After a year of leavings and reconcilings, I finally let go of my last relationship in September of 1984. I found a magical cottage on a wild, somewhat neglected piece of property in Ojai's East End. An artistically converted 2-car garage, it was a huge studio with skylights, cathedral ceiling, wood bat-and-board walls, hardwood floors and a huge barrel of a Vermont Ironworks woodstove. I moved in with a cozy jumble of secondhand furniture I'd collected during that back and forth year. And, I began, in earnest, the journey of re-parenting my little one inside.
I saw clients 2 long days each week. Then, I'd spend a day transitioning: buying vats of flowers to arrange, doing errands, getting a two-hour massage, cleansing, sageing
The second year I began to spend part of the timeless time creating a real home for my little one. I repainted, reupholstered, and sewed all kinds of big soft pillows in wonderful bright colors. I made special nooks for her and altars for all the magical bits of rocks, feathers and wood she gathered in the backcountry. I bought music and good equipment for playing it. This, so that she could dance or dream (nestled in the big, soft pillows) to wonderful sounds when she wanted to. I collected all kinds of drums, gongs, bells and ethnic percussion instruments so she could make big noises or her own sort of rhythm band music (without having to “practice” first).
As she and I began to explore her rage and anger, big noises in the house weren't always the right thing. So, we moved outdoors to the piles of rocks, baby boulders and construction debris that littered the neglected back and side yards around our house. Flinging, shoving, pushing and throwing all those rocks over the hill into the wild place felt so good! Getting knee and elbow deep in the dirt, pushing boulders out of the way with our back and our feet felt so delicious!
One day we stopped just throwing the rocks and started making rock walls and pathways and a platform for a hot tub. Then, rock gardens felt exciting so we got lots of wonderful, fragrant flowers and things to plant (something we had never done before in our life). Later on, we even put in a tiny patch of sod-grass so she could roll naked in the sun in our own, now very beautiful, backyard.
We made a magical fire circle and poured rings of black and then white lava stones around it. After that, we discovered a neglected vegetable patch on the far side of the property and started growing things to eat. Everything grew and flourished and was so beautiful. For quite a while it was very splendid for my little one and me to “tend the temple” we had built together.
One day, late in the fourth year, we woke up feeling it had become too much like work to take care of all that we had built! The flowers that used to be fun to arrange just sat in the vats for days while we avoided them. Hiring people to help made less physical work but then, we had more people around when we wanted to be alone. It was a very cranky time. We wished for a big vacuum cleaner to come and empty everything away so we again could just be little with more open time for doing nothing or doing more that felt like play.
Not too long after that wish, my car-filled with instruments, cassette tapes, both ordinary and ceremonial clothes and jewelry, tons of art materials and camping gear from a trip to sit in circle with my women's lodge-was stolen from in front of a friend's house in San Francisco. It was found 2 days later, intact but “vacuumed clean” of all my possessions! It was surprisingly easy to just let go of it all, as long as my beloved little 2-year-old car was back with me.
It was much harder to continue the letting go process with the rest of the life I had built at home. Giving up doing flowers was absolutely right but the disappearance of the vases felt like failure. As I struggled with cutting back on what had become too much to do, my outside, critical eyes would see the process as “falling apart,” “going backwards,” “letting things go” (in the negative sense of the phrase). It was so hard it to dismantle my too big life without getting caught in seeing my movement toward a more simple life as a shameful, defeated thing. I would get caught even though I knew in my bones that all I hungered for was a more simple life!
It was such an intense and difficult process to acknowledge, much less encourage or celebrate in myself. Daily I struggled with the deeply ingrained cultural definition of progress/growth/success as linear, uni-directional, constantly expanding.
Over and over I looked to the natural world for support for this process I was living: this process of coming apart that, once again, was pushing to happen in my life. In the natural world, the growing cycle includes both expansion and decay. Blossoming/ripening is always followed by the dying away that makes compost for germinating the next cycle of blossoming. The roses in the garden unfold and expand only so far before the petals fall and die. The leaves on the peach tree last only so long before falling. We don't see these as signs that the rosebush or the peach tree are failing.
It takes enormous courage to honor, to not resist this cyclic process in our own lives. We have to break away from the cultural programming, the messages that daily bombard us. We have to risk trusting what comes from our deeps. Life lived from our deeps unfolds in naturally repeating cycles.
In the coming apart/unraveling times we, like the snake, are shedding a skin (a way of living our life) that has become constraining, that no longer has room in it for newness and growth. When the familiar shape of our life comes apart, the pieces of it can get to reassemble in fresh ways. We get to see which elements are enduring and which were only part of our way for a season. During this unraveling time we feel agitated and disoriented by the upheaval. We feel grief for what is passing away. We feel extremely vulnerable and touchy (skinless). We fear that all is lost, that nothing will ever feel solid again.
As we begin to move through these times supported with a consciousness that they are healthy, important and inevitable, we can gradually come to recognize their arrival as signs that we are beginning a season of really significant growth. We can comfort our fears in the coming apart times by tenderly reminding ourselves of all the coming together times that (sooner or later) followed all the past coming apart times. We can lovingly remind ourselves how courageous we are for moving in ways that are so unsupported by our culture. We can try to move as slowly as possible. We can practice being tender, gentle and protective with our skinless selves. And, we can in calmer times, gather a circle of friends who will, together, honor the sacredness of the cyclical process in each other's lives.
Consider honoring and being generously patient with your coming apart self.
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
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