I M Perfect lady

Tag: Open

  • Bring into the New Year.

    As I sit here on New Years Day, I am not filled with wishful expectations, nor am I hoping for a better year…and then sitting back to see what happens.  

    I have learned that Life is a game where you get what you give….and the more you put into it, the more you get back.  I know that karma works.  I know that the Universe doesn't just randomly give out bumps in the road for no reason, that each hurdle comes with a gift of freedom, IF I face it squarely and be completely honest with myself.

    So, there is no point in wishing. However,  I remember Oprah saying she wanted to have a year of Love and Peace….and all she got that year were challenges for her to find peace and love in the worst of situations.  A challege if you will, in loving the unlovable.

    With that in mind, be careful what you wish for.

    For your wishes are God's command.  

    I don't really have wishes, but it does feel like I have just begun to live…or perhaps grasp what living is about.

    In Elie Wiesel's book "Open Heart" he writes,

    "Yes, I have written much, and yet, at this stage of my life, at the very threshold of the great portal, I feel that I have not yet begun."  

    "Too Late?"

    "Similarly, I question my many other activities. For example, in my combat against hatred, which I wished to be unrelenting, did I in fact invest enough time, enough energy, in denouncing fanaticism in its various guises? Evidently not, since all of us who have fought the battle must now admit defeat."

    "At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair.  For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there a chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing.  Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia…?"

    "I have initiated many actions, in countless locations, with many companions. And fought so many battles. Was it all in vain?"

    "What shall I say to God?  That I was also counting on His help?  Shall I have the nerve to reproach Him for His incomprehensible silence while Satan was winning his victories? While my father, Shlomo son of Eliezer and Nissel, lay dying on his cot?"

    Later on he writes,

    "A credo that defines my path: "I belong to the generation that has often felt abandoned by God and betrayed by mankind. And yet, I believe we must not give up on either."

    "Was it yesterday – or long ago- that we learned how human beings have been able to attain perfection in cruelty?  That for the killers, the torturers, it is normal, thus human, to act inhumanely?  Should one therefore turn away from humanity?"

    "The answer, of course, is up to each of us.  We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves.  Or not."

    "I know – I speak from experience – that even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion.  That it is possible to feel free inside a prision. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor.  That one instant before dying, man is still immortal."

    " There it is: I still believe in man in spite of man.  I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed and preverted by the enemies of mankind.  And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console."  

    "As a Jew, I believe in the coming of the Messiah. But of course this does not mean that the world will become Jewish; just that it will become more welcoming, more human.  I belong, after all, to a generation that has learned that whatever the question, indifference and resignation are not the answer."

    "Illness may diminish me, but it will not destroy me. The body is not eternal, but the idea of the soul is. The brain will be buried, but the memory will survive it."

    "Such is the miracle: The tale about despair becomes the tale against despair."  

    He also writes in chapter 15,

    "Such are the thoughts that the patient, a prisoner of his condemned body, confronting his fate, is experiencing the ferocious intensity. As I face the gravity of this moment, I feel the need to search my soul."

    "I am eighty-two years old.  As it has often before, and now more so than ever, the fact that I am who I am leads me to look back: What have I done, and what have I toiled to do, during this long journey filled with dreams and challenges."

    "Strange, I suddenly remember Baudelaire's outcry in his Mon coeur mis a nu  (My Heart Laid Bare): There exists in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous impulses; one leading toward God, the other toward Satan."  Have I distinquished the path to Good from the one leading to Evil?"

    "My life unfolds before me like a film: landscapes from my childhood; adventures in faraway, sometimes exotic places; my first masters, followed by my first moments of adolescent religious ecstasy as I and my friends at the yeshiva recieved from our old masters the keys that open the secret doors of mystical truths."

    "Have I performed my duty as a survivor? Have I transmitted all I was able to? Too much, perhaps? Were some of the mystics not punished for having penetrated the secret of forbidden knowledge?"

