Ode to Bonnie Parker, originally uploaded by nhungsta.

Sunday morning I had a dream of myself at 10. I am rollerskating through the neighborhood and wearing this filmy pink nightgown that my grandmother had given me for my “dress-up box.” I used to wear this over my regular clothes and run or skate around with my friends, who were also dressed up in funny, older clothes. In the dream, I am skating in this outfit through lawn sprinklers, and I am happy. So very happy and joyful and laughing.

As I awoke, I saw that image morph into another from that time period. I used to dream that my father was a terrorist holding my family hostage. Unless I met all his demands, he would blow my mother, my grandmother, and my grandfather up. This Sunday morning, it wasn’t my father as the terrorist, and it wasn’t my family as the hostages. It was me–me at 10 years. I was the terrorist holding the gun, and I was the hostage. If I did not meet my terrorist demands then my life would be destroyed.

Two images of my life — one carefree and joyful, the other constricted and miserable.

I’ve been talking with my teacher about the need to free up my life to allow more time to just be and let creativity percolate. I run around so busy with my self-imposed responsibilities to others. I was ranting about this to my husband Friday evening — because I have “responsibilities” and I am “dependable,” I can’t just let things “drop!”

But I am holding myself and my life hostage, and that needs to stop. And that bomb needs to be replaced by some green and white rollerskates!

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”

This aphorism has always irritated me. Maybe it’s my wee, little intellect, but I love talking about people.

People are so complex, messy, fleshy, and  juicy. I look at humanity and I find us brilliant, wonderful, curious. We are lovely in both our bigness and our smallness. We are lovely in our joy and our angst. We are fascinating in our kindness and our cruelty.

See, I don’t think it is what we talk about — ideas, events, or people — but how we talk about them.

You can talk about an idea like patriotism and either inspire people to do great, big, beautiful things, or small, mean, and petty acts.  All in the name of ideas and ideals. 

You can do the same about people. There’s gossiping about your neighbor’s misfortune or picadillos, and then there’s finding ways to help make people’s lives better.  And that usually, if not always, takes dialogue. 

Maybe instead of definging someone’s intellectual depth by which of three broad categories they discuss, we should look at how they express their hearts…and their minds.

“Colors of Life” by Ketzirah (Creative Commons)

Ebullient: overflowing with fervor, enthusiasm, or excitement; high-spirited

Last night, Michael and I watched the first episode of Heroes. I had never seen it, but the series has been highly recommended by people whose taste in TV matches mine enough to justify a sampling.

I love Hiro’s ebullient dance through the sea of cubicles when he is able to make the clock on his desk go back just one second. His joy and conviction is unsinkable in the face of his skeptical colleague. I laughed giddly watching him in this first episode. And yes, “ebullient” was the first word I thought of to describe him when my husband and I were deciding whether to continue watching the show on Netflix. And then I’m looking online for more about this character and what makes him tick, and I realize that I may just have another media obsession.

“I wanted a guy who felt trapped in a life that was not his dream and what could be a power that would be most wish-fulfilling for that character? And that was the ability to teleport out of that life.” — Heroes  creator Tim Kring on Hiro, 2007

Oh, boy.

In the recesses of my psyche, a little head has popped up with wide eyes open. She is watching and wondering at Hiro’s embracing of his special power and how she can grab onto that joy for the ride of her life — and maybe change the world around her for the better. Maybe this is what listening to and answering the call to vocation looks like to my Younger Self.

That, and laundry.

And changing the cat boxes.

Rather than piss and moan about it, I’m grounding, centering, and using my body and this work as a prayer for a peaceful, loving home for my family and friends to gather.

When I turned 18 and graduated from high school, I moved away from most of my family and every other person I knew to start fresh in a more liberal, open environment. Oklahoma is a great place to live and grow up, if you are like everyone else there or willing to pretend to be. I was not either of those things.

(I’m sure the last two statements will rile my friends and family still living there, and yet not be surprising.)

Luckily, I knew that there had to be a better place for me. Luckily, I knew that I was not the sinful outcast that I often felt like during my teen years. Luckily, I was not bullied as much as some were, and still are. Luckily, I was resilient and knew that I just had to bide my time to get out. Not everyone is lucky.

But still, that shit fucks with you. Yes, I knew I was a good and smart woman. But I also believed that I was ugly. There was and, frankly, still is a part of me that wonders if I deserve joy, security, and dare I say, love. I struggle with that everyday.

