from The Secret of the Pomegranate by Susan Marie Scavo

excerpts from The Secret of the Pomegranate

Poison:

Dream:

I am in a crib – preverbal but just able to stand up. On the floor by
my crib are three little boys between the ages of two and four playing.

Through an open door, I can see the mother in the kitchen making spaghetti, but I see her pour some kind of poison in it. I start to scream in horror. She brings the poisoned food to the children and they eat it while I scream, trying to stop them. They all fall into a catatonic state and two men in white lab coats come in. They lift the boys and take them into the kitchen with the mother so that they can
do experiments on them. All the while, I scream.

Meanwhile, the father enters and sees what is happening but does nothing. He falls into an easy chair. The plates with the poisoned food are still on the ground and red ants have come and are swarming it. The father takes a plateful of food that is covered with ants and puts his arm on it so the ants will bite him. He wants to poison himself, too. I scream and scream as I watch the ants bite him and he falls into a catatonic state.

Switch

I am grown-up. I see my friend Joe, who is a father of a young daughter, catatonic on the floor. I go to him to try to wake him up. Shaking him a little, saying gently, Joe, Joe, Joe.

****

The Cut

Dream:

I am with my mother and she has a small circular saw in her hand. I say, “What are you doing with that?”

Switch

I am looking down at my body and see I am naked. The circular saw is between my legs against my pubic area. It turns on and my mother says, “Why did you turn it on?” I am terrified. It turns off. I say, “Oh, I think it is okay, I don’t think it hit skin.” But then I see the blood.

At the end of the dream, I am in total shock when I realize there is blood and I did not even feel the cutting. Not only did I not even feel the cutting, I am convinced that I did it to myself. I cannot fathom that it could possibly be my mother who turned on the saw, that she could possibly do something like this.

When I was in my thirties, my mother finally told me that she was jealous of me. I felt relieved at her honesty, relieved that it was finally spoken. I did not realize then that the jealousy went all the way back. That it was, in a way, impersonal. I can see now that I was a competitor for her for my father’s love. My father really wanted a daughter and after four boys, they finally had me.

My mother has told the story that when she brought me home from the hospital, she leaned over the crib the first night and said, “If you don’t sleep through the night, I am going to smother you.” In some ways, it was understandable – I was the fifth child in five and a half years. My older brothers ranged from one to five when I was born. She was exhausted.

But it was not that. It was that I was competition for my father in a way my brothers were not. My parents married when they were nineteen and immediately had five children in five and a half years. Their marriage was difficult from the start – two kids dropping out of college to get married because my mom became pregnant. Two people who had to grow up too fast, who did not have a strong foundation with each other or with themselves, two people who ended up equally betraying each other along the way before finally divorcing when I was thirteen.

They both walked into the marriage with their own versions of the Big Lie solidly in place. They both walked into the marriage lost. The lie worked on both of them from the start. My father doubted whether my oldest brother was actually his child, believing for years that my mother “trapped” him into a marriage, that the marriage forced him to leave college and leave behind his future. My mother believed that she had to give up her dream of becoming a singer/actress because she became a mother. She has told us over and over again, “If it wasn’t for you kids, I could have been a star on Broadway.”

I do not know what happened to my parents, what happened to my mother, my father before they became my parents. I do know they were lost, so lost. When I was born, the fifth of five and the only girl, my parents were already deeply estranged. They kept having children because my father really wanted a girl. My father really wanted a girl. Did he not want my mother anymore?

After my father finally left my mother, I worked on keeping a relationship with him. Every time I have visited my father, from the time I was in high school until even now, my mother has felt angry and betrayed. She told me, “After everything your father did to me, how could you even want to see him? Every time you see him, it is like a knife in my back.” She hated that I loved him. She hated that he loved me.

When my mother had a full mastectomy a few years ago because of breast cancer, we had a conversation about how hard it was for her to take in the great outpouring of love for her that happened. Her many friends pitched in and cooked meals, came and took care of her, all her children were by her side. I finally asked her, “You don’t believe any of this do you? You don’t believe that anyone really loves you.” She said, “No, I don’t. I don’t really believe it. I don’t believe it at all.”

I really felt I got to see the girl in her at this moment. The girl who somehow learned that she was unlovable, that she was not enough. That there was something wrong with her. I got to see how she does not see the golden light that is her. That she has wanted to have that golden light be somewhere else.

