Time for Serenity Today

 

Time for Serenity, Anyone?

William Stafford

 

I like to live in the sound of water,
in the feel of mountain air. A sharp
reminder hits me: this world is still alive,
it stretches out there shivering toward its own
creation, and I’m part of it. Even my breathing
enters into this elaborate give-and-take,
this bowing to sun and moon, day or night,
winter, summer, storm, still–this tranquil
chaos that seem to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.

(Found on Parker Palmer's page, he adds this note: "The poem also gives voice to a simple sabbatical insight I want to keep alive: The most radical thing I can do during this era of intense social and political turmoil is hold to inner peace, as best I can. This isn’t the first time I’ve learned that lesson, but I needed to learn it again."

Some of us are seeking serenity even more than usual this year. There's a lot of turmoil going on, it's a time of great unrest. And although the summer has been gorgeously long and hot, the river water beautiful and the mountains majestic, we are also preparing for a seasonal shift, to fall and cooler weather and a return to school. This year that return is very needed yet very stressful  – uncertainty about the virus spreading amongst children, whether the kids will wear masks or not in classroom, all the little bubbles of friends spreading and mixing. Parents getting their freedom back!

Even though my kids are grown and living on their own, my son’s wife is pregnant, and therefore limiting her contacts with the world at large, safely working from home. But as thirty somethings, the invitations for weddings, funerals, christenings and baby showers are frequent - and have to be negotiated, considered, sometimes declined. It is not an easy time for any of us.

In this continuing pandemic chaos, we need a little serenity. I offer this poem as a reminder that the seasons are still turning, the dance of life is on-going, and we are part of this creation of nature. My breathing is part of the give and take.

I need to find tranquility in the midst of the chaos surrounding me, on the news, in the airwaves, around the corner.

When the moon is shining on the water, I am reminded of that beauty.

When the wind is blowing the leaves from the trees, I watch in wonder.

When the storm clouds blow and shake and shiver the sky, I am grateful to have shelter.

Laisse le vent souffler! Let the wind blow, sings Zachary Richard (amidst hurricane season).

There is beauty even in the madness – il y a de la beauté dans la malheur, sings Kevin Parent, two songs I’ve shared recently on my Facebook page. They remind me that music, songs, poetry, nature are balms for my soul – they remind me to stay where I can breathe. To re-center and lift my eyes to the sun and moon, to the stars and the sky. To dance with the wind.

Tomorrow is a full moon. I’m going to get outside and fill my eyes with light.

I want to remember the basics, the in-breath, the out-breath.

Soften my belly and feel my feet on the ground.

Stand like a tree and receive the life energy flowing.

Sending me signals, messages, this moment.

Serenity is within my reach.

 

SoulCollage(R) Card: Heart Focus 

 

 

 

SoulCollage(R) Facilitator Training in Canada

Jenn facilitator card

This is a new year, and with it comes a new role for me – to train people interested in becoming facilitators of SoulCollage(R) workshops.

SoulCollage(R) (www.soulcollage.com) is the single most interesting creative process for self-exploration that I have used in over twenty years of leading creative journaling classes and retreats for women.

Basically, it can described as an easy, image-based tool to delve into a dialogue with the self in a deep, but playful way. I find it more satisfying than journaling alone (although we do journal and write with the 5 x 8 cards we make). I find it calls on my inner artist without challenging my lack of art skills – anyone can cut and paste images onto cardboard cards. And exploring these images with my imagination, finding out where they come from and what they mean, allows my inner wisdom to pop up as I gain intuitive insights. Sharing this with others in community also provides hours of fun and creative flow.

Founder Seena Frost described it this way: "It is a tangible way to know yourself in your diversity and depth, and also to show yourself to others. Showing your deck of SoulCollage® cards to another person can be a profound experience. In like-spirited groups, you can share cards and work with them in many sacred ways. You can consult them intuitively and discover wisdom within yourself which will amaze you. Besides all this, creating them is just plain fun! You will love your deck -- a multi-card Mirror of your Self and your Soul -- whether it consists of three cards or a hundred."  

SoulCollage(R) has also proven to be a valuable therapeutic tool when used by therapists and professionals as a part of their practice. It has brought healing and guidance to individuals, groups and communities, such as cancer wellness centers, seniors homes, women in prison, conflict resolution, pastoral counseling, couples therapy and many more. Facilitators are sharing and teaching this unique process in many ways with diverse populations and in a wide range of environments.

