Memory in a Bubble

by Shen

Memory in a bubble
Kept harmless ever long
If I burst it's fragile film
Can it right all wrongs
if I sing the valid song?

Buried deep there is a verse
A spirit chord and tone
But day by hour we lose the words
And trembling to our bones
We wander all alone.

Snow covered now and frozen
This fragile, tiny globe
Can it still hold the world I sense
With my remaining hope--
This tiny ball of soap?

I Was a Child

.
I feel bad that I felt so alone, when I was a child, that my adolescent years were so confused and that my first sexual experiences were so far from they should have been. I feel angry. I'm working hard not to turn that anger on myself, and to remember I was a child.

At two and six and twelve and even seventeen, I was a child.

There were a lot of reasons why I continually put myself in danger, and why I assumed that everything that happened TO me was my fault. These reasons are still unfolding for me now. But right now, I am seeing that I was a child, and like all children, I passed through lessons to learn, not to be punished.

I can forgive myself.