I M Perfect lady

Category: Books

  • Dark Space of Unknowing.

    Deepak Chopra writes in The Book of Secrets about the caterpillar changing into a butterfly.

    “Outside my window in winter I can usually spy at least one chrysalis dangling from a branch.  Inside it a caterpillar has turned into a pupa that will emerge in the spring as a butterfly. We are all familiar with this metamorphosis, having witnessed it as children (or by reading Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar).  But what goes on invisibly inside the chrysalis remains deeply mysterious. The caterpillar’s organs and tissues dissolve into an amorphous, soup like state, only to reconstitute in to a structure of a butterfly’s body that bears no resemblance to a caterpillar at all.”

    “Science has no idea why metamorphosis evolved.  It is almost impossible to imagine that insects hit on it by chance – the chemical complexity of turning into a butterfly is incredible; thousands of steps are minutely interconnected.  (It’s as if you dropped off a bicycle at the shop to be repaired, and when you came back the parts had become a Gulfstream Jet.)”

    “But we do have some idea about how this delicate chain of events is linked. Two hormones, one called juvenile hormone, and the other ecdysone, regulate the process, which looks to the naked eye like the caterpillar is dissolving into soup.  These two hormones make sure the cells moving from the larva to the butterfly know where they are going and how they are to change. Some cells are told to die; others digest themselves, while others turn into eyes, antennae, and wings. This implies a fragile (and miraculous) rhythm that must remain in precise balance between creation and destruction. That rhythm, it turns out, depends on day length, which in turn depends on the earth’s rotation around the sun. Therefore, a cosmic rhythm has been intimately connected to the birth of butterflies for millions of years.”  Deepak

     

    It came to me today, that blogging the way I do with total transparency is not going to need the same things as those who blog from the cocoon.

    Writing from a cocoon hides what is going on and this is not something I am familiar with.  So I can’t be the one to say what is best for anonymous bloggers.

    But I can speak from transparency. 

    When I began writing I did so with full disclosure, it wasn’t to hide stuff, it was to shed light and to enlighten me, to find answers to who I was, as well as to leave a path for anyone who wanted to know about me.

    I wrote about the dark corners within me that I didn’t know. 

    I asked questions of the white paper and it seemed answers came if I wrote long enough.

    I never felt I had the right to have a voice and writing opened up a space for me to let it out.

    Once I got the knack of it, it seemed that the only way for me to know me was to write it out. 

    The more I wrote the more I knew and the more I knew the more I wanted to know. And slowly I began to really really know me and what I began to learn about me, I didn’t want to cover up nor did I feel the need. 

    Whether it be my mixed up mind, my flipped around thoughts and beliefs or the multiple things I did incorrectly with my backwards mind, all of it became extremely exhilarating for it all was growing a new me.  I wasn’t ashamed of who I was nor who I was becoming to be.

    It was like I was the caterpillar and I was changing and I would grieve the caterpillar parts that were dying and had to grow comfortable with the new butterfly pieces that came in their place. 

    I left my old caterpillar ways…and had to learn how to maneuver life as a butterfly. 

    What I know for sure, for me, is that I need to see me in my past, see me in my present, see what inside of me needs transformation and what needs to totally die. 

    I couldn't hide and build a butterfly me.  I had to see. 

    I would have liked there to be an etiquette book on how to navigate the rough waters of exiting a dysfunctional family and knowing how it feels and what would happen as you go from the inside of a family to the outskirts.

    How to leave abuse, is how to leave a family…

    It isn’t comfortable and there is no cocoon.  You are in the open and vulnerable for pot shots that many aim at you trying to shut you up and protect the family’s dark legacy. 

    And even more importantly, I wanted proof or evidence of my sanity.  I wanted there to be a blueprint of undoing the affects of being abused.  With so many turning away or not agreeing with me, it was a place for me to have my say.  I didn’t keep parts hidden away; I shared all of me, for there wasn’t a part of me that was too dirty or shameful for me not to see.

    It is my humble belief, if you can’t bear to see your self, you will want to remain hidden from others. But, if you have the courage to really really look at yourself and all the cracks and crevices you will find a very interesting and intriguing life. 

