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Monday, June 9, 2014.  I continue to document my ongoing experience of being alive in a body permanently changed in its physiological development by overwhelming traumatic abuse from birth as it continued unabated for 18 years of my childhood.  In ways that I do not understand I often find it helpful to snatch things that trouble me to confine them in words I write here.

It’s not that what troubles me STOPS troubling me after I write a post.  I wish that were so.  But something helpful does usually happen when I write.  So what if this process remains a mystery to me?  I need any reprieve I can find.

One thing I know about myself is that I am always in danger of being blindsided by my trauma history in ways that I have in the past allowed to dissuade me from pursuing experiences that bring me joy.  Currently the threat is to my drumming passion.  I do NOT want to let myself walk away and leave behind something that is connected to a powerful inward passion, something I LOVE to do.

I have a dear friend who has agreed to not let me walk away from drumming.  Yet it is inside of myself that I am fighting this battle with myself today.  I am hoping if I write about this the burden will be lifted and my joy will return.

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I am paying 11% of my meager disability income each month to take weekly 1/2-hour drum lessons at a local music store taught by an expert who has a doctorate in percussion.  Brett also teaches piano and flute.  Up until this past Saturday my desire, my willingness, my enthusiasm, my hopefulness, my resiliency has carried me forward just fine.

I was “HIT” and I am wavering.  My spirit is dwindling.

The first time I went to lessons I blanched as I walked through a wall of terror into a tiny practice room and the door was shut.  There I was choosing to enter a tiny confined space which triggered a long history of trauma from a childhood filled with solitary, forced confinement which progressed into my teens where Mother’s psychosis led her to finding even more bizarre ways of enforcing her desire to keep confined me in her hell.

On top of that I agreed with myself to sit with a stranger.  Well, as time has moved forward I am finding that even having to drum during lessons on the same small practice pad (which sits on a stand) with Brett is extremely hard for me to do.  On top of that his pad has a raised rim around it where mine at home does not — so hitting the rim during lessons remains a big problem for me along with having to share a drumming pad with anyone else!

Then comes the performance anxiety.  I can drum the first piece of music Brett gave me going on 3 weeks ago just fine at home alone and on my own.  I CANNOT do so under the lesson’s conditions.  So I am paying my money to be sent home each week to practice this single damn piece yet AGAIN — not because I cannot play it but because I cannot play it in front of my teacher, along WITH my teacher.

Then it comes to now being corrected for flaws in my hand position that have been there for weeks.  It strikes me as extra difficult to have not been corrected weeks ago for flaws in hand positioning that I have continued to practice until I have great prowess — with the flaws!

It is all nerve wracking.  It all discourages me — right on through the part where  Brett insisted in my last lesson that he gave me three sheets of new music to practice –WHICH HE DID NOT GIVE ME!  I would HAVE them if he’d given them to me — as I so smoothly pointed out to him.

He was also not happy I went to YouTube to find out how to do a triple stroke drum roll because Brett had assigned me that for a week’s practice without showing me how to do one first.  I learned to do what I watched online — and of course — you guessed it — it was ALL WRONG!

Along with what else I pointed out to him when he told me not to worry if I can’t drum perfectly….  “After all it took me millions of hours of playing to get as good as I am,” Brett said to me.

Me in return?  “I don’t HAVE millions of hours to practice left in my lifetime.  In case you haven’t noticed I am significantly older than you are.”  Brett is half my age!  We both smiled.  That tight lips-in-a-line kind of smile.

Do I give up?  WILL I give up?  I don’t WANT to practice today.  That’s the first time this has happened to me since I began my lessons.  I MUST work through this.  I don’t have that many years left to let go of my passions.  I deserve my joy!

I WANT to learn this.  Brett is teaching me the perfect way to drum — classical drumming.  I MUST let myself understand that perfection is not in the people although it is to be striven for in technique.

Who is going to advocate for me if I don’t do it for myself?  Nobody.