    "To begin, I attempted to describe the time of darkness. Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald.  A slight volume; Night.  First in Yiddish, "and the world remained silent," in which every sentence, every word, reflects an experience that defies all comprehension.  Even had every single survivor consecrated a year of his life to testifying, the results would probably still have been unsatisfactory.  I rarely reread myself, but when I do, I come away with a bitter taste in my mouth:  I feel the words are not right and that I could have said it better.  In my writings about the Event, did I commita sin by saying too much, while fully knowing that no person who did not experience the proximity of death there can ever understand what we, the survivors, were subjected to from moring till night, under a silent sky."'

    "I have written some fifty works – most dealing with topics far removed from the one I continue to consider essential: the victims' memory.  I believe that I have done all I could to prevent it from being cheapened or altogether stifled, but was it enough? And if I often publish works – articles, novels on other themes, I did so in order not to remain its prisoner.  My battle against the trivialization and banalization of Auschwitz in film and on television resulted in my gaining not a few enemies.  To my thinking, it was my duty to show that the sum of all suffering and deaths is an integral part of the texts we revere."  Elie Wiezel

    He continues to ask great questions of himself at 82 years of age….and his reflection will be ours someday.

    I wonder if we ask his questions of ourselves today, will we at 82 still be living with questions…and perhaps the questions are how we move into a deeper life…to fully live, aware.

    I do understand how knowing the evil of mankind, he yet believes in mankind.

    How the silence of God doesn't have him no longer believing there is a God.

    And, when or can you write enough about the subject of victims?

    He and I are not on the same scale on the specturm, but even at my lower end, it matters.

    Have I too, distinquished the path to evil?  

    I still am a faithful believer in mankind…that is the energy I bring into the New Year.


  • I fear being closed up.

    "Anything we fear to lose – a home, a car, an attractive body, an agile mind, a deep belief – is a symbol of external power.  What we fear is an increase in our vulnerability.  This results in seeing power as external."  Gary Zukav, Seat of the Soul.

    The sentence about fearing an increase in our vulnerability really struck me.  Somehow I believe all choices boil down to this sentence.

    It isn't the actual change we fear, but the way it will open ourselves up to being vulnerable once again.  And the more you explore and peel back layers of your self, the more wide open you will feel.

    I had to go and look up the definition of Vulnerable. 

    "Susceptible to physical or emotional injury."  I was shocked to read that.  Are you not more susceptible to physical and emotional injury IN an Absive relationship, then if we were out?

    Yet, we fight or resist being vulnerable and in doing so you are more vulnerable while in those relationships, than working your way out.

    Another meaning was, "Open to attack, damage, assailable, vulnerable to critism, exposed."

    Again, it strikes me as not the meaning of vulnerable.  I thought vulnerable was to be wide open and soft.  Yet this meaning seems to be about opening yourself up for attack.

    No wonder no one wants to be vulnerable.

    I can see the two sides of vulnerablitiy.  However, just because you are wide open and exposed, it doesn't mean you will be attacked. To me, exploring the depths of abuse have made me wise to knowing what is abusive and what is not.

    The definitions of vulnerability also seem to come into play as you are trying to leave dysfunction; attacking and critism of your new ways.

    Very interesting to feel the wide scope of being Vulnerable.

    I feel more vulnerable; open, free and exposed and feel that is my greatest strength.  I no longer fear being vulnerable.  I fear being closed up.

  • It is ill fitting in their worlds.

    What I discovered in telling my story is that people get lost in their own lives while listening…lost in trying to defend and discern if my story matches theirs.

    It isn’t being told to match yours, it is merely being told…yet while you are busy trying it on for size, you miss what I am saying…you can’t hear me as you are fitting my words into your world and tossing out the ones that don’t fit.

    As the author of this story and the one who experienced my life, I felt the desire to share what I had lived through or more importantly what I had falsely believed in and was putting it down on paper to find my truth. 

    What I had not counted on was that people would try on my truth of for size, to see if it fits their own experiences and then say it isn’t so.

    I wonder if that is how I listen, to see if it fits in my truth, do I hear others, or do I immediately feel threatened by their story if it clashes with mine?

    It leaves me to wonder, what words another could say that would threaten my world…how another’s experience would unravel my world…what could they possibly say that would start a second avalanche?

