Soul Mosaic

Some emotional “aftershocks” from that trip…

After the trip, I still wasn’t able to start “sorting and assessing” right away, because the flood of “things boiling to the surface” continued for a while. All I could do was let it come. Write it down. And when it started to settle, figure out what to do next. Those reverberations held some clues:

Journal entry: Sun, Oct 1, 2017:

• Feelings of anger, rage, not going to put up with anybody’s sh-t
• When a drawer knob catches my shirt and pulls at me, or I bump into something – I rage
• When anyone treats me like they think I’m stupid or they are pulling something over on me, I rage

Journal entry: Mon, Oct 23, 2017:

• I DID compartmentalize (back in that house and life). I dissociated. I had no voice.
• Now, I HAVE a voice.
• *I DON’T want to be silenced or stay in a closet any more, because of anyone not liking what I have to say
• I don’t like compartmentalizing anymore – I spent sooo much time dissociated.
• My work now is to reintegrate all and be whole.
• And the “Me Too” things …doesn’t answer for me, “So what is next?”

Journal entry: Sun, Nov 12, 2017:

• Ed asked me what my earliest childhood memory was that was not of the abuse.
• My earliest memory WAS the abuse.
• I can’t remember a “before time.” There never was a “before time.”

Journal entry: Mon, Nov 13, 2017

• Where am I now? I am ALREADY TRIGGERING my PTSD, just writing these things
• What do I expect to come out of writing this book?
• Change. Though I don’t know what form it will take.
• I’m optimistic it will be a good outcome.
• *But my guess is it will be something I won’t be expecting. That kind of change is never what you think
• *The purpose is not getting to the end of the book, its outcome, or money. It’s the process that I will experience through the writing and the changes that will come from that.
• *I have to pace it.
• If I rush and don’t touch emotions, I’ll be “okay,” but the experience won’t be worth anything.
• If I bull through and hit too many emotions too fast, that is emotionally DANGEROUS for me.
• Need a “middle path” approach
• I must learn to let it take as long as it will – and it WILL take longer than I want

Stopping the runaway freight train

Working with my therapist after my return, we focused on slowing down the abundance of emotions and thoughts coming up. They were all to the good, and I’d write them down as I knew they would have value….at some point. But we needed to slow things down enough to take stock of what I’d experienced.

Experiences are useless without reflection and then, some way to organize them and see the insights and patterns they hold. I’ll talk about reflection in a minute. But first, order.

Teshuvah – the turning and “re-turning” – Part I

Part I -my 2017 journaling:

It is almost Yom Kippur…Day of Atonement,
the end of the Days of Awe,
which are often summed up in the word, “Teshuvah.”
It’s a good word, combining the triad: “turning, returning, repentance,”
a “coming home” of sorts.

It comes in the reflective and fading days of the year – Fall –
and is a time that calls us to turn from ordinary busy lives,
return to ourselves to reflect,
and repent.

Then, with the end of those days,
we resume the cycle of life and the new year, all over again.
Always, the circle.

The Underworld – Things to remember….

“God is in the darkness.”
Dom Bede Griffiths (Midwinter God ix)

If I had to choose one song to be the theme song for this stage of the work, It would have to be “Break it Down Again, by Tears for Fears. The lyrics and even the pulse of the music capture the emotional turmoil of that nigredo, underworld place, the place where we rip it all open, take it all apart, then wait to hear what it will teach us.

For this post, I will not just share my own thoughts but invite the voices of many others who have made this journey, studied or guided it, and who have a wisdom far beyond me.

What is the Underworld Nigredo Journey?

Before I get into the “Teshuvah time” that I mentioned in the last post, I need a moment to talk about “dreams.”

Buried alive

For a lot of 2017, I was really busy. Between my treasured work teaching kids in a science museum, and helping with visits to see Mom, I was finishing up my book about another love – my fifty years of visits to Colonial Williamsburg, the reconstructed Revolutionary War capital of Virginia.

But in the quiet moments…things were coming alive. Things that had waited a lifetime, but that were growing impatient. And while my days might be too busy to allow many random thoughts to creep in, the nights were another matter.

For a lot of my early adulthood, I hadn’t had a lot of nightmares, maybe because my daytimes were enough of ones themselves. Still, there were some — memories of abuse, and they were never pleasant.

After my father died, they increased. And about the time I decided to undertake this deeper therapy, they showed up with a vengeance, becoming a regular occurrence.

