A week before Philly I dreamt about watching a video with Clint Eastwood about a woman who became a kick ass girl.
When we were in Philadelphia I did not feel like the kick ass girl. I had surges of hot rage shooting up from the wings of my upper back, along the sides of my neck and out above my ears. I needed to feel the heat of those surges, stay in the discomfort of this energy coursing through me and walk away from my father, who, in a dream from the month before, is decrepit and frail. And yet, in that dream, I am still clinging to him. I still want him to support me. I was clinging to the infantile need of a daughter for a father. In Philly I was deep in the process of letting go of my need for my father.
I am not a little girl looking up at the big man of my father, hoping upon hope he will notice me. I am a fifty-one year old woman who has played out the search for my elusive and unavailable father in all kinds of ways with many men, two of whom I married. First I tried the bohemian version as the good artist's wife. Then I tried to be the good German hausfrau in the world of high political correctness. Neither version was who I am.
This week after a wheel meeting, I looked at my chart. There is nothing in that chart of mine that indicates a conventional partnership in the world. I have wanted that somehow. I have wanted a man to complete an image of how I thought my life should be. I have wanted my father's love.
This week I experienced a profound shift. I had this dream:
I am at the Coral Beach Club in Bermuda ( a club to which my parents belonged and at which I spent much of my childhood. My father played tennis there every Saturday and Sunday morning with his buddies. Sometimes my brother and I would go with him, to be a part of his world, and drink sips of shandy with the men, after they were done, in the little bar above the courts). My father is in his tennis whites and he is asking me to come and play tennis with him. I don't want to play with him. I don't want to be with him. I do not feel angry. There is no particular charge. I simply walk away.
I was done with playing the game with my father, giving myself up to have a little moment with him in his world, on his terms. For many years I went up to his house, High Folly, at the top of the Hollow in Stowe, in the hope that it might be different, that he might notice me and the woman I was becoming, that he might be curious about who I really was. It never happened.
Last May I took a copy of my book to him on his 80th Birthday. He has not spoken to me since that day.
In August he invited my three siblings and their families to celebrate his birthday at his house. He did not invite me. It was official. He had closed me out. He is someone who can hold onto a grudge to the grave. He may do that with me. I fell into the pain of rejection. It had always been there. Here is was again enacted. So perfect for me. I slid down the tunnel into the well of my hurt. The truth was, I had never had my father's love and respect. I have been letting go ever since. I have been in the process of letting go and healing the deep wound of no-father.
In the second part of the Father/tennis dream I wander through a rabbit warren of rooms, some old and dowdy, some newly renovated. I walk in to a really great children's room which is red with Italian design style. I lie down on one of the children's beds and have a spontaneous orgasm.
Without the dark father I have my own desire. The passion is within me. It is mine. In a second dream I am captivated by two boys, one four and the other a nursing baby. I am taken by their radiance and aliveness. The boys are me. They are the passion that cannot be lost, that is not dependent on anyone else. They cannot be lost. They are never lost.
This week I feel the boys deep inside me in a new way. I recognize this feeling but it is different. I feel more deeply inside the deepest core of myself. I feel steady in a continuum of focused energy. I feel steady and determined and excited by possibility. I don't care about what does not concern me. I don't care that I am not in my father's world. I don't care from a place of having moved through the cycle of grief and rage. I don't care from a healthy place inside myself that is the radiant, passionate boy. I don't want to be trying anymore to find out there what cannot be.
On Thursday night when I looked at my chart again and I saw in it, the blueprint of my unfolding potential in this life-time, I laughed at myself for all the years of trying to be the person so clearly shown, in the signs and symbols, that I am not. I felt this new level of acceptance of myself wash through me. I am not conventional. I am dedicated to the search for truth and the highest octave of love. My work and my life are one. I am fulfilling my destiny and calling. It is not framed by a picket fence. It is not bound by convention. It is unique, alive, rich, creative, joyful, collaborative, nurturing, resonant with divine love, fed by god, led by wisdom, endlessly fascinating, humorous, silly, satisfying, adventurous and exciting. In walking away from my father, I get to be who I really am. In being the boy I get to have my own passion.