    I guess I expected questions or folks who were interested in knowing more, but I hadn’t expected others would try on my experiences and call them fake. 

    It is the resistance against what I am saying that feels so out of place. 

    The defense of the Church, the defense of the people, the defense of the family, defense of the siblings…and the defense against their practices of handing their sins over to Jesus, all the while unknowingly discounting my story as they are so busy in their defense.

    This rooting around in their defense drowns out my words and leaves me unheard. 

    It is like talking to someone who is paying attention to something else, and they are.

    They are worried about their worlds.

    I wonder if we all do that?  If we all have our very own sets of truths and protect them while not paying attention to others.

    I just hadn’t considered that in speaking out that the facts and truths of what I discovered would be tried on and then tossed out, if it didn’t match their files.

    Somehow, I naively believed that I would have the ears of listeners, and not truth fittings.

    What I feel most, is that a child who is asked to tell the truth about an abuser would face the same kind of treatment, where their words would not be brought in as sacred truths, but rather items to be tried on for size. 

    A child can discern, as I have, the ears who listen with compassion or the ones who are merely trying on their truth and kicking it to the curb in order to maintain their own lifestyle.

    Perhaps my ears have become more open the more open I am with my own truths.

    I can only gauge others by how they grab my truths and try them on, and then how quickly I am discarded…or received.

    I have been taking this personal, trying to say things more eloquently, softly, with class, trying to make the presentation prettier, kinder, nicer, more convincing and it is all for naught.  For it isn’t my truth with the issue, but their lifestyle…my truth just doesn’t fit in. It is ill fitting in their worlds.

  • Enter In

    Julia Cameron writes in The Artist’s Way, “I like to think of the mind as a room.  In that room, we keep all our usual ideas about life, God, what’s possible and what’s not.  The room has a door.  That door is ever so slightly ajar, and outside we can see a great deal of dazzling light.  Out there in the dazzling light are a lot of new ideas that we consider too far-out for us, and so we keep them out there. The ideas we are comfortable with are in the room with us. The other ideas are out, and we keep them out.”

     

    “In our ordinary, prerecovery life, when we would hear something weird or threatening, we’d just grab the doorknob and pull the door shut.  Fast.”

     

    “Inner work triggering outer change?  Ridiculous! (Slam the door.) God bother to help my own creative recovery? (Slam.)  Synchronicity supporting my artist with serendipitous coincidences? (Slam, slam, slam.)

     

    “Now that we are in creative recovery, there is another approach we need to try. To do this, we gently set aside our skepticism – for later us, if we need it – and when a weird idea or coincidence whizzes by, we gently nudge the door a little further open.”

     

    “Setting skepticism aside, even briefly, can make for very interesting explorations.  In creative recovery, it is not necessary that we change any of our beliefs.  It is necessary that we examine them.”

     

    “More than anything else, creative recovery is an exercise in open-mindedness.  Again, picture your mind as that room with the door slightly ajar. Nudging the door open a bit more is what makes for open-mindedness. Begin, this week, to consciously practice opening your mind.”      Julia

     

     

    Yesterday I was panicked due to my one-day weekend, and I was not open to letting the chores go and just using it as my play day as I had threatened to do.  I slammed the door on playing, staying with old habits of getting my jobs done first.

     

    I was crabby but doing the work.  Resenting that I couldn’t play.

     

    It is like being locked in a room to which you have the key, yet unable to actually use it to turn yourself free.

     

    There is an exchange I can’t see to agree with, messy house in exchange for playing!

     

    I want both.  And if I stay that course, I will continue exchanging playtime for work time, for as we all know there is always another job to be done.

     

    She is suggesting that we ‘use’ this excuse in order to keep our Artist from going to explore the wide-open world, that we have become comfortable in the cramped workspace.

     

    My grumpiness spread like a virus, or tried to, but most left me alone in my unhappiness. 

     

    My daughter took her playtime first, and later on in the fading daylight mowed the grass.  My resentment at her is that she has mastered the art of play over work time…and is doing what I can’t allow me to do. 

     

    I blame her for me being unable to exchange playing for a clean house. 

