Dear Mushroom,
Things are going ok, I still cry a bunch of times a day, and erratic things break me, like microwave ovens. The microwave oven died last night and I stood there, trying to figure out how I was going to fix my dinners. With the gas oven and stove to my left. Still, a microwave isn't something I can go out and buy right now. It was a muffled loss, the universe saying, "here, take this, too," and I felt it just like a body blow, like my body answered "sure, why not." Like my body had become Eeyore. Still, it bugged the crap out of me. Mostly about how to dispose of microwaves that don't work, try doing that anymore. It's easier to dispose of a dead body.
It's funny and it's not. New loss is hard to bear these days, even microwave loss.
Each day is hard. It's hard to do the same thing and it's hard to do something different. Yesterday was hard, because I went to an all-day seminar on diversity and inclusion given by one of the better teachers here at work, Patrick V., but it was a room full of strangers and now I would have to expose myself and tell the truth about my biases and isms. For the first four hours I was fighting tears. Eventually it got okay and then it got even better than that. We went through an exercise where we had to pick a profile of a "different" person and explain why that profile would be easier for us to be than the other three. I chose an unemployed paraplegic physicist. Why? Because unlike the other three profiles all of which had various compromises to freedom and dependency on or responsibility to others which affected their abilities to express their intellect, in my profile there was no loss of freedom of the mind, control over the inner cognitive self.
Later I sat outside and thought about why that profile was so attractive to me. I realized that it was true. No matter what damage my mother and my history and men in general and Fang specifically have caused me emotionally, I can still think. The one thing they can't touch is my mind. My mind is very fine. They haven't touched it.
So that was good.
I also think that's why getting to the truth of a thing is so important to me. When I know what's true, recovery moves just an inch forward. I used to think knowing the truth was the sure path to the heart's release, but there is more work to be done after that, I've discovered. Knowing the truth opens the door; and then there is the walking through of it all.
Anyway you'll remember that I didn't go to my AJ class last month because it was the week after or just before Fang dumped me, and I was having an okay day, as I recall I'd taken the day off and I just wanted to be still inside; I had trouble thinking about managing a room full of people. Now I'm sorry I didn't go.
But they tape the sessions and you can go online and replay them. Last month's AJ happened to be about loving yourself~~ tra laa...so I booted it up to watch at work this week.
I still think JB has the world's biggest heart and is doing the world's best work and is also possibly the worst deliverer of the message I've come across in this weird little ride I'm taking on the lovingkindness peace train. Possibly LL, the depression Buddhist, is worse, but anyway. James is like a nerd mad scientist hippy. Affect like an eager beaten puppy coming back for more. It makes me crazy. "You're okay!" he chirps. "You can do it!"
But after he tried to be incoherent and super kind for half an hour in front of the crowd, he brought up this woman MJ Ryan who's written a bunch of books about self-esteem and compassion and she was great. She says instead of trying to love yourself directly, go sideways and help your brain find evidence of the ways in which you are lovable. She talked about neuroplasticity, too. She talked about the Dalai Lama's translator's compassion retreats, which have been offered secularized to the public and how she just got back from one. It's nine weeks long. Basically nine weeks of repeating the lovingkindness metta/sutra. The last one you do is the one for yourself, because in Western culture we have such a hard time allowing ourselves to embrace self-love. Somehow, Eastern cultures do this better? That's a debate for another time, I suppose. All the Western-style ego and aqcuisition is about compensating for essentially feeling unlovable, though, this I see clearly.
Next this woman named Eve Decker, who used to sing with my ex-friend Patty in a band called Midnight Radio, came up to sing. She's been up before. The last time she was awful; trembly and off-key. This time she was great. She absolutely knew what she was talking about. It was very neat to see such a change, illuminating to see how mutable the human experience of certainty is. How art comes from a particular kind of sureness. The voice, that clarity of joy, awakens, just as this seminar is trying to help us see. I am doubtful that words are really the path into it, but togetherness seems to be. Touch seems to be.
Eve's been a meditator for a long time and spoke about hatred. Hatred is not the absence of love. Hatred is the failure to accept one's own humanity. Self-love doesn't happen until one knows all one's faults and foibles and loves oneself anyway. Some of these things she said, some of these things I thought as I watched her.
I saw for the first time why Fang is so hateful, especially if he's being asked to look at himself, even more so when he's being asked kindly.
He can't because he doesn't love himself. And that's where his hate comes from.
I get it; because I know about that, too.
It's very difficult to metabolize the notion of self-love. Yet, as Cormac McCarthy says, it is the self that the coward abandons first; after that, all other betrayals come easily. That courage cannot be a thing that is subject to the vicissitudes of fortune.
I wonder if all real love comes easily, once the self is cared for...
12 August, 2011
08 August, 2011
Grace, Returning
At church this week I met a beautiful woman named Helen. She showed me her aprons and her gospel songs. She has this way of moving you into the next thing, like breath.