And I still choose to keep opening my heart. Every day, I have to choose between the bitterness or sweetness of life, between trusting and suspicion, between rushing headlong into experience or keeping myself safe. And I don’t always choose “correctly” or for my best interest. But I choose.

Other people’s disapproval is the price you pay for living the life you want, and it’s worth every penny.~Plumcake at Manolo for the Big Girl

 And if there was one thing that I could tell Contance McMillan now, or could have told Phoebe Prince or Tempest  Smith before they died, it would be “Fuck them. Lean on me now so that you can stand later. Prove them wrong by succeeding in this world. You will be stronger than they can ever hope to be.”

But we can’t say that, or be there for them, without first choosing to be open ourselves, without doing the work of healing our own wounds. My friend Ketzirah is counting the omer right now — this week is an exploration of Gevurah, or Strength. Her post today talks about Loving Kindness in Strength, which I take to mean the compassion and the strength to say “NO,” to draw the boundary between what is acceptable and what is not.

Here is my line in the sand.

Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. You’ve been stoney for too many years. Try something different. Surrender. ~Rumi

I spent this weekend living a past experience from the other side.

Much like hosting a surprise birthday party for a dear friend after having enjoyed being the birthday girl yourself.  There is something so fresh and unadulterated about opening the door, not knowing what is on the other side, being shocked at first, and then overwhelmed with love. The experience can carry you away, make you giddy with awareness that you are special enough for people to do this for you.
And then there is the experience of throwing the party. The mindful planning, the mature preparation of details, the pacing to get everything set up for just the right effect. If we pay attention to the energy flow, we can sense the gradual shifts and rises that lead to the outpouring of that “overwhelming” love, but we are not ourselves overwhelmed or giddy.

Reflecting on my weekend, I realize that all exchanges need to be felt from these different perspectives before we can even begin to understand the meaning of relationship. There is a giving and a receiving — and I’m beginning to see that we have to experience them both to have a sense of wholeness.

Our hearts are broken. We break hearts. We give of ourselves to people we love. We receive the precious gift of self that other choose to offer us. We betray and are betrayed. We sing out our life’s experience, and we listen to the song of the universe. And we don’t even begin to understand wholeness until we experience fully both sides of the ebb and flow, in and out, of these relational experiences.

What I got an inkling of this weekend is that I have been holding on to my pain from an early betrayal for far too long. That instead of trying desparately to keep the barriers up, instead of scrambling to keep myself together and strong, that sometimes, how about right now, I need to open further. I need to run out to face the storm that threatens to break above me and yell out the the gods:

“I AM HERE! I AM NOT GOING ANYWHERE! COME TALK TO ME AND I WILL LISTEN! I WILL NOT STOPPER MY EARS! I AM YOURS IF YOU WILL TAKE ME AND GROW IN ME!”

(Just typing that set my crown chakra tingling! Uh-oh!).
Photo: Exhileration by Chloe Grayson

But I like to know the rules. I feel safe with rules. I don’t believe in always following them. The big ones, the important ones? Sure. The smaller ones that don’t seem to matter much (at least to me), or that would be harmless to break? I usually say, “break ‘em.” But I need to know what they are first.

I’m working my way through a cluster of feelings, attitudes, and beliefs about myself, other people, the world, and the nature of reality myself. Why do I have such mixed feelings about authority? Why do I knowingly break rules? Why this need to rebel coupled with the need to appear good? Who inside me is the teenaged punk-rock rebel? Who inside me is the good little girl who dances on command? Where in my life did these come from?

So many issues I am dealing with in my life seem to spring from one source in my early teen years. Issues of depression, anger, emotional numbness, hyper-indendepency, mistrust, sexuality, and spirituality — so many threads that are leading me back to the same causal nexus that was simultaneously a revelation, an initiation, and a betrayal.

For more than half my life I have lived under the shadow of betrayal. In the last 20 years I have been struggling to crawl out. In the last 6 years, I have been doing this work consciously. And I’m just now beginning to see how everything weaves in and out and around this pivotal series of events, this family secret.

I was talking with my artist mentor last week about the meaning of my art in my life and in my spiritual work. I talked about my ambivalence toward truth — what is real, what is not real, what is me, what is not me, what needs to be said, what needs to remain silent — and how I question whether I can speak to my spiritual group and the people I mentor with any authority. He suggested that my artwork be that vehicle to express my explorations into this ambivalence. Which got me thinking that  perhaps the very nature of visual arts holds that ambivalence of speaking truth without making any type of claim for ultimate authority that the written or spoken word often implies.