So my next step is to have the music store order a cymbal stand for me that my own practice pad will screw onto.  It will help me at home so I don’t have to tape my pad onto a stool that I need elsewhere for other things in my tiny apartment.  I won’t have to battle the baby who likes to rip the pad off of the stool and run away with it.  (We argue about whose turn it is to use the drumsticks quite often throughout a day.)

Then….  Next step….  I will be able to decide if I want to carry my own stand along with me on my mile walk to lessons so I can set it up in that tiny studio to play on my OWN pad.  Talk about problems with personal space and boundaries!

Where there are problems there have to be solutions.  NOW I will practice.  At the moment I don’t feel I WANT to practice.  I will do so because some part of me is insisting I MUST!!

But what a pain-in-the-patoosky that even the smallest things nearly always turn into some kind of a HUGE CHALLENGE!!  Oh, well.  That’s the story of my life.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

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Leave a Comment »

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Monday, June 9, 2014.  Baby stayed home today with his daddy, neither of them feeling very well.  I caught baby’s cold last week.  It hit me hard so I am very grateful for a second quiet day to myself.

I discovered thoughts this morning I jotted down in a letter to my 88-year-old friend who was our closet Alaska homesteading neighbor during my childhood.  My friend understands the lifelong effects of severe abuse trauma in early years.  She also had a mother who hated her, but she also had a father and many other relatives who loved her.  I’ll just copy those thoughts into this post.  Perhaps they can mark even a small turning point in my continued hard battle to adapt to conditions last fall’s drastic move here have created in my life.

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I called the senior ride people this morning and they will get me for my doctor appointment this Friday.  Even such little things scare me!  It costs $3 each way cash so I need to get a stash of ones here.  Better than a hassle with city bus lines which would scare me even more.

Going to the doctor scares me.  I haven’t used that word applied to myself before — but, yes, it’s anxiety — but it is so because I am scared!!

I am trying to get back to sewing my long-handled shoulder bags and I’ll tell you — as strange as it is — even “being scared” is present with that!!  Even stranger I just connected how I feel here with being attacked millions of times as a child [from birth] for the whole 18 years of my childhood by PSYCHOTIC mother [Dorothy knew Mother].

That kind of terror out of nowhere came from Mother every day of my life and I never knew when or WHY!  I am only in this past year coming to understand how the PSYCHOTIC nature of her abuse was both unique (among child abuse) and SO devastating to me.

This has made CHANGE itself my terrifying enemy.  I just chose to change everything in my life [by moving up here] — but even setting up for and returning to my sewing requires hundreds of steps of change because nothing is the same as it was.

Instead of two big rooms to work in I have a little tiny space.  My friend so kindly gave me an older but seems unused Wards sewing machine — but I think I have to restart my sewing with this familiar old nearly worn out machine I used in Arizona.  I am scared of the new one!

My anxiety is so overwhelming no matter what it’s connected to because — I see at this moment — I no longer have any barriers to all that terror Mother created in me that is IN MY BODY!  [I was built that way.]  I used to be able to block it but I no longer can.

How strange.  How real.  How unfortunate!  This is what terrorists do.  They terrorize people.  Your mother did that to you.  I think it created (for me) a massive ocean of terror inside of me — no more ignoring it.  It hasn’t GONE anywhere.  My simple and familiar life in Naco did not create continual strangeness which exists here around everything.  I cannot keep it all at bay here.

But I can slowly work through this sewing chaos.  I need to know where everything is — every kind and piece of fabric, scissors of which I can only find one good pair and I have at least four — sewing must be orderly and efficient if I am to enjoy it, be creative and effective.  At least I have this day as a bonus to try to work through some of this.

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I add….  I don’t believe that anyone who was not themselves “built by terror” has a clue what I am talking about let alone what I am experiencing.  I intimately and permanently know what “disorganized-disoriented” insecure attachment disorder feels like, what Reactive Attachment Disorder feels like.  I believe the basis of these feelings is terror.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

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Leave a Comment »

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Wednesday, June 4, 2014.  It took being trapped here last winter to get me reading what I consider trash fiction for the first time in my life.  All of the books have been given to me.  Legal thrillers.  Crime thrillers.  My current reading is “The Gods of Guilt” by Michael Connelly, a “#1 New York Times Bestselling Author.”

