++++++++++++++++++++

Well, here I am at mid-day and I am not outside working in my yard.  It’s very hot outside, but that by itself is not what is stopping me.  I have lymphodema in my left arm after cancer in my lymph nodes on that side, and today my arm is swelling from my work outside these past few days, and I am always worried when I see puffiness beginning to move down into my left hand.  THAT will not do.  Today my arm needs to rest and I cannot WILL it any other way.

This leaves me with some free mental time to think further about my observation about whiners and workers.  As usual, my thoughts turn upon their own invisible fulcrum and in that expanding spectrum I ran into two recently found friend-thoughts:  Rupture and Repair.

Yet because of the past days I have needed to work on some repair for myself, my thoughts have slowed down enough that I can see some of what lies between these two big “R’s”.   And as I do, I look outside into my transforming front yard and because of the clearing, simplifying and patterning of my new layouts I can see something I never noticed before.

My brother and I planted a desert Sycamore tree out there while I was taking my chemo.  This is a fast growing tree, and I have been trimming off its lower branches as it stretches up in height and now I can see that this tall trunk with its bunch of neat branches at its top is actually working like something I have always wanted in my yard for a long, long time:  A sundial.

Within my new landscape plan I figured out yesterday how to dig 8″ deep rectangles between each of the perennial plants.  In these holes I wet and stir the mud with a little cement, and then place stones in them so they look like the bed of a stream.  I figured out that the weeds and Bermuda grass is not likely to be any more able to sprout through these ‘spacers’ than it does through the actual adobe bricks I have been making my walkways out of.

In addition, after watching the downpour the other day I can see that these ‘stone pads’ between the perennials will also be able to accomplish another important job.  They will create water runoff streams that will now go exactly where I want them too when the rains come — seldom and hard — right onto my perennials!

But as I looked outside today, somewhat begrudged that I can’t healthily be out there furthering my working plans, I see that those pads as they lie at the outside of my newly created garden give the shadow of my tree a place to land on as the sunlight scoots across the landscape.  Each of those stone pads now looks like a marker on a sundial!  How cool is that?

And in between the pad-markers are the plants themselves which of course vitally depend on the sunlight to reach them and NOT be overly shadowed by the tree leaves as the light passes them.  It seems to be working out OK.

And this whole visual experience this morning, combined with my ‘freed time’ to think helps me understand that in between the two fundamental poles that living in an ever changing and often challenging world creates — patterns of rupture and repair — are shades that can be named more specifically.  Because patterns of rupture and repair are what build our ‘operating system’ of secure or insecure attachment in and to the world from our conception, it is helpful and important for me to understand that in the cycles of living there is more detailed and specific information I can learn, name and use in my life.

Because of the severe abuse I survived, that altered my entire body’s development permanently in my early years, I understand that my resulting insecure attachment (along with the other Three Sisters I mentioned previously, depression, PTSD and dissociation), all happened to me because patterns of rupture and repair did not follow one another in supportive ways in my early years.

I have never found ‘functional’ or ‘dysfunctional’ to be useful terms to my thinking when I look back on my severely chaotic, traumatic, dangerous and harmful infant-childhood.  These terms do not name anything I can relate to, so I went searching for more accurate and useful terms.  Rupture and repair are REAL processes.  Yet as I think about them today I see some of what lies along the spectrum between them, and those things add more detailed information that I can use to think with.

++++

I have a collection of those little “Y” shaped hose end attachments, some metal, some plastic, some older, some new.  They all cost me money, all cost the planet resources, and they all eventually seem to fail for no reason I can determine other than planned obsolescence and shoddy craftsmanship.  Yesterday as I was working away on my project outside the one I have been using for several months at the watering end of my hose (I then have one ‘spigot’ open for running water and the other has a sprayer attached to it) simply fell apart.

I had been adding water in the shower formation to my adobe mud mix one minute, had dropped the hose end to the ground to stir, and when I picked the hose end back up the water could not be turned off on one end of the “Y.”  What on earth had happened in that split second?

It turned out that the tiny screw that held the turn-on-off on one side of the “Y” had fallen off and vanished!  I tried another “Y” I had on hand, it was flawed also.  I twisted on a new one I bought last week, and for no reason I could understand, my hose end had decided to spring itself a major leak also!  The washer was fine.  I ended up having to use the super (and very effective) Rescue Tape the hardware store people had convinced me to buy last week — along with a hose clamp (which I found out last week now costs $1.29 for one of the smallest ones they make!) to FIX the end of the hose before I could even screw on the new “Y.”

All said and done, I never expected to find the tiny pieces that fell off the first broken “Y” as they fell down somewhere between the tangled masses of Bermuda grass, the dug-up dark, damp earth and the mud.  But they DID appear!  A tiny rubber ring about 1/4″ inside diameter, and then suddenly the little turn-off handle itself!  Seemed like a miracle to me!

Well, to make a long story even longer, all of this fed into my thought channels about rupture and repair, and about the four things I mentioned in a post last week:  Make, Use, Fix, and Break.

