Category Archives: inspiration

Dec7

pull your head out of your past

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That was the message I “heard” in my morning meditation. Do my spirit guides know my language, or what?! I’ve been perseverating for days…weeks…months…years – okay – decades now, about doing something…anything…creative or productive or proactive to help myself out of this malaise. “This” malaise is commonly known as poverty. Struggling financially, but more so, spiritually.

The J.O.B. (Just Over Broke) hasn’t been working out so well the past decade or so…you don’t want me to work for you. Everyone I’ve worked for lately dies. Just sayin’…

Over 13 years ago I started this blog in an attempt to write my way out of a nervous breakdown. It worked, and I’ve been writing since. Several years ago I began making videos on my own YouTube channel, Crow Quill Tarot. I have also painted some paintings in that time period; I’ve drawn. Made jewelry. But I don’t feel creative. Getting started is always a challenge and requires a shove. But finishing…well, I’ll let you know when I’ve finished something.

Most of my adult life I have assigned myself a “winter project.” I enroll in a class or two, or study on my own, a new subject or skill I think I would like to master. This fall I decided to study astrology. After all, it’s all the rage. I’ve toyed with going back to making videos on the tarot channel, but there are hundreds (maybe thousands?) doing it, and well. People with far more technical expertise.

And many, if not most of them – certainly the most popular and successful, are incorporating astrology into the tarot readings. In fact, that is how they have “delineated” the collective. And there’s where I got hung up – right there, at delineation. Collective = our common humanity, if I understand it correctly. How we are not only alike, but psychically connected. That understanding I have no problem with. But once I start defining myself and others, and using a fixed set of criteria, I am in the business of predicting the future. I call that fortune telling. And not only has it never interested me, but it is a sad and gross mis-use of the infinitely present tarot.

“The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.” – Indigo Girls

So, I have been struggling to understand how astrology fits for me. I had a teacher in ninth grade who asked each student on the first day of her class what their sun sign was. Some didn’t know, so she asked their birthday and told them. Then she proceeded to assign us into study groups accordingly – that is, those students she didn’t send to the office to transfer to another classroom because their sign wasn’t compatible with hers.

When I listen to tarot readers using astrology to “clarify” messages I break out in a rash. It goes something like this: “this person may be a Leo or a Sag…or a Scorpio…or they could be…” until they’ve listed 9 out of the 12 signs. They have missed the point of the tarot entirely – which is a precise methodology for developing self awareness and hence, intuition. Intuition. Helllloooooooo! How intuitive are you if you need to list every possibility?! Make up your everlovin’ mind! WHAT are you saying, exactly? To me. I’m not listening because I want to know about my mother’s sister’s neighbor’s cousin. It sounds like they are trying to connect with everyone and anyone. Because that’s how they make money. And so, in the interest of learning, I have listened to many different readers addressing all the 12 zodiac signs. And identified with something in each of them. So now what?!

I want to make money. So I keep going back over this in my mind. And this morning I was meditating on why don’t I get astrology? Why isn’t it clicking for me?! And I heard, “because you are every sign.” Yes, yes I am.

And the bubble in my chest popped. I’m every sign. You are every sign. How can this be? Because we are not the past. We are not even who we were yesterday. We have been transfigured. We have risen. We do not need to keep reliving the crucifixion and the resurrection. We are on the other side of that now. It’s over. Pull your head out of your past.

“What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them, and they have changed since then.” – T. S. Eliot

Nov17

dimming up…

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“What fresh hell is this?” – Dorothy Parker

Living with chronic illness is exhausting, but by far the worst illness I deal with on a daily basis is the OPD. OPD (Obnoxious Personality Disorder) and it’s symptoms are debilitating. When I am miserable, feel like life is not treating me fairly and God has abandoned me, I know where to go for help. I go to church. Right here, today, with Carolyn Myss. She is my spirit animal, and lucky for me, she’s got clues to spare.

And then I channel my inner Elizabeth Bigelow and remind myself what a privilege it is to be alive in the here and now, even if I don’t know how the technology works…

Nov3

I won’t let you leave my love behind.