    You will see how you took that path or formed that opinion or learned to believe this or that.  You will discover a life that you will never ever want to cover up again and go back to live in a small dark space of unknowing. 

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • A dream for me.

    Some days are filled with contrasts that keep you from mulling anything, you go from event to situation to more incoming information, past, present and future…

    This ride at times seems to be moving at super fast speeds, going so quick it is hard to process one thing before the next hits. That was yesterday.

    I had a mission to talk to the Detective to help get a ball rolling, but he will not play catch with me.  I sit, holding my ball…while life seems to be passing so quickly.  Another week has gone by and he appears too busy to return my call.

    To him I may be more work or I am not as important as what he has going on…however he knows not what I know.  I feel myself bumping into a silent wall of rebuff.

    The information grows like a weed out of control and I am losing my faith or trust that even when alerted he will be unable to pull or eradicate this weed that is poisoning the innocent…it seems that the garden is getting overrun while no one is looking.

    I have to have faith that it is all perfectly perfect, that it is going at the pace it should, even if not my speed.

    While I can’t gain his attention, I seem to forever bump into people who I feel are feeding the weed.  It seems so exasperating, like a poor cosmic joke, to see them everywhere and the Detective is nowhere to be found.

    Oh and the normalcy is worn like a costume.

    Letting all that go, I attended a speech given by the Author of the book, The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls.  She lived her first 17 years in abject poverty, and went on to become a journalist living on Park Avenue in New York City, while her parents remained homeless.

    She spoke to the freshman class at Michigan Tech, and a few of us from off the street, eager to hear her speak.

    Her rough life taught her many lessons you can’t learn on easy street, and in writing it forced her to be with the reality of her life.  She learned about her self and respected herself more for telling her truth, than when she was hiding it from people around her.

    What I found that was different between us, is that as a child she could not hide her ‘shameful’ life situation.  In her town everyone knew they were the poorest family, her clothes and body odor too obvious to hide, and so she wore her label everywhere and was treated appallingly in high school.

    Her very dysfunctional poor lifestyle was hard to not see. 

    And in my case, my outward appearance wasn’t too bad, poor but we did have running water and flushing toilets, although no shower until I was in middle school…just a sauna lit twice a week.  And there was a dirt-poor girl who lived less than a mile from us, who was poorer.  A two room shack more or less…

    Anyway, Jeanette could not hide what shamed her, and I didn’t know the shame that followed me where every I went, I was ‘HIS daughter’ A story was spoken when I left the room or before I arrived, unbeknownst to me.

    I have often wondered what my childhood would have been like had I known that my father was a pedophile, how would I have walked into places and out of them, knowing who I truly was?

    I know that I was always treated like the daughter of a pedophile, yet I was spared because I didn’t know.  I felt I was just a girl from a poor large apostolic family.  I didn’t know that underneath me was incest, abuse…

    I walked with confidence and not with mortifying shame.

    The mortifying shame came when I was 46.  And then I knew what the people of the church knew and yet not one approached me even then.  But, then they started to overtly treat me like a pariah.

    It seemed odd to me that once my truth was out they then began to treat me differently.  It still puzzles me…we all know the truth and now they keep me at arms length, they turned down isles to escape me…

    The only thing changed is I openly walked my truth…and they now did not know what to do or how to talk to me.

    Isn’t it interesting that it was easier to be with me when I was not walking my truth, than it was for them when I was?

    Just yesterday it came to me that it is much easier to be with people who are walking step by step with their truth, than to be with folks who want to tuck a huge part of their lives under a rug.  I can’t be with a half person.

    So, Jeanette and I are the same, we both had rough childhoods, the difference is she knew it and I did not.

    Her father carried a dream of one day building them a glass castle, and she believed in his dream.

    My father never had a dream for me.

     

     

  • Believe Them

    The Unhealthy Truth, by Robyn O’Brien and Rachel Kranz was discussed on Sirius Radio yesterday.  I have not read the book, but was intrigued by what she was saying.

    They were discussing the way our food here in the United States is compared to the way it is in countries with socialized health care, and it was shocking to hear.

