Let Go

Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go.  Let go...

It's like I'm missing a key brain cell or something.

L is for ________

Loneliness.

So much time to myself lately.  Got an unexpected day off today because one of the girls is sick so their mom stayed home.  I did have some fun at the hospice office this morning as I helped get a couple of mailings out.  That was great.  But now I'm just...  alone.

All the stuff with Shannon last week really highlighted my...   singleness.  I've spent so much time in relationships that weren't healthy, and left so many that might have been great had I been less afraid to let someone love me.  All of my choices have led me here, which is great in so many ways...  but they've led me here alone.

It's not a complaint.  It's a statement...   and a condition I wish to change.  I'm making a decision to no longer be alone.

Lessons.

I'm learning again and again that my life is an accumulation of my choices and that I have the power to create whatever sort of life I desire.  How many times does life try to teach us that lesson?  An infinite number of times, I think, yet is seems to be one of the more difficult lesson to truly learn.  I know now.  Every choice I make ripples out around me...  and around others, too, as I fully learned last week...   and shapes my experience.  I chose to end up here alone.  I choose to change that.

Living.

But before I open up my heart to someone else, I'm going to fully open my heart to myself.  As lonely as I feel, there is still a pull to go out into the wilderness and be absolutely alone with me, with God, with God in me.  I want to live that life, even if only for a short while, to stand in the desert with a mirror and very little else...  and not come back until I am truly ready for someone else.

That pull is so strong, has always been this huge part of me that I've only danced around now and again.  Why wait?  I thought the Peace Corps and Botswana would give me that opportunity, but I didn't fully create it.  I got scared and made choices that led me to Selibe-Phikwe and home again in short order.  I created that.  I know it.  I accept and love it.  But it's time to create something else.

I'm going to take at least three weeks next summer and survive somewhere in the canyon lands of southern Utah.  That's it.  I have this amazing opportunity with my current job/living situation to take my summer and run with it...   run into me.   A minimum of three weeks...   just feels right...    but with the understand that I may not come back.  That isn't a threat or a fear...   it's the realization that my soul has always pulled me toward the desert and survival...  and perhaps it will decide to keep me there.

I just know it's time to live...   and that I need to live with me before I can love with someone else.

Love.


I also need to get back to the things I truly love...   Rumi, for example.  I found myself quoting Rumi twice today and was reminded how much I long for connection with my own spirituality.  I spend far too much time in my own head on things that simply don't matter.  Spinning.  That's what my friend Brian calls it.  I start spinning on money, stupid shit on Facebook, old worries...  and fail to reconnect with God and spirit, to ground myself the earth, to shine my light outward.

When I quoted Rumi this morning at hospice, a switch turned.  I heard myself talking.  That might sounds weird, but...  how often do you truly hear yourself?  So much of what we say is automatic, a trained monkey sort of response/reaction.  So much of it is scripted from old stories we told ourselves, stories which, as I learned so well last week, may have no basis in reality whatsoever.   But I was speaking from my heart, from my strength...   and I could listen to myself as well as listen to the other people in the room.  And I opened.  I can't explain it, really...   I just opened.  I could feel a door to my soul open wider...   Love was inside.

"I may sound strange, but it's my strange...  and it's true for me...   so I'll sing it out loud."

It was like...   I lost my self-consciousness for a moment...  because I let go of fear...   because, for an instant, I just let go.

Letting Go.


I'm going to get a tattoo on my wrist in the next few weeks that simply says "let go."  It means so much...  is the culmination of SO many of my experiences and lessons.  Let go.  Just let go.  I can't love someone else until I truly let go of Tom...  and all the stories I've told myself about him, me, relationships, etc.  I can't love ME until I let go of all the stories I've told myself about me.  I can't BE Love until I let go of everything...  attachments, ideas, duality... Fear.

I've got to just let go...  and let God, God within me...  

My ramblings for the day.  Amen.

Shame Train

I have a lot to sort out...  so, I'll warn you:  This post is likely to be a mess.

I spent Tuesday night, Wednesday night and most of the day Thursday with my ex-boyfriend from college...  and it has thrown me for a loop and then some.  I feel like the train of my past derailed right into my face, and I am having a difficult time piecing it all back together.

I feel like I need to lay out the background...   create a foundation so that I can reassemble my feelings into something I can better grasp...   but, as I get older, my memory gets worse and worse.  I can feel that so completely right now.  So...  my dates and memories might be really off.  Still, I have to try.