Images, intuition and imagination

The collage process we use helps to reflect and give a voice to all our parts; sometimes images call to us and we don’t know why, it seems beyond words, until we dialogue with the card and discover who or what  it is. SoulCollage(R) is a great tool for awareness and personal growth, and making the cards is a pleasing process full of synchronicity and surprise. Some of the images you choose will symbolize inner parts of self, maybe your Inner organizer, your happy inner child, or your inner lonely one, or your Inner Nurturer. Others are larger energies, on a mythical level, like the Great Mother, or the hero archetype. These universal stories are woven into our own personal journeys and stories.  I see this process as a gathering of the whole, bringing all the pieces together, the unknown or invisible ones, the silent or ignored ones, and acknowledging them, reclaiming them.

Tapping into your own inner wisdom using images develops intuition as well. The more you play with it, the more you learn to trust the process. It’s a great life lesson. We can become our own wise oracle, consulting our cards and using our imagination to let the images speak with us.

In my own women’s circle, some of us get together every two weeks to make cards, dialogue with them, and then do card readings once a month. Consulting cards you have made to represent energies and archetypes, parts of self and members of your family and friends, is a very rich way of accessing inner wisdom, and to my mind a lot less mysterious or esoteric than consulting a deck of oracle cards devised by someone else with symbols I may or may not understand.

There is no wrong or right way to do SoulCollage(R). It is a gentle, intuitive self-care process that reaches deep into our inner pockets of knowing. Most of the people I have introduced to it find it immensely satisfying to both make cards and do readings.

Body Love card

In early July, I will be offering a 4 day SoulCollage(R) facilitator training. All information on registration, lodging and fees is on my website at www.jenniferboire.com.  

or http://jenniferboire.com/the-soulcollage-facilitator-training/.

In the training, you will be given a comprehensive, step by step workbook (manual), and all supplies are provided; accommodation and meals are covered in the total fee. You will learn all about SoulCollage(R), how to use it, how to incorporate it in your workshops, including ethical care, and be invited to network with like-minded people. 

The only pre-requisite is that you have followed an Introductory course on SoulCollage(R), either in person or online, and begun making cards for yourself, so you see the benefit of it, before starting to share it with others as a facilitator.

Sample card:  Heart Focus for 2019 card

I made this card recently to represent an intention of mine for the coming year. It said to me: 

I am one who longs to feel my heart open. I am one who receives guidance from the universe. I am one who feels connected when she is around open-hearted, soulful creative people. I want to bring back more of that Heart Focus in my life this year.

Heart Focus card

Watch this video to hear from some people attending a facilitator training on how and why they love to work with SC.  And if you want to learn more about SoulCollage(R) or become a facilitator, just drop me a line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrHmvbEb4w0#action=share

Jennifer

Valentine's is for the lover in you

Dear ones,

it has been too long. I am posting frequently on Facebook, sending out monthly newsletters, leading classes and retreats, but I have forgotten to come back to this blog.

I guess it's a sign of where my attention is going.

But today, this week, Love Week, here is something to watch and listen to, to remind you that your heart longs to be loved, held, cared for, to love and be loved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm6dvYnUrIs

and here are some Lovely Quotes about Love (music by Stuart Hoffman). Watch this lovely slideshow, prepared by Mitch Ditkoff, who is trying to make this go viral and raise money for www.tprf.org (a great cause, peace and dignity for all).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR33tqKz8r4


Happy Lover's Day!

Musemother

Empowering the Feminine within: A woman who follows her own heart

“The things women are most yearning for---such as deeper connection, spiritual awakening, self-expression, creativity, right livelihood, creating an enlightened world for generations to come---all require a new level of Feminine Power to bring them forth.” Jean Houston

A woman who follows her own heart has learned to listen to her intuition.

A woman who follows her own heart listens to her body guidance.

A woman who follows her own heart shares deeply, listens deeply, is present with others.

A woman who follows her own heart feels her fear, acknowledges it, but is not held back by it.

A woman who follows her own heart is always expanding, growing, learning.

A woman who follows her own heart discovers her true desires and interests.

A woman who follows her own heart is impatient to get started.

A woman who follows her own heart believes in herself, and her creative powers.

A woman who follows her own heart is able to say no, and speak her truth.

A woman who follows her own heart knows the value of doing nothing, of rest and recuperation.

A woman who follows her own heart knows that to go down and in is preparation for coming out and up.

A woman who follows her own heart is a source of calm, a balm for others.