    That in London, for instance, all the food is organic unless otherwise stated, there is a small section of foods that have things in them that are not good for the body.  In the USA, we have a small organic section and the rest has things in it that isn’t good for us….

    What she said, is that the Government regulator in England are very concerned about what their people are eating, for they are the ones paying for their health care.  In the USA, they are not paying for our health care so if we get diseases… it matters less or let’s say not at all.  And the health care business is Big Business.

    It was just interesting for me to hear the way the food is looked at by who is paying the medical bills.

    We are being manipulated and don’t even know it.

    I guess we all have to see to whose benefit is it to eat this way?

    It is like we are all being fed poorly so that at some point we will be funneled down into the system where we will pay them for the years of eating this way…they have us eating out of their hands.

    It seems odd that the poor food system is needed in order for the Medical Business to thrive, and we need to fail in order for them to succeed. 

    The insanity of this boggles the mind, that how in the world did our food source get so tainted without us moving a muscle, we allowed them to come in and flip it all upside down and backwards so we are eating poison, pretty much, in order for them to get a bad body to work on and charge insurance companies etc.

    Like cows to slaughter…except our worth is all the pills and surgeries it will take to keep us alive…when the food source is the one who is killing us.

    This insane cycle is the same kind that is in my old religion, they needed us to be worthless in order for them to come in and make us worthwhile. They lined the shelves with sins and said if I did them, then I would need their antidote, ‘the forgiveness of sins’…why not just not have sins.

    Why not just not have bad food?

    We buy into these systems. We believe in the sins, so we then need to believe in the words about forgiving them, to erase them.

    They put bad foods on the shelf, so that the medical care can fix us.

     Who would be hurt if we had only good food to eat?

    Who would be hurt if there were no such thing as sin?

    It gets you to wondering, how many other things we are doing wrong just so that the end game benefits someone? 

    What other unhealthy truths are out there?

    Who benefits from your actions and the way you believe?

    How much control do you have over your life?

    Isn't it an oxymoron, "Unhealthy Truths"?  Some truths will show you the insane sane system, and how unhealthy it is to believe them.

     

  • With me.

    In Chapter 8, Recovering a Sense of Strength (in The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron), she writes.

     

    “One of the most difficult tasks an artist must face is the primal one; Artistic Survival. All artist must learn the art of surviving loss; loss of hope, loss of face, loss of money, loss of self- belief.  In addition to our many gains, we inevitably suffer these losses in an artistic career.  They are the hazards of the road and, in many ways, its signposts.  Artistic losses can be turned into artistic gains and strengths – but not in the isolation of the beleaguered artist’s brain.”

     

    “ As mental-health experts are quick to point out, in order to move through loss and beyond it, we must acknowledge it and share it.  Because artistic losses are seldom openly acknowledged or mourned, they become artistic scar tissue that blocks artistic growth.  Deemed too painful, too silly, too humiliating, to share and so to heal, they become , instead, secret losses.”

     

    “If artistic creations are our brainchild, artistic losses are our miscarriages. Women often suffer terribly, and privately from losing a child who doesn’t come to full term. And as artist we suffer terrible losses when the book doesn’t sell, the film doesn’t get picked up, the juried show doesn’t take our paintings, the best pot shatters, the poems are not accepted, the ankle injury sidelines us for an entire dance season.”

     

    “We must remember that our artist is a child and that what we can handle intellectually far outstrips what we can handle emotionally.  We must be alert to flag and mourn our losses.”    Julia Cameron

     

    What I love about this first page of the chapter is how we have to learn how to survive loss.

     

    In life it seems we are so focused on other things, no one teaches us how to mourn the little things, so when the huge ones arrive, we too can use the same techniques.

     

    And I love how what we don’t mourn becomes our scar tissue, the bumps and bruises we did not sit with and honor their presence in our lives….don’t really disappear, but ride along gathering a thick skin…scar tissue.

     

    It will literally feel like we are tearing off the scab to now deal with loss from long past. To even sit with a self that was robbed of being so…all the little ways I failed to hold on to me.