Shannon was a bass player at MSU.  I had already dated his then "best friend" Jon, but it had been more than a year later.  It had to have been...  because I'd taken a semester off, prompting Jon to dump me, and had then come back for at least another semester before dating Shannon.  I know we started dating on April 22, 1995 because I have it written in a memory book I kept at the time (one Tom LOVES to tease me about all the time).  People thought we hooked up because I wanted to get back at Jon, but that simply wasn't true at all.  Shannon and I were sort of pushed together by fate...  and a horrible turn of events with mutual music school friends of ours.  We were in a very stressful situation together and...  turned to one another.

I was 20.  I was a kid.  I didn't have a great track record where relationships were concerned either.  I'd had a long relationship with my high school band director which was completely and utterly dysfunctional.  Then I dated Jon...  which was fine, I guess.  I mean, it wasn't stressful, we never fought...   but I clammed up with him physically and I'm fairly certain that is why we broke up...  that and taking the semester off.  He may have thought I'd gotten back together with my old band director, but that wasn't true either.  Who knows.  It's only speculation on that point.  Anyway...

My relationship with Shannon was pretty great, honestly.  And part of what has messed me up in the present is that I'd convinced myself, made up the story, that he was horrible to me...  although I do recall him calling me ugly names, but he was joking...    still inappropriate, but...  we were freaking kids.  I probably did it back.  I can't remember for sure.  I only remember that we were both horribly sarcastic and a lot of people found us both fairly obnoxious.

We spent the summer together in his home town.  It was a great summer.  I loved his family, and they loved me...  apparently even more than I'd realized at the time.  Shannon told me the other day that his brother Steve has always considered me his favorite of anyone Shannon has ever dated.  So sweet, really...   can't believe that.  The only struggle we seemed to have was that I wanted sex a LOT more than he did.

I'd actually forgotten that, really...   how I practically begged him for physical attention.  I now remember how awful it made me feel.  How unwanted.  Maybe that was what started my story...   that he was unkind to me...   maybe that was the impetus for creating a negative picture of him.  Maybe.

By the end of the summer, it seemed like we were heading way too fast into something permanent.  Maybe it was the ring he gave me for my 21st birthday...  or maybe it was his sister-in-law asking when we were going to get married and start having babies.  Who knows.  I just know I started freaking out...  and shutting down.

Fall semester brought my new best friend Jill to MSU.  We got super close super fast...  and she didn't like Shannon at all.  I'm not blaming anything on her, mind you...   I was clearly already looking for a way out...  but when she said he was abusive, that he was mean to me, that his playful jabs (both verbal and physical) were totally inappropriate...  I allowed myself to believe her without question.  And by Thanksgiving, I dumped Shannon.

I can see now that he'd had no warning.  I hated confrontation and, although we did have our arguments, I never let on that anything was truly wrong or that I had misgivings about being with him.  All of a sudden, I just ended it.

And I became Bitch #1 at MSU's music school.

Of course, I wrapped myself in defensiveness and in the story that he was awful.  I vilified him, honestly.  But I didn't see that clearly at the time.  I thought I was justified.  I was hurt when friends took his side.

Kati, a mutual friend of ours, told me that I destroyed Shannon.  He boyfriend and Shannon's close friend Carl wouldn't even look at me.  Shannon sent Justin, one of the other bass players, to get me out of my practice room one day and to get my stuff out of his practice room...  all the things I'd left at his house (toothbrush, clothes, whatever it was, I can't remember).  I just remember how horribly his friend treated me...   gave me a message supposedly directly from Shannon saying, "Tell that bitch to get her shit out of my practice room and leave me the fuck alone."  Instead of thinking maybe I WAS being a bitch, I just chalked it up as par to Shannon's abusive course.

I didn't believe any of these people.  I just thought they were being defensive of their friend, which I thought was almost admirable in a way, if not simply understandable.  I never stopped being defensive myself long enough to consider what they were saying/doing...   the mirrors they were holding up for me.

In fact, I completely put all of it out of my mind for the last 16 years...   except to list him as an abusive boyfriend I once had in college.  Yes.  I did that.  I've told countless people over the years that I once had a horrible boyfriend who called me degrading names and even hit me a little too hard sometimes.  (He did...  he once punched my arm so hard in Landon Hall's dining room that I got a charlie horse...  I'll never forget the look on Jill's face when he did that.  He kind of laughed it off...   and I knew he didn't mean it, that he was kind of joking...   but...   you know?!  I let it solidify my abuse story, that's for sure.  But he wasn't giving me black eyes or pushing me down the stairs.)

Shannon left MSU very soon after we broke up.  I knew he went to Vanderbilt to study with Edgar Meyer, and felt even more justified in dumping him as I had.  We never spoke again...   until the magic of Facebook brought us back into one another's lives.