They were ugly…really ugly. Disturbing, shame-filled portrayals of “something” that was buried alive within me. Sometimes, I would thrash around and talk in my sleep. My husband was aware that it happened, though he couldn’t make out what I was saying, given my CPAP mask. Except for one night very recently, when I yelled REALLY loudly…something I’d never done before. But I’ll get to that later.

He just said that the sounds coming out of me, and through that mask, had an “otherworldly” haunting quality. Which was appropriate since those dreams were filled with the ghosts of my past. It was my subconscious trying desperately, I think, to “flush the cesspool of my memory” and process things still trapped and unfinished.

The person in the journal pages

To write about the emotional therapy of the years from 2017 on, I want and need to be mindful. I have a wall chart full of the issues that were surfacing, and a list of themes I kept revisiting. I don’t just want to throw them all out haphazardly, but rather, reflect on them so I can tell a coherent story for all of us, myself included.

As I think back over these last few years and try to remember the specifics to share, my memory simply says: “It’s been painful, long, deeply emotional, and worth it.” Duh.

So I realized I needed to take some time and go back through my journals for these years. And hands down…that person in the journal pages tells a much richer tale of where I was at, what I was thinking about, and in much sharper detail than my memory.

While the early one in 2017 was more sparse than the later ones because I was still, in a lot of ways, emotionally unaware, it still contained enough information to get this journey started. So I’ll start that with a journal “warm-up,” a preview or “sampler buffet” of things to come….

The binder buffet

When I look at that journal now, I see it was often more abbreviated than I would have wished for. Comments were less elaborate and more cryptic in nature. But nevertheless, there were clues of what I was starting to feel.

Those journal pages were like charts from a volcanic seismograph — blips and peaks of new activity cropping up within me. They pointed to the fact that my “long-dormant volcano within” was coming alive. But the signs were still subtle enough for me to miss them. It would take a couple more years of therapy work, and my mother’s death, before gases would belch forth, and lava would finally shoot out. Reading the pages now, though, I can see the cryptic warnings seeping out in the words.

And then, a miracle occurred?

So the question remains. How does a caterpillar go from this…

…to this?

Yes. We all know the basics – the caterpillar hatches from an egg, eats leaves and gets fat, then weaves a cocoon around itself. Then it “sits inside the cocoon” for however long each species needs, until one magical day, a beautiful butterfly (or a moth) cracks open the dried cocoon husk and emerges. Then it pumps fluid from its abdomen to inflate its wings, rests for a couple of days while they dry, then it spreads them wide and flies off to mate and lay new eggs that will hatch into new caterpillars. Seems straightforward enough.

But. HOW does that tube of mostly mushy guts with legs BECOME that butterfly? What SPECIFICALLY happens inside the darkness of the cocoon? Do the legs fuse to become a head and body? Does the outside skin form the new wings? And where do all those gooey insides go?

As many years as I’ve been on this planet, it took me until recently to actually stop to consider the question: “Exactly HOW does that caterpillar TRANSFORM to a whole new body structure?”

I always knew “something” happened. But it had never occurred to me until very recently to dig deeper and not just write it off as “and then a miracle occurred.”

Just like it wasn’t until the last few years that I finally realized I needed to dig deeper into myself as well. Maybe some miracles might be found there, too?

That is the quest of this book section – find the riches of my “Undiscovered Country.” And there is only one entrance to that country: transformation.

Tools for the garden

My husband reads all my posts, something I deeply appreciate. After the last couple, he noted that he could see I am “searching and gathering.” Searching, because right now I have more questions than answers, and gathering the things that I think will help me find them. As usual, he nailed it. Unlike the previous section of my life story, a more straightforward process, this is the part that is the “fumbling through darkness.” So I need all the help I can muster for it.

One particular Mother’s Day, my husband wrote a note about the “gardener I have been through life.” He observed that years ago, amid the chaos of my life in that house, I had started tending a vegetable and herb garden. I dug out the space, planted, and weeded to coax new life from the soil. And he said that, now, I am doing the same with my life.

I loved that comparison, and I agree. In writing this book, I’ve been l laboring to spawn a rebirth from the old soil of my past. A harvest of insights may emerge in their own time, but I must actively work that soil to reach them.

So, aside from right mind and attitude, what else do I need to do this? And why?

The words come last

It might seem odd that when talking about the tools to write a book, words, questions, story, and writing process are actually at the bottom of the list. Maybe that’s because before you get to the words – the communicating of answers and wisdom – there are so many “non-verbal” steps needed.