A few years ago, she said to me, “Why don’t you write plays?” I could feel that it was her trying to give me her light, trying to have me live up to the potential that is in her. Wanting to live through me instead of through her own creative self. She even suggested one time that I bring her dreams to a dream therapy session, pretending they were mine, so she could find out what they meant. Instead of going and having a session herself.

I can feel how my mother could not face into her own creative and vital self, her own gorgeous light, and by not being able to do so, turned it against her children. How she had to have someone to blame for her own inability to step into her own true self. She blamed my father, still blames my father, and she blamed her children.

We grew up hearing her say, “If it wasn’t for you children….” and “You children sucked the lifeblood out of me.” She projected all of her possibility onto us, all of her light. Her main identity became that of being the mother of the five of us, of being the beloved mother.

When I first told my mother, in my mid-twenties that I was beginning to feel that something had happened to me as a child, something sexual, the first thing she said was that it was probably my father. I did not know what to say. Because I have no clear memory of the event, just the feeling memory, it opened the door for a great deal of speculation. I knew it was not my father, but she told me, “There were times when I was downstairs and you were upstairs when I would hear strange noises – I bet that’s when it happened.”

When I started the dreamwork, I was convinced I was the victim of some kind of childhood sexual abuse. But after a year, I had had no dreams, or so we thought, that showed this. I was really relieved to let it go. Relieved to write off all my terror and shame around my own sexuality as part of the process of my separating from the Divine. It took another several years for the dreams to take me back to it. To show me that something did happen. It took a long time for me to be able to receive what happened.

Because what happened was something with my oldest brother. Something probably before I was in second grade, before my self-conscious memory begins. In the house that we lived in until I was seven, my bedroom was in the attic, across the hall from my two oldest brothers. My other two brothers were downstairs, across a landing from my parent’s bedroom.

I do not remember the details, just the feeling. The terror and the absolute conviction that it was my fault. The way that I believe in the dream that I must have turned on the saw. That it must have been me that cut myself. Just like in the dream, it does not enter into my reality that my mother had anything to do with it.

How could my mother have had anything to do with it? After all, what happened with my brother was with my brother. We were two young kids. We were probably just curious about our sexuality, innocent in our curiosity. The feeling I have is that a line was crossed and I did not know to stop it and he did not know that it was not okay to cross it. That I was projecting the Animus onto him, the way I projected the Animus onto all my brothers, making him big and powerful in some way because of the projection. It is not as if she were there, making it happen. Not as if she wanted something to happen.

My mother told me that she often wondered what happened up in the attic. I wonder why she did not go up to find out. I wonder why a little girl was in the attic with two preteen boys whose hormones were just beginning to flood their bodies. I wonder why my room was in the attic, far away from my parents, instead of in one of the three bedrooms on the second floor that were next to their bedroom.

What was I doing up there? What was my mother unconsciously doing leaving us in the attic by ourselves?

And where was my father? My father reacted to his difficult marriage, to the stress of having many small children at such a young age, by working a great deal, by not being around.

My family was crippled by the dynamics of the Big Lie. My mother blamed my father, my father blamed my mother. My father acted out by leaving, justifying his action through shame, “You are all better off without me.” Then feeling betrayed by his children. My mother acted out against her children.

The dream of the circular saw graphically illustrates what happened in my psyche with my mom. How in the dynamic of our relationship, unconsciously and sometime consciously, she cut me at the very place that I receive, at the heart of the feminine. Trying to cut off all possibility for me to feel anything sensual.

My mother has spent her life trying to find love in the outer world, feeling she needed to manipulate to get that love. Living the life of Psyche. First with my father and other men and then with her children. The terrible seed that was planted in the place of her separation from her true self, her relationship with the Divine, with me was that of competition, jealousy. She did not want me to receive the love she did not have. A seed that has grown to sprout rage and resentment and deep sadness in her. Every risk I have taken in my life has been met with her rage and disdain.

I learned not to have needs, or if I did, to try to hide them, manipulating to get those needs met. I grew up chasing after the love in the outer world, just the way my mother chased the love. I learned well how to be Psyche, eagerly embracing the search for love in the world rather than feeling the deep grief, the deep bereftness. Rather than feeling the deep fear of facing into the Divine. I became utterly lost to my true self in the same way my mother was lost to her true self. My complicity in what happened with my brother was probably me chasing after the love with him, a little girl innocently offering myself to him in desperation to receive love, projecting the Divine onto him.