And into my living room this week.

We didn't talk a lot about the past...   but we did touch on our breakup a couple of times...   enough to really throw me off balance.

Remember when Kati said I'd destroyed him?  I guess, in may ways, I really had.  She wasn't being dramatic.  He said my breaking up with him changed his entire life...  prompted him to leave MSU, to not be able to date again for many years, to just not care about anything at all for over a year...

He had actually been in love with me.  And hearing him say that...  killed me.  Because it made me remember the truth...  that I had loved him too...  and that I'd sabotaged it all because I couldn't believe that I deserved to be happy, to be loved, to have a real future with someone.

It's part of the story I told myself about my dad...  that no man could ever really love me or care about me.  Shannon fell victim to that story in a huge way.  I changed his whole world with it.

He's in a great place now.  He's an incredibly successful musician...  in fact, one of the most successful bass players in the country.  He turned his pain into amazing things...  practicing, studying, following his dreams.  And he was so...    sweet and grateful and...   gracious about all of it.

There is so much more here...  so many more little details.  I wish I could sort it all out...  I'm just such a mess...  taken so much aback by all of it.  I am struggling to turn my guilt into something better, more productive.  I'm having a hard time not beating myself up for being such a selfish jerk to him...   for making up this defensive story about all of it and carrying it around with me for the last decade and a half.  I'm seeing all of the ripples of my actions...   both good and bad...   and learning new things about my own past that are hard to swallow.

I see our mutual friends in a different light, too.  I can accept how they saw me now...   how there was so much truth to their judgment...    but I also have to not accept their judgment, you know?!  It's hard...   paradoxical.

I feel so much weight.  Feel so heavy-hearted.  I want to feel it all the way and not miss a single lesson here, but...   I also want to be good to myself and not take on more than my share.

Where is the line?

How do I accept responsibility without taking on the shame?

What Layers!

What Layers Beneath : mixed media on canvas board
Sept. 2011 - For Sammy

I had a very interesting dinner with my friend Burette this evening.  Haven't seen him in a while...  a long while...   not that I have ever really seen much of him to begin with.  Ours is a very unique amoeba of a relationship.  And seeing him, and having the conversation that we did, was stunningly synchronistic.


I'm learning that the key for a happy life (for me at least) is being unapologetic.  That might sound a little strange...  perhaps even a little discompassionate, at least if you're in a similar mindset to mine before beginning to see this differently.  Unapologetic, living an unapologetic life, means never having to say I'm sorry for being authentically me...   never second guessing the decisions I make, the life I lead, the dreams I have, or the art I create...  It means never having to justify...  not even feeling the need to defend...   the bliss that is my existence!  


Take the painting I finished for my brother Sam yesterday.  Yes, I got the inspiration from someone else's artwork.  That's often the case.  I see something I love and I decide to make it my own.  In the past, I would do one of two things:  I would pretend/deny ever having seen anything like it before...  OR I would over-defend my decision to  "study" some other piece of art and plan never to sell my own "study" of it, blah blah blah.  Hey, I'm not ripping anyone off here!  I know what I like and what I don't...  and if I see something I think I could make MORE pleasing to myself, why the hell shouldn't I go ahead and do it...  and do it without apology or defense!


I don't care if you think I've ripped off someone's intellectual property.  What IS property?  No one owns anything, when we get right down to it.  No one owns me.  Not even myself.  But I digress.


Being unapologetic means I can be free to live in each moment, with as much bliss as possible and without a single grain of guilt.  Is that not the point of life anyway?  Maybe?  Being unapologetic also means that I don' t ever have to know a single thing about a single thing.  (That just made me laugh.  My BFF always says, "...and I know and thing or two about a thing or two," which cracks me up every time!)  I no nothing about anything...  and, guess what?  How awesome is that?!  


Burette reminded of a saying (neither of us could complete it or remember who said it) that basically said...   it is when we begin to believe we know... that we die.  It's just as Rumi said, "Define and narrow me, you starve yourself of yourself."  Labels, thinking we know something (anything, in fact) kill us...  kill the infinite potential in every single moment, every single experience.


You see where my head is right now (besides all over the place and nowhere at once)?!  


I took a painting that I saw sometime back...   made it mine...   yes, and made it Sam's too, since he asked for it...    and now...  let's be honest, it isn't anyone's at all!  It's just dust...  particles...   nothingness and everythingness.  All of it.  None of it.  Whatever.  No one can claim it, not even me...  and I painted the damned thing!  Isn't it freaking gorgeous!?!


Yes, it really it!  I love it!  And don't care a bit about it other than the experience I loved while painting it!


