SOAR . . .

'It's called a "leap of faith" . . . because there is strength in daring to take the leap . . . and the faith happens . . . just before you realize . . . that you have begun to fly.'
- Hallmark/Mahogany E-card.

My Mom sent me this quote in an Alvin Ailey e-card, yesterday evening, and I only just checked my mail at nearly 5 am today. Interestingly, I was browsing a old local paper early tonight and found an advertisement for Alvin Ailey coming to my town in April '09. I don't believe in coincidences. Troubled by sleeplessness, I just happened to turn on the computer. This quote RESONATES with me. I am creating my way in the world, daily.

I feel, in some intuitive way, that I am standing on the edge of my life's true greatness. I don't know how close, in time, I am to that moment, but it's there, poised in the unseen, waiting to enter the full frame of my life and change it forever. My LEAP is coming. I ask the Universe to 'conspire for my benefit' and bring that moment into the NOW. I INTEND to be fully concious and recognize it EXACTLY so that I may ACT.

I have another quote that relates to this one which includes a reference to my personal talisman. This one is on the front of a journal I bought for myself, recently.

Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.
- Proverb (from Quotable cards journal)

Butterflies start out as 'ugly, wiggly, earthbound things', but the POWER OF TRANSFORMATION
allows them to soar. I love you, Mommy, and I eagerly anticipate my wings.

All is well in my world.

Eat, Pray, Love

I recently read Elizabeth Gilberts' book: Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman‘s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. A close friend of mine read the first 20 pages and INSISTED that I HAD TO read the book myself. When she called me to talk about it, I happened to be sitting in the parking lot of Barnes and Nobel about to go inside to look for something to read. What a coincidence! NOT!!! I read the first 20 pages and immediately understood why I needed to read the book.

The author was telling the story of my own life experience for the last four years through hers. Her journey even begins at the same age that the most painful time in my life began! I was immediately taken in by her style of writing, her honesty and the raw emotion she seemed to leak onto every page. Sometimes the book was difficult for me because her emotions caused such a DRASTIC emotional response in me. I would put it down, cry for a while and then make my way back to reading again. I admire Ms. Gilberts' ability to infuse even the most heart wrenching experience with humor. I was all at the same time devastated, inspired, amused, heart broken and uplifted by her book. I strongly suggest that anyone who feels deep inside that they need desperately to change /reclaim their life read this book. Her journey has so many lessons to teach about healing, love and survival that it should not be missed.

I finished the book feeling somewhat disappointed. Not because there was ANYTHING disappointing about the book itself. In all honesty, I was looking for a magic answer, in classic 21st century fashion, I waited for the exact secret to make everything in my life perfect! Though I recognized so much of myself in the first section of the book in Italy, when she is working her way through the aftermath of a divorce and the process of finding herself again, I felt left behind as she moves on to India and begins her healing process through meditation at the Ashram. Once she reaches Bali and I was witness to her incredible transformation, I was so happy for her, but desperately sad for myself. I felt this way because I couldn't imagine how I could find or move through a process for myself that would allow me to reach a place of peace and self-recognition and I expected her to provide that answer for me. to a certain extent that means I missed to message of the book. Self journey is about self. My answer could not be the same as hers and though our experiences were similar, our paths could not be the same. I did gain something from the book (among many things!) that I felt sure would help me on my path to reclaiming my life.

In another one of those non-coincidental coincidences, the type of yoga that she studies and the Guru that she studied under were introduced to me when I was in my late teens and experiencing my first psychiatric hospitalization. The doctor who treated me was a devoted follower and shared the teachings with me as part of my recovery. At the time, I was young and unable to understand the significance of these teachings or how they might help heal my depression. As I look back on it now, I recognize that the circle of my life has brought me back to that place through a book by divine design. I have been asking God in desperate late night tears to 'work on me' and help me find myself again. He chose to speak to me in the way that I would be most likely to hear. He talked to me through a book. I am a true bibliophile and have been since I learned to read at 4 years old. God could not have chosen a better way to answer my cries for guidance.

I have written a letter to the doctor and hope that we will be able to begin a correspondence that will help me to go on my journey of self-discovery and move further along in my quest for actualization. I can't imagine that many people haven't heard about this book but in case you haven't, pick it up, whether you are in a place of crisis or not, you will take something useful, funny and beautiful away from the story Elizabeth Gilbert tells!

Peace and Blessings.

Reflections on Reflections

I started this blog over a year ago and I haven't been a very faithful writer. I used to think this was due to lack of discipline. Recently, I have come to the conclusion that I have been afraid to write about all the things that I have been thinking and feeling. As a matter of fact, fear of the intensity of my thoughts and emotions has prevented me from writing in my journals as well. I have done just about everything I can to encourage myself to write somewhere. I've bought new journals (one as recently as two days ago!), resurrected old ones for new uses and even resorted to a set of pretty multicolored gel ink pens so that I could write in a different color each time. None of these things have worked . . . . because I am afraid of the depth, seriousness, emotion and possible implications of the things I have been hiding from inside my head.

