“I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changin’ all the time…but he’s no good at being uncomfortable, SO, he can’t stop stayin’ exactly the same…”
Oh, she’s brilliant:
“Curious, you’re lookin’ down your nose at me…Courteous to try and help, but let me set your mind at ease…”
There is something to be said for being comfortable with being uncomfortable. “I can’t help it, the road just rolls out BEHIND me”…hahahha! Your assistance is to no avail…and, by the way, I don’t want the bail…
Yesterday, I alluded to the nicknames Resourceress and Mary Poppins. They are both actually nicknames that two different friends have given to me over the years.
Now, as it happens, I have always been a huge Mary Poppins fan…my Pinterest board titled “the real Mary Poppins” is a reference to my personal belief that we wise and creative women are all good “witches”, or alchemists, spiritual midwives, healers…in fact, I believe that not for the intelligence of creative women throughout history…well…I doubt the race would have survived THIS long. After all, it seems pretty obvious that men are trying their very best to wipe us off the face of…another day…
Mary Poppins was magical…a good witch, even though Disney didn’t blatantly portray her as one. We recognize each other, don’t we…and I like myself for admiring her more than the other Disney heroines…!
Anyway…it is the metaphor – strong, strong, metaphor that she can PULL ANYTHING SHE NEEDS OUT OF HER BAG!!! that insinuates her as every woman…as any mother could certainly attest. But mother or not, few women in our culture have not had to make something out of nothing, pull off a seemingly impossible feat in the stress of the day, and dress up the mundane while entertaining the “children” of all ages. Take the lead, git ‘er done…and don’t break a sweat, or a heel, doing it!
My Mother – an angel like Lincoln’s (the man knew…) – set a great example of grace under pressure. Damn she had a hard life. Good, but I sure wouldn’t want to trade places. Her mother’s was harder…and I know that you see it in your own heritage.
They truly were “resourceresses”…a word that I think my friend, the artist Richard Schemm, made up. He likes to make up words, but also, he has extraordinary women to appreciate in his life. He will tell you: we resource. It’s what we do.
Once I drove from northern Michigan to northern California. I was staying with friends in San Fransisco, but never having been to their NEW home, they decided to meet me at the highway and lead me from there through the complicated streets…so, we stopped for dinner at one of the chain restaurants that congregate near the exits. We ate, and preparing to leave, Debi said, “I have to stop on the way to the house to buy one of those phone jacks that adapt a single jack to a double”…I reached into my purse and pulled one out. She smiled knowingly, and called me Mary Poppins. It just so happened to be the very last thing that I grabbed – along with the phone- as I was walking out on my deadbeat husband, heading off into the distant unknown…
I just watched an episode of Renovation Raiders on HGTV…and cried. My Mother, Doris, was THE original “renovation raider.” She was a homemaker with five – count ’em – FIVE children within eight years in age. When she got an idea to remodel, add on space, or redecorate…she did it herself, and pulled off the install within hours. She would plan everything out, from moving walls, electrical work, whatever the project called for, to the nth degree.
This was the 1950’s, folks – there was no such thing as a HOME IMPROVEMENT store!!! If you needed an electrical outlet, a window or door, flooring, drywall, etc…you went to the lumber yard and ORDERED it…and often waited weeks for it all to arrive…talk about planning!
My parents were by no means traditional in their roles, but my Dad did control the purse strings, and any home project had to pass his budget approval. This meant that she often pulled off miraculous makeovers with pennies she squirreled together out of her grocery pocketbook…
She once decided to turn an extra bedroom, located next to the kitchen, into a dining room by opening up the wall between the two rooms. Drywall, move electrical outlets, install a chandelier…Piece of cake! What no one (least of all my father!) knew at the time: she had simultaneously planned to knock out the back EXTERIOR (brick!) wall of the new dining room, remove the existing window and install a sliding door-wall out to the patio!
So, she secretly enlisted the help of her sister, had all the material delivery scheduled the morning OF the remodel…and waited for all five kids to leave for school, and my dad to leave for work… and we came home that afternoon to a beautiful new dining room and a yard full of cheering neighbors!
She’d put on her folk or country music (she also played the guitar and sang) and get to work…here’s her favorite song:
Tomorrow I will tell you about how those nicknames in the title came about…stay tuned!
