I discovered today how angry I still am at the Educational Bureaucracy that was involved in Sam's life last Spring and in the earlier part of this school year.
I went to see Kate, the tremendous therapist, who gave me an assignment to process-through-writing... and then, I happened to bump into the School Psychologist who failed Sam and then the Principal who failed Sam and I could not believe the energy that flowed through me at just seeing them.
Very, very, very angry. Not weepy, not sad - but very, very, very angry.
I am glad I am conscious to it.
And I can see why bad stuff happens to folks who mess with children.....
I sat at my desk and wrote, early morning sun my visual accompaniment.
My pencil lifts up, swerves and swirls over the page, making meaning from traces of lead, leftover lead. This very practice is miraculous. Truly, what it took to create language. Miraculous.
My pencil scratches and sputters. I stop writing. Interruptions, as usual, from inside the house. Visitors from inside speak to me from the doorway to my writing-desk-sunrise-facing-sanctuary.
What is it, to write everyday?
What is it, to trust the self?
What is it, to open the heart to the mind’s restless meanderings, the listlessly kicking the ground travels of thought, of ponderings, of curiosity?
In my Teresa-Carolyn-Myss-Castle studies, I have been exploring humiliations, walls of shame, boxes and cages and unsolvable pasts stacking up in front of me, seeming to be impenetrable.
Why do I open myself up to hurt, over-and-over again?
The blue lined white spaces tenderly hold my questions, insistent for nothing, just momentary treasures, life-long treasures.
Questions, well-lived, shape us.
Questions, consciously held in our hearts show us the way as we allow God, Divinity, Spirit, whatever-the-heck-we-want-to-call it, to surf the question along with us.
Some people know about Just from looking at my face Reading my words Breathing the air in my space
I have an ongoing not-so-secret love affair
Every day I hold my love close I stand, in blissed-out glee I tilt my head slightly to the side To gaze at him, beside the tree
I have an ongoing not-so-secret love affair
His being is reflected in page upon page (how I hope this doesn't sound trite!) My words can not hold my adoration For the sun, the morning star, the light
I have an ongoing not-so-secret love affair love affair...
Yesterday I found a very important collection of words.
This morning I spent a significant amount of time re-reading them, looking at my recent-past self under a magnifying glass, carefully examining the bits and pieces of fresh fossils also known as my recent life history.
I wrote of the residue from the fires last Summer in Santa Barbara, I read snippets of poetry from Rumi and Mary Oliver, I read of trips to the dump and the river bed and moments of deep thinking and moments of the mundane, picking the foot up, putting it down – but what I love the most is… it is all right there, on the page, waiting for me.
They waited, expectantly, never far from view.
I had lost these “blue lined conversations” because I got tangled up in expectations of a different sort. Expectations with attachments, expectations filled with hopes left empty and a silent absence that had been deafening to not only my ears but to my soul as well.
I wrote these words to my friend, in the blue-lined-conversation, “My heart just said, ‘I wish you were here.’ I won’t censure my heart. ‘I wish,’ my head says, ‘you could see my growth in progress. Not just the stories and the end results, but the process.’ “
The breathing in and out, the chest rising and falling, the subtle shifts in my face as I “got” something as it happened, right in front of you – my friend. Not months later in the retelling, in the rewording.
I am listening to Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” as I write. It came to an end in a long, drawn out note of longing, of hope, of that exact moment. The announcer speaks about it in German, so I don’t know what she is saying. I just know how the music made my heart feel, a brilliant accompaniment to these words I type, these heart yearnings of expectation.
No wonder it made me feel this way, this piece of music originally written for Wagner’s bride to be played outside her window on Christmas morning, also her birthday – the first Christmas they spent as a married couple yet years after their love was born and years after several of their children were born – all which could have been seen as some sort of major black marks against both of them, a scandal filled, sure-fire destructive path, right?
No, the music holds the heart truth, the core-love underneath the surface “scandal.”
May Sarton wrote, “It always comes to the same necessity: go deep enough and
there is a bedrock of truth.”
I am amused that Wagner accompanied my writing for much of the morning yet I didn’t even hear it until it came to its almost end and it swept me away.
Now, as I research it – get the intellectual bits and pieces and nuggets, I want to listen, really listen – to its entirety.
I want to allow the process to unfold in the forefront of my soul, not as background music while I am busy with “other things.”