This is a very strange development for me. I survived the greater majority of my childhood and young adulthood by keeping journals. Somewhere among my many boxes in storage are all the journals I have keep since the very first one I was given at 9 years old. It's particularly painful to go back and read that journal because I was nine and lacked all sophisitcation (as 9 year olds should). It's hard reading for a 32 year old. A friend of mine noted for me at a much more stable time in my life that maybe my need for journaling decreased because there was relative peace in my life. If her theory is correct, in light of the course of my life recently, I should be writing CONSTANTLY!!!

I am going to try once again to keep up with this blog and/or my written journal. I am still in the same searching mode I was in which inspired me to start this blog. The CRITICAL difference is that my life is in a much less uplifted place than it was when I started. Truthfully, I feel more lost than ever. Perhaps this is a lack of reflection over the course of the last year and a half. I have been VERY MUCH on autopilot; almost to the point of being a spectator in my own life! I look around sometimes and wonder who's life I am living.

Here's hoping I can get back on the journey's path and accomplish some self-searching. I fear that if I do not, I will wake up one morning 10 years from now and my life will 'no longer resemble me'.

Patience . . .

I beg you . . . to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer . . . Rainer Maria Rilke

Ok, raise your hand if you read this quote and feel like what she is asking is impossible!!! The first time I saw this quote, I re-read it two or three times before it sank it what she was talking about. Sometimes no matter how much we may want the answer to a question, living is the only answer there is.

Almost two years ago now, my ex and I broke up around an incidence of infidelity that turned into a relationship outside of our marriage. By the time I found out about it, she was already in love with the other person and the life we had built together was no longer important. I didn't understand then why our world was imploding. In the two years that have passed since the moment I found out, I have discovered MANY answers to the question or why through the simple act of living.

Before we began to fall apart, I was in therapy searching desperately for a deeper connection with my children. In the madness that followed the wake of our demise, I found that relationship. I came to understand that they needed me to be their Mom as much as they needed her, just in different ways. I found that I was fully capable of comforting them and providing for them on a daily basis without any help from anyone else if that was how it had to be.

Through patience, I am learning about facing the challenges of loving someone again. It has proven to be, by far, the hardest thing to do in the wake of breaking up a long term relationship. My heart is sometimes overly cautious and jaded. I find it hard to allow myself to be that vulnerable to another person again. The physical side of things has been simple compared to the challenge of opening up emotionally. Making a connection with another person and risking being hurt, rejected and/or abandoned again is so TERRIFYING. I have tried very hard to leave the damage of the relationship that ended out of my new one, but truthfully, the new relationship is somewhat a product of the old one ending, so it's very difficult to completely separate the two. It's hard not to bring the baggage that developed at the end of the other relationship into the new one because the fear is still there that the end is what I deserve, not a new beginning and that an ending will be coming along shortly to prove my theory. This has lead me to learn to be patient with myself.

I sincerely believe that God understands us so well. He knows what we need. When things in our lives are beyond our understanding, they don't remain so forever because God understands that we need to know, to keep our sanity, we need to see the purpose for our suffering. In my life, I have found, that God shows me the reason for my tradgedies. This allows me to look at my history without regret because I understand why the path had to be as it was. I am fond of saying that I would relive every moment of my life exactly as it was to be standing in exactly the same place because I would not want to have sacrificed any of the many blessings along the way. I may not have understood the reasons for the turns in the path as I walking it, but through patience, the reasons came to be clear.

Epiphany

At 3 am on my fourth day of sleepless nights
I decided
I had to find a way to purge my soul
Release the pain I’d claimed some two years before

She said to me, ‘It’s unfortunate but there’s a third party involved.’
In that moment
Life I’d known disintegrated
Nothing I loved would ever be the same

Lonely nights followed
full of resounding silence and uncountable tears
My heart wrenched in ways words could never suffice to explain

I watched her
Nightly
Go to another woman’s bed and
Daily
Return

No longer lying to me
But now to herself
And
Our Children
Nearly always back at 6 AM donning sleeping clothes as though she’d never left.

I rarely challenged but lived in hope
Eventually she would come home
Remembering
The vows we’d exchanged

It didn’t happen

The house we’d bought together
Transformed
A cage I wandered helplessly in
For days of sleepless nights
And wondered why

A million times I thought
I would trade places with Her to be the one she loved again
All the while She wanted to be me

Why?
She possessed what had been most dear to me
Both of us in captured orbit around the planet
That only one could claim

The Beast (as I came to call Her) became the new gravity maker
I became inconsequential
Cook maid babysitter
A wife to one who wasn’t a wife anymore

Fast forward in slow motion through months of sometimes fighting
And
Always hoping
Admittedly
I searched for love in other places
Found comfort in familiar and unfamiliar arms

And yet

I reached back

Here and there now and then

To see if courses could be changed
Broken things mended
The response
Always the same
‘I’ll think about it.’
No other words ever came

The night I poured my heart out about the emptiness she’d left me with
She told me,
‘Fill that space up with your children.’