Van Morrison just does it for me…what can I say…please enjoy the music as you read…
Last November I went through a health crisis. More accurately, my health crisis BEGAN…it’s been rather ongoing since. It started, instantly, at midnight on a Monday. I was SICK. Exhausted and in pain, “the voice” woke me from my feverish sleep at three a.m. of the third night…I mean, a BOOMING MALE VOICE woke me out of a deep sleep: “This is a gallbladder attack!”
THAT never would have occurred to me! I suspected some mild food allergies…but I have the constitution of a horse…so, I boot up and find a list of gallbladder symptoms…and, check…check…check…
When the symptoms had not subsided a week later, I went in to see a doctor. (Don’t use me as an example…) At this point, I was feeling much better. I was doing just fine eating nothing but beets, and having lost close to fifteen pounds now…but no more pain or fever.
Try to tell a doctor that you know what the problem is because A VOICE WOKE YOU AT THREE A.M. AND TOLD YOU…really, you try that…I’d be curious…and so, the tests, etc…I have gallbladder issues…but that isn’t THE HEALING this post is about…
That near death experience was just the beginning…I literally -physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually- became instantly intolerant of anything – food, words, people – that were toxic to my now acutely sensitive system. I would not wish this on anyone. Phew! My life changed that November night, and will not ever be the same.
About a week later I had what I only recently learned theologists call a “conversion experience”. Words will never describe it. It began as a hot flush, ears turned red and all…and as that sudden heat began to subside, an altered state of consciousness overtook me like a gentle, warm wave…and the ABSOLUTE peace lasted for several hours, until I fell asleep and woke the next morning.
And I have spent the last six months since in the discovery of a new life, a new identity…and it has been the most difficult time I have ever been through. My initial response to the experience was that I must be dying…and yet here I am…astonishingly intolerant of so much on so many levels!
And never better, Thank You! Would I go back if I could? Well, life was easier BEFORE the healing had begun…for one thing, I prided myself on being able to get along with just about everyone. Those days are over! My nerves are shot…I like to say that I am having a nervous breakthrough. I am learning how to “speak my truth”, and to be brutally honest (we might as well), and it is NOT PRETTY.
It is ugly precisely because I lost my co-dependence, my people pleaser…have you seen it? I wouldn’t pick it up if I were you…it’s lethal. Two days ago I alluded to this in my post “Show Me How Big Your Brave Is”…because if you are going to withdraw your co-dependent support from all of your relationships, if you are going to be honest with everyone all the time, you had better get your brave on…it is LONELY out here!
This is not to say that I don’t have any tact, or remember how to behave in public, but I am referring to my close encounters with family and friends. They changed that night, too…apparently, I threw up and off my old belief systems. Now I hear “the voice”…and I know it speaks the truth…as I said in another earlier post, “Maybe I’m Crazy…” (Post of March 15, 2013) Listen to the words of that song…they speak right into your heart.
All I know…well…it isn’t anything like what I used to know…as Oprah would say, “What I know for sure…” I know that ART matters. It heals. When I did not know what else to do with myself, I dug my old 1997 copy of The Artist’s Way out of a dusty box in the basement, and just coincidentally the next day Kelly Forrester sent an email announcing her class based on The Artist’s Way…
And now, months later, the class has continued with the sequel, Walking In This World. And the healing continues…Julia Cameron says:
“Sometimes when we get angry enough at being treated as if we are small, we get brave enough to trust those who think -and say – we might be big. One slight too many and we finally say our true name…”
Yesterday I snapped at my elderly father…again…about smoking in the house. I have asked what seems like dozens of times for him to smoke outdoors, weather permitting, as I work to get my home ready to market. As any one selling- or buying – a home can attest, the smell of cigarette smoke is a deterrent. Now, it is true that “weather permitting” has precluded the possibility of being outdoors here until the last week or so…even now the night and early morning temperatures are at or below freezing.
It is also true that “weather permitting” means something entirely different to HIM than to me…I hold an expectation that sitting in the warm sun in a sweater or bathrobe is a pleasant thing…our back deck hosts a comfortable table and chairs. The birds are everywhere enjoying feeders, houses, and baths. The landscape changes daily at this time of year.
Our front porch could be on the cover of a magazine…wicker club chairs pillowed to nap in…curtains billowing, lamps and racks of magazines and…dirty ashtrays…
This morning I came downstairs after nine, sun streaming in the back door to illuminate him sitting at the kitchen table en-plumed in a cloud. He saw me and immediately hid the cigarette under the table.