     

    I now am gathering to me all the parts that I gave away, and bringing them back to my center, my attention and my awareness.

     

    I love that loss must be acknowledged and shared…for that is how we can not only see our wound but let other see it, so we all can acknowledge it, honor it…and it will then fade away.

     

    Who knew that it was the ‘hiding’ and keeping our hurts secret that we suffer the most?  It seems airing our loss is where our strengths will be found.

     

    I know that this blog has been a great show and tell for me and I am grateful and humbled by those who read and witness it with me.  This sacred place is more healing where two or more are gathered in truth. Thanks for being here with me.

     

  • To be me…perfectly.

    There seems to be a time in life, where you get off the karmic wheel of your childhood, where you finally come to the end of the road where old beliefs, thoughts and ideas run dry, where you have uncovered, discovered, and recovered all parts of your self.

     

    And you have decided what stays, what goes, what has value or no value, what is something I will use in my future and what is best left in the past.

     

    As each old thought and belief came to surface, I had to replace it with a new one, one more suited for my self and was often less comfortable for the ‘other’.

     

    Most of my replacement ideas, thoughts and beliefs are much more flexible and fit my spirit. They are filled with potential growth and expansion, unlimited space for creation.

     

    The purging of my old self was difficult and painful at times and extremely liberating as well, the dying and rebuilding co-existing, the undoing and the re-doing.  Each loss I mourned came with a new birth.

     

    Just as they flip houses, I flipped myself, changing me from a worn out pattern into a more creative one.

     

    I can’t imagine getting left in the old mind patterns and beliefs, stuck and unable to step out line, locked by fear and unable to shake off the chains of conditioning.

     

    I feel at times I have forgotten from whence I came, and have a hard time remembering the darkness with so much Light, forgetting what it is like to live under the shadows of others, never finding your own spot in the sun…

     

    My thanks all go to the Universe whose wisdom I seen in every lesson, gift and miracle, and who synchronized it all.

     

    As I continue forth with my awareness my artist’s prayer is;

    to remain faithful to the wisdom of my body,

    to always pay attention to the gut feelings,

    to stand with the truth no matter the cost,

    to have faith and follow my own feelings,

    to reach towards new experiences fearlessly,

    to be a student of the Universe,

    to accept all lessons with grace,

    to never lose sight of what is,

    to find my purpose,

    to know who I am,

    to be me…perfectly! 

  • From the Cocoon!

    The Artist’s Way, while it is inspiring for Art, it is also bringing forth an artful self.  It is finding the dark spots where we lost the art of living, the art of being, the art of individuality, where we conformed into roles that are in direct competition to being a creation from self.

     

    A self that lives behind the roles.

     

    A self we set aside years ago for a variety of reasons.

     

    This is the self we will find if we continue on The Artist’s Way…the path leads to self.

     

    I have been disrobing from roles that made up most of who I was, and underneath was a girl who I didn’t know.  It is this girl who has been struggling to come alive, against the adverse conditioned mind.

     

    This conditioned mind puts fear, guilt and shame along my pathway, sprinkled with false claims of a gloomy future, IF I dare make a new choice, explore and discover a new way of living.

     

    I have been jousting with this mind for 6 ½ years now, seeing which one of us will win at each turn.  Even having the fight is a great improvement to the capitulations of the past, where I didn’t even to fight.

     

    Now I have two separated ideals/beliefs/thoughts and desires vying for the chance to live as me.

     

    I feel a huge percentage of me is now onboard with the self and just fragments and pieces of me are still tangled up with the mental mind. 

     

    The Artist’s Way is working to unhinge those parts as well as strengthen and ignite the ones already free!

     

    I feel a huge part of me is flowing with the energy from the field of Art and pure potential, unlocked from the constraints of the mind.

     

    Like a butterfly almost cleared from the cocoon!

  • It just is.

    This week in The Artist’s Way, we are looking at money, how we spend it and what we think of it, and she is challenging us to seek being frivolous. 

     

    As I wrote about Money in the morning pages, it came to me that in my childhood, money was definitely an issue or the lack thereof, but we blamed the money, when in fact the culprit was my parent’s beliefs.

