I M Perfect lady

Tag: The

  • 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. 

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Reasons to Spin

    While dialoguing in the comment section on the Post, “Where Your Best Interest Lies” a few posts back, I am feeling like I am a reporter trying to get my story out and they are working like crazy Spin Doctors or the Public Relations Department of the FALC to prevent that from happening. 

    They are trying so hard to convince me it wasn’t their ‘faith’ or the church or its members or any of that religious stuff, and that my abuse stands alone, like a rogue virus.

    I feel people are working so hard to spin my story off into this lonely little section called abuse where religion never touched it, blessed it or had ANY thing to do with my abuse. 

    There is abuse, AND there is religion and never shall the two touch each other.

    It is sounding like a political debate where they want there to be two sides. 

    And I am here to tell you in my experience, Religion had a huge part in keeping abuse in my family home.  It did not stay there on its own and without the knowledge of the church.

    There is no way I can speak of my abuse without including the church. 

    In fact, if I had good faith in the forgiveness of sins, I could have had a normal dad.

    If I had good faith in the power of the forgiveness of sins, the sins would be washed away never to be heard from again…

    Maybe you all want to blame my weak faith on the fact that my father kept abusing little girls.  For damn it IF only I could have believed more deeply he could be washed whiter than snow and not hurt one more little girl.

    Do any of you know what it is like to call your childhood friends, now 40 years later and say, “I wish you would not have been my friend, for honey it cost you way too much.”

    Have you?

    Do you know that I recall one bright memory of me being on a huge white pole swing in our yard on a bright sunny summer day, and my dad came to me crying asking ME for a blessing.  Why?  What did he do to this young young little girl whose feet couldn’t even touch the ground.  What???  I don't know if I did it properly…I was way too little. 

    Did I not bless him properly?  Did I not believe it, IS that why he continued on molesting, raping and fondling little girls?  Was my faith to weak in strength to erase it correctly?

    Am I going to hell for being a bad blesser???

    When you question my story, you are saying to me, that I am wrong. Tell me where I am wrong?  Tell me, please and USE your name.

    I believed in a father.

    I believed in a mother.

    I believed in the power of the forgiveness of sins.

    I believed in order to be good, I had to bless bad people.

    I believed wrong…

    And did my ‘faith’ in the forgiveness of HIS sins spare one little girl?  Did it?  Can you put the blame on me?  Did I bless him wrong???

    Oh yeah my faith is weak now, it is actually nonexistent in the power of forgiving and blessing away the sins of the fathers.

    Yes it is.  I believe 100% that it does not work. 

    I am living breathing proof. 

    Where do you all believe these piles of sins are?  Look behind you they walk with you everywhere.  It is only in your mind, that you think they are gone.

    Each and every action you have made is written down in the book of reality seen by God…nothing gets erased ever.

    The only thing you can do is do better when you know better. 

    In the past, I was a good Christian and spoke of it not, not my feelings of terror towards my father, nor my deep down resentment towards my mother, I sucked in and asked to be blessed for being such a bad child to feel unloving toward her parents. 

    I kept trying to be a better child, never even stopping to see if I had parents I should be loving toward. 

    When my father’s name was spoken as being the one to molest my niece, I became a very bad child.  I stood with the little girl and somehow I knew I was standing with me. 

    I stood in reality and refused to bless it away, like I even could.

    This little girl isn’t going to be ‘unabused’ if I utter the magic phrase.

    I am bad, a bad ass, and a bitter, cold, vengeful woman some say.  I will be alone and lonely for saying what I say.  I will be ridiculed and not believed…all the same things I felt as a child.

    As a child I believed them, now as woman who is speaking her truth I do not.

    I have faith in God and me.

    I have faith in truth.

    I have faith is using my real name.

    I have faith in others who can reveal themselves to me.

    The rest, I have no faith in.

    For if you can’t say your name, you are not standing with me, you hiding like my father behind the front of being normal.  Good people don't hide.

    Only those in truth will say their name.  This is my belief and this is my blog.  If you feel differently you can blog yourself and have a great conversation and sharing anonymously.