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Something remarkable and normal has happened. As I said in my last post, I have been going through a bit of a tough time. So when I went to bed shortly after dark last night I said a prayer. I asked very specifically to be shown that I am being heard and guided – and I said, “either in my dreams tonight or in my YouTube feed in the morning.” Strangely, I didn’t remember any dreams. But as I checked in after reading email and messages, here was the first video in my feed:

Next question! I’ve written about Tiokasin Ghosthorse in prior blog posts. I’ll try to link those at the bottom here. He teaches us that in the Lakota language there are no nouns. They don’t need them. They know something we don’t in our Western culture: everything is a verb. Everything is in relationship to everything else, and everything is in process. We are becoming.

I’m writing this on Saturday (to post Sunday) and the election is 3 days away. Everyone is on edge. Friends and family I haven’t heard from in years are contacting me and want to know what will happen. Throughout my adult life I have often been employed, paid or not, to be a psychic. I do know where this is going. I know who will win the election and I know what will transpire afterward (btw, I have predicted them all accurately, as a few close friends could attest. They all argued with me prior to election day in 2016.) However, I am not telling. You do not need to know. If you never hear anything else I ever say, hear this: you never need to know. This was explained to me directly by God, who showed up in a dream in my 20’s, and did not look at all as expected. We argued about that. I wanted proof. He pointed at the television and started playing movies made just for me with my people in them, showing me things I could not have imagined. That gave remote viewing a whole new meaning…

Yes, I read tarot cards. No, I am not a fortune teller. That is not what the tarot is for. The Indigo Girls said it best: “the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.”

You will be fine. No matter what happens, and most especially no matter how you feel about it. Did you think that meant it would be easy?! Yeah, I make that mistake myself, hence the dark night.

We are having a spectacular fall here along the Lake Michigan shore. The weather is warmer than I remember in a long while. I think we had snow last year by this time. Yesterday it rained gently off and on all day while the sun shone. In many native cultures they say that means you are being blessed. I’ll take it.

Big, Beautiful Questions: https://apainterlyhome.com/category/tiokasin-ghosthorse/

Oct27

get a real job

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He was a well educated professional. I was an unskilled hourly worker. I guess you could say he married below his station. In fact, he had a genius IQ and, like the movie character Little Man Tate, had his advanced degree by the age of nineteen. He went from college into an administrator position straight out of school. He was brilliant. But I was smart.

Within weeks of our getting married we were dealing with children in crisis. His dear daughter was being released from court-ordered drug rehab and he was excited to see her. He handed her the car keys and a wad of cash and told her to have fun with her friends. What a great Dad. I remember telling him, “I wouldn’t trade my smarts for yours for anything in the world. I hope your daughter survives to grow up. Meanwhile, what am I going to do with you for the the rest of my life?”

Like many unhappy couples, we primarily argued about money. Especially since we skipped silly little tasks like repairing the leaky roof in lieu of supporting the nearby casino. But if I brought this up he told me, “at least I have a real job.” I used to sing around the house, “why can’t you be like your big brother Bob – get a haircut and get a real job?!” Because I would make jokes about anything I couldn’t communicate any other way…a sort of last-ditch effort at making a point. From the abstract to the surreal I guess.

Just a few days ago a friend called to talk. She is in the grievous process of selling her home and filing for divorce after forty years of marriage. She stumbled upon his affair, apparently hidden for years at this point. Being in their 70’s now, I seriously doubt it’s his first. He’s always been rather distant. Emotionally unavailable. And, of course, we haven’t lived this long without having dealt with our share of hardship. I have watched for decades as she held that family together through thick and thin. Having lost her own parents early in life, she cared for his ornery, ungrateful mother through years of dementia with the patience of a saint. She nursed him back from the edge of death more than once, including donating an organ to save him. But he was preoccupied elsewhere. By divorcing, she’ll get half of everything, which is half of what she’d have if he’d died…and you wonder why women contemplate murder.

Let me make a monumentally long story short: I am dealing with the depression and angst of feeling like I have been stupid for the first 60 of my 70 years. Really – just downright, flat-out stupid. Trying to make relationships work with narcissists. The word familiar comes from family.