A few minutes of this kind of reading before bedtime accompanied by Snickers is part of the trance I require to reside in this so-not-ME place.

But occasionally even within such mental blank space of reading I find a sentence or two that wakes up my resonance-within sleeping beauty.  When that feeling dashes through me I pay attention:  Some part of my own reality so deeply embedded in a trauma past has been touched.

I wanted to mention this one — the main character, a lawyer heading to visit two inmates, thinks —

“I knew from prior experience that going into a prison would be exhausting.  It was an ordeal that fully taxed the senses.  Prison sounds and smells, the drab gray steel set off by the garish orange uniforms of the incarcerated, the mixture of desperation and threat in the faces of the men I’d come to visit — it was not a place I ever wanted to spend an extra minute in.  I always felt as if I were holding my breath the whole time I was inside.”  pages 206-207

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Some main part of myself woke up and paid attention to these words as they bolded themselves and jumped off of their pages.  I KNOW THAT FEELING!

Not only do I know it — no matter what is happening around me I usually feel this feeling — nearly all of the time.

I have in the past year or two come to experience this feeling of being trapped in a body in a life in circumstances that don’t seem to suit me literally as it makes it hard for me to BREATH.  This is a very powerful body-based, visceral sensation that is almost like a claustrophobia of being alive.

Helluva deal!

Of course it anchors into 18 years of torture and confinement.  But it also ties in with a lot that has followed/led me through my adult life.  I have never quite been able to “figure out what is going on” so that I can extricate myself from any situation that makes me feel uncomfortable — change settings, so-to-speak — dive under the ice and come up somewhere else where there might be an opening that leads me to a place in which I might feel “better.”

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What is comfort?

What is comfortable?

I believe for early traumatic abuse survivors, especially for those of us who were traumatized by our attachment people from birth, the inability to “self sooth” follows us forever in this lifetime.  That sense of being SAFE and SECURE, of being calm in a state of comfortable comfort, escapes us.

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I do not like Fargo, North Dakota – as you readers here understand.  Yet I am 100% sure I will not be leaving here before another winter in hell arrives.  Yes, there are some really tough choices that have led me to this decision.  I have no money to leave.  I am not willing to dump everything I own to head off back to my high desert comfortable sanctuary place broke and homeless again.

I also believe that this next year is critical in the development of both of my little grandsons.  I have something critical to offer them of significance to their development on the positive side of the scale of their lives.  I will not abandon this task I am committed to finishing.

So here I sit in a CITY without a view, without open wild spaces, feeling crushed as if I am in the prison Mr. Lawyer character described.  I know that feeling.

Sure, there is goodness here.  Much goodness.  But I am one for letting the big circle of life appear in all its splendor — both in its joys and in its difficulties.  I AM making personal sacrifices to be here.  That is a fact.  Goodness happens, as well — but all happens together as a ONE THING called “life.”

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job – I think we will have to find an alternative!).  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

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Leave a Comment »

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Wednesday, June June 4, 2014.  As simply focused as my life is right now I certainly cannot say that “life is passing me by.”  The change of weather in this northern clime has worked a million times its magic on my behalf.  May brought unusually cooler and wetter days to the point that it is only now as June appears that it is sunny and warm enough to lift my spirits.

I have thought about writing many posts but my thoughts never have time to develop lately.  A FLASH in the pan — and they are gone like a fast bird on the wing.  This morning I have decided to simply write something here.  Something being “better than nothing” will have to do.  This is simply a collection of tiny happenings.

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I can look outward at the lush lawn surrounding the cat tail area in front of my sliding door (the only window) now and not see TRASH!!!!!  TRASH!!!