    Oh and one more thing.

    Someone mentioned I lost the faith in God.

    No honey, God has been with me all along.

    He was the one who erased my memory of the event.

    He kept me being a little girl with out such a horrific thing to remember.  And did however keep my truth in my body, to keep me from going near the man who did such awful things to such a sweet innocent BELIEVING girl.

    Your church doesn’t own God; he is not applauding your spinning my story to make it kind.  He was there and he knew I would not have survived life living in that house with a visual memory, sadly I would have went insane.  Only a child who didn’t know could support that family. 

    I didn’t know… and I put my faith in the folks who were spinning my life to be normal.

    Now I am no longer fooled by the spins, I only see what is behind. 

    Only anonymous have reasons to spin.

     

     

  • 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.

     

     

  • 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.

     

  • Outside of the Mind.

    I went on a tour of The House on The Rocks in Wisconsin.

     

    At a distance it looks like a needle jutting outwards towards a rock formation, and the view from the garden seem architecturally intriguing, the surrounding landscape held trees of various sizes and types all growing on a hilly terrain… right in the middle of nature.

    We spent time in the gardens, taking pictures of the flowers and the fishes that swam in the lily ponds.  If this was the outside, we couldn’t imagine what the inside would be!

    IMG_6464 

    Our first entry was narrow and tight with low ceilings, dark and airless, carpeting lined the walls and floors and small windows let in a bit of light.

    As we exited into a transitional hallway, where we were able to walk out on the needle we had seen in the distance, we did then see we were above the trees or in the trees and nature surrounded us.  Once again we could see the sunshine and trees.

    And then the tour led us back inside, into dark mazelike rooms and hallways, were we couldn’t turn back and couldn’t get out.  We had no choice but go forward following the signs, “Tour continues”.

    The walls and interiors were lined with a collection of odd things, mismatched and yet similar in feeling.  From masks, to old dolls…their eye staring wildly…stuck behind the glass with lights shining upon them, the rest of the room dark. 

    IMG_6482 

     And placed in even darker corners imitation tiffany lamps.  It was said he kept the house dark to show off their colorful light. Interesting he honored them more than the brilliant nature right outside.

    The windows coverings were a dark blue, so we never glimpsed the light of outside. 

    And then came the windowless rooms, and in this darkened maze we walked, trying to neutralize the overwhelming heaviness of insanity…a carousel played its circus music, which added to the crazy energy, spinning around and around. 

    We went downward into a huge room that held a wale its innards exposed an octopus draped over it; one huge eye bore down on us.  Even in this huge cavernous room you felt stuck.  A narrow sidewalk kept us walking single file forward.

    Lining the walls was a collection of old toys, like forgotten memories neglected and hidden from children or remnants and artifacts of children.

    In the darkness and cave like atmosphere all things took on a sinister glow…perhaps each cried out from their prison. 

    I have seen old things reverently kept in museums, and these treasures were locked away in the darken bowels of this man’s creation, taking on his energy by how he displayed them.

    Our next stop the ‘house’ café, where fumes of cooking overwhelmed our already churning insides.  Amazingly there were folks dining, we walked by their tables, anxious to be set free.

    As we exited the dining room we met two young workers and asked how much longer the tour was. To which they replied 25 more minutes.  I asked if they could lead us back to the Zen gardens, and one replied he could, and we followed.

    My brother said that the inside of this structure was like taking a physical tour into his abused mind…

    In the years he and I have talked together, we have been trying to get him free from that confused maze like mind.

    He has a picture of himself prior to the abuse, and in it stands a little boy with a red sweater. So we always speak of his inner voice, his creative voice, his Spirit as the little boy in the red sweater.

    It was so incredible that it was a young lad in a red tee shirt that led us out and back to the Zen Garden…just like in my brother’s life.

    I was able to see and feel the energies of a mind gone insane, and see how there appears to be no way out and nowhere to sit down and be at peace, no way to find Light and freedom inside the mind.