I stopped blogging, I realize, because I was so concerned about whether or not anyone read it, whether or not any of it mattered or made sense...   and I lost the point entirely!  I love to blog because it frees my mind from the words and thoughts I put here!


So I'm back!  And I hope I live in this kind of moment far more often...   

Geraniums

My grandmother used to have potted geraniums on the stair landing under a window...

Lately, I have this pressing urge to grow geraniums myself, although I never liked the plant before. Never. I found them common and old fashioned in a most unromantic way. I never liked the red ones she grew and always thought they smelled sour.

Why do I want them now?

I've had many opportunities recently to reflect with others on the major events of my past... the big turning points in the novel of my life. How did I become this person? Why?

So many things can be explained by a single moment. So many others simply cannot be explained at all. Why do I want geraniums in my windows? Sure, I associate them with my grandma... but I associate so many much BETTER things with her! I'm not craving raspberry bushes or kohlrabi! There is no answer.

Sometimes there just aren't any answers.

Confused... is also a choice.

I got a dozen roses from TC today. I knew something was coming, but I didn't know what... and BRAVO to me for not getting too attached to what it might be...

Still... they arrived with a card that simply said, "For Lil Glo -Tomcat," and I kind of reeled. It didn't say "Marry me" or "I love you." A dozen red and pink roses and I had no idea what they were for or what they meant.

ACIM teaches me that they mean nothing other than the meaning I place on them... and I'm doing my best to place no meaning at all. I did, however, want to know what meaning HE placed on them. You know what... that means he is still in the doorway to my heart, and no one else is going to be able to get in until I remove him... whether it's by getting him all the way in, or taking him all the way out.

Then I called him... to thank him for the roses and to feel him out. I was an absolute pussy. All he said was, "I thought they'd be nice for you," and I let it go. I'm still in a place of such fear and dis-empowerment... afraid that he'll reject me yet again... though I know that it's me who has rejected myself in the process.

Why am I not letting TC go? It's been SO long. Why do I hold so tightly to something that has never really worked? Why is it TC? Would it be anyone? Was it just a timing issue?

AT thinks I just need to have a huge cry and feel the loss of him as deeply as possible... and then he'll just be out of the doorway. I'm too scared to even do that... to just cry, do a little Psy-K... why?

It is really TC, or just the meaning/feelings I've placed on him? If the latter, why did I place them and why can't I RE-place them? Why am I SO afraid that I won't love anyone else... and that they won't love me back at all?

Evolve

It's been a long time and a lot has happened since I last posted here, but today has been about taking a few steps back and viewing the past in a new way so that I can move forward again... stronger, wiser, more evolved.

I have had revelations... revelation after revelation, in fact... and for some reason, I rarely seem to stay in those places of new understanding for long. Perhaps it's because I'm so impatient with myself. I need to grow. I need to grow faster. I need to be perfect... or as perfect as possible. I need to get brilliant right here, right now... no time for error...

No time to let anything actually sink in.

I forever feel like I'm in some sort of trouble... so I have to keep pushing forward. I feel like I'm in trouble right this very moment, but with whom and for what? I have no idea. It's self talk, ridiculousness, old patterns finding ever sneakier, more insidious ways to play themselves out.

Today, however, I had a new kind of revelation... the kind that made me stop, and marinate on it, and savor every nuance, see every facet... I realized a new angle to my "story" which then made me ask myself the question, "Why did I ever stop doing what I loved? Why did no one ask why I always say 'used to' when it comes to those things I say I do? Why do I run away from things that fill me up?"

Why did I stop volunteering for hospice? Why did I give up music? Why do I never paint or take photos anymore?

Doing what I love somehow got turned into being selfish... and it didn't fit the "givers gain" model I'd completely distorted. I forgot that I have to give to myself in order to give to others, as simple and cliche as that sounds.

See?! There it is again! Resistance!

It is the one year anniversary of my first Vision Seminar. Wow. No wonder today was huge. We tend to subconsciously recreate important dates. I had a mini seminar of my own today, that's for sure! And the man who introduced me to Vision is the very one who held up a much needed mirror for me today. Remarkable, isn't it?! Our brains are so amazingly powerful!

"Glo, you keep trying to be the student, thinking you have to learn more, that don't know enough... but every person I've introduced you to... knows that you are a teacher." Ah-ha! I get it. Furthermore, I have kept myself stuck in "teachers' pet," not just student... but a student who constantly vies for her "superiors'" attention... PAYS for it, begs for it... because she doesn't truly believe she is worthy just as she is.

Craziness.

And now I have to run... because my life is calling and I'm tired of missing it.