A woman who follows her own heart leans inward in times of trouble, but is not afraid to ask for help.

A woman who follows her own heart knows that angels and guides are watching over her.

A woman who follows her own heart knows her own value.

A woman who follows her own heart accepts herself as she is, flawed but fabulous.

A woman who follows her own heart lets her children be flawed and fabulous too.

A woman who follows her own heart stands her ground.

A woman who follows her own heart knows how to be grounded in root energy.

A woman who follows her own heart lets go to the flow of synchronicity.

A woman who follows her own heart trusts the Universe and knows she is loved.

A woman who follows her own heart has a constant companion and Friend within.

A woman who follows her own heart reaches out in compassion to those who suffer, she has been there too.

A woman who follows her own heart creates an atmosphere of love and caring around her.

A woman who follows her own heart remembers where her Joy is.

A woman who follows her own heart laughs from the belly.

A woman who follows her own heart loves her body and knows she is beautiful within and without.

A woman who follows her own heart forgives herself for her mistakes.

A woman who follows her own heart is in love with Beauty.

A woman who follows her own heart is in touch with her feminine power.

Any woman who follows her own heart can learn to be this woman.

Any woman who is aware of where she is and how she feels, and doesn’t try to pretend to be something different, can be this woman.

You are that woman with heart, unfolding, becoming, and realizing herself as the goal.

Heart is the Hearth and Home of you. Come home to your heart!

Namaste,

Musemother

More News for the Heart

http://www.exelans.org

Dr Christiane Northrup has been writing about women's bodies and the wisdom that comes from listening to the body for over twenty years. I first heard about her and her book, Women's Bodies Women's Wisdom when my aunt sent my mother the book. Seeing it on her coffeetable, I asked if I could read it. I don't think I ever gave it back. It opened my eyes to so many new ways of thinking and understanding symptoms of illness, and my connection to my female body.

This month, Dr Northrup is addressing the Heart in her monthly newsletter, and I love what she has to say about hidden emotions and heart disease.

I have done various types of bodywork, from osteopathy, massage therapy to Rolfing, and in every case, there has been some form of emotional release as well as the healing power of touch.

Here is a link to her article: http://www.drnorthrup.com/blog/2013/01/hidden-emotions-hurt-the-heart

Love your Heart!

Musemother/jenn

Meditate on your Heart Month

February is Heart Month

I'm going to write more about what opening into heart awareness means for me, as I did in my monthly newsletter for my website (sign up at www.jenniferboire.com),
but for the moment, here's something I found on Facebook, with some lovely music and visuals to help you focus and breathe through your heart.

http://chandinilove.tumblr.com/


Namaste,
Musemother

Turning Fifty? So What's the Big Deal?

Now that I'm the wise old age of 57, sometimes I forget what it was like to approach fifty. My forties are a bit of a blur because I had my children late, and they hit puberty as I was hitting menopause. I do remember the arguments over plates on the counter, not in the dishwasher, and begging them to make their beds, until I gave up and just closed the door. But my personal life sonmetimes took a back seat to raising children and renovating our living space.

Even at fifty, my youngest was only 12...so the good times were still to come. There were lots of good times of course, family times, picnics, vacations, soccer games, ballet recitals, hip hop concerts, you name it.  But 'me time'? not so much.

So for me, turning fifty and above has been mostly about trying to carve out some time for me - time to find that well-adjusted psyche and sense of fulfillment people talk about in articles on mid-life. If you have your children in your late thirties, your mid-life may end up being in your late fifties. And you may still be adjusting to mid-life in your 60's.

Being fifty, (or 55, or 57) is about finally finding your self, your choices, your own tastes, your own heart's desire.  Mid-life has been like a second adolescence for me, partly because I stayed home with my kids and so the question of what I wanted to be when I grew up was still relevant. I had already gone back to school, gotten a master's degree, but what did I really want to do with it? Writing at home in my little room was no longer as fulfilling. I wanted to go out into the bigger world and play!

So my fifties has been about discovering this side of me: I've taken workshops, lead workshops, read books, written a few, and now I am leading retreats for women as well as creative journaling classes, which is so much where I want to be. Learning, exploring, following my passion, doing what I feel like - which involves more learning about what I love, what I feel, understanding my patterns and places I get stuck, finding out what really excites me.  And sharing those discoveries with other women.

