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| December 2006 At last we're having some really chilly days and nights. I've changed my tent bed sheets to the winter flannels. Each night, I take my two fleece-covered hot water bottles with me to warm me as I wrap up in my icy sleeping bags. One heats my feet in the bottom bag's toe pocket. The other I cuddle to my chest as I wait the two or three frigid minutes until they and I have warmed my cocoon for the night. I sleep with the bag's hood over my head leaving only the smallest opening for fresh air. Even on the few recent just below-32 degree nights, my cocoon was warm and cozy, keeping me quite toasty and comfortable. When I stuck my nose out of my cocoon those mornings, the air was shockingly cold, the whole meadow and the walls of the tent radiant with white frost. (There was even ice on my car's windshield.) September began my 20th year of sleeping outdoors every night but those with rain or high winds. Not being able to sleep on the ground out in the fresh air is one of the things that make traveling and being away from home so challenging for me. When rains and wind or a cold or muscle aches force me indoors, I often make a pallet on my floor rather than using my bed. Sometimes I do that even in motel rooms or friends' houses. Sleeping close to the ground seems to nourish something deep and primal inside me. The rest I get there is so different from what comes with sleeping in a bed. After all these years, it seems so normal, so ordinary to me that it's quite startling to note that other people sometimes think it (or me) odd. Leaves are turning and falling: reds and golds, even some orange and maroon. From the trail overlooking town the view is reminiscent of earliest fall in a tiny New England town-absent the white clapboard church spires-the colors subtle rather than riotous. Though lots of the chaparral and shrubs on the trails hold their green year round, the grasses and underbrush trailside and on the mountains are now all shades of tan and rust and beige. The near edge of my meadow is littered with the huge golden ovals of persimmon leaves. The tree itself is hung mostly with the slowly ripening brilliant orange fruits on which avian acrobats will soon be feasting. I look forward to their coming antics through the holiday season. The apple leaves are bright yellow and dropping daily. My little garden suffered some with the frost: an abrupt end to tomato season and the ruin of dozens of cherry and beefsteak tomatoes that were ripening on the vines. Lots of dried, crinkly leaves on so many of my treasured green beings: the wounds of freezing temperatures. Trimming away the damaged parts I begin the annual process of pruning back the sprawl of my uncontained container garden. The frost makes it easier to begin the cutting back that often feels so sad to do. When I went out to the patio the other morning to have my tea and enjoy the garden, I discovered that a tiny hummingbird had just gotten its beak stuck in the mesh of my shade umbrella. I talked softly to it as I gently enfolded and freed it. Off it flew-such a bit of magic that I should walk out at just that moment, before it had exhausted itself. It was sweet to have a magical moment in the midst of a month that's brought some trying times. November's my favorite month, the season of giving thanks, of my birthday and of my annual 10-day birthday retreat. Over the 20 or so years that I've been taking my birthday retreats, I've learned to come into the sacred time without any plans, expectations or agendas. Though I try to lay in stores and to anticipate what errands might come up during the time, I rarely succeed in eliminating all needs to go out into the ordinary world. That used to frustrate me because it made my retreat not quite fit the template of serious retreating. As the years have passed, I've been able to give up the idea that there's a right or fitting way to do my long (or even my shorter once monthly) retreats. Now they each shape themselves however they may. The only essential element is my disengaging from contact with friends, family and clients. The retreats are times of being even more conscious and focused than I am in ordinary life on showing up for whatever shows up in the field: for following wherever the energy of the moment seems to lead me. What showed up at first was a series of modest but trying physical challenges: A gum laceration caused by an adjustment recently made on my partial lower denture sent me off to my dentist on the first day of my retreat. It also left me wandering around like an eight year old without my lower front teeth as the wound healed over the next three weeks. On day three, I picked what appeared to be a dead bee off my living room rug. Though moribund, it had enough energy left to sting the pad of one of my fingers. Having become highly reactive to bee stings these past few years, I'd grown adept at using a particular and no longer available emergency epinephrine delivery system. This time around, using the new-to-me Epi-pen, I seriously bungled the procedure, bouncing the pen right back off