"I came here, oh, a long time ago, somehow. I came and I left and then I came back," she said to me this week
I'd seen her the week before after services, but hadn't made her acquaintance. I caught sight of her as I was passing through the kitchen where she was wiping down the table upon which lunch had been laid out for social hour. She paused as I came in, offering plates and pointing out what had been cooked that week. She looked up at me over her glasses and smiled, gestured that I should help myself. Later she cleared my plate when I had finished and offered me herbal tea from a tray she was passing around. All of this took me to tears. It takes me there now.
Helen is tall, willowy but solid. She seems to have a look, or at least a "church" look: she wears a thick cotton sash wrapping her dreadlocks in an off-kilter, flattering way, the way that a beret sets a face into interesting angles and shadows below. No-nonsense glasses with dark blue frames and half-rectangle lenses, a hair wider than bifocals, frame her dark brown eyes. Though she dresses in strong colors, neon-bright animal and floral print skirts with matching shirts and shawls, she herself doesn't ask for a lot of attention. It feels like she's offering her presence to you as a greeting, the way a flower would, but doesn't need to otherwise take up space. If I had to guess, I'd say Helen is an introvert. One of those introverts who has a quiet secret garden inside her mind that she visits frequently. Her voice is soft and clear.
"I came here, oh, a long time ago, somehow. I came and I left and then I came back," she said to me this week
07 August, 2011
Restoration Period
Labels:
Grace
It's been so long since I've posted that I'm wondering how. Almost four years by the dates, I think. There has been a lot of grief.
Since last postings, I fell in love, or something like it, and now I'm recovering from surgery on it. I thought the second time that I tried with the same person that perhaps we could end it, if it had to end, in a way which allowed us both dignity and the chance to simply understand our incompatibilities. And I mentioned that to F., in fact, during the first weeks of our renaissance, which is to say during the early giddiness in which we fell back into bed and tried to build the foundations for daily life around that. Not easy with a man who lives 2 hours' drive away. But I thought with what we knew and had learned from the first time, perhaps there would be more ease in our considerations of each other.
Not to be.
The end was a fiery crash.
I don't want to say that F. is cruel, but in fact he is. Entreaties go ignored, efforts to find some kind of peaceful neutral ground for conversation are met with icy silence or fury. I know I have many faults, perhaps the biggest one is trying too hard. He used to call that my A+++ behavior. But he, I have to conclude, uses that space to punish me, instead of relenting. More may be revealed as I study the whys of what I do, and why I am attracted to abusive men.
Grace paid a visit today. Went back to church and met new people. Once again found the sermons uninspiring or somehow, missing the point. I stayed anyway. Met a woman named Helen who makes the most gorgeous aprons. And who coaxed me into practicing for the gospel choir. Met a man named Eduardo from Cuba. Saw Pat and Zhenne.
Belonged, for two short hours...ah! The grace of belonging.
I hope these gentle people can be patient with me as I try to find the self that I feel somehow has gone missing again, abandoned, along the way. I want to bring something of value to this place, to give back. I pray to be kept safe, please, for the journey.
Grace is simple. Grace is unexpected love.
As Annie Lamott says, "my favorite prayer is 'help, help, help, help...'"
Katie
Since last postings, I fell in love, or something like it, and now I'm recovering from surgery on it. I thought the second time that I tried with the same person that perhaps we could end it, if it had to end, in a way which allowed us both dignity and the chance to simply understand our incompatibilities. And I mentioned that to F., in fact, during the first weeks of our renaissance, which is to say during the early giddiness in which we fell back into bed and tried to build the foundations for daily life around that. Not easy with a man who lives 2 hours' drive away. But I thought with what we knew and had learned from the first time, perhaps there would be more ease in our considerations of each other.
Not to be.
The end was a fiery crash.
I don't want to say that F. is cruel, but in fact he is. Entreaties go ignored, efforts to find some kind of peaceful neutral ground for conversation are met with icy silence or fury. I know I have many faults, perhaps the biggest one is trying too hard. He used to call that my A+++ behavior. But he, I have to conclude, uses that space to punish me, instead of relenting. More may be revealed as I study the whys of what I do, and why I am attracted to abusive men.
Grace paid a visit today. Went back to church and met new people. Once again found the sermons uninspiring or somehow, missing the point. I stayed anyway. Met a woman named Helen who makes the most gorgeous aprons. And who coaxed me into practicing for the gospel choir. Met a man named Eduardo from Cuba. Saw Pat and Zhenne.
Belonged, for two short hours...ah! The grace of belonging.
I hope these gentle people can be patient with me as I try to find the self that I feel somehow has gone missing again, abandoned, along the way. I want to bring something of value to this place, to give back. I pray to be kept safe, please, for the journey.
Grace is simple. Grace is unexpected love.
As Annie Lamott says, "my favorite prayer is 'help, help, help, help...'"
Katie
27 July, 2007
12 July, 2007
I want this. What does that mean?
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