Conversations this past week have sparked images rising up half-formed from the unconscious cauldron of chaos to float in my mind’s eye. As I “follow the juicy thread,” I realize that before I can trust my animus or daimon, I need to go back into my shadow and struggle with this part of myself and my history again. I have tried to write and speak about the heart of this causal nexus for a while, but my throat closes every time. Perhaps my hands working with paints, glue, beads, paper, and thread will have an easier time of it.

Michael and I are living in the chaos of contractors. Furniture has been piled in the center of rooms. Plastic is draped over everything. Drop clothes cover the floors. We are having the old 1963 wallpaper removed, the plaster walls repaired, and everything painted in bold, bold, BOLD colors.

The cats are loving it — that and the new kitty door we’ve put in the basement door so they can get back in the house when they slip into the basement while I’m doing laundry. Sleeping in the guest bedroom and hunting for clothes and other things that are buried under plastic and dust — I’m not really enjoying that so much, but it’s only for a couple more weeks.

So in the midst of redecorating the house, why not change our appearances as well? Michael is growing a beard and I bleached my dark brown hair. Last night we took the above picture on my laptop camera in the kitchen (one of the few rooms in the house not in a state of disarray). We look happy, and we are. Just having a fun evening in, fixing dinner together, making stupid jokes, and watching a movie on Netflix.

Tonight I am heading over to Ballston to attend the National Capital Region’s Pagan Leadership Conference. Every year someone asks me why I continue to go. Sometimes the agenda is not something I am interested in. Sometimes the town hall session becomes unbearable.  Sometimes there is someone that I really don’t want to interact with who I know will be there. And yet if I don’t have a previous commitment on the calendar, I continue to go.

I find that I actually am looking forward to spending time with other pagans who lead groups and/or are very active in the local community. Swapping stories with people who share the same community organizer disease as I do (or “mad vision and masochism”) is fulfulling to me. Many of these folks are friends I see rarely because we live across the metropolitan area from each other (and we all know that pagans can’t cross running water like the Potomac River…or is that vampires?) and have calendars loaded with the day-to-day activities of coordinating an event or group of people. Other folks will have good ideas about how to handle the challenges we all face. I learn about new groups in the area and new events. I hear about how established groups and events are doing. And I get to meet new leaders, starry-eyed people who are just stepping out on the journey that I remember starting a decade ago. It helps with encroaching cynicism.

This year the official agenda is about financial responsibility, fundraising, and branding. Not personally my cup of tea, although I recognize how important these things are for the functioning of a group, and I believe we all can stand to learn more about them. But for me, as it has always been, it’s the people and the connections I establish and strengthen with my own kind.

This last weekend, I participated in a workshop, Awakening Creativity Through Spiritual Practice, taught by Sylvan at Reflections Mystery School. You know you’re in trouble when your response to a trance is, “Whoa! Deep! F**k!” The big message I took away for my artistic work is to draw the pictures that I am afraid to draw, that I am afraid to be seen by others.

I even committed–outloud and in front of others–to do just that.  I have experienced a tremendous amount of anxiety over this for years and kept myself to positive, beautiful, uplifting, and safe subjects. But that doesn’t seem to be what I need to draw and paint. The thought terrifies me, and yet there is so much energy here, which usually means there is much power waiting to be released and used. That is one of the lessons I have learned in working to integrate my Shadows. That, and “to attend to where the energy is”–a corollary of “energy follows attention.”

Today’s post over at Seth Godin’s blog deals with the resistance to actively and successfully moving toward our dreams. He talks about the lizard brain, or amygdala. From scholarpedia, I learned that the amygdala has been implicated in the processing and memory of emotional states, such as fear, aggression, maternal feelings, sexual urges, and ingestive (eating and drinking) behaviors. And yes, all of those are subject matter for the images that are bumping up against the surface of my conscious wanting out.

Last night I took the first steps by looking for stock photos for reference, taking some of my own with my little digital camera, and doing some sketches. It wasn’t as bad as I feared. The anxiety is lessened but not gone.

How does this relate to my last post? Perhaps this is a boundary I must cross to follow the holy man on fire. Perhaps that is just one aspect of my animus. Perhaps this crossing and expanding of my personal boundaries is necessary to grow both in my art and my spirituality.

I don’t know exactly. Maybe it doesn’t make rational sense. But as the BlissChick wrote today, I will follow the breadcrumbs.