I never until yesterday realized that there is maintenance required on some of those hose “Y” attachments.  I didn’t know that eventually the tiny screw that holds the little handle on that turns the spray on or off loosens — and then falls off!  Maintenance.  Obviously connected to FIX and to REPAIR.

Yet maintenance is more closely connected to another word that appeared to me yesterday, one that lies within my more finely-tuned understanding of the spectrum between Rupture and Repair.  The need to MAINTAIN something keeps it working BEFORE it needs to be repaired.  Maintainance is a form of RESTORATION.

As I mentioned, I never knew that these “Ys” needed to be maintained so that they would continue (at least some of them) their functionality.  Maintaining the proper tension on the little handle screw by checking it periodically would have RESTORED it to its ‘factory specs’ and kept it working properly.  The whole minor mess I encountered yesterday could have been avoided if I had both known this, and done it.

++

Which now leads me on a minor diversion here.  I have instinctively known, as I have mentioned before, that the term RECOVERY did not have the same meaning to me as a severe infant-child abuse survivor that it has for others who did not have a severely traumatic childhood.  I do not have very much at ALL to go back and ‘recover’ of myself from ‘back then’.

What I do as a severe abuse survivor is something else — not recovery.  If I had maintained my “Y” over time, and adjusted it to RESTORE it back to its original operation, I would have been assisting that little piece of hardware to RECOVER what it once possessed.  To me this is a FINE and an important distinction!

++

To get back to whiners and workers — to rupture and repair — to sunlight being marked by my growing single tree in my yard as the minutes of the day tick themselves along — and to the words and terms we use to explain the important processes of life — I will now add yet another concept here.

This word that came into my mind has virtually nothing to do with the mechanistic metaphors used to describe human experience such as ‘functional’ and ‘dysfunctional’.  It has nothing to do with a functional or dysfunctional “Y” watering attachment.  But it has everything to do with what happens to living organisms that are required to go through natural cycles of rupture and repair to stay alive.

The word is REPOSE.

My broken (ruptured) “Y” is, true, reposing in a bowl of vinegar water to remove the calcium within it so that I can try to repair it now that it’s broken and I miraculously found its tiny pieces in the muddy mess of my yard.  Will the repair actually restore it to use?  Time and effort will tell.

In the meantime, I am thinking that in my severely abusive home of origin, with my continually working father and my chronically whining mother, rupture without repair — or hope of repair — was the chronic state of our environment.

Along with all the ruptures without repair REPOSE was entirely missing.

Looking at it today, REPOSE and REPAIR are essentially tied together.

REPOSE only happens when safety and security are present.  REPOSE happens at the same time a safe and secure attachment in and to the world is possible.

REPOSE lets restoration that leads to repair happen.

++++

When it comes to understanding that our ‘stress response system’ in our body, the same one that is permanently altered and damaged as we grow and develop under malevolent infant-childhood conditions, is ALSO our ‘calm and connection system’.  They are THE SAME SYSTEM.

Without safety and security REPOSE doesn’t happen, REPAIR doesn’t happen, and our entire body-brain-mind-self lands smack on the STRESS end of things rather than on the CALM end of things.  We pay the price physiologically — and then in every other related way — for the rest of our lives.

++++

So in the sundial movement of the circle-cycle of life between ruptures that need repair, and the repair that either does or does not happen, lies MAINTAINANCE and  RESTORATION that only happens when REPOSE is possible, attainable and present.

Trauma does not offer repose.  Repose is an essential requirement for repairing a rupture (healing) so that both growth and an ongoing life of well-being can happen.

Neither continual working or continual whining allow for repose, and hence the cycle of rupture and repair is broken.

++++

Just as I did not know I needed to maintain my “Y” neither of my parents were able to maintain their own self.  I had to assess what went wrong with my “Y” yesterday (not hard when I saw pieces missing).  Neither of my parents ever knew the truth about what happened to them during their infant-childhoods that robbed them of well-being.  They never knew what happened to MAKE them BROKEN, so they could not either USE their full abilities or FIX what was wrong.

And REPOSE, what is supposed to be formed at the center of our physiology as our body-brain grows from conception forward, was completely missing.  REPOSE ability was missing because neither of my parents ever truly knew what safe and secure attachment even was.  Neither of them had it formed into the center of their body-brain as they grew up.  Repose, which lets restoration repair the ruptures life creates, was completely left out of the recipe both my parents used to create their life — and the life of their offspring.

++

Just as rest and repose is what my swollen arm needs today — not whining without end, not work without end, it is what ALL of me needs — nearly all of the time.  So much trauma-based rupture without repose and restoration that leads to repair makes heavy demands on me, as it does for every severe abuse survivor whose life did not offer to them the opportunities to be safe and secure in the world.

But at least now I am beginning to find the words to think the thoughts that are more closely aligned with what I need.  I do not think in terms of ‘functional’ and ‘dysfunctional’ and I am glad for that.  I also know that my need for REPOSE is beyond great.  And I am learning why that is so.  I have to live in and with this body my mother so drastically affected in its development, but as I do so I hope to continue to understand what I can do to live a little bit better every step of the way.

No this isn’t easy.

++++++++++++++++++++