It sounds like it's all about me - and it is.  I have found my vocation is largely talking about myself, something I've always loved anyway.  I use my own stories to illustrate the mid-life journey, as well as those of others I've encountered. There's a lot of uncertainty for women who have raised children, worked as caretakers and managers of households, once they begin to wonder what their skills are, and where their gifts and talents lie beyond bandaging scraped knees, driving kids to piano lessons and multi-tasking. Actually even the women who work full time as well as raising families sometimes question their roles at mid-life. Not a few women I know have created new careers, started businesses, or gone back to school in their forties and fifties.

Time is short, and at fifty, you face your own time limit. It's time to find out what really turns you on, what you really want to do with this wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver puts it. Maybe it scares you a little, but you find you have the courage, one baby step at a time, to explore new options, discover new territories, set out on adventures beyond your back yard.

And for some, the adventure is to come back to the roost and rest, to stop churning and turning in busy busy mode, and simplify. To learn to do one thing at a time. And that's an adventure too, because it is also unknown territory.

Whatever your adventure, getting to know your self along the way makes it more interesting.  I've only used about half the box of crayons, and there are so many colours to discover!

Namaste,
Jenn/Musemother

Valentine's Week

Consider that February is really the middle of winter and you understand why we need a Valentine's Week, not just one day.

Hold your sweetie every night in your arms.

Love your body as you take that shower or bath, loving every light-filled cell.

Be gentle with yourself.

Be tender with your heart, like a newborn baby child.

Know that you are love, and you are loved :)

I will only go as fast as the slowest part of me feels safe to go....from a song by Karen Drucker

Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing,
falling up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.
Nothing else to do.
......~ Rumi


Happy Valentine's,
musemother

In the Stillness of Retreat

In the stillness of this moment, I am peace.

I'm listening to a Retreat music CD, taking a few moments to prepare for a retreat March 14 that I will lead at H-OM yoga studio in Hudson, Quebec.

This music is gently rocking me into a feeling of peace, like a lullabye, coming to a slower breathing rate, in spite of the frantic pace of the morning, trying to pack, make lists, prepare for a 2 week vacation in Turks & Caicos (yes, I am so lucky!).

I am waiting, I allow myself to wait, 
I am waiting, I allow myself to wait.
My life's been moving , way too fast
I need to stop and take a breath
to see what the Lord wants me to do
so for now I wait and I listen....

Wish I could post the music too, it's very relaxing and soothing piano and voice.

Just wanted to leave you with a reminder to Breathe, Listen, Wait, Rest...if you are in transition, if you are impatient to start something new, if you are leaving something behind, if you are just crazy busy and don't know when you'll get a break.....Take One Now.   

"I will only go as fast as the slowest part of me....I hold myself like a newborn baby child."

Don't wait for a break down, a broken leg, or a break-up to push you into Self-Care mode.  Be gentle with yourself, with your tender heart, now, today, this moment.

You are precious, valuable and loved :)

take good care,
musemother/jenn

music cd available from A Woman's Way  www.awoman's way.com
or
www.karendrucker.com for the music from A Retreat of My Own

Dreamer

What do I love, what do I want to do right now? I wrote in my journal sometime before the Christmas holidays began.

I was away in the mountains this past weekend with my kids. While they skiied with their Dad, I sat and read, wrote in my journal, did yoga, some writing exercises. It felt very grounding and peaceful. After the rush of the holidays, the marathon of friends and parties and family do's.

Reading this journal entry put me back in touch with the space I was in then, and the space I want to be in right now.  The wisdom of the heart.

Right now, in this moment, I want to allow the wisdom of my heart to bypass the strategist. I want the dreamer to awake and tell me her deepest cherished dream. I want to hold her hand and shush and rock her until she dares speak out loud her deepest wish - she has not shown herself for fear of being judged, and she is hiding underneath the bed.

She doesn't like to compete, she hates hype,  marketing, meetings and pressure to produce goals.  She is anti-goal. She lives for the feeling mode, under the surface of things. She is a shy fish. My outer voice is too loud, sometimes; it frightens her. I courted her in the past, but gave up, bured her under convention, under the 'should's', the must's, and Duty.

Right now I want to listen.
Right now I want to receive guidance.
Where are my life's interests sending me - a book, more classes, healing?
I do want to be healed.

Sometimes you have to let the wounds show, let the air at them.
Here's to opening up to heart's wisdom in 2010.

that's as far as I can go with 'planning' or goals.
Trust, surrender, giving myself the space to explore in.

You have not danced so badly

Hafiz

"You have not danced so badly, my dear, trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One. You have waltzed with great style, my sweet, crushed angel, to have ever neared God's Heart at all.

Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow, and even his best musicians are not always easy to hear.

So what if the music has stopped for a while. So what if the price of admission to the Divine is out of our reach tonight. So what, my dear, if you do not have the ante to gamble for Real Love.

The mind and the body are famous for holding the heart ransom, but Hafiz knows the Beloved's eternal habits.

Have patience, for he will not be able to resist your longing for long.
You have not danced so badly, my dear, trying to kiss the Beautiful One. You have actually waltzed with tremendous style, Oh my sweet, Oh my sweet, crushed angel."

I Heard God Laughing, by Daniel Ladinsky.

image from www.farjamcollection.com/.../02/about-hafiz.jpg

This is it, right here right now

Always we hope someone else has the answer.

Some other place will be better.

Some other time, it will all turn out.

This is it.

No one else has the answer.

No other place will be better.

And it has already turned out.

At the center of your being you have the answer;

you know who you are and you know what you want.

There is no need to run outside for better seeing.

Nor to peer from a window.

Rather abide at the center of your being;

For the more you leave it, the less you learn.

~ Lao-tsu

The Secret inside the Secret

just back from the Gaspe and a bucolic wedding at Lac Bijou, wee man-made lake with a tiny island and a bridge to the island. lit by torches at night, fairy like. the giant white tent with 3 peaks, big enough for 170 people, the dancing 'villagers', musicians and singers and talent, the family love, the huge heart-filled space we created as we celebrated my brother-in-law and his wife/love.

driving back 11 hours yesterday, it was sun and rain, sun and rain, huge banks of cumulous clouds, black nimbus, green marshes and flowers blooming along the roadside in clumps of yellow, blue, white and purple.

the St-Lawrence river by turns slate coloured or blue, shining or misty, curving or straight, and the mountains we drove through, winding and smooth-paved new roads easing our delivery back to Montreal

there are travel days like that when time is suspended, punctuated by french fries, doughnuts and iced cappucinos or Tim Horton's homemade soup....watching the Tudors on dvd in the back seat....or chewing gum to stay awake at the wheel

and the many stops for Mollie the shitzu mix to stretch her wee legs....

and now we're home, the pool needs filling, the flowers were watered by rain, but bedraggled, the wash is in the washer, smells of bleach in the kitchen and I'm here, writing about the return to normalcy after being suspended in a 4-day party mode.

what I want today is to travel deeply into the thirst for quiet that has surfaced, the need for re-collecting, re-vising, re-viewing, settling into thought and words again. the white room that is empty of all stimuli is not available, the chalet or cabin in the woods not ready yet, but there is this inner space, this separation from time and 'doing' and 'going', this place where I receive myself, sit and listen attentively and find out where and what the impulse is, the in-pulse.

Bella has reminded me of Rumi's heart-logic, so here's what I read just now:

Food for the soul stays secret.
Body food gets put out in the open

like us. Those who work at a bakery
don't know the taste of bread like

the hungry beggars do. Because the
beloved wants to know, unseen things

become manifest. Hiding is the
hidden purpose of creation: bury

your seed and wait. After you die,
all the thoughts you had will throng

around like children. The heart
is the secret inside the secret.

Call the secret language, and never
be sure what you conceal. It's

unsure people who get the blessing."

from Coleman Barks' the Soul of Rumi

I am hungry for the secret heart's revelation. Back to the bakery, then,
adieu,

jenn/musemother

Menopause Space for the heart

After all the reading I've done, and notes I've taken on women's initiation into menopause, and the passage we go through, I have come to a startling conclusion.

What I don't need is an intellectual understanding of the process. What i do need is to feel well in my body, mind and spirit.

What provides this most completely is to talk with other women in a group, in a circle, or one-on-one. Even writing this blog is a way of reaching out to other women who may be going through something similar.

I have a huge thirst to be heard and to be seen. It's a point of frustration for many women in their marriages, that women feel their husbands are preoccupied with their work, or with their hobbies and other concerns, and there is not enough 'dialogue'. We worked on this, my husband and I, in a weekend workshop on communication, and even practised the dialoguing for a few months before we fell out of the habit. It doesn't seem to come naturally to some men, to sit and open up, talk about their feelings.

Women on the other hand, usually love a good gab fest, and if they are able to drop down into the deep listening mode and allow the other person a chance to speak from the heart, a deeply satisfying communion takes place. We know each other's troubles because we have lived them too. We empathisize, sympathize and this energizes us, to share what we know, what we feel.