And part of this recent realization comes with the acknowledgement that I allowed my creativity to be sabotaged all of my adult life. In other words, I sabotaged it in deference to people pleasing. In a futile attempt at keeping my beautiful home and family together.

Like Camille Henrot, I did everything I could not to become an artist, and like Camille Henrot, I find art can help make sense of the world a little bit – or at least respect it’s nonsense. When I say respect, I mean like I respect the power of water, or nature. I mean respect like reverence for that which I find myself powerless to control.

Oct20

the cherished outcome

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“Oh love, bring every grief you’ve carried with you as a door you’ll walk right by / if you don’t stop to look with that loving heart and a troubled eye.”

Our troubles feel as if they are like stone, a compacted, impenetrable medium which will not allow us in. It’s time to “put my money where my mouth is…” so to speak. Time to show up, front and center, and face that stone inside, standing steadfast between me and my own liberation. I talk a good game, don’t I? All this wisdom about getting free. As if I had a clue.

When I am lost as I am this week, in the rock hard grief of my own making, I have few places I can turn. I can always turn to David Whyte. Ironically, I was introduced to him long ago by a friend I no longer have any contact with. She chose to stay in the comfortable captivity of her abusive marriage, and I had to stop pretending that I could be her supportive friend. If you read this journal once in a while, you’ll realize this theme has carried throughout the 13 years since I began here. I’ve gone no contact with more people than I have in my life anymore. Every single one has been a death I am mourning. In retrospect today, this seems an obvious theme. After all, I began this outlet as a means to help me process my divorce and separation from family, from everything I’d ever thought I wanted. To come up against that rock hard resistance and face the unknown.

C.S. Lewis is quoted as saying how shocked he was to realize that grief feels so like fear. There is good reason for that. Grief is the last doorway between us and our freedom, and we are terrified of our freedom. How, exactly, do we manage to be in the world, but not of it? Get back to me on that, won’t you, please?

It turns out that ignorance is never bliss; it’s really only ignorance. It also turns out that bliss was never the goal. It has always been awareness, whether we care to admit that or not. Bliss would be, well, blissfully easy by comparison. But awareness is how we get to freedom – which is our one and only job here. We like to pretend the god ate our homework. Yes, you read that right. So what is all this angst-ing about? Well, I have come up against the biggest boulder my heart has ever encountered, and I’m guessing you have one, too.

Since my teenage years, all of my relationships have been hard. I am hard. I have always been difficult to get along with. Something inside of me has always been as uncompromising as a boulder. I was the eldest of five children, and the scapegoat in a narcissistic family system. Yada, yada, yada…I married young. I got out as soon as I could, and I wasn’t going back. At the age of 24 I had my son, and he has been the light of my life. In many ways, my salvation. I don’t think I’d be alive today were it not for him, and I certainly wouldn’t be the person I am. He inspires me endlessly. But we are at odds right now, and it is breaking my heart. It has shaken me to my core.

Intellectually, I can explain everything. To tell the entire story, I have to begin with the health problems which impacted that pregnancy. I was always a nervous and thus scraggly kid. In high school I was diagnosed with bleeding ulcers. I struggled all of my young life to keep weight on. So I was considered medically malnourished when I became pregnant at 23, and I proceeded to lose 24 pounds. I gave birth to a healthy 9 pound, 6 ounce baby with teeth coming through his gums, but I left the hospital at just over 90 pounds. I’m 5′ 6″ tall. Perhaps because of this, he has always had some (miraculously mild) learning disabilities, despite an extraordinarily high I.Q.

During his first year in school he began to show behaviors that we would now recognize as autism. I took him to every doctor of every type that I could think of. We checked his eyesight, we checked his hearing, we checked his cognitive abilities. The doctors all told me exactly the same thing: this child is a genius. He is bored. With the wise counsel of some teacher friends we began a discipline of working through a daily checklist. I would write and draw it out on a blank sketchbook page at night, and he would work through it after school the next day. He had to complete it before he was allowed to play. It always included 2 or 3 light chores and 2-3 fun, creative activities. It always included Hug Your Mother (because I’m not above manipulation.) Then, an hour before bed we sat together and read a story or watched a favorite cartoon while I massaged his feet with a grounding oil, usually sandalwood. This routine was working beautifully. To this day, when he becomes stressed he will often create a checklist.