Last weekend on a coolish drizzly morning I dragged the partly broken, paint spattered 35-gallon garbage can I rescued from its spot of doom alongside the apartment complex’s dumpster around and through the cat tail (drainage) area to haul out accumulation of mostly windblown plastic items to deposit them in the dumpster.  I lost track at 17 full containers delivered.

I say nothing to the management of these buildings.  They know who cleaned that up.  I know they know.  My neighbor told me so.  Am I asking for recompense from them?  Nope.  This is on their conscience.  They certainly were not going to clean that dump up on their own.

Nobody who lives here, certainly myself, was going to feel inspired by the tiny piece of nature that holding area contains as it looked before I went to work on it.  And I DO know how to work!  Maybe that job took me 4 hours.  The benefit of the clean-up is immeasurable to the well-being of all who gaze upon it — especially the children!

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Children.  My life continues to swirl around the weekday care of my youngest grandson who just turned 22 months old.  Along with him have arrived children of many sizes, “colors,” planetary origins and religions.  All as gorgeous flowers who surround me as families escape the winter confines of small apartments out into the long light of northern days.  I have kept with me at least a dozen plastic kitty litter trays purchased from dollar stores over the years (never used for original intention).  They hold craft projects, sorted items for this-n-that — and make amazing individual little water play trays out on my cement “patio” for many young children to delight themselves with on a day’s afternoon.

Little African Islamic girls in their gorgeous cloth drapery, their young brothers, a little lost so-very-sad Anglo 4-year-old girl who recently lost her mother to jail while her video-game-playing father mostly ignores her.  Poor poor tiny little thing!  My heart aches for HER!!  (Google CDC ACE study – losing a parent to jail is one of the BIG Adverse Childhood Experiences that can turn a child’s life in the direction of tragedy over its lifespan.)  Hugs and much love she will get over here as I seek to understand her too-fast speaking so hampered by her great need for speech therapy.

And there are the many mothers of the many young children, immigrants to Fargo from Nepal as well as the refugees and immigrants from Africa who live here.  All, big and small, with wreathing smiles!  I have learned to set my one canvas folding chair, bright red, just on the grass for all the mothers who stop by to sit in while they inspect with calmness the activities of their young ones.

Yesterday afternoon – out came my 5 bottles of liquid poster paint from Wal-Mart (white, black, red, blue, yellow), some of my collection of 100 paint brushes and piles of typing paper.  We were blessed with NO WIND whatsoever!  All children from 6th graders to age 2 — around 10 of them — sat calmly together on that small cement slab outside my door with those paints and taught themselves and one another how to mix every color they could think of.  Four hours later I could have hung a small gallery with their creations.

Not one fuss except for the little lost girl — who tells me her parents walked away somewhere and are lost themselves (which makes me wonder if the man caring for her is her birth father or not) – who I finally had to walk home after 8 pm while the other children’s careful watchers never let their little ones out of their sight.  One of the elder men from Nepal stood unmoving at the top of a small knoll under the shade of a tree watching his little girl for over 4 hours.  He never interfered with her play.  He “just” loved her.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job – I think we will have to find an alternative!).  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

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Leave a Comment »

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Monday, May 19, 2014.  Maybe people who are born in a safe and secure enough early attachment environment just naturally develop into who they are so they then go out and continue to live a life that is their own.  Maybe such people never need to stop and wonder WHOSE life they are living.

Whose life?  How might it be possible to live someone else’s life?

Well, if I just look at the first 18 years of my life I can wonder if all I actually accomplished was to survive my abusive mother’s life.  My life of terror was certainly no kind of life I would have chosen for myself.  And then, coming out of that childhood into adulthood — did I even know enough to know I was a self (“had a self”) that was suddenly “free” to go off and live the life of my choosing?

Those kinds of choices, I would tender, stem directly from an entire long series beginning at birth in which a person has been able to have some kind of say about how their feelings, needs, decisions, choices affect their daily lives.  These patterns – or the lack of them – directly affect how one’s nervous system and brain develop.  The older I get the more I understand how hard making informed decisions and choices for myself in my life actually is given that I never was able to build a body-brain that knew a single darn thing about being the master of my own fate.