So what I want to offer to women is what I need myself - a space to be heard and seen. A space to explore my longings, my childish heart, the whims and desires of the lost little girl I want to free from her middle-aged cares and concerns.

I don't need to explain, theorize, discuss and debate. I want to encourage free self-expression and remind participants (if it's a workshop setting) that for this to happen we (I) need to button our lips, listen without commenting, and respond from the heart without judgment or criticism, resisting the impulse to give advice or tell the other person what we (I) think she needs.

What I remind myself, here and now, is that I don't have to have all the answers.

My brain is tired of facts, figures, statistics and medical information about menopause.

The best medicine for my heart is this lovely, deep, nourishing, satisfying, timeless space where there is room for the heart to speak.

I'll be away for two weeks, with my daughter while she attends a design course in NY. Will be retreating, treating myself to some soul collage work, some reading and writing time, and some space for the heart. Have a good summer, and be well.

nameste,
jenn
aka musemother

Honouring the inner masculine

Ok, to even the debate, let's talk about the inner masculine and inner feminine, instead of calling it the sacred whatever. The inner masculine is about the fathering you received, according to Linda S. Leonard, author of The Wounded Woman, Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship. I found all kinds of archetypes and images that resembled my relationship with my father, in this book, which I originally read over ten years ago, and recently picked up again.

My father's legacy to me was neither all positive or all negative, but since I left home at age eighteen, and especially as I had children and questioned the parenting I had received, I have focused on the negative - the rageaholic angry man who threatened us with verbal abuse, yelled at us for minor infractions and seemed to lose it for no reason at all. The patriarch, the authoritarian 'boss' of the household who made us feel tense and uncomfortable and seemed to belittle my mother's opinions and attitudes, in spite of proclaiming a deep love for her. The man who behaved inappropriately with women and girls.

I can't begin to describe my parents' co-dependent relationship, but suffice it to say, I was a father's daughter - the eldest, the one encouraged to excel, praised for my brain as well as my looks, made to feel special, the apple of his eye. On the other hand, while he encouraged me to pursue my interest in theatre as a hobby, he pooh-poohed writers and artists as likely to be starving in attics or alcoholics, (although he paid for my sister to go to art highschool and loved to paint himself). He just didn't think they were good careers.

Reading about the armoured Amazon woman archetype, I saw myself in that image; somehow accepting my father's image of me as strong, intelligent, rational and in charge, also led to an overidealizing of the masculine qualities of strength, hardness, and self-protection that lead to a terrible burden of over responsibility and joylessness basically - and sore shoulders - maybe cause it drove the playful feminine underground. I saw my stay-at-home mother (another bohemian artist in her soul) as the weak one without power (and in this situation she mostly was). But if women turn themselves into ambitious, competitive fighters to get ahead in the world and turn our backs on the softening influence of the feminine, of spontaneity, we negate a part of ourselves and become too serious, rigid, lose the joy of life. Leonard describes some of the mistakes we make when we imitate this rigid idea of the masculine, like this:

"This young woman's Amazon armor covered up a shame of her femininity so that she overrode the demands and needs of her body. She also mouthed a theory that there was really no difference between men and women. And she treated her body that way, not acknowledging the changes of body and mood brought on by her menstrual periods." Linda S. Leonard

Of course I am interested in how we override our monthly cycles, and our bodies in general.
So I am reconsidering my father's legacy, since his death two years ago. I remember the artist in him that painted a stained-glass window with water colour paint and black tape on our huge front window, the Madonna and child image he outlined in tape on the family room window. He was a quirky eccentric, his yard was never mowed on time, the weeds drifted over to the lawn of the extremely nit-picky neighbour who happened to be my vice-principal at high school. He collected old cars that rusted out while they waited for him to 'repair' them with my brothers and his yard was the 'shame' of the neighbourhood, or maybe just of me.

But he was also a warm, sensitive man, who taught us a love of story, and language. He loved Little Theatre; before we were born he acted and directed plays. He played piano and sang, mostly after a few beers, and he loved literature, opera, music in general. He taught me a love of the French language and I followed my own dream to Montreal, and married a French Canadian.

Now that I'm beginning to recover my inner masculine's positive side, I hope this frees up my creativity! that's the promise Leonard holds out. That conscious recognition or naming of the beast, brings light; that seeing the shadow or dark side of my father as part of myself, and seeing his good qualities as part of myself too, will heal me.

here's to reclaiming the inner masculine, the man with heart.