I’ve been given the rare gift to spend a couple of days visiting with extended family. A joy. So I am taking a short break from my writing and will resume on the weekend.
In the meantime, as I do for any holidays or breaks, I leave everyone with inspirational gift posts. So here we go.
“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”
Earl Nightingale
I’ve been given the rare gift to spend a couple of days visiting with extended family. A joy. So I am taking a short break from my writing and will resume on the weekend.
In the meantime, as I do for any holidays or breaks, I leave everyone with inspirational gift posts. So here we go.
“The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”
Walter Bagehot
I’ve been given the rare gift to spend a couple of days visiting with extended family. A joy. So I am taking a short break from my writing and will resume on the weekend.
In the meantime, as I do for any holidays or breaks, I leave everyone with inspirational gift posts. So here we go.
“Challenges make you discover things about yourself that you never really knew. They’re what make the instrument stretch — what make you go beyond the norm.”
Cicely Tyson
Writing this first draft of my memoir meant traveling back through many “previous lifetimes” and versions of myself. So much struggle, so much learning, so much assembling of all the tools that would be needed for the most challenging portion of my work — these last eight years.
The work of these last four years has been possible only because of all that earlier work. And these have been the ultimate challenge – opening those last padlocked doors of my psyche to shine light on the places never before confronted…either out of fear, or because I didn’t even know they existed. I only “felt” the pain vibrating out of those shadows. So I had to choose – stay with the pain or break down those last walls. That required a level of courage and strength that was only available because of all the work that came before it.
Now, I am about to begin this last phase of Carl Jung’s spiritual alchemy – the Rubedo, or red, fire part. It is the “me of now,” the me of decisions and answers, but also more questions, especially: “What do I feel and take away from this long journey?”
A friend noted that as she read the last of my recent Citrinitas posts, she heard my current voice returning – the person she knows right now. For so long, the voice was of so many earlier versions of me.
Her comment got me to thinking about “then and now.” What new horizons of me were showing now, compared with the “me of then?”
Journal: July, 2018
Prologue: The Ground Rules
So who am I now? That is the focus of this Rubedo section. What have I learned? Have I changed? Have I healed? How?
I have a bunch of folders with scribbled notes I am organizing as we speak. Those are my “source material” to consider. The thoughts on those notes came up all throughout my writing process. But since they were more for the end of the draft, I would scribble them down and toss them in the folders. It will now be interesting to see how the “me of then” who wrote those notes compares to the “me of now” who has finally reached the point to consider them.
I know there will be a difference, because I feel so different after all the writing of this past year and a half. Hence, this will be a journey of discovery. Pleasant discovery, I think.
Before I dig into serious topics, I will start with joy. The me of the present moment is not just serious and introspective, but also joyful, curious, and in awe of so many things.
So I will start with one of my “Moments of Respite.” In the past, these were any kind of distraction to help me survive Dad’s raging abuse episodes. They were always about hyperfocusing on some small overlooked aspect of my surroundings that I could escape into. Now, though, they are more about embracing my wonder and joy at the world around me.
(more…)Our son has an embroidery hobby — a particular variant of fine lace embroidery — that uses wooden spindles and thin colored threads. His pieces are intricate, beautiful creations.
One day, while watching his process and examining the final piece, I thought about its resemblance to the journey I’ve been on.
This blog started with the dark, early posts where I was choking on floods of unidentified emotions that I knew I had to face. But first I would need to untangle a mess of knotted threads and examine each one. So those days were the impending storm.
Much of the blog over the last year and a half was about sorting through confusion. What happened? Why? What did it do to me…and others? How to find my way back?
It was a long, long journey of trying to put pieces together into something that made sense.
(more…)THIS….The answer to “Why cows?”
This morning, my husband said something about the dead and destroyed cows in that nightmare that made it all come together. I had always wondered, “Why cows?” And he answered it.
Cows are mothers. And women. Providers of milk. Sustenance. Nurturing.
WHO were the victims in our house? My mother. She was obliterated by his abuse. All of us. And any victims of abuse out there, no matter what gender.
