February 2009 - Since the winter retreat, I have been feeling this new place filled with love and light and am overflowing with creative energy. Even when I am scared or in pain I feel this energy flowing through me. My homework is to know that when I am feeling this way I am the girl.
It comes from my dream: I am Jim’s girl separated out from him, he is not sure of her but I am, she is good and full of light and love, and I am she. I feel her through and through.
This place feels remarkable to me. It is a place where I need to know nothing more than to be present in the moment I am in. In the act of putting down the weight of managing and manipulating the world so that I will be okay, a great love and light fill me with all I need to face into each moment. This place can be excruciatingly vulnerable. But I have come to crave that place of being so true. It is here I feel alive, where I know I am the girl, I know I am good and full of light and love, I am over flowing with it.
I do have reaction to this state of being but I am in enough to ask for help, to speak anyway, to know it is crap. The voice of who do I think I am to make comment, to speak up, to take action, swoops down on me. I know this is an attack, I know from this place to call it out, to name it and take its power away. This is something I can do for myself or when I can’t I can ask for help, from my sisters and brothers in this work, to my loved ones, to call it out and let it go.
There has been a time where I have appropriately asked Marc to intercede for me with God. Through all these many years I have been in the work it has been what I have needed from him; for Marc to stand in the breach for me. But it is time now to have my own relationship with Him, to face into God directly and not through Marc. This does not mean I am to step away from the love and support Marc has for me, I treasure that love and support. But it is time for me to stand next to Marc in my own relationship with God. I am at this place in my work.
There have been parts of me that have known how to do this. My writing has come from that place, and more recently my paintings. It feels like these places have been like a practice for me, places where I have been able to flex that muscle, strengthen it and come to know the feel of facing into God. Because of this it is not a wholly new place for me, I have experienced the feeling of it and trust it because of that experience.
This is a new place for us in North of Eden. This is a new place where we can stand side by side with each other. And for those of us who are at this place in our work, it is an edge. The edge of stepping into the world in our own unique way; the way that God has created us for. Into the space which fits us specifically. Just as we are loved by the Divine specifically, who we are in that love is specific, and our gift to the world is specific through us.
September 2007 - From this place of deep pain, from feeling the deep pain, I have come to understand this: I have opened the place of feeling in myself, of connection to the divine, to the love of the divine; it is in this place that I can feel the pain, move through the pain in the light of love.
It has been an opportunity to choose feeling over pathology’s way of thinking. To simply feel the pain, although dreadfully painful, has allowed me to be in the Archetype’s support. So, even when I thought I could not go on feeling, I knew in my heart that I could because I could feel them there with me. When I stayed with the pain I did not have to go down the dark, mean corridors of pathology’s prison; a prison which kept me alone and devastated for so many years.
That place of pathology where I worked so hard to keep myself from getting hurt by not allowing myself any depth of feeling; where I continuously set myself up to relive my trauma. Where I could use rejection and abandonment to strengthen my cell’s walls.
But here, below my trauma, I can have my feelings. I can feel love and I can feel fear and I can feel the pain. Here, I can be with the Animus, feel my love for him, my wanting of him. Here, I can be recognized by the Anima.
Dream from the summer:
I’m in a store, Christian (Animus) comes to me, he is very excited, a store in Concord has seen the poetry books I’ve made and are holding them until spring for weddings. I ask if they want more, he doesn’t know but as we talk we go outside. He is holding my arm and we go up, up into the sky. And then we drop. It is like skydiving only no parachutes. The wind is rushing past us and we start doing skydiving maneuvers. I can see the ground coming up but we just keep going. Right near the end we prepare to land. I say jokingly, “Oh, here’s were we break our legs,” but we make a gentle landing. / switch / I am hiding in the bushes. A woman (Dark Mother) with dogs on leashes walks by but then turns around and comes back. I am very scared she will find the little girl with wings who is hiding in the bushes. The little girl who is me.
