 |
| January 2006 The rains come. For days and days, constant downpours. Snuggle up with Ms. Pretty at the fire days. Reading and drifting into dreams and waking and reading and drifting into dreams again. The delicious, voluptuousness of resting-doing nothing timelessness while the rains waken all the greening that is our southern California winter. Wandering in the mountains this weekend, the first bloomings of brilliant yellow acacia, more and more wild green grasses. Then, in the middle of these chilly-time-for-fires days, we suddenly have days of sultry Santa Ana winds. The warm-almost-hot desert winds bring summery days in January. Every day a different season! These past weeks, I watch crows, jays, finch and sparrows as they precariously perch to nibble at the last dozen or so very ripe persimmons still hanging on an otherwise bare tree. They tumble, dart and dance along the delicate, flimsy branches snagging strips of fruit. The smaller birds often balance comically right on the very persimmon they're sampling. The crows seem fastidiously to wipe their beaks on the branches before losing their balance and flying off. Their daily acrobatics just outside my tent and door are an absolute riot. With the passing of Solstice, the sun has begun its annual move northward once again. I watch the line between sun and shadow on my patio daily inching more southward. Learning the patterns of the sun in this new place as I once learned them so many years ago at the old house. Seeing how much those patterns are a part of my slightly less than conscious awareness of time and season. Noticing, too, in this new geography, the different angles of the sun in the tent windows in the morning hours. Loving that my life affords me this lazy awareness of the natural world and its cycles. For weeks now, around the edges of the resting-doing nothing times, I slowly wend my way through the year-ending/year-beginning chores that have become my Solstice season rituals. As outside, so inside of me: I am completing, closing, reviewing, revisiting. Letting go of all that I'm done with, reacquainting myself with all that I choose to take with me into the New Year. Sending Solstice/New Year's mailings to friends, family and clients as part of marking the transitioning time. Making space and spaces into which newness can be born. Tonight, I lovingly vacuum a year's worth of dust and spider webs from the Spirit Mother Totems-18 of my large fiber masks that live with and are guardians for me. Yesterday, I gently wiped clean the leaves of all the 21 green beings that live inside with me. This afternoon I began the annual pruning of my outdoor container garden. Cutting back most of its exuberantly uncontained wildness so that the roots have a time to rest deeply before setting forth a new year of growth. This year, with this smaller more circumscribed patio garden, I don't go through the somewhat melancholy angst that so often precedes the cutting back. Instead, I move eagerly, easily into and through pruning the haphazard wildness. As always, I come to marveling at the special spare, bones-revealed, crew cut beauty of all these green beings as they come to their all-too-brief resting time. They and I seem to breathe differently in this simplified space. Moving very slowly toward the writing of a new introduction for the manuscript. I feel it germinating as I wander through my days of resting and rituals. I trust that at the right and ripest moment, I'll find myself here at the computer having it pour through me onto the screen just as this journal is doing right now. But, that time is not yet here. It feels quite fine with me to be just exactly where I am at this moment. So different from earlier seasons of my journey when I would have nudged and pushed or prodded myself into sitting down to write because I “should get on with it, already.” So delightful to feel so un-driven, so peaceful and trusting in this “between” place. (Writing several days later.) For almost three months now, I've been living with some rather odd goings on in my mid-back spine. A weird kind of pinching tightness and intense discomfort whenever I arch backwards. Hooking my bra triggers it. So do many yoga postures and turning over in lying down leg-weight exercises or even in bed. If I didn't ever bend backwards, I'd never know anything was “off.” The level of discomfort is tolerable but strong. I can breathe my way through to releasing it in the moment but it never disappears. This despite numerous massages, Feldenkrais sessions, acupuncture and “cupping” treatments and some non-force chiropractic. Ibuprophen doesn't seem to do much either. I think it started just after an overzealous choice to begin my foray into leg lifts with 5-pound weights (I have since more sensibly gone with 2 _ pounders). Still, I've been convinced that it is “about” some more, old “mother-trauma” stuck in my body. Ancient stored trauma being stirred by all this movement toward putting my work forward into the world in a possible book. For all of my remembered life with her, any of my blossomings into my own fullness would bring forth from my mother venomous ridicule and almost murderous hostility. All the years of deep psychological emotional work I've done have released me to keep moving forward and outward more and more fearlessly. Yet, frequently at the thresholds of wider expansions, my body seems