I am telling you this now because he has been struggling again. As mentioned recently, he is quite depressed. The aftermath of the recent natural disasters seems to have impacted him deeply. He is a highly sensitive person. But I, too, am struggling terribly as a direct result of interacting with him, in his mental and emotional distress. And because I am literally the only sober person he knows, I’m the sole voice of reason in his life right now. I must make mental health the priority of our lives.

And yesterday, I suddenly felt terribly helpless. I was consumed with fear, and I blew it. He came out of left field touting some wild conspiracy theory about the corrupt government having created the weather disaster and being out to get us all – and I lost my shit. It isn’t even that I necessarily disagree with everything he was saying, but I absolutely cannot – cannot – function from that perspective. It is mired in fear. It is entirely divisive. And it is utterly hopeless. Talk about a conspiracy!

I don’t know that I have ever screamed that loud before in my life. I screamed at the top of my lungs – at him. I told him he was dead wrong about so much of what he has recently adopted to believe. And in no uncertain terms I told him that he is subscribing to cult behavior, and that I am afraid for his sanity. I frightened him, and I frightened myself.

And so, shaken as I was yesterday, I must ask myself some very tough questions. Do I want to defend my own personal beliefs at the cost of anyone else’s freedom, including my sons’? What if he and I become estranged and never speak, as the current politics has divided so many families? Can I live with that? Are my convictions that important? Are yours?

Do I have other options here, besides finding “the truth” of the situation? Of course. Firstly, I recognize that if I am not experiencing peace, I have given away my sanity. Somewhere in the hours/days/weeks leading up to this blowup I have assigned meaning somewhere it doesn’t belong. If every upset is a setup (and it is,) I bought into somebody else’s agenda. Or in this case, depression. I picked it right up because it’s a familiar habit. And if I picked it up psychically, so did my empathic son. We can put it down just as fast. I’m not going to give assholes my vote this election. My pussy is not up for grabs. Neither is my mind. Out, demons, out! Here’s to our better angels.

Both my son and I lost our sense of humor – and perspective! After all, that’s what depression is. I fell into that bad habit, and so did he. Now I want my funny son back. I want my kind, intelligent son back. I’m thinking that screaming at him isn’t the best approach. But I’ve been holding on too tightly. Too much fear bottled up inside. It is no coincidence that I am having a flare-up of asthma symptoms. I have been holding my breath. I’m done with that. You want to see what created weather looks like? Watch out for that boulder rolling downhill. Tomorrow’s forecast is warm and sunny.

“You too have travelled from so far away to be here, once reluctant and now as solid and as here and as willing to be touched as everything you have found.” Thank you, David Whyte.

Oct15

I’d rather be a crooked tree…

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My friends and I are all getting old. Our children are middle-aged; our grandchildren and nieces and nephews are no longer young adults. And, sadly, I have to report that I do not personally know anyone who isn’t struggling. We are all finding it increasingly harder to make ends meet; we are having to make difficult decisions every month, or week…or day. For me, still living relatively comfortably, albeit paycheck to paycheck now, it means I drive an older used car. I’ve long since given up vacations. I eat out far less often. I cannot afford to adopt another dog after losing my darling companions, and if Medicare doesn’t cover the prescription I look for a natural alternative. Uncomfortable, yes; life-threatening, not thus far.

When we are honest with ourselves the future is rather scary. When we are honest with ourselves, we must confess that the middle class is gone and our leaders haven’t had our back in decades. Our food and water supplies are largely toxic to us now. You heard it here first – I’ve been saying this since I was a young woman. I began acknowledging that we are living in a military state here in the U.S. when Reagan was in office. No one was listening. That awareness came to me in a dream. Wurnt nobody listenin’ to that woowoo…

Among my closest friends, including those who don’t know one another, there is a profound concern for the welfare of our children and grandchildren. But I am having to talk most people I know (and sometimes, myself) down off a certain ledge – the concern that our children are not self-sufficient. And no one seems to be aware of the scope of this phenomenon. Yes, the most recent census told us that over 50% of baby boomers are helping to support their offspring. More than half of American households now house at least two generations.

