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| March 2007 A mockingbird has just this week taken up residence in my privet hedge-tree I love it! His endlessly changing repertoire makes me smile and even, sometimes, laugh out loud-so many different calls and hoots and chirps and trills. And, he's absolutely tireless: singing all day and well into the nights. Everywhere around me spring is burgeoning. Despite the decimation of the intense January freezes, almost everything in my meadow and container garden is returning to life: greening, budding and blooming lavishly. Lavender periwinkle and rosemary, purple bearded iris, pansies in all shades of purple, lavender and magenta, deep pink verbena and the first rose of the season-a bright orange mini-are smiling in the sun this morning. As I walk to and from town or the trail, the streets are all fringed with flowering fruit trees in shades of pink and rose. Shrubs and other trees are lacy with white blossoms. The wild meadows are carpeted with tall grasses, orange California poppies, yellow mustard and sour grass flowers and some (unknown to me) little raspberry colored wild flowers. It's a jubilant celebration of life returning from its time in hibernation. On my way in from my tent this morning I found a white-crowned sparrow floundering in the wood chips at the edge of my patio, clearly in serious trouble. I gathered it up gently and held it doing Reiki and whispering softly to it while I looked for any injuries. There were none, but It was gasping for breath, having body spasms and unable to support its own weight. Such a precious, delicate little being-bright eyed and perfect yet obviously dying. I sat holding it and sending it love as its breathing gradually slowed and, pooping in my hand during a seizure of some sort, it let go of life. Wishing it well on its journey, I buried it among the lily bulbs at the edge of my patio. So grateful that I saw it before my kitty did and that I could make its last minutes easier than she might have. So grateful that there's the time in my life to spend in such a deeply moving way. In this season of beginnings and endings I find I'm often feeling vaguely disoriented and out-of-sorts with myself, not quite right in my skin. Puttering in the garden feels nourishing and juicy. Reading in the hammock or in my nest of pillows in the house feels comforting; so does wandering around town or on my favorite nighttime trail. Work with my clients is satisfying and rich. Yet, there are hours in the day when I can't seem to find a place to roost. I feel crabby, exhausted, irritated and irritable, sad and teary without a sense of the source of it all. Other times in my journey I'd be at it hammer and tongs trying to figure it out and to do something to make it better. These days, I'm more apt to simply hang in with it, to keep making room to feel it all: to cry, have rants, and feel put upon. Or, when I'm tired of all that, to bury myself in books or books on tape or to put myself down for long naps. I trust that when I'm ready to know more about whatever is cooking down in my deeps, the knowing will rise up into my consciousness without my efforting or vigilance. This is a much more gentle way to live with myself even while it's a challenge to not cut to the chase and try to get myself over the malaise. All the current hoopla (at least on the West Coast) over “The Secret” drives me (and many of the women I work with) crazy enough to spit. The movie-based on the Laws of Attraction-is the latest repackaging of the same old tired New Age spiritual materialism that we've been inundated with so many times before. I hate the cant/drivel that promotes what can best be called “The Spiritual Bypass” approach to life and growth. My own unfolding has taught me that the dark and shadowy places/times along the journey have a richness and depth to them that I would not wish or wash away with the excessively bright light of allowing myself to think only positive thoughts. I've learned and continue to learn so much from hanging in there with myself in those rough-going places. They grow me, grow my courage and wisdom and they strengthen me in ways that all this living-only-in-the-light really stunts or aborts. The shadow is with us and will always be. What we need most to learn is how to embrace and learn from it, how to be loving and gentle with ourselves even in the dark passages so that we can reap the medicine/healing they have to offer us. It seems to me that this is what allows us to live into our greatest potential. Prohibiting feelings of sadness, grief, anger, despair when they arise for fear that these so-called negative emotions will call forth more of their like seems a crazy reversal of the truth. Feeling the feelings and loving ourselves through them is what leads them to diminish and allows us to move ahead. Learning to transform the critical inner voices into loving allies for the journey is the task, not legislating their silence by fiat. I hate how each new/old wave of this positive thinking ideology can be used as a whip to beat ourselves for being in the places in which we currently find ourselves. “This is only the out-picturing of your earlier bad thoughts.” Well, isn't that an enormously loving, helpful and caring way to talk to ourselves? (I'm sure you can see how fired up this hogwash gets me!) I do believe that the way we talk to ourselves profoundly affects how we live our lives. And, I'm all for learning to talk to and treat ourselves more lovingly. But I do not believe that comes about by legislating ourselves out of the dark places. (I'm getting off my soapbox now.) It's okay with me that I feel out-of-sorts right now. I don't love it but I do embrace that here's where I am this week. I absolutely will allow myself to think whatever cranky thoughts there are running around in me. I'll be kind to my squirmy self in the middle of all this knowing that it will pass when I've felt my way through it all. Some of what's fueling the crabby unease is surely the upcoming major move my parents will be making in April. They've (possibly though, we won't know for sure till the March 30th closing date) sold their home of 34 years in Florida and signed a lease on a two-bedroom independent living apartment in a senior community in Maryland that offers them graded care facilities as they come to need them. Living only 15 minutes from my stepsister and three of my closest cousins will provide them with a viable family support system to replace the one they used to have in Florida (before everyone became too ill or too old to be able to be available to each other). The project of closing house, divesting of or diverting a lifetime of their stuff, buying scaled down furniture for their new small apartment, finding movers, physically moving them to and settling them into the new space, connecting them with new medical people and supporting their transitioning is enormous. My extraordinary and extraordinarily capable stepsister has been handling the endless and major share of it all. Just thinking about all the moving parts she's been coordinating (while still working full-time as a teacher) puts my psyche on overload. I'm so grateful she's into doing so much of it, I'd find it all too overwhelming at this stage of my life. I'll be there with her and them, though, for their last week in Florida, doing whatever needs doing to gather escape velocity. Then, I'll be flying up north with them and spending 5 or 6 more days helping them with getting the apartment set up while my stepsister goes back to work. This second two week long visit with them this year looks more daunting than my two weeks with my sister and dad in early October. My guess is that they'll both be quite tense, anxious and short-fused with each other. There's reason, as well, to expect that the upheaval may exacerbate my dad's level of confusion and depression and my step mom's frustration and frazzledness. All that and being away from my little womb space for such an extended time feels quite edgy. The fact that the timing is still fairly up in the air makes it all even more shaky to contemplate. I know that I'll do fine with it all once I'm in the middle of it, I always do. It's just the anticipation that fills me with discomfort and dread. That the current plans feel a bit more rushed and potentially chaotic than I would have arranged for-had I been in charge-is also challenging. But, I'm most assuredly not in charge and my job is to do whatever they need done whenever they need it. Lots of surrendering asked for here once I've given free enough rein to all my cranky negativity about it all. To visit the Bulletin Board Archive Table of Contents Site Directory (for non-frames viewing)
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