Little Grace

If you tell your child her entire life that you just can’t have a conversation with her, then don’t expect to have conversations with her.

The acupuncturist: This point here (in my chest, at the top of my cleavage)… when I put the needle in, people usually feel a profound grounding. Many times they feel a spreading sensation.”

Me: … (squinging on insertion, per usual)

Me: …

Me: Nope.

Then later I asked the acupuncturist what she thinks about me not feeling these sensations that other people do during acupuncture sessions. I mean, I usually do get very, very relaxed and can meditate, visualize, etc. Once I even visualized the Medicine Buddha stepping into the room, splitting form at the end of the acupuncture bed, swirling me with all sorts of good heal-y-ness, and levitating himself back into one form and up onto a platform at the head of the bed and thinking all good thoughts just for me. But as far as feeling the sensations many people do during the actual insertions, or feeling the wooziness or feeling refreshed afterward, all the things I’ve read and heard one is likely to feel, well, I really don’t. And when I asked the acupuncturist, she said I’m probably very resistant. Very, very hesitant to let go. For some reason I’m probably having trouble letting the changes happen.

Shit.

But why?

But this brings me, in a very roundabout way to my point. A scattered point at that. I love to travel. To be in a place completely unfamiliar to me. To be in a place that makes me turn to myself, because I believe wholeheartedly that that is where one truly has one’s home. In the words of Mr. Emerson in Room with a View, “My vision is within. Here (poking his chest with his fork) is where the birds sing! Here is where the sky’s blue!”

This I believe. But when I’m in a place so long that it becomes so familiar, I lose sight of myself.

But then again…

Maybe what’s happening is that I’m using new places as a distraction. Or, once I become familiar enough with a place, I have to start examining my role in that place. In the world. In my own skin. And I want to bolt.

This is truly a fearful thought to me. I’m not being dramatic. I truly love to be in a place where I have to struggle a bit. A place where I have to think about how I express myself. Have to read people, a learning experience. Constantly questioning my thoughts and beliefs based on what’s going on around me.

But this boredom that sets in. Maybe it’s really a sign that I’m not really carrying my home around with me?

Oh hell, this post will either get changed or clarified a lot, or I’ll continue to write on the same thing for a while. ‘Til I get some sort of something worked out about it. ‘Til I can figure out if I’m resistant to changes happening inside, even if they’re for the good, and if so, why? It could altogether just be a case of me being dense.

The main goal, though, is to shore up my home and make it more stable. Despite the fact that I might be resistant, or hesitant, or dense. Whatever. I’m in the process of shoring. Meditating. Tending to my health. Balancing the future with the now. Expressing myself more. Write, write, write…

One of the things I’ve been remembering since I’ve been staying with my mom again is the time she told me about getting a note sent home from my teacher about my bahavior. She sent word back to say that when I’m at school, I’m THEIR responsibility. As she was telling me this story years later, she was pretty proud of herself, and never once thought about how that made me feel.

Make that present tense. How that MAKES me feel.

As far as she was concerned, that was a reasonable response. To be somewhat fair, I have to admit that the “bad” behavior was nothing more than me being bored and chatty and squirmy. Not like I was doing anything really scary or anything. But still. Never once was this note mentioned, until years later. Not once was there any concern as to why I was bored. Nor any thought to doing anything about it.

I was not a brilliant child. But neither was I a dolt, or trouble maker. So I suppose I was just tolerated, and passed on the the next teacher the next year.

So through the years, after I moved out of the house, there have been times when my mother has been upset that I haven’t kept in touch as well as a good child might be expected to. She wanted to know what was going on in my life, how I was doing. She never made the connection that her early lack of interest in being involved to my later lack of interest in her involvement. I was simply labelled, once again, as a bad child.

Even now, even though we’ve both worked to make our relationship better, I still resent her wanting too much input into my life. I resent those sporadic bouts of interest. I have asked for her help with this medical issue by giving me a place to live for free while I try to heal myself a bit. But for the life of me, I just can’t be as grateful as I’d like to be.

Can I just say, though it’s stating the obvious, that this couple of weeks living with my mom and stepdad again is… an excercise. It has been dramatic. While I know I’ve grown in the last couple of decades, this last stretch of days feels as if I haven’t. At all. Nor does it seem my mom has changed much either.

Of course we both have. Our relationship has gotten better than it ever has been. But man oh man, what a strain this is.

At any rate, acupuncture starts tomorrow. The road to better physical, and probably mental/emotional, health. And then, the rest of life.

I HATE these things that feel like steps backward.