I raised my hands to her in rage
She expected me to do what she had not
I understood then there was nothing left to do but leave
That line
Once crossed
Is easier to cross again

I understood that anger snaked its’ roots in me and would not be stifled

Days of sleepless nights later
A life of headaches, itching, ulcer, fear and worry
I could not see myself
I had left
But
Taken her
And
Left me behind

Sleep starved epiphany at 3 AM
I purge my soul
Find my voice
Tell my story
Free my heart
Hoping to find me again

FINDING MY CRADLE - for the TKIDZ

Part I
The call came
January 10th, 2002
I was at my desk

3 brown little ones needed a cradle

To rock them
and
Soothe them

Nurture them
and
Protect them

Educate them
and
Encourage them

Raise them
and
Love them

They needed a cradle

I had little experience with cradles myself

But I was willing to learn

And

I shared my task
with one who knew cradles
much better than I.

Originally,
we’d said we’d only take in one brown child

We had to take them all

Into our home
Into our lives
Into our hearts

Part II
When they brought them to the door
They were
Fuzzy
Out of focus
I could
Barely see
Where one of my little people began
And the next one ended.

Neglect clung to them
Shadow in a badly taken photo
Obscuring their personalities
But
Their spirits shone like angels
In spite of their past

They were my little people from that first moment.

We fed them
And
Clothed them

In hugs
and
In kisses

In attention
and
In care

The shadow subsided
And
They came rapidly into focus.

I became hazy in return.

I didn’t know how long they would stay
I didn’t know how much I might have to endure
If
They went home to their mother

In a gesture of hope,
We embraced her too
Hopeful
At least
If they had to leave
We might still have some
impact on their lives

Instead

She made a loving mother’s sacrifice
And
Gave them to us to cradle

Part III
As much as I knew
I would have died for them
(As the cliché goes)
I couldn’t bring myself to hold onto them

Not too tightly anyway

They might have had to go
And
Take my heart with them

I figured
Once we got the word they would be staying
I would begin to feel my cradle.

The day
came
and
went

No cradle.

“I’ll feel it once the papers are filed.”
“I will surely find my cradle then!”

Didn’t happen.

I knew how to defend, protect and pull all the punches
To play the ‘Mama Bear”
And
Give my children a voice in the noisiest of rooms

But

I was afraid to love them too much.

Afraid to cradle them to close.

Part IV
I struck another bargain

“The cradle will come when I see my name on the papers
I know it! Then I’ll find it.”

The papers came on Wednesday, November 17th, 2004.

I saw my name on the pages
Along with theirs

I did feel differently
But
Not in the way I expected.

Quietly I realized

I had been a cradle all along

Not the same as they left behind
Nor the same as they received from others

But

A cradle none the less

Now I know my cradle and
I am no longer afraid.

Some Thoughts on Conciousness

Ok, so I am in the midst of this explorative journey, and I am distinctly lacking in direction. I am a Christian and I believe in God. I also believe that God equips us to discover ourselves through personal enrichment activities. I look to my Bible for guidance and I pray for discernment, but I also have to put my own mind to use in the process. There is an old Russian expression , 'Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore.'

That having been said, when I was in my twenties I was very suspicious of and skeptical about self-help books. I guess there was a part of me that felt my intellect should be sufficient to resolve any issues I might come up against. I was also regularly attending therapy and figured whatever needed to be resolved would come up therein. Now, at 32, I find myself gravitating towards the self-help section in my local book megastore. But those trips often leave me feeling entirely overwhelmed. It is unbelievable the plethora of topics for which self-help books have been written. From Dr. Phil (Self-Matters) to Stephen Covey (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) to Iyanla Vanzant (In the Meantime), all three of which I own, you can find a book to help you with just about any issue you face in life. It's a multi-million dollar industry. However, inspite of the reading I have done, I have only been able to glean fundamental concepts. There is no 'magic pill'. Self-discovery takes work. You can't read your way to knowing yourself, no matter how much reading you do. Action and deliberateness are required. My therapist refers to this as living conciously.

How do you go about living conciously? I believe the first key is to understand that you can't do it all the time. The emotional energy it takes to be present each and every moment would overwhelm the most grounded of people. To always be paying attention to what you think, say and do as well as always paying attention to the world around you is asking alot. Sometimes you just HAVE TO be on autopilot to give your brain an opportunity to rest. Lately I have been paying attention to how much I 'pay attention' and I have realized that I am barely concious most of the time. From rising in the morning to laying down at night, I am usually on autopilot. Through daily effort, I am trying to teach myself to be more aware. My goal is to train myself to navigate each and every day with my eyes as open and focused as possible. Autopilot is now reserved for the moments when my brain needs a break to recharge so I can be present for the next experience life throws my way.

Butterfly

An ugly wiggly earth bound thing
Searches for green life
And
Gorges itself
In preparation for change
As the chrysalis forms

Impermeable

A miracle begins

A different spirit
Emerges
From murky skin

Revealing

Beauty once hidden by
Unrealized transformation

This new creature
with wings
Flying
In spite
Or maybe because of
It’s beginnings

A magnificent unprecedented being
Looking out on a world of possibilities
From above.