I just re-read an earlier portion of this writing:
I wrote these words to my friend, in the blue-lined-conversation, “My heart just said, ‘I wish you were here.’ I won’t censure my heart. ‘I wish,’ my head says, ‘you could see my growth in progress. Not just the stories and the end results, but the process.’ “
Last week I prepared for a session with Kate, my therapist. I recognized at long last that for me, my process is as much “a product” as the end results are “a product” – the very “unfinished” nature of the process IS “product”.
Does that make sense, as paradoxical as it sounds?
Let it sit for a while, it will become clear.
The note I made in my morning pages notebook, in pink ink, says “Process is the product unfinished” – raw, naked, muddy, still sweaty with exertion.
The “in-the-moment” writing says, “See? I knew what to do.”
"What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose."
She loves, loves, loves to sing... and I love her t-shirt, which tells the story of her ability to make friends with ooodles of people of all different ages.
She figures, or so she tells me, that when she is 18 she will have a line up of suitors, at the front door, offering candy and jewelry and lots of precious attention.
I rested in a hospital bed, wondering what I had done in giving birth to this baby boy who I had insisted was a baby girl the entire time he was in utero.
When the doctor proclaimed, "It's a big baby, it's a boy!" I couldn't believe my ears.
My mother WAS right. I had a boy.
I was speechless for what felt like an eternity before I choked out, "I have a son... I have a son?.... I have a son."
It took me about six months to fall ridiculously, head-over-heels in love with him. This past year has been phenomenal.
“Demons frighten us because we set ourselves up to be frightened. We are overly attached to our reputations and possessions. When we love and desire what we should be rejecting, we are in conflict with our true selves. That’s when the negative energies catch us and use our weapons against us. Instead of taking up what we have to defend ourselves, we put our swords in the hands of our enemies and make them attack us.”
Teresa of Avila
I have been reading “Entering the Castle” by Carolyn Myss and working through her distinctions around being humble and being humiliated and what our “thought relationship” is with these two related words.
I have been cataloging times when I have felt deeply humiliated – and times when I have contributed to others being humiliated.
I didn’t appreciate doing either exercise. I avoided them like I avoid standing in long lines – but at the same time, I knew it would be of benefit in the long run.
Friday I sat under a hair-dryer at “A Head of Time” in Downtown Bakersfield with my beloved deep pink journal in hand and started writing haiku.
I figured I could write seventeen syllables of humiliation.
That wouldn’t be too bad, I reasoned, seventeen syllables at a time. I figured it would be a small, easy-to-swallow way to soulfully catalog minute chunks of time when I felt inner wounding.
Without time to pause, these haiku flowed from my pencil:
Twilight Hollywood Drunken rant targets my soul Never forgotten
Why does he wear that? Will he ever fit with me? Nonetheless, settle
Wide eyes stare, leer, snarl Anger boils in my bellow "He is different!"
We are always late I find my classroom empty Mr Keller sees me
I was 26 when the first haiku-budlette happened.
I was 21 when the second haiku budlette happened
I was a child, at random times, when the third haiku budlette happened.
I was 8 when the fourth haiku budlette happened.
I have written of the first episode, perhaps even mentioned it here recently as it has boiled up into my
consciousness lately, requesting processing time.
The last one, I have spoken about, amazed how clearly and consistently it makes an appearance.
The other two took me by complete surprise.
Here comes another.
Lost out on the part Snap! Ohhhh, I saw what he saw…. Inside my knees break……
Somehow, perhaps it is the artform of haiku itself – the soulful quality, the artful yet also prescribed format – that makes these moments in time easier to approach when I just take seventeen syllables to bring them light.
Not a lengthy dissertation, not a wordy explanation with story attached.
It is just an inhale and exhale of “This was it. Here it was. Here I am. There. We. Were.”
Passionately detached. Aware, alert, present.
No longer “humiliated” - - it simply was. It is no longer a demon. It simply is.
My most recent show, "The Beourgeois Gentleman" by Moliere, closed this weekend. I always feel a pinch of grief when I put a character away, hang her up with my costume... knowing my life has been changed permanently, because of her presence.
Madame Jourdain was a treat - I am so grateful I had the opportunity to know her and hopefully to portray her in a way that honored the intentions of Moliere, who created the words she spoke.
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