When I entered my marriage, I was as lost as my mother was when she entered her marriage. Utterly bereft of my true self, utterly bereft of the love from the Divine. I did what my mother did – I worked to create a fairy tale out of the marriage. I projected the Divine onto my husband instead of allowing him to be his human self. And when I became a mother myself, I worked to create a fairy tale around motherhood as well. I did exactly what my mother did, just in a different way.

I grew up believing the lie that you could not have a life if you had children. I felt I had to make a choice between myself and any child I would have – so I choose to not have children for a long time. I did not want to have a child who was needy needing me. It seemed that it would have meant giving up my soul. And I was afraid that I would only hurt a child that was under my care.

My soul was already lost, but I did not know it.

When I had a daughter, Samantha, I swore that I would not give up my life to have her. I also swore that I would love her in a way that my mother could not love me. I was going to do it differently.

But I have not done it differently. I have done only a different version of the Big Lie. I have projected my brilliant white light, my luminous child self onto my daughter. Wanting her to have everything I did not have, wanting her to have the best, wanting her to feel she is loved.

When she was born, I immediately became the mother bear in a horrible way, not wanting her to be very far away from me. I felt that when she slept, she needed to be touching me in order to feel safe. I hovered over her. I had many, many moments where I did not trust my husband with her. Instead of threatening to smother her with a pillow, I was smothering her with my “love.” The dreams have worked to correct this in me. But when I do not know my true self, when I am not being the girl, not receiving His love, His specific love for me, I then project my child self onto my daughter.

I have projected the abandoned girl, the scared girl, the lost girl. I have wanted to protect her from everything, everyone. I have wanted to protect her from her own feelings, her own experience, including her feelings around the falling apart of my marriage. I have wanted to blame my husband for her pain around the breakup of our marriage. All projections.

The seed that was planted in the separation from the Divine in my mother manifested as rage, jealousy, control, manipulation, meanness. The seed that was planted in my father manifested as withdrawal, rage, silence, shame. The seed that was planted in my separation has been a combination of what I learned and inherited – I have hidden my feelings, hidden who I am. I have manipulated my husband, not telling him my true feelings, my true needs. I have betrayed friends out of my fear of intimacy. I have abandoned people I loved and who loved me, the way I abandoned my true self.

I have hidden behind the shield of victim – just as my mother and father both have hidden behind the shield of victim. I have used the shield of victim of abuse, victim of my mother, victim of my father, victim of my brother. I have used my childhood experiences as an excuse to not feel, as an excuse to stay hidden, as an excuse to not face into taking responsibility for my own failings, as an excuse to not accept myself, as an excuse to not enter into my relationship with the Divine. As an excuse to say no to God. Even when I was no longer frozen.

I have given myself away by diminishing and hiding my own needs, making the other’s needs more important. Making the needs of my mother, my father, my brothers, my husband, my friends, the stranger walking down the street more important. Manipulating all the time to get my needs met.

With my daughter, I have made her needs more important than mine as well. I have done the same dance of manipulation I have always done. Doing what many mothers who are surrendered to the Big Lie do – try to live my light through her.

The Return

Dream:

I am very small and in a bar with three of my brothers. A large man comes and says it is time to go home, that he will drive me. I leave with him, leaving my brothers behind. They do not notice. In the car, he tells me that he has an errand to run before taking me home and that it is a little out of the way. I say, okay. I feel complete trust and have no worries about where we are going or why. We drive for a long time through city streets that look vaguely familiar. Finally, he stops at a small apartment building, like the apartment building my parents lived in when I was born, gets out and goes into the building. I stay in the car, waiting for him.

I am just waiting, not thinking of anything, not wondering where he is or what is happening. All I need to do is wait for him. It is a very quiet feeling. Then, a brilliant white light shoots out of the building and comes toward me. As it gets closer, I see there is a shape to it. When it stops in front of me, I see that it is a white dove. I am filled with awe. All of the rest of the dream falls away – it is just me and the white dove hovering in front of me, both of us surrounded by white light. Then the dove gives me something – I look down and it is a perfect infant girl, bathed in the light, looking directly at me.