All those dead cows and floating body parts were the remains of what he had abused and destroyed. What ANY abuser destroys. They were the collateral damage of filling his needs, and then the damage from the battle I had to wage against him even as I didn’t want to have to fight. And they were the reason it hurt so much to see them blown apart all over that parking garage.
All the lost victims. And in abuse in general, all those who might have become mothers and never made it.
THAT was the reason for the cows. And as soon as he said the words, my stomach tightened and my soul screamed out, “YES!” in recognition.
My husband, who has walked for so many years through all of this with me…he is a treasure, and a gifted and insightful partner.
The next book after my memoir will be an expansion on Ed’s Coda at the end of this one…The Story of a Marriage – how we got together, why, and how we stayed together.
Thank you, Ed. All my love…
All my life, those nightmares signaled whatever still haunted me, or what I was fighting off. But lately, they were turning a corner…
Journal 6/20/25
This morning:
After my shower, I went outside to fill the bird bath, then came back in and noticed a smell in the house. Nothing unpleasant, just something different than usual. But as I pondered the word “smell,” I suddenly remembered last night’s nightmare and the smell of dead snakes. In the dream, there were thousands of them all throughout the house, and we needed to get them out…
The nightmare:
I realized we had snakes coming out of various places in the house – wall cracks, vents, seams that weren’t sealed…they seemed to have the ability to get in and come out of everywhere. AND they were multiplying…fast. I sensed that the basement was filled with them and they were reproducing, even though I didn’t know how many. I only knew some would come out of this large block of honeycombs down in the basement. I just knew something had to be done, and I knew I just couldn’t handle it.
(more…)“I saw a quote that said: ‘Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it. For many of us, our generational curse is avoidance. We come from people who just act like it didn’t happen. But pain demands to be felt. And somewhere along the line, a child will be born whose charge is to feel it all. These are your shamans, your priests and priestesses, your healers. You call them mental health patients and label their power as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and the like. But these are the ones who are born with the gift of feeling. And as we all know, you can’t heal the pain that you refuse to feel…’ And I felt that.”
Deep Minds Anonymous
Throughout most of this Citrinitas section of posts, I have been sharing the information I dug up from my research. I needed to spend some time looking for facts, because those would help me in my quest for answers to the questions I’ve carried for life, including:
What happened in that house that made it possible for Dad to so manipulate, fool, and control us?
Why couldn’t my mother fight back?
Why didn’t I leave sooner?
How did I finally get out?
How did all of that affect my decisions and the events of my life going forward?
Who, if anyone, was to blame?
What about truth, hope, forgiveness, agency, love? Did they exist or have any meaning to me?
Most of my life, all of these were stuffed into a back closet of my mind while I dealt with the needs of a present moment issue. But to leave it all there meant never having a clear, complete picture of what happened. Just a pile of broken pieces with no idea of how they connected to each other.
Sometimes you need the 20,000-foot view…that place where you can see the entire landscape at once – where the hills meet the river, where the cliffs are, how the lake in the valley is fed by a source high up in the mountains. And where that is.
In that moment, standing at the top of the world, you finally see the whole vista and how it all relates to each other. That is the moment when all of the individual pieces fit together, and things make sense. And in the end, making sense of it all was the crucial point.
By going through all of this, for the first time in seventy years, I feel whole.
Is the assembled picture pretty? No way. But it rings true. And seeing it all there in its entirety has its own…comfort. An affirmation that I wasn’t crazy, but that house environment was.
This may all sound strange. But there is something about unmasking the dark horrors in the daylight that takes away their power to keep haunting you.
It’s like one of those dark, frightening “fun-houses” at the amusement park from childhood. When you rode through it, every corner was another terror. At any moment, some monster would lunge at you. And screams filled the air even though you could see no one. But the fear was contagious and kept growing.
(more…)I am always picking up interesting rocks and bringing them home…just because I love how they feel in my hand. But while I love all my rocks, I am especially drawn to pegmatite. Powerfully. Even the obsidian glass arrowheads with their ebony sheen just don’t hold a candle to it.
When I hold it, I feel a sense of “solidity” and “strength.” In my gut, I sense something valuable and complex about it. Why? So, I decided to finally figure out where pegmatite came from and WHY I love it so.
(more…)