    The tour was worth so much more than they charged, for it showed us a walking tour on how it feels to be lost in the abused mind and to see it sitting in reality surrounded by nature.

    It is encapsulated in the midst of splendid reality, shut out to itself, like a huge pocket in the land of sunlight, air and splendor, it is secluded and dark, narrow and airless…it again is like the mind…without the access to the right side.

    And the juxtaposition, Zen Garden – Dark airless rooms, maze like hallways, dead-end corridors…even the fake tiffany lamps could be seen as a false sense of hope or false prophets…just steps away are flowers, waterfalls, lily ponds and peace.

    A young woman we shared our experience with said it sounded like the religion she just exited.  On the outside it has a Zen Garden like look, but once you get in you are lost and in the darkness.

    What was so amazing and telling to me, were the reactions of others, some were doing jigs to the carousel music not feeling the energies there, for it they matched their own levels.  Others were like us anxious and feeling suffocating and needing to get out.

    It was a great gift to see the overall picture of the abused mind, a mind caught up in the crazy making of a dark religion lying in the middle of a Zen Garden.

    For it is literally true, that nature is our own natural state unless your sense of self gets caught up in the left side of your mind…

    We were able to see the insides of the man who created The House on The Rocks.  How scary to build this monstrosity in the midst of nature’s grandness, totally blocking it out.

    Just seeing the close proximity of the wide-open expanse of nature, the brightness, the airy breezes, the smells and sounds of nature, just outside of the darkened maze was profound.

    How like the human experience of either being in reality or lost in the confused mind.  Reality is always here; we just have to find our pathway. 

    The road that leads us back to being our self, to self expression, self awareness, to being the self we were meant to be, our unique expression of who we are…is found outside of the mind.

    “In order to experience the Ultimate Reality you have to be out of your mind.”  Neale Donald Walsh

    IMG_6478 
    Nature's brilliance!!!

     

  • 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!

  • The soul that lies beneath.

    Julia Cameron writes in The Artist’s Way…

     

    ”Conditioned as we are to accept other people’s definition of us, this emerging individuality can seem to us like a self-will run riot.  It is not. The snowflake pattern of your soul is emerging. Each of us is a unique, creative individual. But we often blur that uniqueness with sugar, alcohol, drugs, overwork, underplay, bad relations, toxic sex, underexercise, over-TV, undersleep – many and varied forms of junk food for the soul…”

     

    I have never thought of overeating or any of the above as being junk food for the soul. That most of the things that are bad for the body is also bad for our souls.

     

    They blur our uniqueness, keep us living in with a fuzzy image of who we are, what we want, what we feel and where we heading, and above all, make it hard for the soul to shine through.

     

    In fact all the bad habits keep the soul from shining through and yet we believe we need these habits, we literally crave them, and what they are is a black out curtain for the soul.

     

    It is odd to me that we crave what keeps us from being our whole soulful self, and that we want the stuff that darkens who we are.

     

    Perhaps we want to darken our reality.

     

    We want to shut the shades on what is in order to survive…instead of taking actions to remove ourselves from situations in real life, we drape a curtain so we don’t have to see.

     

    It is amazing to me that we become so accustomed to living a life with a darkened drape, that we have no idea how to live a life without them.

     

    Julia Cameron is gently telling us what stands in the way from being you. What items we do to not be alive, aware and unique.

     

    By removing the junk food from our lives we can see what they were covering up.  The more we crave and hold on to things that are not good for our souls, the more chances there is big stuff we are not wanting to see, feel or respond to.

     

    For me, my big mess was revealed first.  I saw a whole life that I had no clue was going on underneath my dark curtain of denial, of self-numbing or fuzzy blurring of reality, and I then had to start eliminating things that contributed to the blanket of dysfunction.

     

    This blanket of dysfunction lived my life for 46 years, a thick layer of stuff that my soul was unable to shine forth through.

     

    It is surprising the difference between living as the dark curtain or the soul that lies beneath. 