From Chopra’s The Book of Secrets:

For me, what goes hand in hand with this is acceptance.  Maitri. And trust. I talk from time to time about how I don’t have the gauge that lets me judge people accurately. Not a reliable one at any rate. Sometimes I just know, and I’m dead on. But most times it’s a challenge. Most times, if I were to follow my initial instinct, I’d either pass up a true gem of a friend, or get horribly hurt. Not that these designations are objective. I’ve had my fair share of horrible gems. They’re valuable.

But when it comes to what the universe will open up and show me? I guess I was born with an innate “trust” of sorts. An uncontemplated  knowing that what I need, or at least what’s available, is there for me to experience and learn and have. I’ve never doubted that, mainly because I never contemplated it. It was known without me knowing I knew it. Only after I started reading more, learning more, did I realize that not everyone possessed this same trust. My mom certainly doesn’t. She’s worried that I’ll die alone. I told her we all die alone anyway, regardless of who or what all we have in our lives at the time of our death. We go it alone, on our own. It’s part of our individual, personal journey.

And so are our epiphanies. And I’ve had epiphanies out the wazoo. Beautiful moments that “should” have added up to great wisdom. They have added up to a great amount of wisdom. But there’s something in my makeup. Something that mixes the signals. Somehow, in my mind, this wisdom applies to others, not me. I’m open and eager to learn about the mind, the heart, the universe. But have somehow managed to be out beside the equation rather than in it.

Trying to apply what I know to myself, I feel blindsided. Overwhelmed. Surprised, somehow, that I exist and need to heed my own wisdom. I didn’t realize that I was leaving myself out of my own universe.

Mechanized and analytical. My views are apparently like this. I see this unputtogether puzzle and have been trying (I think?) to force the pieces into some semblance of a recognizable image. Not terribly organic. I’m attempting to adopt more of a garden metaphor for myself. Gardens don’t have the same sorts of “right” and “wrong.” Just different compositions, different seasons. Some parts dying off, other parts thriving, but nothing is ever wasted or useless.

Some part of my wisdom has seeped through, though. A decent portion of my life is left to chance. To change. Uncalculated.  I prefer it that way. When I talk of trying to fit the pieces together, I’m talking partly about how to go about viewing things. Do I take charge and try to carve out certain things for myself in life? Or do I follow the path that organically appears?

The answer, of course, is yes. Both. Clarity and balance. A center.

A center.

CG recently said she’d like to hear about my experiences with, and the affects of, institutional schooling.

Top of the list: I don’t feel it prepared me in the least for life. It didn’t prepare me for myself. A combination of my mother’s attitude about child rearing and the methods used in schools has left me floundering for years.

There have been more naysayers in my life than encouragers. There have been many people who have guided me on how to conform. I never did, really. But I never broke out into my own self either.

I’ve had a scant few people along the way who have wondered what it is that’s holding me back from expressing and becoming my full me. I had a university counselor ask me, “Who is it you’re rebelling against?” I had no idea. It felt like I was rebelling against myself, honestly. But then, I couldn’t figure out why I was doing that. The counselor seemed determined to talk more about my horrible marriage and even more horrible divorce. He was certainly on the track of a painful and traumatic experience, but it was hardly the seminal event. It was only another in a long line of consequences that stemmed from an overall lack of confidence and near total ignoring of what my insides had been trying to tell me all my life.

I think I learned to ignore what my insides were trying to tell me simply because I’d never had anyone tell me that was important. Quite the opposite. I was guided and directed to see and hear what was outside of me, and taught that THAT was the important stuff.

My family are good, solid people. I love them and trust them. But they’re incredibly beige. Oh if my mother had only been capable of recognizing what I needed. She knew I was strong, independent, different, smart, open minded, good hearted… confused, alone, bored, mired up in what I had been taught I should do. Only breaking out enough that most people knew I was hearing a different drummer. But I never really fully heeded that beat.

Part of the problem is that I was really good in school. Too good, up to a point. To the point where I never learned to study, because I didn’t have to. There was very little learned in the way of self discipline, or negative consequences when things went wrong, because things just generally didn’t go wrong. No one depended on me to be part of an integral part of a whole. I never got a chance to teach or share things I learned on my own, or was shunned when I tried. As a result, I learned to devalue that autonomy.

As I remember the telling of it, my father was born in a place called Gizzard Holler. At some point someone thought to snazzy it up a bit I guess, and changed the name to ‘Possum Hollow. I remember being there, sort of, as a child. But I couldn’t begin to tell how to get there. Unless I looked it up. I don’t ask my mother about these things much. She has never told me anything about the past, so I figure she doesn’t want to remember it. But this has left me groundless, rootless. And in the midst of embracing that from-nowhere-ness, I sold everything and hit the road. But now, two and a half years into living in Alaska, I think I might want to go home.

If I can find out where that is.