to send up warning flares of one sort or another. I've felt fairly certain that this pinching constriction in my back is just such a flare. The whole osteoporosis business this year, though, did give me some pause. I struggled with whether or not to explore the physical basis of what I was assuming was a flare. A flare that I believed would release once I'd convinced my body that we were safe. That we could and would go forward slowly. That I would hold us safely as we actually took the next step: recasting the manuscript's introduction to go with its new title. In the endless back and forth with myself over these many weeks, I came to taking two different, and for me unusual, paths to “checking out” my hypothesis. First I contacted a well-known medical intuitive. Quite a departure from my usual “my own inner guidance knows better about me than anyone outside of me” stance. It felt like a quest for confirmation/affirmation from an independent source. I wasn't ready yet to go the western medical diagnostics route. I was able to get an appointment with Dr. Mona Lisa Schultz for the day after I called her. The morning I was to call I found myself feeling very anxious. Apprehensive about what she might have to say and how well I could shield myself from absorbing any input she might offer that didn't feel right to me. I prayed and sage-smudged my house and myself. I also gave myself absolute permission to terminate the half-hour session immediately if her input felt like it was in anyway undermining of my own sense of me. The session actually was quite fascinating. Most of what she reflected was spot-on, affirming of everything I had felt and had experienced. Her assessments were confirming of all the ways I choose to deal with what she called my “extreme porosity” (what I call my extreme permeability). And, her basic read on my current body issues was that they were “battle scars/wounds” from the early mothering trauma. Not anything to do with my current emotional or physical life style. After another two weeks, I found myself thinking about my now-dead former partner. She'd believed (and was affirmed by two psychic healers) that what turned out to be stage 4b cancer in her bones was “only” her body releasing more of her early trauma. Remembering this at the same time that I remained still convinced that what was going on in my spine really did have to do with old mother-trauma. To feel safe, I finally decided to go ahead with some western medical diagnostics. The results of the thoracic and lumbar spine films confirm the osteoporotic changes in my spine. They also reveal some degenerative changes in some of the discs and a very slight scoliosis that I never knew I had. (My mother had and my sister has significant scoliosis.) But, nothing insidious or untoward. That news came yesterday. It opened me to go deeper with my inner journeying around the discomfort and constriction. To sink further into it and let the feelings it is metaphorically expressing rise more articulatedly into my consciousness. (As Dr. John Sarno's Healing Your Back Pain so brilliantly suggests). Out on a boulder on the fire road trail this evening of the almost full moon, I leaned back into the constriction. What rose up in me was a wave of intense physical terror. In the odd way of such things, it was like having an anxiety attack without the current anxiety. I came and went from it a few times. Feeling exhilarated that I was finally being able to move into it! I know I need to go slowly and gently with myself as I allow the stuck terror to rise and release out of my back. I know that, as I slowly do this, I am helping myself not to have to otherwise “hold back” the flow of newness and expansion. Actually feeling the terror is so completely different from just knowing that it's old stuck “mother-trauma.” I'm moving further into the healing. I find myself stepping into this New Year filled with so much curiosity about all that seems poised for birthing. Awash in a sweet calmness, a quiet sense of anticipation. Full of appreciation for how I've been able to meet, encompass and move through the challenges and emotional storms that have come this past year. All the inner work that I've done and keep doing continues bearing such bountiful fruit for me each day of my life. This work is continually to make safe space for myself to feel all my feelings, to be all of who I am in each moment. To make sure that nurturing myself stays my first priority. To make sure that I go only as fast as the slowest part of me feels safe to go. To make sure that I remember to cherish resting as a sacred and essential part of everyday life¬. And, most basic of all, to make sure that I treat myself with as much gentle, tender, loving kindness as I possibly can in every single moment. I'm completely stunned and amazed by how far I've come from the world-class self-excoriating, self-lacerating being that I'd been for more than half of my life. So profoundly grateful to the Grandmothers/my deep self for helping me to transform that constant litany of self-hate. For helping me to grow this constant, unconditionally loving inner-mommy that keeps me always honoring, accepting, embracing and encouraging all the still evolving never perfect parts of me as I continue on with the journey. To visit the Bulletin Board Archive Table of Contents Site Directory (for non-frames viewing)
* |