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“Thunderstruck.”  Heck of a saying.  I suppose the sound waves from lightning does actually create hits although it is the lightning itself that we speak of as hitting things.  I vaguely woke this morning to the sound of massive rumbling over my apartment building.  “Good.  Hello.”  And I went back to sleep.

I don’t know whether or not the first thought I had so clearly in my mind when I finally crawled into my day well after the thunders had left was in part created within me by that outside storm:  “I am trying to live someone else’s life here.”

I am surprised only that this thought took this long to get through to me.  For a person who grew from birth knowing clearly who they were such a thought might never need to appear to them.  I need this thought.  It is exactly accurate for me.

When my daughter expresses her wish that grandma (me) be a part of her young sons’ lives she knows what she is talking about.  How I heard and interpreted what she said – and then acted upon what I thought – has evidently been all tangled up in the fact that I have always had an extremely difficult time actually defining who I am – let alone “whose” life I am living.

Trying to fit in where I don’t belong?  Oh, I’ve done that!!  I did not belong to Mother’s insane abusive madness by any other factor than the fact that I was born to her and nobody rescued me from her.

From the moment I left home I tried to fit in.  As I scan over the distant horizon of my adult life I see that in all cases except my move down to southeastern Arizona in November of 1999 I was, in fact, trying to fit into other people’s scenes.  Blah blah blah – long stories later — when I heard “be a part of your grandson’s life” I found no other way to do that other than essentially give up everything familiar to me as my own life and move into what is, to me, hostile territory.  Sterile territory for my soul.

Sure, I like the hundreds of refugees from around the world that live in the area where I do, can deal with, cope with, survive — and for many of those actual refugees be extremely and forever grateful for the chance to live here.

I have so “been there done that” refugee thing.  This morning it is ever more clear to me, “I don’t have to live that life anymore.”

True, the poverty of my life did not allow me to visit up here without moving here although the $3000 plus that family gave to get me up here would have bought a lot of plane tickets for me to travel back and forth to see these little boys.  But things didn’t work out that way.

The questions I wrestle with here now have to do with whether or not I can endure another horrible winter here — or if I will choose to (based on what information within?).  Where is the money to get me and my belongs out of here – to transplant me back where I came from and evidently belong?  Will I have to yet again give up nearly everything I own?  I know I will have to go through another bout of homelessness before I could resettle down there.

None of this has much significance in the grand scheme of life on the planet — except that it means something to me because this is MY LIFE.  It is the only life I will ever have on this planet.  I wish it was not always so  difficult for me to navigate around decisions and choices, but it is.  My brain, altered through severe trauma during critical early developmental stages, simply processes all information it receives — differently.

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In many significant ways raising children does take a sacrifice of one’s own life for theirs’.  “Being a part of” my grandson’s life — past this year I did choose to dedicate to caring for the youngest week days until after his 2nd birthday – does not necessitate that I continue to “live someone else’s life here” for any longer than necessary.  Something about this thought coming to me today broke through an inner gridlock that has kept me trapped within miserable unending circles of doubt, confusion, and lack of direction.  I still don’t have all my answers, all my solutions.  But I think I made an important leap back onto the track of MY own life.

 

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job – I think we will have to find an alternative!).  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

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Leave a Comment »

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Thursday, May 15, 2014.  As often happens I have no idea how my thoughts will trickle through this post.  I just know I have a lot of them tumbling around in my mind right now, and that I do not feel calm and chipper.  Will writing here help me to put pieces of thoughts together into a more coherent whole?  Can I “differentiate” and then “link” them up in a better way so that I feel more “integrated” — as Dr. Daniel Siegel describes this process of moving forward through life in a healthier way?

I know a little guy who just turned four who wonders a lot about what death is and why, where dead “things” ARE once they are dead, and about what is real and what is not real.  Once something is dead is it REAL any more?