    Smug mug pics 1003 
    This is one of my first quilts after the revealation of my big mess….and you can see the sliver of gold, which is the soul trying to emerge.  I called this the Soul Lost.  I now have a better understanding of this quilt 6 years or more later!

  • When I am 80.

    My writing assignment was to write a letter from my eight-year-old self to my adult self, and I sat there blank.  I could not figure out what the little girl needed to tell me.

     

    So, I went and did my morning yoga session. And it came to me that if I look at her sitting within a family of dysfunction and her seeing her older self having escaped, that perhaps then there would be lots to say.

     

    My little self would look upon this adult woman and admire the strength it took for her to walk the walk needed to walk the walk to get her out of the situation of her childhood and to now be working on becoming more artful self.

     

    She at 8 could look upon me where I stand today and be so grateful that I was able to circle back and regain the ownership and awareness of her soul. 

     

    That I was able to traverse the wild churning waters of abuse and arrive seemingly unscathed and actually prospering as an adult woman, she would be amazed at my ability to withstand the truth and then to make new choices based upon it.

     

    She would be so grateful that I am no longer in abusive relationships or that I am still being victimized, that I have learned how to do self care, to speak for my self and have the strength to follow through.

     

    She would breath a sigh of relief to know that we survived and are now heading into an even brighter future, where I am honing my self-awareness with yoga and The Artist’s Way, that we are on the pathway of self-loving.

    At times I too find it hard to see the distance I traveled and the depth and breath of change that my life has withstood…I stand with my little girl in awe of where we have been and sit in gratitude we not only survived but also are thriving.

     

    What brings me the most peace is that I can look straight into my little girl’s eyes and feel proud and wise and strong, and not have to look away in shame and guilt.

     

    I feel so strongly confident that we are on the right path, and that when I am 80; I will look upon this 52-year-old self the same way.

     

    And in fact there is a writing assignment to write a letter from your 80-year-old self to your 50-year-old self.

     

    I found that much easier, for I was telling me what the Artist’s Way is teaching me, to be more artful, more daring, more wild in learning new things and experimenting, to go out and grasp all the delights the world has to offer, to change your routine, to add some spice and thrill, to toss in colorful experiences…

     

    I want to be at 80, what I am today, but more of it. 

     

    I want to look backwards at the next 30 years and be breathless at what I did!

     

    Each Artist’s date is adding to the list of things that will blow my mind as I look back when I am 80.

     

     

     

     

  • Mine.

    As I was reading Chapter Two of The Artist’s Way book by Julia Cameron, I found similarities between finding your artist self and leaving toxic relationships.

     

    She is leading you forward suggesting ideas and things that will focus on self and in doing so you discover where you are standing and how you have been living and who has had their hands on the reigns of you.

     

    Unblocking the Artist is like opening the eyes of those in denial.

     

    Julia speaks of poisonous playmates and crazymakers and I see them as the dysfunctional family I was lost among where there was no space for my self.

     

    She makes reference between giving up toxic thinking as giving up drinking.  And those still enjoying the toxic beverages and the toxic mindset, will not be your cheerleaders and in fact will weaken your resolve.

     

    The Artist Self is the self that is untouched by other’s influences, but whose sense of being comes from within and is connected to the Universe. 

     

    She is looking at this process from the self outward, where I was looking at leaving the mess of dysfunction.

     

    I wasn’t trying to find an authentic artful self, but rather fleeing from the abusive family that I felt had stolen my self.

     

    And it had, a pattern maker or follower had replaced my own artistic creative self, I had no personal connection to the Universe, I was plugged into an extension cord. 

     

    My sense of self flowed not from the Universe; it came from my mother/father/brother/sister/friend/anyone but the Universe and me.

     

    When everything that was holding the definitions of me was shown to be very dysfunctional, I then seen my own dysfunctional self. 

     

    I saw what the extension cord was plugged into, and I unplugged them all.

     

    It was the unplugging them that freed me to be available to hear the Universe, to pay attention to my body, my feelings, my emotions, to connect me back to me.

     

    The definition of Universe is one song.

     

    I am now singing one song… mine.