Tag: transformations

• What we want

  As I have watched nature showing itself as Flooding, I watched the changing transformation….how it expanded and now how it is contracting, receding back into its normal size.

  I have thought how it is a metaphor for life.  How we will have moments or events that will overflow, create difficulty in life.  We traverse them, grow, gain confidence, wisdom and then they too recede into our past.  A memory.

  I was delighted yesterday morning to see the evidence of the river level dropping.

  
  
  The snow banks are gone, and the chair stands…

  
  
  This is the corner where the river found its exit….and it is still coming out, but much much slower.  And, further up the road there is a place where the river flows back in…like it is testing land for a bit…or perhaps Me.

  
  
  What my jeep looks like after a rough day on the Spring roads.  I actually had to use my four- wheel drive to get out of the mud. But, on my way home yesterday, through the water, it washed the wheels.  A good under body flush while the river was up! 

  
  
  See how green everything is beginning to turn…there are buds on the trees, but very small…a bit of warm weather and another transformation begins.

  I guess what we love are pretty transformations, the ones that seem to require nothing of us, just our admiration upon completion.  But, the transformations that tear apart your insides, demand changes in behavior, etc we deem as 'bad'.

  However, they are the ones who develop us.  Those transformations oddly are course corrections, they are taking away all that isn't our soul's purpose or what is right for us.  

  Most of what I lost were toxic or dysfunctional or abusive.  I didn't lose love, peace and joy….it was through the transformation that I found them.

  And how would we appreciate dry dusty roads, if we didn't have a foot of water to compare them to?  The contrasts of life gives us meaning, helps us navigate into what we want. 

  May 5, 2013

  flooding, nature, river, self, transformations

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• Resolve to Stay the Same.

  While we all know that my father transformed into a monster many times, over many years with a variety of girls, what we fail to recognize or even consider is the lack of changes in the lives of others who knew and did nothing.

  Who knew and did nothing, means they did not respond or change or transform as a new truth or information landed in their lives.

  It is this unchanging landscape that doesn’t match the little girls changing landscape that really really bothers me.

   I know that I somehow expected more from my mother after the event than I did my father.

  I expected her to save me, to move me away from harm, to change our world somehow.

  It is hard to articulate the transformations of my father, but it is equally hard to fathom the no changes in the ones who knew and did nothing.

  When I say, “knew and did nothing” I mean have a lifestyle change, have a reaction that mirrors criminal sexual assault.

  The ones who lived with my father or near my father had one opinion of who he was. When a new identity comes in it seems that you would then have to reconfigure your world. 

  It seems that something so huge would not fit into your old lifestyle, that IT would literally change you. 

  Yet the opposite is what happened in my family.  I have heard from a few in my family who said, emphatically that they would not let what my father did change their lives. One is a sheriff…(he isn’t going to let Ray upset his world, and let him win, giving him the satisfaction.)

  They were not going to change their worlds because of his sick behavior, it wasn’t going to ‘ruin’ their family, or change their relationships, and they simply were not going to allow it to affect the lives they had. 

  I have actually been accused of ruining their childhoods and their fond memories…ripping our family apart. 

  I am the one to blame…more so than Ray.

  One sister said she confronted him for a half hour and went to work.  Imagine, a half-hour and her world was set back right side up. 

  What does this say about folks who can let this come in and then allow it to reside there and not have their lives change?

  Due to the fact that this time Ray went to jail, to court, hired lawyers, it was way real, and still at the end of the day…it is life as usual.

  I am more transfixed on what didn’t change than anything else. 

  It is the space between my family and I.

  I stopped my whole world…when I heard what my niece said. 

  I sat in a place outside of my life…and looked in.

  I saw things I didn’t want to see.

  I had to act in ways I couldn’t imagine acting.

  I let go of people I couldn’t imagine letting go of.

  Knowing what Ray did has changed my life forever.

  Nothing remained the same…and I can’t begin to imagine how they are able to walk unchanged.

  This behavior seems equally as odd as my fathers transformation, the unchanging resolve to stay the same.

   

  September 26, 2011

  actions, denial, transformations, truth

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