His daddy told me that this train of concern began one day when their family went to a dinosaur museum.  Just like at the local zoo the little boy loves to visit there were big glassed-in “cages” where the dinosaurs “were.”  Or where they were supposed to be?

The little guy approached one of those “cages” to find NO DINOSAUR.  Just a long collection of bones.  “Where is the dinosaur?” the little guy wanted to know.  “It is dead.  They are all dead.  These bones are all that is left of this dinosaur.  Only its bones.”

NOT SATISFACTORY!

Questions about when he will die, when his mommy and daddy will die, and WHY follow often now.  What happened to a wolf now missing from the local zoo?  “He died over the winter.”  Where is the wolf?  Why did he die?  Why isn’t he real anymore?  On and on….

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Maybe I am puzzling about the same concerns but just on a different front.

When people do not seem able to differentiate their emotions and thusly stash them somewhere (?) are those emotions real?  What if the front that appears to the world cracks open – no matter how wise, nice, smart, motivated, together, giving, happy, etc. etc. a person might APPEAR in the world, and even perhaps appear to their own self — if emotions that don’t fit this public image DO exist somewhere else, is that person “being real?”

What happens when OTHER kinds of emotions break through?  What if a person is really (!) far more angry (full of rage) or sad (full of grief and sorrow) or scared than their public self ever shows?  What do we let ourselves and one another know about our WHOLE self?  Is a part self more real than a whole self?

When a whole self doesn’t seem to be present every day, all of the time in a person’s life — is a part of that person more dead than alive?

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Very possibly because of my intense and very long history of terrible abuse during the first 18 years of my life I walked into my adulthood being completely oblivious not only to the fact that I had been abused at all but also just as oblivious to the self I am who experienced those horrors.  Where were my feelings?

I don’t ask that question now.  But I also realize now that there are MANY people who are so uncomfortable with FEELINGS – theirs or anybody else’s if those feelings are not deemed “pleasant” and therefore acceptable — that if such feelings should actually show up somewhere all hell is likely to break lose unless those “awful” (awe-full) feelings can somehow be made to disappear again — ASAP.

From my side of reality all feelings are REAL and are REALLY important – or they would not exist.  If they are quarantined, banished, “obliviated” they do not go anywhere.  In fact, I think they are more real that the “real” feelings people try so hard to “only” live with.

It makes me wonder about this so-called “derealization/depersonalization” that is a part of PTSD and other trauma-related developmental changes some people go through.  So many people perhaps are NOT “being real.”  How can they FEEL real to me when I am around them if this is the case?

I lived like that until I was 29 and my entire world began to fall apart.  I woke up.  Slowly at first.  But I DID wake up.  I am ALL me — yet in contrast to a “social world out there” in which many people may in fact not be living with their whole self present, there is a temptation for MY way of being in the world to be labeled “mentally ill.”

Mentally ill be damned.

I live my passion.  My whole passion.  Passion is not always easy, tidy, silent.  It does not ignore what might be less-than-charming in life.  Passion expresses itself.  Passion is itself.

That’s my bias:  Passion is real.  And when one’s true passion is forced out of one’s main life I think sooner or later all hell WILL break lose.  Passion is life.  And sometimes life is just plain messy.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job – I think we will have to find an alternative!).  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

Leave a Comment »

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Monday, May 12, 2014.  Too many titles.  Nearly every thought that swirls around to come up at the top of my mind this morning sounds to me like a possible blog post title.  Too Many Titles is one all by itself.  If a title is meant to signify a complexity of thoughts underneath and connected to it, then it is clear to me today that there is simply TOO MUCH INFORMATION in my universe today.

In the Aftermath of Mother’s Day would be another possible title.  Nobody can ever prepare for being a parent.  Not really.  What I am learning by being up here with two of my grown up children is that nobody ever prepared me to parent THEM.  Not at this stage in their lives.  Not at this stage of mine.