I suspect those numbers are conservative, for we don’t understand much of what the increasing poverty is telling us. Poverty causes depression – and depression means that the people behind the doors of those little houses do not care about your survey. Even I have a No Soliciting sign on my front door. I am 70 years old. I do not need you to help me decide how to vote; I have been politically active since 1972. Go away. I especially do not need you to help save my soul. Go away. But I digress…

WHY are the younger generations not trying to improve their lot? What is wrong with them? Well, I will argue that there is, in fact, something RIGHT with them. Weren’t we idealistic back in the 1960’s?! We thought we would change the world. We thought we would end the Vietnam war and save the planet and the polar bears. We would change the government leadership. We would wake everyone up…and here we are, old and sick and tired. We had no clue what we were up against.

Now, before you think me too cynical, let me tell you why this is exactly as it should be. This is not, I repeat NOT, the end of the world. It is the end of the world as we know it. And baby, that sucker needs to burn. The systems and infrastructures and cultural expectations of the past must be transfigured. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be easy. It has to happen.

And the revolutionaries and shamans and visionaries that will bring a new way of life into being are your children, and my child, and our grandchildren. They already woke up – while you and I were scrambling to make ends meet, arguing over who is woke, and subconsciously functioning in “what the everloving fuck is happening?” mode. They are biding their time and not wasting precious resources (including themselves) trying to fit into in our dead culture.

Molly Tuttle was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease at the age of three. It causes her hair to fall out. While I am whining about my achey joints and not feeling creative, she’s years past worrying about what might get in her way. She isn’t letting anything hold her back.

“And who am I to wish I wasn’t just the way I am?!” she sings. And who are you? Insert here my stubborn argument for A) healing our codependent addictions before they kill us all, and B) while we are at it – HELP SUPPORT OUR CHILDREN to the best of our ability. Any way we can. If you haven’t got any children, help support someone else’s. Any way you can. Because who do you think you are that you know how to fix this mess? And don’t you DARE give up on anyone, let alone everyone. Don’t you dare lose heart. Don’t come to my door selling your beliefs and your outdated culture. You won’t like me when I answer.

Meanwhile, back here at the ranch, it’s gonna be a big week. So buckle up, buttercup. A hard rain’s a-gonna fall. And trust me – you need to trust your children. They are a crooked tree.

Oct10

pain always finds the surface

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Well, I must go back on my word. I said I’d share some of my favorite murder mysteries this week – but only the funniest. Three Pines isn’t a cosy mystery. It does, however take place in a small village, populated with quirky characters – one of the cosy mysteries basic premises. This is a police procedural. It isn’t funny. Don’t watch it alone on a stormy night. But it’s too brilliant to bypass. I’m often asked why I am so obsessed with murder mysteries. And my simple answer is this: when well written they are some of the most complex and interesting human stories, and they come to a logical and cathartic resolution. Oh but that I could expect the same from life. Again, a single season of 8 episodes, this is based on the Inspector Gamache novels by Louise Penney. Your local library has them, and they will keep you intrigued all through the cold, dark winter…

However, in the interest of full disclosure detective, I have now realized that I must review my previously held opinion that the best murder mysteries are British. Three Pines is Canadian. Ludwig is British, as is Queens of Mystery. Only Murders In The Building is American, and Recipes for Love and Murder is produced in South Africa.

There is one more series I will mention here, and it is from New Zealand. So Anglophile confession, detective, I guess I’d have to admit the Brits don’t have the corner on this market any longer. So, okay, they started it. I think. Brokenwood Mysteries seems a combination of small-town-quirky-character cosy mystery and police procedural…it wouldn’t be nearly as funny were it not for one particular character who is simply hilarious, that of the Russian forensic pathologist and love obsessed Gina. You’ll enjoy getting to know her.