I can feel a protectiveness around my mother that is part of the girl who still wants her mother to love her, who still cannot believe that her mother would take a saw to her. When I protect my mother, I am really just protecting myself from feeling and knowing what I know. But, when I let go of my mother, when I let go of needing my mother to be any other way than she is, to feel any other way than she feels, when I let go of my brothers, when I let go of needing to be something to others, what I can receive is my child self. My child self that comes from the Divine, that does not come from any mother. The child self that is not encrusted with the wounds and betrayals of generations of RNA code inherited from the matriarchal line.

The child self that comes from the Divine is simply the child, my child. I am the child who only wants the love, only wants to be with the Divine. Only wants to wait in the car for Him, only wants to be taken home to my true father, my true mother. When I am this child self, I only want the same thing for my mother, for my father, for my brothers. I only want them to know themselves, to know their own, beautiful, true child soul selves.

It is when I am this child that I can feel the full force of the pain of how my family was crippled by the setup of the Big Lie. How the seed of rage grew in my mother toward my father. How the seed of rage grew in my father toward my mother. How that rage was planted and acted out on all of their children.

I can feel the full force of how this rage was acted out on me.

I can receive the horrifying image of the saw slicing into my vagina, cutting off all of my feeling. Cutting off the possibility of receiving the Divine. I can receive the reality that I accepted the cutting, that I even accepted the lie that I cut myself. I can even receive that after a while, I readily took over the cutting of myself.

When I am my true child self, receiving the Big Love instead of the Big Lie, when I am receiving the Divine love, then I am stepping away from being Psyche chasing after love in the world, then I am stepping away from being Demeter. I am stepping into my particular version of Persephone’s journey moving to being united with the Divine.

When I am my true child self, then I can step into loving my daughter without projecting my light onto her. I can love her for her light, I can love her and support her in all of her experiences. Not making her bigger or less than me, but honoring her in her journey to find the Divine love in her.

When I was pregnant, I had the feeling that the child in me did not really belong to me. That I was being given the opportunity to cherish and witness this glorious being as she moved into and through her life. I am returning to that feeling, knowing that she is her own light and it is only my job to love her as her.

The only way I can do this is by being the girl myself. By being the girl delivered by the dove, the spirit, the one directly from the Divine. By being the girl, I can step into my creative, sensual life with Him. And I can be an example of that for my daughter as she finds her way to her creative, sensual life with Him, however that looks for her.

When I am the girl delivered of the spirit, the dove, then I am home, then the wound of the cutting done first by my mother, as it was probably done to her, and then by my own hand, can be healed.

from Marc Bregman

There are two versions of the story of Chronos. One is the better known story of the father who devours his children. The other, lesser known, is that Chronos was not a tyrant who devoured his children, but that he ruled over a golden age. Why does the mother accuse the father of such a heinous crime? Because it is her crime. It is her unconscious desire to kill her children, a desire that comes from her ownership of them.

On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you
yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love
but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward
nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer’s hand
be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Because children come from her being, the mother projects her soul child self onto her children and therefore, in a moment of enigmatic tragedy, she births herself and loses herself, often forever. Whatever potential she had for herself as a virginal bride becomes lost in motherhood and she forgets the virgin inside of herself.

Pregnant women often become angry at their husbands even as they are giving birth. This rage is really the loss of innocence and the pain of the final nail in the coffin of putting Persephone’s journey suddenly out of reach. For the mother cannot be Persephone. She is Demeter, watching her daughter, claiming the prize and unable to let go of her. She condemns the daughter’s actions by condemning the male who would love her. She condemns her husband for loving the daughter and she condemns the daughter for receiving the love. Deep in the bowels of her own soul, she has been betrayed. From this betrayal, she is not the one but she still yearns to be the one. For the Demeter mother, if motherhood is the price to be paid, then it must account for something – power, prestige, love – something.

None of these things are real, of course, for the only love that is real is the love given to one’s self. The pain of watching the daughter receive the love is often too much. Jealousy and competition seep in. The mother cannot let go of the daughter or she lives vicariously through the daughter or she hates the daughter or she may even attempt to sicken and/or kill the daughter. The extreme of this last example is Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy in which a mother will poison or kill the child in order to gain attention for herself. Examples of this may seem to most to be an anomaly, but symbolically it is inherent in the suffering of many women and how they quietly grieve their own losses, watching their daughters attempt to live the life they gave them. In fact, the mother has lost nothing.

