Evolution

Or devolution

I’m feeling differently today. I’ve just had a couple of weeks of tough conversations with people I care about.

I was watching myself in the conversations; just watching. Some were rather exhausting, brought up the chaff I need to see. Chaff that brings me more to a place I need to be which is quiet. Always this is meditation; what is quiet? Where is peace? I never had the time to think about that. I’ve been busy living through other people which is what I thought being a mother/healer/wife/friend/sister etc. would be.

I’ve been tempestuous, outspoken. Many times I speak as I think as opposed to thinking first. Sometimes this has stood me in good stead. Being angry can be a form of self defense, protection. As I’m aging I get more space. I don’t believe one should cut off challenging people or situations. However, it’s ok to make a space for oneself in the chaos. I can tend to be overly dramatic and think in all or nothing ways. So many problems with me!

Being a mother, sister, friend, wife, healer was my identity. There’s a phase of life that’s about this. About creation. Creating through one’s children, work, relationships. It’s vital to engage in this process. This is how we create a life. To go forward into identities or ideas and be subsumed. To be molded and shaped. To jump.

There’s much talk about trauma these days; generational trauma, gender trauma, trauma trauma. It’s right to be empathetic about it. We hold trauma in our bodies and when it is felt we might be transported to the moment the trauma happened, held captive. It can create deep pain. It can inspire. It can create illness. Every day I am with people in deep pain and I can easily and lovingly hold a space for their pain. With my own I feel awkward, tense, uncomfortable. I’m learning to soften into it and accept.

Birth is traumatic. Going from the warmth and safety of the womb to the cold, hungry place that is this world. I felt this with all three of my children’s births. A sense of mourning the loss of our physical connection to the world they entered, alone. So I’d spend a lot of time attempting to ameliorate this while not realizing how much pain I caused. Stopping pain is good, isn’t it? Especially for one’s children?

One can seek to return to the womb but that means death for the life which is coming in; so delicate and needing a mother to survive for awhile. So dependent on the circumstance of the world we are born to and clinging to an identity or idea of who/what/where we are.

I’m becoming older. I think of my grandmothers and their stories and how they shaped mine. Both creative, vibrant humans who overcame deep pain, quiet pain. Miscarriages, adultery, orphaned by 12 years old, cancer, living through world wars, the Spanish flu, the depression, their own tragedies and triumphs. Their stories and the warp and woof of their lives which I feel in my own life now.

They are my heroines. They were imperfect, beautiful and sought to share their wisdom through love. One urging me to “follow my bliss” with evangelical fervor. The other, sitting with me after the death of her husband telling me that he was now “in the land, all around me” and that she wasn’t sure she wanted to continue to be on the earth anymore. She could feel it, that it was a choice. She could go, be with him, her life partner who was never kind - but had told her he loved her just before he died (quickly, a fall on the ice carrying wood in for the fire and he died the next day). Because a part of her, the fabric of her experience was now gone. For me he had been a genial and loving presence. He’d transformed as he aged and I felt his love strong and true. He hadn’t been able to give that to his children nor his wife in such a solid form. My grandmother used to say that life was built in reverse; that just as we learned what it was to live it was time to get ready for death.

She lived over a decade longer, alone, save for the time her severely alcoholic son came to live with her. The pain of this wore on her yet she fought on. She told me once she felt a stroke in her body and she said no, no, stamped her foot and it passed. She was that kind of woman. She’d sing in public, unabashed and brave. Embarrassing.

My other grandmother contracted breast cancer in her 50s, the changing time. She went the natural route of healing. Part of this healing was leaving my grandfather after six children and many years. She came to live with us in California for awhile. She was an elegant woman, dressing with Isabella Duncan as her muse. A southerner who had married a Yankee, an orphan who had lost both her parents very young, she had a gentle power. People loved her, were drawn to her. She began living with a writer who had been widowed in a gorgeous home in a canyon. She practiced feldenkrais and got acupuncture. She healed. She worked as a temp worker for awhile, and then she went back to Connecticut, to her Yankee. She worked for the National Endowment of the Arts when she was younger. An ideal job, traveling and watching dance companies and deciding who received funding. She loved Art. She told me once that every piece of art was beautiful because it was, simply art. She told me not to worry that I’d lose my own creativity when I had children because my creativity would express through them. She left her job at the NEA because she felt she was losing herself in the bureaucracy and paperwork. She lived authentically most of the time. Sometimes living in authentically is how we figure out who we are.

The marriages were never gentle nor warm but fraught with jibes and comments. Having been in a long marriage, I realize this is the sound of two humans trying to be themselves while also confined in an institution.

Individuals who have sacrificed something to a larger thing and are hoping this was the correct decision. The creation of the entity of a marriage transcends the individual. Joseph Campbell said many wise things about this reality. Real love is not pretty. It’s not elegant nor pleasant sometimes. Sometimes it is. The sacrifice to something larger than oneself is not lauded these days but I still think there’s something to it. There’s you, them and the marriage.

In any case, she lived to be 90. In the end medications and what passes for elder care swallowed her. She was a shadow of herself and who she was became just a physical echo.

My other grandmother swam every day for years. She stretched each morning to help her be able to leave her bed. She had terrible arthritis. She liked to eat naughty, rich foods and this no doubt contributed. At some points, my father had her come out to California and put her into various wellness Centers for the winter. Juice fasts, colon cleanses and such made her feel better then she’d return to her 50 acre spread in Connecticut where she ate as she pleased again.

In the end, she gave up on western medicine after they’d removed something they shouldn’t have and she died quickly, in her own bed after a time of pain, drifting in and out of the worlds.

My own mother and her story I can see now and probably will see more clearly as I age. Like me, like all mothers, she started out on a good track and then, like a tired long distance runner, quit. That only made things worse for us all. In spite of how she felt (exhausted) she still had young children.

I decided I would never quit. I would persevere and love and sacrifice beyond any human bounds because that’s the endless story. One generation thinking it has the only answer to a universal pain. That we can fix it through our actions and decisions. Yet, inevitably another pain shows up, unexpected, a saboteur who arrived through the back door and hid in the shrubbery awaiting the perfect moment to strike.

And then, as all healing happens, we collect ourselves. We stare into the abyss. We go on, perhaps a bit wounded, limping, realizing that all the control we thought we had, all of our illusions, our hopes and our ideas are full of crap. And as my father used to say “ that shit is manure for growth”. Ha, thanks pop.

And maybe we can stop. Stop taking things so seriously. Stop trying to force our own will or ideas upon a world of endless mystery and tragic grace.

Last night I awoke, worrying about something and a voice came to me it said “oh Kelly don’t worry so. You’re just on a green blue marble floating through space and nothing matters, really.” I chuckled and the voice chuckled and I felt warmth I the knowledge that all the trying, the striving, the hurt, the joy, the ideas I had that I believed. All for naught. But I wouldn’t change a thing. I’m just going to enjoy the time left here on this marble. And…evolving.