February, Restart your Year

How did it get to be February already? I'm just pulling out of the fog of January, ice and snow keeping me indoors, rain, freezing rain, falling slush....then a week of sunshine.

Miraculously, creative and inspirational projects are simmering anew, my brain energy has been reborn. Was it the week of restful reading in the sun, or perhaps seeing my teacher Prem Rawat give an inspirational talk on Essential Gratitude in LA?

All of a sudden my calendar is filling up with workshops and retreats, plans as far ahead as June. My schedule has jumped from 0-60 km an hour overnight, or so it seems.

A life coach once recommended that we wait till February to restart the year. I think that is a very good idea, and it happened by itself this year without me planning it.

What's intriguing me right now: healing old family wounds and finding the gifts of shadow. I've been taking a course on Daily Om called Releasing Family Karma (or Shadow) - they list the 7 shadow energies as: illness, addiction, abuse (physical and sexual), violence, poverty, abandonment, and betrayal.

It's been a very informative exercise to make a family tree with all the generations I know of, and their subsequent shadows.  I saw depression, anxiety, addiction, abandonment and illness come up in several generations, on both sides of my family tree.

Sometimes these were closely held secrets, until one current family member became ill or depressed, and the stories of aunts, grandmothers, great grandmothers began to surface. I have read on other websites that these traumas are stored in our DNA and carried down. Apparently neuroscience is catching up here, with experiments on how rats parent when they are deprived of basic nurturance and affection by their own mothers.

Another course I have just signed up for will help me write, make art, do more SoulCollage (R)  cards around these shadow energies - wherever there is conscious awareness and transformative art brought to attend and tend, it allows old wound to heal. I have been aware of most of these for over 30 years, and began writing about it in my 30's (am now 62). What I see is that deeper acceptance and  grieving the losses and old 'story', allowing feelings to surface from out of the depths, brings lightness of being, renewed joy, gentle compassion for myself and others. We spiral upwards, around our stories, seeing them from a new angle each time.

Or like they say, you need to deal, to feel and heal.

Here's a poem I found on Facebook today, posted by a fellow SoulCollager, that says it all.

The Joy of Incompleteness
Albert Crowell

If all our life were one broad glare
Of sunlight clear, unclouded:
If all our path were smooth & fair,
By no soft gloom enshrouded:
If all life’s flowers were fully blown
Without the sweet unfolding,
And happiness were rudely thrown
On hands too weak for holding–
Should we not miss the twilight hours,
The gentle haze and sadness?
Should we not long for storms and showers
To break the constant gladness?

If none were sick and none were sad,
What service could we render?
I think if we were always glad
We scarcely could be tender.
Did our beloved never need
Our patient ministration,
Earth would grow cold and miss indeed
Its sweetest consolation:
If sorrow never claimed our heart
And every wish were granted
Patience would die, and hope depart–
Life would be disenchanted.

(artist unknown)

When life slows down to a crawl and you don’t want to get out of bed

(this is a story about not wanting to write)

Is it February? Is winter not over yet in your part of the world? In my landscape, it is whiter than white, blowing snow, blue above the clouds, a little sunshine sparkling on snow, drifts and piles of white everywhere, and a crisp coldness. Some days I find that invigorating, and head out to the frozen lake (Lac St-Louis is really part of the St-Lawrence river) and cross country ski, especially when there is fresh snow covering the ice.

But some days, like one day this week, the cold, the clouds, the constant bundling up and trying to stay warm got me down. Or maybe it was my immune system fighting off cold or flu germs (I have been sneezing a lot). All I wanted to do was stay in bed. I had planned a writing day. Actually, it seems to go with the territory, that when I plan to work on my stories, resistance comes up and I suddenly feel a huge weight on me, inertia sets in, and I can’t get motivated. I want to hide under the pillows and sing, woe is me.

So I lit a candle and got out my Native American totem cards, picked four cards and wrote in my journal. Put on some soothing music (Bija, my favourite heart-beat like pace of sound), and hunkered down on my bed to write out what the cards said (great advice, always). Then I pulled out a book I’m supposed to review, (Mothering from your Center) and read a chapter on birth energies and did the visualization of my creative center, and whoops – before I knew it was writing, making notes on the book, on my experience of energetically releasing two previous miscarriages from over 23 years ago. My passion came back, my interest in writing, my mojo was back. I had a productive day.