The child self still awaits inside of her. A woman can have a child and still be the beloved, she can have a child and still be her child self, she can have a child and still be a lover. Perhaps it is easier to project that child self onto the child rather than claim it for herself. Perhaps she never knew the potential within, but when she sees the love of her child, she begins to remember the love she herself is worthy of.

In this complexity of emotions and projections, it is to be remembered that the mother is always the little girl waiting to be found, waiting to be loved and carried and prized. Waiting to grow in the bosom of the Divine love. If only she would remember and travel in Persephone’s footsteps. This deep and urgent unrecognized need becomes the fabric of evil that is woven around a woman’s heart, often without her even knowing it. It creeps inside her in the middle of the night, when she least expects it.

She forgets herself, forgets her need, lives for her child. She forgets herself, forgets her husband, lives for her child. She forgets herself, forgets her child, forgets, forgets, forgets. But the pathology is “good.” It lavishes great things onto the mother, encouraging the soul to forget its loss. Psyche’s lament is that she got to be the goddess. She lost her soul, but she became the goddess. It seems like a good trade-off, for there is power and wisdom in the hierarchy of the matriarchy. The daughter, on the other hand, is weak, powerless and vulnerable. In this setup, one would rather control the daughter than be the daughter for it seems to be the better position.

The child, however, does not want to be the mother, does not want wisdom, does not want power, does not want control, does not want responsibility. The child wants the Divine, wants love, wants the Father. The child wants to be cherished and lifted up. The child wants to ride the white stallion, to join with the Divine.

The hurt and rage inherent in this split in the woman who is both child and mother, the mother lost from herself who projects her own beauty onto her children, is one of the most painful experiences and terrible splits in the human psyche. So great is this tragedy that great harm is unconsciously done to both mother and child if the set of circumstances is not corrected. If the mother can only find her soul once again, if she can only let the child be the child and let herself be the child, too, she could navigate through this complicated projection. A woman’s desire to give birth to a child seems powerful and poignant, but the truth is that the desire to be with the Divine and to be the child being birthed in the psyche is also a powerful need. Unfortunately, this need comes later in life, if at all.

The biological imperative sees to it that bearing children is a woman’s first need. Her goal is to be married, mated and with child because that is her sense of her womanness. It is not the sense of womanness of a Valkyrie. Whether or not a woman is aware of this, she carries the seeds of her own pain for the true nature of her soul cries out for liberation. Ignoring it does nothing but create depression, suffering and the unconscious acting out onto the child. In Sue’s dream, the violence reaches a crescendo as the mother takes an electrical saw to her daughter’s vagina. Postpartum depression is exactly this repressed rage. It is as if the children have kept the mother from the fulfillment of her own need.

The mother who finds the love becomes the best mother. The mother who does not find the love is a threat and a danger to her children. The mother who does not find the love cannot truly love her child for she has no love to give. She hopes others will love her child, but she secretly hopes for that love herself. She becomes jealous and hurt and resentful, for the happiness her child receives pricks her soul and reminds her of her own state of being bereft of the love.

How can she revel in her child’s success when she herself is lost from the love? This blind spot allows pathology tremendous range to commit a great deal of emotional damage without the mother’s awareness. Therefore, the dark mother that feeds on the corpse of the soul’s separation piles one betrayal after another onto the poor woman who brings life into the world. It is not the father that devours the children. It is the mother. It is the greatest horror and an unintentional fact of life, for she could not live with herself, could not live with the sin of it, if she knew what was happening. Because of this, someone else must be blamed. The weight of this tragedy becomes the judgment upon the male.

This is the Big Lie. It is only when the heart is broken, like the pomegranate, revealing the tears of pain that this truth is revealed and the innocence of this need is accepted. Until that moment, the lie must go on. For the results of this denial are so great that it cannot be faced. The mother could never see the damage she does to her children, for it is her very essence of belief that she loves her children and would never do harm. Only when she herself becomes the object of love can she be able to see the damage she may have caused and accept the horror of her actions. Buoyed by the love and the forgiveness, she is allowed to be human and young. Buoyed by the love, she is allowed to make mistakes. She is just a child who grew up too fast, like everyone else.

from Susan Marie:

Into My Hands

Dream:

I am returning from some event and enter the house of an older couple instead of entering my brother’s house. I know that it is time to do something and I have a feeling that it is suicide. I go to a small plain bedroom, get under the covers, lie on my side and wait. I know it is time. I put my feet together and my hands together, then hear two loud pops under the covers. I can feel that my feet and my hands have been shot through with something. I think, “Thank God, it is finally done.” I wait, wondering if I will bleed to death, not really able to move. I feel in a different place entirely, like the room has faded away even though it is still there.