Stage?  Drama.  Is it truly possible to BE a human being without drama being present?  I often think of Dr. Carl Jung these days.  Collective drama.  He named the patterns of the key players that show up over and over again as “archetypal” roles played at one time or another by every human being around the world.  I don’t see how we can deny this no matter how individually unique we might like to think we are.

The Goose and the Rabbit.  Another possible title for this post.  In fact, if I were to boil down into some kind of essence what is going on in my life right now I would nail it with this title.

The Goose.  A gorgeous Canadian honker standing behind a chain link fence barely taller than its head, neck stretched as far toward the sky as it could reach.  At Fargo’s small but so-well managed zoo I went to with my daughter yesterday and the grandboys.  Free moms’ day.  Free perhaps for everyone but the animals trapped by human error that threatens their global extinction.

Geese are not so threatened.  But on a ONE basis THAT goose was so distressed it was honking its heart and soul out to the corners of the cosmos — crying and crying WHAT?

Oh my heart broke for that little (perspectively) wild creature.  Could it fly?  I don’t know.  Was it physically injured and best kept behind a fence not much taller than it was?  I do not know.

Of all the families full of people walking the tidy pathways of that zoo yesterday — ALL being able to hear the pleading — I was the only one who stopped both to speak to the goose and to listen to it.  “Poor poor baby.  I am so sad to see you so sad.  What is WRONG?”

The goose lowered its beak from its frantic pointing at the sky, turned its head sideways and gazed into my eyes.  It became silent and did not move.  At that point I had no need for words and neither did it.  Just love.  Just love between us.  Just a widening circle of awareness bending outward in all directions from the two of us at the center.

It seemed like everything else disappeared around us.  Changing focus.  Connecting up.  A kind of shorthand linking, a silent texting from center to center inward and outward.  Just precious.

I walked away finally with a quiet goose left standing beside the fence.  I visually checked backward as our family moved forward to see how the goose was doing.  I checked several times.  The goose was quiet.  And in that quiet I could feel it resting.

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The Rabbit?  At the end of a very long and pleasant day spent with family yesterday it rained.  Standing outside my daughter’s car.  Soaking.  Talking that kind of talk that escalates into a clutter of power-filled words that dig a hole between two people.  Wider and deeper than anyone ever hoped for or intended.  But words that HAVE to be spoken.  Sooner or later as the complexities of intertwining lives through the generations find their way into the light of day.  Or into the darkness of a chilling rain soaked night.

I feel fortunate that last week I decided to send my first phone text.  Now this  honking bleating of generational complexities voiced out into the darkness can be bypassed in texts about the details of daily life when need be – and nothing else.  Nobody means to harm.  Nobody understands one another.

Suddenly my daughter spoke a few words to me that belonged to some other conversation.  Some other kind of conversation:  “What is that rabbit doing there behind you?”

I turned to see what she saw.

Oh Soul of my Soul!

My young small gentle wild rabbit friend.  We did not abandon one another during that long frigid winter.  I with the tuna cans of food portioned out double on the coldest of nights.  It with its courage and willingness to love me, closer and closer, but never quite touching.

“Oh my friend.  There watching my back on this cold hard night of a different sort.  Thank you.”

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job – I think we will have to find an alternative!).  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

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Leave a Comment »

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Sunday, May 11, 2014.  I allowed myself to follow myself into wakefulness at 4:00 am this morning at the end of a dream that is significant to me.  It is not one I would have remembered while awake if I had not made my own recent efforts to pay some attention to my dreams as I mentioned in my previous post.  I wrote the dream down.  It has many implications.  What are they and what do they mean to me?

The dream was involved many spiritual factors that are very personal to me, that I will not speak of directly in blog space.  Obviously the dream had to do with making decisions based on either passive or active choice.  I clearly made some important choices in the dream itself, and the dream alluded to choices I have made – and still need to make – in my waking life.