There is no magic cure for inertia, but what I found worked (yesterday, then again today) was just snuggling down into it. Of course, I work at home, so it’s easier for me to stay in my pj’s and read a book. Today I pulled out a collection of erotica, short stories, excerpts and poems and before I knew it, I was hotly inspired to write - jumped up to the computer and revised one of my old chestnuts (stories that have barely survived my total ignoring of them for over ten years), and actually sent two stories out to  literary journals. It helps that they accept email submissions, so I didn’t have to get dressed and go to the post office or the nearest mail box, or look for stamps.

Now that is way more than I have done in over a year, in fact, the only things I have sent out are to a once a year story competition, and I remind myself not to do that anymore – I haven’t published any short stories yet (well, one, in a parenting magazine), and so submitting to open ‘auditions’ if you will is more productive than sending a one-off to a competition that 500 other writers are sending to.

My secret was just to keep moving – to pick up a book, to just put a little oil in the machine,  get the motor running, purring a little, before stepping on the gas and taking her out for a ride. I’m still sluggish, even more so after eating lunch and now my digestion system is slowing me down, but here I am typing up this blog post, see I didn’t even know it was going to be a blog post until just now. And I am working again. In spite of inertia and slug like slowness.

On a day where you feel as slow as molasses in January, even if it’s February, take it slow and easy. Put one foot in front of the other, pour yourself a cup of hot tea, and hunker down to it. Gently. You can do it!

Musings from my notebooks on younger self

Post coitum omne animal triste est /“after sex every animal is sad”. (written 2005)

What is it that keeps us awake at night or early morning before dawn, skin damp with sweat, heart doing silly flip flops or pounding on the door to get out? I lie beside you at 6:15 and put my hand on your chest. It falls over your heart and I catch its rhythm, a little irregular, but beating steadily the way it should, but I know you are tired before you even begin the day, the way I know by just looking that it is not a good time to bring up the subject of bills to pay or dogs to walk, or moving out west. So I hover my hand over your heart and pray that today you will take each breath at a time and not run ahead of its rhythm, and that I will stay close to those cantering horses, slow them down to a quick trot, not gallop all day like a wild horse in a field full of gopher holes. Ready to break my neck at breakneck speed; god speed -- that’s the speed we should walk at work at, a gentle breathing pace. I soothe myself with this thought, before I sit up to meditate.

My fears about my mother’s drinking, over 25 years sober, celebrated her golden sobriety, but suspected of sneaking sips just before Dad died; the deep shadow buried in the cave of my worries. Sinking pit in the stomach feeling, fluttering with unease, yet I function in spite of it. Wind howling around the ears, narrow escapes through windows in my dreams, my body under ice drowning, trying to get to what buried treasure?
Old lady, look at my life, I am a lot like you were.
Addicted to the adrenaline of stress, pushing too hard then collapse, fuel gage on low. A bit manic compared to last year’s lethargy.

Want to recoup, withdraw the lines of energy binding me to everyone else. Kids already align themselves with their father, a good sign, release the stranglehold of motherworry I project on them. We all seek freedom, equilibrium. Learn to sit still and listen.

Deep in the body, transcendent, the feeling you get when love making is genuine: threshold, a rite of passage, betwixt and between, a transition phase like death or birth, from out of a dark moist place, the eclipse of the moon or sun, the diving into the darkness and noise of sex, a rollercoaster ride, into the tender light of morning.

Coming out of the castle of chastity into the world of nature, life, undoing the wound of childhood, regaining its purity.

Tuesday morning, I sit with the ball of anxiety in the pit of my solar plexus, see myself running forward, turning back now at half way point to catch up with my self. Look back to retell the story of how I got this far, reframe it as myth, or fairy tale.

Feel the center folding in, collapsing. The little tyrant trying to hold it all together, fear of this falling but can’t carry the ball anymore, it’s as heavy as Atlas’s globe. No way for it, but in, underground, past the scary bull dog Cerebus, down like Innana, stripped of jewels, headdress, necklace earrings clothing –the trappings of beauty, head shorn and bare, exposed throat open to the knife.