The last part of this dream is showing me the moments before my trauma. The Dark Mother is about to pounce on me. But as the little girl I can feel my fear of her. I am the little girl who flies with the Animus.
Recent dream:
I am on the bank of a mountain stream watching a young man work on a cabin across from me. He is waiting for his father to come back from the store with supplies. I can see two tall trees rising from ledge; below where it has been washed out, I see the roots. There is also fallen trees and leaf litter found in such mountain woods. The father comes and parks his truck. I stand, walk over and embrace him. There is this understanding: we are at the head of the path, the headwaters or spring and that the path is the river.
Recent Dream:
It seems we are sitting in the stream. We are children, a boy, a girl, and myself, we are eating cheesecake. There is a great feeling of love and friendship which is the stream flowing around us.
I am special. I am with my family at the source of the path. I am a child eating my favorite cake bathed in love and friendship. This is the place I live now. It is a place of trust and belonging. It is the place which makes it safe to feel my fear, to feel my pain. It is the place which makes it safe for me to feel my love and the love of god.
And it is through feeling these feelings that healing comes, it is where I can know the truth, where I can speak the truth, and where I can be with Him.
January, 2006
Just before Christmas I had this dream: I am with a group of people, we are in a house trying to protect ourselves from the evil father. We have to stay close to keep him out. This is difficult because this father is a spirit and so can enter you. As I am going to sleep in my sleeping bag I feel the evil father trying to get in. I am wrestling with him; I am wrestling with the devil for my life.
As it turns out, when I am wrestling with the devil, holding myself closed so that the devil can not enter me, I am closing out more than the devil. I am also closing out god’s help. God too can not enter me. I must open myself to the devil so that god or the animus can help me. I must trust that they will help me. So my homework with this dream was to be with the evil man and call out to the animus for help.
Christmas held a key for me. Christ, born into the world, born into my world, the love of the mother Christ in me. I began to feel that love and trust it. I found that love to be tremendously painful, painful but not unbearable. Painful, I think, because in receiving love I realize the extent of loss I suffered in not having felt that love as a child. How I constructed my life to be without that love. And how, even in my yearning for love, I was so scared of it that I could not allow it into my life. I spent so many years pushing away those who could have loved me and those too who did love me.
During this time I began to paint. I moved from painting ink on rice paper to acrylic on gessoed paper. I moved from the tones of gray to color. And although my painting has been a place of meditation for me, a place of connection, for the first time I felt my paintings coming from the dreamwork. I painted my dream gift of a hummingbird which had symbolized the birth of my soul-self, I painted Christa’s parrotfish, I painted the wolf. The wolf, a subject I never would have chosen to paint for myself.
I also wrote a new poem which feels like an answer to this new self. The poem says: I will not live in the silence of being cut off from my self’s music. I will be the song.
Decant
This rawness beckons
like a wild-thing, wolf,
hawk, new born babe,
follow the unknown it
says, using the tongue
of water against rock,
its sound like ice to a
burn; so when the night
goes quiet, I think this
silence unbearable,
a burning that might
kill me. Had killed me
once before, a time
I spoke loss fluently.
This time, I open my
mouth, let water pour
the mountain’s stream.
Soon after all this I had another dream: I am with my friend Chico. We walk into a restaurant for lunch and sit at a table. I overhear the women behind the bar say, “She’s with him.” At first I am ashamed, I feel bad because I am with Chico who is a married man. But then I realize that is not what they are saying. They are saying I am with him, that is, the animus. And I feel good and right about being there with him, we are friends. We then go to a shop which it turns out we are going to take over. We look at some things and then leave. Chico says that we are going to sell third world gifts, I say “Are you sure, there are already shops like that around here.” But I will do whatever he says. I am with him.
My homework now is to stay with him, to paint, to write, to follow where those things lead me, where he leads me.