Then, two women enter the room. I am scared of them, afraid they want to give me a blood transfusion and I do not want them to do that. They pull back the covers and I am surprised that there is little or no blood. One woman lies down facing me but does not touch me. The other leans over, moves my arm and writes a symbol on my left breast, just above the spot where a pre-cancerous tumor was removed several years ago, just above my heart. I am afraid she is marking me for some kind of medical procedure. I am too weak to move.

I woke up knowing that this was a stigmata dream. Even before the dream, I knew something was happening, knew He was doing something inside of me. I felt like I was waiting. Felt that once I could pull back the projection of the pain, once the pain was just what it is, that something would happen. After this dream, the grief and the sadness moved into fear. The kind of fear that enters my body with sensual electricity. It has been entering me all week, filling me up even when I am working at my software job, even when I am walking my daughter to school.

In the dream, I am so glad it is done. I am so glad it is done. Marc and I spoke of the stigmata as a way of stepping deeper into His consciousness.

My fear of the women in the dream shows how I still have residual trauma. That there is still in me the knee jerk reaction that something terrible is going to happen. The two Anima figures have come to be with me, have come to help me to accept this gift of the dream, to accept the wounds. I still have the knee jerk reaction that something bad is about to happen and project onto them that they want to harm me. The women are there to help me accept the gift. When the one woman writes a symbol on me, the residual trauma tells me that she is going to do something terrible, some experiment, she is going to cut me. I see the symbol as a door as if there is something to go through, as if there is some big awful thing on the other side.

The symbol she wrote on me was not a door. When I showed the symbol to Marc, he saw immediately that it was the Jewish Chai symbol – the symbol of peace, of God’s love. And she placed it directly on the place where I had had a tumor, directly on a wound, a wound over my heart. She was giving me God’s love, giving it specifically to me and specifically on the place of my wound.

She was showing me that my wound is done, that it is healed. That it is time to accept the gift of His wounds. With the gift of His wounds, comes the ever deepening gift of His love.

In my knee jerk, I was even scared that there was no blood. Why was I not bleeding? I asked Marc. He said because He already shed His blood. Because receiving the stigmata is not about shedding blood, but about receiving. It is about Dying to Him, Dying to God.

By falling into the deep well of my trauma, falling through my experiences, falling past them, falling past any connection of the pain to anything in the world, by falling all the way down, I fall through. From the wound of my separation, the wound of my trauma to receiving His wounds. I fall into receiving His love.

I am learning to receive His love, learning to receive the healing of my wounds, learning to receive Him, His consciousness, learning to be the monk in the world that I am. Learning to wake up in the morning not under the shadow of pathology’s darkness, but held in His love. Waking up as the woman of God that I am.

Waking up to the familiarity of this feeling, waking up to the remembering of it. My body is remembering. I am remembering.

I am remembering because it is time to remember. I am remembering His love and His passion. I am remembering my grief and my love and my passion. I feel I am just now beginning.

Untethered

Dream:

I am in a house with others. I go upstairs and throw up in the bathroom. I feel so relieved.

Switch

I am living in an attic of a house when some men arrive. They claim they are there to do renovations. I wonder if I will be able to live there while they do it. They are good-natured, joking a bit and do not really say. They are gutting the place, taking it down to bare bones, then they talk about taking off the roof. I realize I cannot stay there, so I leave. As I leave, the three men lean out the window and croon a song to me.

Switch

I am walking down a beach and I can feel how right it is that I left the house. The beach is edged with an ancient forest, the trees higher than redwoods. They are gorgeous. Some are dead and some are still alive. One is sitting out in the water on its own little island with a great deal of the roots exposed. Some have little plaques with information about the specific tree. I notice that the handwriting is my handwriting. Then the forest ends and there is a big open beach. On the beach, a man is playing in the shallows of the water, running really fast, then throwing himself onto his back and gliding on the water. Sometimes he glides on his feet. I want to do that, too. When he turns, I notice that he has a penis growing out of the back of his neck.