Oct8

meddling aunts and all…

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Ahhhhh….fall. Best time of the year. Cool, crisply dappled sunlight through the thinning tree canopy…hot tea and cider. Honeycrisp apples. Perfect time for murder. When the mystery writer makes it about mystery writers, I’m in. Nobody does cosy mystery better than the British. Move over Ms. Marple…the aunts are in town.

Queens of Mystery is hands down my favorite mystery series…e v a …and it’s cancelled. Once again, not consulted. So you’ll have to get your fill within the 12 episodes. Guilty pleasure confession – I’m on my third round this fall. Like most cosy mysteries, there are an inordinately high number of murders in the sleepy little village of Wildemarsh. Isn’t it wonderful?!

After all…if I were a homicidal manic, I’d hide on the outskirts of a village, wouldn’t you? And, to quote Wednesday Addams, “they look like everyone else…” So, nothing to see over here, folks. The three crime writing aunts in Queens are of the meddlesome sort. My spirit sisters. But really, they’re just trying to help.

This intricately written crime-solving series has a poignant mystery woven through it’s storyline, but it looks as though we may never find out what happened to Matilda’s mother, the fourth sister, and why she was raised by her aunts. Even the series’ introduction is just about the most creative thing I’ve seen. Rumor has it that OMITB took it’s influence from this, and I can see the similarities. What’s OMITB, you ask?! Only Murders In The Building, of course…do try to keep up, darling.

Oct7

may we realize our nature

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Creativity is so much more than art. This post is for my dear friend who lives in Arizona. She thinks she is not creative because she is not an artist. She recently retired as a Hospice nurse administrator. God help us as a culture, let alone a species, if we cannot honor THE HEALING ARTS as the highest form of creativity. Have you ever spent time with a person who is seriously ill or near death? You are present. Right here. Right now. Because when we are ill (and, news flash! – we are all terminal here), we cannot be anything but present. We are unable to do for ourselves; we are dependent on others. And our caretakers must be present with us in our vulnerability. They are entirely engaged with imagination, moment by moment. All pretense drops. They are holding imagined peace in a state of being that can only be love. They are imagining us well and free of suffering.

Vital Germaine is a retired Cirque de Soleil performer, and the author of Think Like An Artist. He has clues for the rest of us. Let’s pay attention.

It seems I have spent my entire adult life as a frustrated artist. And I may continue that way, only time will tell I suppose. I can give you a hundred reasons why I have never lived out loud as a self-proclaimed artist; they’re really just excuses, aka trauma responses.

But I am learning to re-frame my definition of creativity. I have always lived a creative life. This thought takes me right back to ACIM basic principles: THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES. All creativity is miraculous; all miracles are creative. As it happened, it was in an ACIM study group many years ago that I first met my above mentioned nurse friend…coincidences only happen when angels coincide.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein

In the 1980’s I went through Hospice training so that I could work as a volunteer art therapist with the Children’s Bereavement Group at Munson Hospital in Traverse City. At that time it was a leading edge group, led by the late Dr. Barb McIntyre. She was a pioneer in that field. Art therapy students came from around the country to study. In my training a book was recommended: Who Dies, by Stephen Levine. It leveled me. Just read it. He tells of healing as a spiritual awakening. Nothing more. Nothing less. He says, and I agree, it has nothing to do with the body. Some people heal and their body recovers. Some people heal and their body dies. All that matters is the healing.

“I die so many deaths each day, what does it really matter which one of them is real?” -Anais Nin

After you’ve read both of those books (links below to my Amazon affiliate account. I might earn a small commission at no cost to you), then please read a third: The Miraculous 16th Karmapa. Known as “the black hat buddha,” he was a living awakened, or Christed, being who performed miracles and healing simply by being in the presence of others. There are many examples of others who have lived in our lifetime, but what struck me so profoundly about HH Rangjung Rigpe Dorje was his insistence that his seemingly miraculous state of being was, in fact, perfectly normal. Dying in a Chicago hospital, he proclaimed to his grief-stricken attendants, “nothing is happening!” Can we imagine that to be true – that there is no order of difficulty in healing, even as we pass from this bardo to the next? Can we imagine?! His “dream flag,” imagined in a dream as a prayer for enlightenment to all sentient beings, will hang in my home until my last breath. And that is thanks to another dear friend who now lives in Florida. How blessed am I?!