my thigh rather than holding it there for the 10 seconds that would assure delivery of the drug. So off I went to the emergency room for an epinephrine shot and two hours of required “observation” while they made sure my throat wouldn't close down. Two hours on a hospital bed mixed with the agitation from bungling the shot and having to rush myself off to the ER seriously messed with my back. None of my usual tricks for releasing back spasms worked: not the ma roller, the miracle balls or the heating pad. So, day four sent me off to my chiropractor for an adjustment that made things worse before they began to resolve. In the end, breathing and time were what worked. The spasms came and went for a few days with me just breathing my way through them and “Poor Honey-ing” my little self all the while. It was fascinating to watch me watching the process, taking each of the trials one at a time. Getting so clearly that physical challenges were going to be a big part of the ride this time-out, I seemed able to surrender into whatever needed doing without feeling irritated or thwarted by any of it. With no agendas or expectations for the time, I could just be in the middle of what was actually unfolding, feeling all my feelings but not resisting the reality. What a change from earlier days in my journey! By far the most intense moments of the retreat came starting the second day when my till now mostly transformed and regenerated inner critic began launching vitriolic attacks on me. While this Hatchet Lady voice reappears briefly from time to time at certain edgy threshold moments, she was present with a force and a relentlessness that I haven't experienced in the now many years since I did the deep work that defanged and converted her. The mommy-inside voice was strong and fierce and immediately present. She answered and calmed and reframed every attack so that I was neither taken-for-the-ride nor thrown into the old downward spirals the Hatchet Lady used to trigger. The abusive attacks were nonetheless both exhausting and confusing: where was this all coming from and why now? “You're really so completely screwed up! You live the way you do because you can't handle being around people, you can't cope with the real world! You make it sound healthy, like a choice you're making but the truth is that you're really damaged, f---ked up and incompetent.” And, “Your life is so completely boring and meaningless, all you do is putter around doing menial chores, wasting your time and reading to escape the realities that you can't handle. You never do anything or go anywhere except to your parents, you live in a small, insulated box!” And as the days progressed: “You act like you never care or feel upset by anything that happens, like you're so 'evolved' when all you are is shut down and cut off and deluding yourself.” All this was hurled at me as I walked along the ocean's edge or in the mountains feeling wide open and very permeable. It was so intense. The mommy voice was right there: “No one ever said we weren't damaged or screwed up or deeply wounded. The magic and wonder of it all is that we've figured out how to take such loving and tender care of our self. That we've created a life that is gentle and safe for our wounded being. That we don't ask our self to do things that are painful or damaging to us.” And, “It may be so that most of what we do is puttering and everyday chores that are 'menial,' but making order and tending to our house and garden gives us enormous, simple pleasure and deep peace. It's what we truly enjoy.” And, “Yes, we love reading and listening to stories on tape as a way of being in other realities without the energetic stress that comes for us with travel and being out in the peopled world. It's a way we can 'be with people' just exactly as little or as much as we feel up to. It's really important and wonderful that we've made a life in which we can (most of the time) do just what makes us feel calm, comfortable and safe even if it does look from the outside like we live in a very small, insulated and boring space. And, even if it really is a small and insulated space, it's one that really nourishes and fills us-it works for us, that's what matters” The mommy-voice reminded the Hatchet Lady, “We don't think or talk about our self as 'evolved,' just as living as fully in our deeps and in the moment as we're able. And, “Even if we 'really' are shut down or cutoff or deluding our self, the truth is that we're only able to be consciously in touch with just what we can be in touch with at this moment. It's true that, in this moment, most of what happens doesn't seem to cause too many waves inside of us. We feel sad, abandoned, frustrated or angry in moments and when we let the feelings come up and out, we seem to get over them pretty quickly. That's just how we seem to work right now. We've let go of things pretty easily and pretty quickly-something we've been able to do since we were very young.” Over and over again across the first few days of the retreat the dialogue between the Hatchet Lady and the mommy inside repeated and repeated and repeated. Things