     

    As I sit with this thought, I used to get appreciation and attention for keeping my mother’s house in order…and the opposite may be true, wrath if I didn’t help.

     

    I recall many siblings not caring where I cared too much.

     

    When I thought I cared about a clean house, in fact I cared what my mother thought of me.

     

    Perhaps, this is the issue that needs to be examined. 
    ”I am better if I have a clean house, even if I am grumpy.”

     

    Who do I like better or who feels better inside?

     

    It seems my self-identity is wrapped up in what I do and how external things look. 

     

    How brave to let it all go and play…That is the challenge this week…being a child doing what she feels like, letting go of responsibilites that can wait.  The 'mother' in my head may want me to slam the door to fun, but I have to be strong enough to nudge it open and enter in.

     

  • Let the Pain Out

    “Real difficulties can be overcome, it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.” ~Theodore N. Vail

    When you face what you actually are compared to what you desire to be, you will find much peace, it is trying to be someone else that’s impossible.

    Letting go of the potential, the prize of someday, the if only of yesterday, and the idealized version of self that is the hardest to do.

    To sit down fully in imperfection and disappointing the mind, by facing all the evidence contrary to many beliefs.

    What I felt most for the men on stage with Oprah was that they were unable to claim their lost innocence and how abuse changed them.

    They wanted what is impossible to attain, and in doing so sit in denial of whom they are.

    They are the combination of innocence lost and the affects of abuse, and when they can see the imperfections of their lives, they will see how perfectly it is.

    How abuse does steal innocence, how if you don’t address abuse, abuse lives its life for you.

    It seems that you are a victim when you repeatedly succumb to the wishes of if only, or I can’t be different, and you become a victor when you stand and state the obvious.

    I was abused.
    I am confused because of the abuse.
    I lived an upside down life due to being abused.

    Until we can recognize how upside down we are, we can’t seek to right ourselves.

    By holding on to the picture of innocence, we miss who we now are.

    I will never not know the feelings of terror of a father.
    I will never not know who I would be without the abuse, but I can know who I can be in spite of it.

    There is a life after abuse, a way to reclaim your life today, but not undo yesterday.

    Life after abuse starts when you out yourself.
    Until then, you are locked in the dark with the secret.

    Once you step out, your life after abuse can begin…Abuse and its shame lives in the dark quiet silence.

    You don’t have to tell the whole world, but speak to someone, open the wound and let the pain out.

  • I Play Where I am Happy!

    “It’s easier to love a happy me,” is a comment I made and it seems profound in a very simplistic way.

     

    How can you love yourself if you are unhappy?

     

    What I found by writing is that unhappiness is wanting what is impossible to have.

     

    If you are not happy with what you have, you can’t love what you are.

     

    My happiness came when I discovered that there was no chance in getting what I wanted for me, that I had to accept what I was.

     

    I wanted me to be a not abused girl.

     

    I didn’t want to own the abuse and all what the abuse did to me, nor any of the characters attached to the abuse, or the church’s line of forgiveness.

     

    The list went on and on, and nothing on the list was pleasing to me; a full menu of things I didn’t like.

     

    When there was no hope or a pray in heaven that my reality could/would/should change, I found happiness.

     

    It was either be okay with my lot in life, or be unhappy.

     

    It is easy to be happy with a nice pair of shoes or jeans that fit you well, but try and put on reality when it seems too sordid to tell and be happy in that.

     

    But it hurts more to be forever waiting and wanting what is impossible to have.

     

    For some reason it is better to accept what is possible than to get left seeking the impossible.

     

     

    I made friends with what was possible.

     

    I learned mostly I had possibilities.

     

    “When God shuts a door, he opens a window” I believe is a phrase many use.

     

    Instead of sitting by the closed door, I went to the window and had the courage to find a way to be happy.

     

    By turning my attention and desires away from the closed door, I was presented with a million opportunities to be happy. 

     

    They would never be the choices behind the closed door, they were all different and I was delighted and surprised to find they made me happy.

     

    In the window of opportunities I began to see a new life, a new way, a new me, a new normal was being born.

     

    There is simply nothing I can do to change my past or all the characters who played there, but I can now decide how I play today.

     

    I play where I am happy!