To say that my father is a scoundrel would be a gross understatement. At a younger, more virile age he was a monster, a sociopath of novel proportion. That story is for a different venue – but as a little example, we do have a standing joke in my family that he should reveal where he buried Hoffa before he dies…and it’s sorta funny! How he managed to escape prison, or being murdered is beyond me. He did disappear for several years, I imagine until the statute of limitation ran out on some crime he committed. But now he is a weak old man…
Don’t think me magnanimous or overly kind by taking him in. As there are, truly, two sides to every story, he also provided a wonderfully adventurous childhood rich in the support of art and music, and the best private education drug money could buy…
He is the same Dad who taught me to swim at the age of three, to be kind to animals, to confidently pilot a boat through ten foot waves. He saved my family when our forty-two foot cruiser sank in a sudden storm out in the middle of Lake Huron…He is the same Dad who trooped we five mischievous kids across the country, up and down the St. Lawrence Seaway, over to the Bahamas fishing, and instilled in us an awe of nature. He hired me in high school to paint a mural across the side of his construction office; and sat by my bed and listened intently when I grieved the loss of my best friend. He is the same parent, in partnership with my Mother, who encouraged me to paint and draw and never to be bigoted toward any other human, nor to measure myself below any other human.
He taught me that everything comes in dichotomous evidence…everything is perspective. Everything. Not a day goes by that I don’t appreciate that without him, I would not be who I am…
“Everybody’s been there, everybody’s been stared down by the enemy”…I often feel quite foolish here, as I write and post these missives. I am in the sixtieth year of my life, and I feel like I am beginning to express myself honestly after a lifetime of holding back. The shadow was winning, sucking the life right out of me…my history of silence was not doing me any good.
It seems to me that the youth of our culture are so very much smarter in so many ways, and yet I see them succumbing to the same demons of my generation. The addiction of codependence pervades our consciousness and looms larger than life. It’s a paper tiger, but a strong addiction never the less. We risk a painful, slow extinction if we do not wake to it’s evil.
And yet I sense theurgy…evidenced by the creative renaissance in music and in art. When our very existence is threatened everyday, when we feel increasingly powerless, how else can we respond but to become increasingly creative? We had better enlarge ourselves to beat that tiger at his own game. We owe it to ourselves, and to our youth.
So…say what you wanna say, and let the words fall out. I want to see you be brave. I want to see you…and Thank you, Sara.
Well…I’m heavily in like…I had not been a Michael Buble fan until seeing this clip. He handles a heckler, expands himself and performs a random act of kindness and generosity.
I took this off of my new favorite blog, A Thousand Shades of Gray. I know nothing of this writer, Jill Salahub, but do yourself a favor…check out her sweet, well written blog…you’ll be glad you did.
She says people are sick and tired of being afraid. I know I am. But I am in it, this “shitstorm” of shame and guilt and fear…the street fight of my life. Vulnerability, come to find out, is my greatest strength. And I am blessed with “move the body” friends who I can count on to show up for me no matter what; I have won the friend lottery. They live in vulnerability, too…and I am learning how to show up for them; that is my greatest moment of honor. As Brene Brown says, that is when I am aligned with my values, and courage is my value:
Anyone who has been around me for any length of time has heard me quip, “I’d tell you my whole story all at once, but then you might not buy my book.” and they laugh…finally, perhaps, at the age of fifty-nine (damn, I wish I’d have gotten wiser younger!) I am beginning to realize that I need to choose more carefully those with whom I can trust my story:
The bottom line here is that I want to live wholeheartedly. Perhaps for the first time in my life I understand the stakes. None of us are getting out of here alive, but if I cannot have less fear in my days, let me meet those days with courage and the grace to show up for the street fight armed only with vulnerability.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation…for the nature of reality, it turns out, is a conversation. David Whyte has been my favorite poet for many years, since a friend gave me his newly published “The House of Belonging.” There are few lives lived in such genius, and we ought to take full advantage of their willingness to join with us…I’m sure he could have gotten a janitorial position with Will had he not been so brave. Every minute of this twenty minute talk is chock full of help for those of us busy shaping ourselves to fit this world.
So may we, in this life, TRUST to those elements we have yet to see or imagine…
A Painterly Home 