Think Like An Artist by Vital Germaine: https://amzn.to/4gWrP7W , Who Dies? by Stephen Levine: https://amzn.to/47XtTZB , A Course in Miracles, https://amzn.to/3XRGtEZ , and last but not least, The Miraculous 16th Karmapa: https://amzn.to/3XSYW46 , Karmapa Dream Flag: https://amzn.to/4eSkfJE

Oct6

when push comes to shove

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The year was 1980. We stood in front of the Oakland County Court Judge and my husband looked incredulous. He looked me dead in the eye and said, “Susan, I never hit you.” And the Judge asked me to respond, to which I had to tell the truth, so I turned and faced him, standing with his attorney at the other table, and shaking, said, “No. But you pushed me into the wall and I fell down. And you kept coming after me when I was on the floor.”

“I’ve heard enough,” the Judge stated, “motion granted. You will have 24 hours to vacate the home, and you will not come within 50 feet of your wife. Do you understand?” The neighbors had called the police three days before. They were tired of being awakened between two and three a.m. after he had returned from the bar and begun to attack me. The young officer asked me if I had somewhere to go. I had called my friend and business partner, woke she and her husband and their children. I would hastily pack the baby, two overnight bags, and the officer would escort me to the edge of town, the border of his jurisdiction. We would live on their family room sofa for the next three nights, and I would show up for this hearing at 8 a.m. Monday morning.

That was husband number two. Number one I had snuck out on while he was passed out high, and never looked back. It would be 14 years before I married again, husband number three. I was 40; he was 57. He was not a drug addict. He was not physically abusive. He was, however, an alcoholic and a gambler. I would divorce him and remarry him, believing he had grown and changed; he had not. He had learned some new language and become more manipulative. They all had addiction in common. They were all narcissistic.

The counselor drew three stick figures stacked vertically, and connected each of them via lines between their hands. Marionettes. He labeled them from the top down: father, husband, me. Apparently he felt a visual aid was needed. He literally drew me a picture.

However, it would yet be decades before a different counselor would finally convince me that codependence IS, indeed, an addiction. There is no ingestion of substances. The body’s physiology produces the substances to create the addiction. It’s an invisible dis-ease. I suspect the problem with overcoming substance abuse is that the substance serves as a symptom of the underlying mental health imbalance – that being codependence. No one is going to successfully get off substances if they don’t face the demon of codependence head on.

Industries have thrived upon the medical knowledge based on addiction recovery research. You can’t stop drinking; you have to substitute something that tastes like the alcohol of choice without the alcohol content. Hence sparkling wine and non-alcoholic beer. You can’t stop the brain’s addiction to smoking without replacing the action; hence the vaping industry.

There is no demonstrable action to replace people pleasing. That is the causal level of addiction. Fixing the gigantic hole in the soul. Fixing the original wound. And most of us don’t remember it like Robyn here. But we see the evidence, the symptoms of our dumpster fire lives as they float past us in the flood. So where do we start? Take the Adverse Childhood Experiences test (ACE) and find yourself a counselor. If you are old enough to read this you need – and deserve – a counselor. Carolyn Myss said it decades ago: therapists are the tribal shaman of the Western culture. Find yourself a shaman. And then a streaming service with British, South African, and Australian murder mysteries. They do it best. I will highlight some this coming week here, but only the really funny ones…

I am immeasurably grateful that I have never had a substance abuse addiction (well, okay, coffee.) But I am no less of an addict. I am a people pleaser, what Melonie Beatty (Codependent No More) refers to as a Master Enabler. I will forever be in recovery. I will never quit quitting. I will practice setting healthy boundaries as if my life depends on it. Because it does. So does yours.

And people wonder why I’m obsessed with murder mysteries…