My own unnamed fears and anxieties throttle me. To dive from this height -- pull back in fear, trembling. Yet only one way to lose the fear, jump. Exhilaration of that long swan dive, the younger self catches up to the swan self and we re-integrate, heal the split. I left her behind, repudiated her, now I can reclaim her, embrace her wickedness, her rebellious, annoying belligerent exuberance, her painfully loud anger, and growling refusal to buy into complacency,

My shit disturber fighter-of-injustice self, my stand up and be counted fire-breathing dragon, galloping goliath fighting little Sheba/David. Protector of innocents, wielder of the shield of Hope, pitting herself against authority and high school tyrant teachers and principles – the muckraking journalist–thorn in your side student. ....Who am I kidding? I left the leftist leaning hippie behind and morphed into the corporate hand kissing middleclass homeowner with an executive lifestyle – split again – between high class and no class. So what is the real person doing in the middle of these identities? Who is she rooting for?

So I let down the armour, admit to being human, release the burden of harsh self-judgment. When I say no to my kids, I feel the weight of the monster that judges herself for being too strict, some confusion between the philosophy that brought me this far (on parenting) and the one I will discover.

As far as what I want to do with my life, I don’t know yet what I want to be and maybe I don’t have to be a ‘famous’ anything, maybe my gift is just to be myself, be happy with that. I can do so many things, why be only be one thing? And why does it have to be like that forever? That you decide now and become something-- why not lay down that terrible burden of trying to be something.

Lay down in the grass and let the sun shine on your back, lie prone on the ground, receive the sun’s heat and ask the burning questions – (for me) what is the value of a mother?

It’s not a break-down, but a breaking open of the heart, that’s what tears do. The drum of the heart beats a great heat through the body to melt the fear-armour, split the hull of self-deceit and protection.

The mothering we need: to be shown how to do things, how to eat, cook, do laundry, we need to be shown how to love, recover from heartbreak, hold the neck of a new baby, change a diaper. Le mal de mer – not seasickness, but mother sickness, missing mothering, the tender rocking of waves.

musemother, notes towards acceptance

Embrace Writer's Block

and overcome it....

this is what I plan to do, and here is the quote that inspired me:

Embrace your writer's block. It's nature's way of saving trees and your reputation. Listen to it and try to understand its source. Often, writer's block happens to you because somewhere in your work you've lied to yourself and your subconscious won't let you go any further until you've gone back, erased the lie, stated the truth and started over.

taken from 36 Assumptions About Writing Plays, by Jose Rivera on the internet somewhere

My plan appears simple on the surface. I am going to write in my journal every morning for a minimum of 10 minutes for 100 Days. call it, 100 Days of Solitude (instead of 100 years).

On my computer I have a file called Fiction and Stories, with material in draft form for a whole book length manuscript. I thank my sister Sue for nudging me towards writing the story of my life - but I have already started years ago in classes taken on-line and various Autobiographical writing workshops. The problem is I hate editing them. I get mad at myself for the lousy writing, I lose interest in my own bleeping adventures, no matter how exotic they seemed at the time.

The material is there, and yes, I may have lied to myself many times about the 'me' in some of those stories; to find out where the 'lie' is, I'm going to re-read all of them and write in my journal till I get at the nugget of truth. (It helps that my kids are not here so no-one is even figuratively reading over my shoulder. The censor always kicks in when I get to about age 16....)

This great project idea just occurred to me five minutes ago, as I was considering spending $347 US dollars on a publishing reset course, supposed to give me tools to approach an agent or publisher with a Hook of a Book. (along with 6 CD's and a huge workbook). The thing is, I know a little about publishing, and I know a little about how to find an agent, and how to have a web presence (this blog). What I really need is to sit down and Just Do It (as my scented candle reminds me from my desk top), just bust my shoulders by typing the thing. (oh yeah and buy a wireless keyboard so I don't hurt myself)

So, as part of the adventure, I will blog a little about how the stories are coming along and maybe 'publish' a few extracts, as they come up.

Stay tuned for the life and times of,
musemother

(yes, she was a little mother once, but was she ever little?)