Today is Mother’s Day, a plain old day that our culture chooses to focus with attention specifically on mothers.  I am finding so many new levels of complications to my life involving my daughter who is now a mother herself.  The biggest conflict is probably around what decision I will be making about staying in this far northern town where she resides or leaving come fall to head back to the small Arizona town I moved up here from.  My daughter and I have lost the ability to talk about anything of personal concern to me.  We lost our friendship as far as I can see.  She wants me to stay here.

As I see it I would not be true to myself if I try to remain in this climate and place that I learned so many, many years ago is not compatible with me.

One of my daughter’s friends from her high school years came to town this weekend to run a half marathon, which she did successfully (13.1 miles).  I got to visit with this woman a bit yesterday and it was fantastic to see her again after all these years.  I believe my dream was stimulated by something she talked to me about:  “We must celebrate our OWN successes.  We decide them for our self.  Everyone’s successes are different.”

Her gist was that no matter how large or small, no matter if they make any sense to anyone else, our successes matter and have highest value to OUR SELF.  WE DECIDE what goals we set, what pathways we follow.  We as individual people find joy in certain things that might not matter at all to anyone else.

What I HEARD is that they are not SUPPOSED to matter to anyone else.  That is what being an individual self actually IS!

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Last week I began to clearly see — whether or not this is a REAL point or not it seems real to me — that the goal I held strongly when I moved up here to care for my youngest grandson so he could remain out of a large day care setting during this most significant developmental year of his life (he is now 21 1/2 months old) is being met very well.  I wanted this little boy to develop his SELF.  I wanted this SELF to be clear, strong and powerful.

Oh MY!  Spending what is now 9 hours rather than 10 hours a day with him mostly in a single room (I finally put my foot down that he HAD to be picked up at 9 hours or I would have burned out completely – never mind how much he needed to be with his parents that extra hour per day) is becoming so much more difficult simply because I met my goal!  He is cruising toward his 2nd birthday at full speed being not-such-an-easy baby to “manage!”  HE HAS A SELF — HE IS HIMSELF!  He is NOT anyone else — and his ideas about himself in his life are often in conflict with those around him.  So be it.  That is a most excellent state of affairs no matter how difficult life may now be for a while as he transitions through his childhood.

So – I see success with my goal!  This is not insignificant for ME.  True, I was thinking of my grandson’s well-being for this project of mine.  I have not taken the opportunity to congratulate myself on my success!

And my drumming.  I LOVE my classes and am now trying to get in 3 practice sessions each day.  I know enough about brain science and learning to know that a 20 minute practice with at least 2 hour break following for the brain-body to consolidate what it has learned in the 20 minutes is the absolute most efficient way to learn.  It’s working.  While I have not totally perfected my drumming form yet I am past the 300 beats per minute mark and speeding up.

I want to play MUSIC!  At yesterday’s lesson Brett, my teacher, told me he is moving me to the next level.  Next week I get SHEET MUSIC!!  I know based upon what he’s said to me before that I am one month ahead of schedule on this.  I also know that if I decide to leave here heading south when my lease here is up at the end of November I want to have made every possible step of progress while I can still be in this man’s presence.  He has told me lessons can continue via Skype once I leave, but he and I have to be absolutely in sync before that time for that type of lesson to be effective for me.

Can I truly celebrate my drumming choice, love and progress!  At what point I will feel there is success here depends on how I look at things.  The truth is that at age 62 (nearly 63) it is pretty wonderful I am actually pursuing this love at all!  And I am doing great at it!

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The tension inside of me as I learn how to be “just” my daughter’s mother without “friendship” is present constantly for me now.  What will happen along the way between us I do not know.  I can celebrate that I stood up for myself, that I could define a line that was crossed, and that I am letting myself “be real” with myself about how I feel.  My choices ARE my own.  Recognizing successes in my life, large and small, might turn out to be a powerful next step in my healing journey.

I guess I woke to a success.  I remembered my dream.  I wrote it down.  I will not forget it and I may well use what was in that dream to inform some important decisions yet to be made.  It is not always easy – or at all easy – to face and make decisions and choices.  Even in my dreams.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job – I think we will have to find an alternative!).  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

Leave a Comment »

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