would calm down briefly only to erupt again. Each time, the Hatchet Lady seemed to find some new things to hurl at us. “You take the same hikes and walks over and over again, the 'safe' ones and you never go out to the edgy places anymore. Your life is getting smaller and smaller all the time!” The mommy inside kept gently talking to her: “It's true we're staying with the less edgy, safer walks and hikes these days. We need to not be walking the edges by our self and we need to be walking alone most of the time. So we walk the safer places where we can feel comfortable by our self. This is a good and very caring thing to do for our self. If it makes our world look smaller, that's just what we need now to feel safe and free.” During these endless and tiring dialogues I kept wondering about from where this virulent and seemingly unregenerate critical voice was coming and why it was surfacing now. During a long beach walk on Thanksgiving Day the light finally broke through, I got it. For years my (currently estranged) friend Cynthia and I had often judged each other mercilessly, especially around our different ways of being in ourselves and in the world. She's been the only person in my recent life that I've judged seriously. Everyone else, myself included, almost always gets the benefit of the doubt-gets the most affirming, accepting reading possible on anything we do or anyway we are. While this judging and being judged had become much less a part of Cynthia's and my ongoing dance with each other, it was clearly the place in which some part of the Hatchet Lady had been hiding out. This part of her (unbeknownst to me) still quite alive and kicking had never been through the embracing and transforming process that the rest of her had undergone in me years ago. With Cynthia currently on indefinite disconnect from me, the untransformed Hatchet Lady remnant had turned her fire back upon me-with a vengeance. As soon as I grasped what was going on, the assaults slowed. I moved into a totally different engagement with the Hatchet Lady remnant. As I had in my original work with her many years ago, I gathered her to me with love and caring, inviting her to tell me about what was troubling her and making her feel that the only way she could get my attention was by attacking me. (Years ago I'd come to understand that her attacks were really clumsy and frantic attempts to get me to pay attention and stop doing things that she felt were endangering to me/us.) She was fearful that I was closing down and withdrawing too much from the ways that other people live and even from my own already less than social ways of the past. Her fears have always concerned what other people might think or say about us. She's seen it as her job to protect us from being broadsided by challenges and criticism from other people. Her vitriolic challenges and criticisms were always meant to stop us from behavior that might draw such negative attention from the outside world. That her criticisms were far more devastating to us than any outside criticism might be was something she (before the work we did together years ago) never quite understood. I walked the remnant of the Hatchet Lady through all this, reassuring her that it was truly okay for us to be doing just exactly what we've been doing to make our self feel safe and strong and well-cared for. I reminded her that if whatever we were doing helped us feel grounded and centered, none of it had to look any particular way. And, I reminded her that however we do things, however far we remove our self, however circumscribed our life looks, we do keep on growing and expanding and having more of our self available from which we can live and make good choices. In the process, I claimed and re-incorporated a part of me that had been living outside of my awareness for a very long while. A part whose judging of Cynthia's-often very different from my own-choices had freed me for quite some time from being the butt of its scrutiny and worries but simultaneously kept me blind to its unregenerate existence inside me. It was a very edgy, often difficult and wild ride of a retreat. Yet, it was one which had many lighthearted and delightful interludes interwoven and one that left me having come home to and embraced so much more of myself. In this new place, a strong need emerged to sever-from my side-whatever energetic ties still bound me to Cynthia in the middle of the estrangement that she's chosen for now. I was able to find a practical and ceremonial way to acknowledge and mark the ending of the past 10-year era in our sharing while remaining available for a new chapter sometime in the future. My sense is that having done the ceremonial severing, I'm opening to any other parts of my self that may need reclaiming. We are at the eve of the Winter Solstice as I write this. May we all be blessed with vision and clarity, joy and peace as the light begins its annual return; wishing gentle and nourishing holidays to you all. To visit the Bulletin Board Archive Table of Contents Site Directory (for non-frames viewing)
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