     

    We may have danced around the fact that there were too many children, but we never forced the issue as to why so many children when you can’t afford them?  Money took the blame, when in fact they lost control of themselves within the churches rules.

     

    When you have no control, you tend to blame things or people who make your life miserable, when in fact if you pulled yourself back into control, money and things would lose their power.

     

    They are only powerful when you are not.

     

    As I also wrote, it came to me, that there was no space to be frivolous, for there was barely money for the basics, and it was drilled into me, that if you were frivolous, your basic needs would go unmet.  And it feels like life and death, for it was very close.  Being the second oldest, I lived through the harshest years of way too many children and not enough cash flow…and within me now, being selfishly frivolous means someone will go hungry.

     

    The flow of power is not up to the money, but it lies wholly in our beliefs.  We put our experiences into money, money doesn’t have an agenda, it just is.

     

     

  • Paying Attention to each part of me.

    In the Sun Magazine they have a section where they give a word or two and you write about it. This month it was called Paying Attention.

     “Whenever my husband talks to his mother, brother or sister – on the phone or in person he sits down. This irritates me because I wish he would multi-task.  It also makes me jealous because I wish I came from a family of people who gave each other their full attention.”

     “My father traveled a lot on business and left the raising of my sisters and me to our mother.  A consummate multi-tasker, she’d pack meat for the freezer while helping one of us compose a school report.  In the middle of talking to us, she’d trail off: “Get me the…” The radio or TV was usually on, tuned into a talk show…”        Gigi Maniscalchi Edwards

     

    Paying attention to me meant if you could keep all the things going, you were paying attention.  Little did I know that I wasn’t paying attention to any of them, but just snagging bits and pieces of each.

     This fragmented view of life is what I was raised with, your focus was never fully intent on one item, behind each thing you were doing, was a background noise of a half a dozen more.

     In a large family there is always something going on or something to be done, there never seemed the time to stop and pay attention.

     Even as I raised my own children, I didn’t stop to pay attention fully and intently on each child and their conversation…I was juggling too many items in each moment of time.

    I am getting better at paying attention and focusing on one task at a time, and I can feel my body get anxious when there is too many things going on at once.  And I feel the distracted attention when speaking to someone who is doing things while we talk. 

    I prefer the game of one on one, where there is only one ball in the air at a time. 

    How sad for my children to be tossed in the air with dishes, clothes, cooking, and things; where my fragment attention was all they ever got. 

    My self was one of the things that got lost in the shuffle as well, and I have been learning to slow life down to now start paying attention to each part of me.

     Here is another writing on attention  that caught mine…

    “The other graduate students and I at the University of North Dakota drank a lot of coffee.  Whoever drained the last few drops from the thirty-five cup coffee maker would discard the used grounds and, using a long handle brush that we found on the wall in men’s restroom, scrub the inside of the percolator.

     

    We were satisfied with how this system was working until the day someone saw the janitor cleaning urinals with the brush.”     Lowell Wandke

     

     

     

  • Cultivate the Art of Play

    In reading chapter 5 in The Artist’s Way, Recovering A Sense of Possibility, she speaks of being self-destructive, and yet she isn’t talking about what we usually think of self-destructive behavior.

     

    We usually think of drugs, alcohol, abusive type behaviors, but never just being nice or being good.

     

    That is the self-destructive behavior that I struggle against. 

     

    Julia Cameron writes.

     

    “A young father with a serious interest in photography, years for a place in the home to pursue his interest. The installation of a modest darkroom would require dipping into savings and deferring the purchase of a new couch. The darkroom doesn’t get set up but the new couch does.”

     

    “Many recovering creatives sabotage themselves most frequently by being nice. There is a tremendous cost to such ersatz virtue.”

     

    “Many of us have made a virtue out of deprivation. We have embraced a long-suffering artistic anorexia as a martyr’s cross.  We have used it to feed a false sense of spirituality grounded in being good, meaning superior.”

     

    “ I call this seductive, faux spirituality the Virtue Trap. Spirituality has often been misused as a route to an unloving solitude, a stance where we proclaim ourselves above our human nature.  This spiritual superiority is really only one more form of denial. For an artist, virtue can be deadly. The urge toward respectability and maturity can be stultifying, even fatal.”