January, 2004
For most of my adolescent years, I controlled my eating. It wasn't about weight for me, I am naturally slim. It was about controlling my hunger, my need. I never allowed myself to lose enough weight that anyone would notice until at twenty, involved in an abusive relationship, and at an all time low, I lost my ability to keep a level weight and dropped below 100 lbs. I understood then that I was in trouble. I left that relationship for a kind and gentle man and for a while, I settled down. But I hadn't dealt with the underling issues and true to their nature, they reentered my life blowing fire. A terrible pattern was emerging from my past. Heartbreak and numbness dominated and I determined I would change it. Shortly after, I came to "the work."
I walked into Marc's office and sat down. When he asked me why I was there, I named anorexia my reason. He responded that we wouldn't address that issue directly. That when we had dealt with the underlying issues I would no longer starve myself. I felt a sense of relief; instinctively I knew, I had come to the right place.
I had some inkling then and I later grew to understand fully that there was something in me that needed to control my self, my feelings, my soul so strongly it was willing to sacrifice my body and if necessary my life. That it needed to make that sacrifice in order to survive. The task that became vital to my survival was to discover what that something was. To, in a sense, sacrifice it.
What I discovered in my many years of doing "the work," is that the small child inside of me was separated from the archetypes, in a word, God, at an early age. I learned that in my desperate want to be loved I had become whoever anyone wanted me to be. I was a chameleon. The trouble with this method of gaining love is that you sacrifice who you really are and your relationship with the archetypes. Also, the love that comes to you is given under faults premise and so, can never be real, and so, can never be truly felt.
I had become a liar, not intentionally, but because I had practiced this form of survival for so long, I didn't know the truth myself. I had become so lost to myself I now needed others to construct me. I let the fear and pain I suffered control me.
But there was a part of me that was strong enough to live and demand that I come back to my heart, that I hear my own truth. I am truly grateful to that part of myself.
I like working with my dreams because I am unable to manipulate them. Writing poems also works well for me because while writing I can go to a place of truth within myself and allow it on to the page, however encoded. My poems and dreams have become the truth-tellers I work with.
Slowly I have learned and am still learning how to live without my pain, my suffering. I am beginning to not only know myself but also show that self to the world. I am still terrified of this self-expression. But I know that if I want to be true to myself, and I do want that, I must reveal my truths and live in them. I have come to the point where I can see this is a life and death matter. I must move into this new place of true to live. Because when I am caught in my old habits, it feels like death to me. I do not want to die. This keeps me on the path, the true path.
The Reading Of a Poem:
I strongly believe that the poet only does half the work of a poem in writing it. The other half is done by the reader. In this case, I am acting as both the writer and the reader. In explaining this poem, I travel to the world of my own self-discovery.
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A Final Wound
You turned to me-
face a ceaseless question.
Had you not foreseen
my brittle tongue's retract?
The sky broke like a lantern,
spilled the clatter of escape.
I had left
if I had ever been there.
Locked against the tumble
of a forgotten wind storm.
A waxing shadow over sense
leading me home.
The matted bed I've made myself.
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The "You" in this poem is all the people, most often men, who I have been in some kind of relationship, often romantic. The face of the "You" is a ceaseless question because in my action of walking away, I reveal my actions to that point, as being false.
My words are taking something away from the "you" as I retract my symbolic "brittle tongue." I am taking away the truth of the words I have spoken up to this point.
My created world with the "you" breaks because I can't go on with the shame I have created. I can never get what I want from the shame of the relationship because one can't get true love from a false connection. This breaking allows me to escape.
I leave the relationship having never been truly there. The true you cannot be there when you are living in a made-up world.
The "forgotten wind storm" is what created this whole complex in the first place. It is made up of the things that have happened in the past and kept me unconnected, that is, "tumbling" along.
There is a "shadow over sense" that makes me blind to what I am doing and how to stop doing what I am doing to myself and others.
And I live with it. I make my bed, so to speak, and continue to sleep in it. That is, I play this game repeatedly.
The poems I write are always on the edge of my knowing. I do not think of an issue and try to address it. Often it takes a long time for the truth of an issue to come out, especially so clearly as it does for me in this poem. This poem names a time I am ashamed of in my life.