When I woke from this dream, the words untethered and unfettered were bouncing around in me. I also woke feeling completely emptied out, completely exhausted. Purged. As if I had spent the night actually throwing up.

I am remembering Him, remembering my relationship with Him, the feeling of being in relationship with Him. The more I remember Him, the more I receive Him, receive myself with Him, the more I feel as if I have walked through a threshold, one that I cannot go back through anymore. And the more I receive, the more He can help me to purge out what is not of me, what is not the true me.

I have spent a great deal of energy looking to the outside world to anchor me. Frantic energy. I have looked to my mother, my father, my brothers, my friends, my lovers, my husband, even my daughter. I have looked to my writing, my work, my independence. And I have looked to my stories to anchor me - to tell me who I am in relationship to the world. I have used all of this, especially my stories, to shape who I am.

Because when I am unanchored in my connection with my self, unanchored from the Divine, I am desperate to sink an anchor somewhere else. When I am unanchored from God and I look elsewhere to be anchored, I anchor in pathology. I become tethered to pathology out of my desperation.

I remember my connection with God as a child. It was terrifying. I could not contain it. I do not remember the moment of losing the connection, but I do remember suddenly realizing I was alone for the first time. That the presence I had felt was gone.

I remember that this was even more terrifying. In the vacuum, I turned to the world, turned to my mother, turned to my brother, turned to the construct and gyroscopy of the lie and allowed pathology to become anchored in me. In the vacuum, I turned to pathology. I allowed the pathological dark mother to lead me through my life, tethered on a leash.

I have been tethered to pathology and I have desperately clung to that tether.

In the dream, this is being purged out of me. The tether to pathology makes me sick now. I feel relieved that it comes out of my body, relieved to feel what it feels like to be untethered and unfettered.

I am remembering Him and when I do, then my anchor is inside with Him. When I remember Him, nothing else matters, not even the stories. I do not need them.

When I am untethered and unfettered, when the anchor pathology has in me is purged out, I am just me. A woman of God in all my quirkiness, all my messiness, all my fierceness, all my passion, all my grief. I can return to the ancient forest in the dream where I have been before, a place I vaguely remember. I can find the notes I wrote trying to explain everything. I can find my way back to Him.

He is reclaiming me and I am reclaiming Him.

****
Changing Every Cell

Dream:

I experience inside my body a vibrating, electric, almost sexual energy that begins to spread to every cell. I know that it is changing, in some physical way, every cell, and I recognize the feeling as the feeling of Alchemy. When I realize this, I clench my body tight to stop it. Then I remember that I do not have to stop it and simply relax, letting it move through my body even though I feel afraid. A man watches me.

This dream shows how, at the moment of change, the moment when Alchemy is happening in my physical body, I want to stop it. The moment of trying to clench down on my body to stop the Alchemy is the residual of a NO that has been stuck in my throat since I was a girl.

The NO comes from my trauma, from the moment when something happened with my oldest brother, when a line was crossed. There was a yes in me before the line was crossed – I adored my brother, projecting godlike things onto him and onto all of my older brothers.

But when the line was crossed, there was in me a NO WAIT that got stuck. Just as there was a NO in me about what I saw in my family as a young child and did not want to see.

Because the wound with my brother was based in sensuality, sexuality, the NO has gotten stuck around my sensuality. Whenever He tries to come to me, whenever the Animus tries to give me a gift, I feel the surging energy of that NO. It screams in me NO NO NO NO NO. Whenever He tries to gift me with anything, whenever He asks me to do exactly what it is that I want to do, what comes up is the NO NO NO NO NO.

Here He is, offering me the greatest gift, the process of Alchemy, of true change where I can drop into being more truly myself, where I can drop into a deeper relationship with the Divine and my knee-jerk reaction is to try to stop it. It is as if the gift is an act of violation. I cannot even have Him entirely in the picture.

With any gift I have ever received – the gift of love, of friendship, of trust, the gift of being shown my gifts by Him – the first thing that comes out is the NO. It is a subtle trick of the pathogen – it uses the NO that got stuck in my throat against me. The NO that I could not get out when I was a girl, or if I did it was not heard/believed.

Pathology would have me believe that if I say YES to the gift, then I am saying YES to my brother – that I am saying YES to being violated.

• Essays