     

    “ We strive to be good, to be nice, to be helpful, to be unselfish. We want to be generous, of service, of the world. But what we really want is to be left alone.  When we can’t get others to leave us alone, we eventually abandon ourselves. To others, we may look like we’re here. We may act like we’re there. But our true self has gone to ground.”

     

    “What’s left is the shell of our whole self. It stays because it is caught.  Like a listless circus animal prodded into performing, it does tricks. It goes through the routine.  It earns its applause.  But all of the hoopla falls on deaf ears. We are dead to it. Our artist is not merely out of sorts.  Our artist has checked out. Our life is now an out of body experience. We’ve gone. A clinician might call it disassociating. I call it leaving the scene of the crime.”

     

    “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” we wheedle, but our creative self no longer trusts us. Why should it?  We sold it out.”

     

    “Afraid to appear selfish, we lose our self. We become self-destructive.  Because this self-murder is something we seek passively rather than consciously act out, we are often blind to its poisonous grip on us.”

     

    “The question “are you self-destructive?” is asked so frequently that we seldom hear it accurately.  What it means is Are you destructive of your self? And what that really ask us is Are you destructive of your true nature?”     Julia

     

    What I had known was that I left myself behind to take care of and be responsible for others, leaving my needs alone on an island far far from my awareness and I called this being a good girl.

     

    I would not have called this behavior as being self destructive, but I had the experience of waking up at 46 shocked that I was no where to be found.

     

    Now, 6 years later I am much more conscious of a self, my self, and in the past few years begun taking care of her in ways that I had never done before.

     

    I am learning to let go of the responsibility and care for others or at least balance it out between self care and other care.

     

    I am not completely there, but now have an eye on me.

     

    The Artist’s Way is to bring more attention to this self, to bring her right up in front and out in the open, to display her and showcase her in your life and be the main Feature and not the sideshow.

     

    It is wildly exciting and intimidating and it feels strange to dive into thoughts, ideas, dreams and experiences that have been long forgotten…and a part of me wonders and doubts, while another part feels the forbidden fruits I am reaching for.

     

    Dare I reach and grab onto things that only I want?

    Dare I consider only my self?

     

    I can feel the long forgotten parts of me ready to awaken, but unsure if they should trust? 

     

    Like a see saw between coming alive and staying comfortably dead…my spirit hangs in the balance.

     

    What seems to be shocking even to me is that I was able to stand by my self through out the revelation of my father’s abuse and the aftermath, that I was able to find a strong voice and a steady stance… but doing frivolously artful living seems like a luxury.

     

    Finding a self in the sea of abuse and taking care of my self as I unraveled seems like an honorable thing, but to just do fun things, artful things, things that make me come alive and tickle me, seems so careless or playful.

     

    And sadly being care less or play full is not what I know how to do.

     

    I don’t know how to play.

     

    I don’t know how to do frivolous things.

     

    Imagine I need to learn how to play.

     

    My self doesn’t know play.

     

    My self isn’t a natural player.

     

    I will have to cultivate the Art of Play.

     

  • Many years of pain.

    Yoga is the opposite of junk food for the soul and when done, I get left with a wonderful feeling, a relaxed stretched out calmness…a great way to begin my day.

     

    What I marvel at is that I drag my body to the mat, I slowly exit the bed, and begrudgingly tossing the quilt aside, I almost angrily put the heater going, like preparing for my death or torture. 

     

    And it is torture to take this neglected body and bring it back to life, to make the muscles strong, as they should be, or the joints as flexible and mobile as is their nature.

     

    I have noticed in the past few months, when I have been doing just a few yoga sessions a week, that I have fallen backwards in how my body moves.

     

    I can see how we become stiff and weak.  It is by far easier to stay beneath the covers and not make the effort.  But we will have pain either way… as Bikram says, “90 minutes or 90 years.”

     

    By making the difficult choice of getting out of bed, I struggle or suffer for 90 minutes and that will save me many years of pain.