And just as I was perusing the conflict in my Gemini soul, I found the following quote:
“The universe exists only through a constant dance of consistency and change. Through consistency, consciousness finds meaning; through change it finds stimulation and expansion. To find consistency within change is to embrace the unfolding flow.”
- Judith Anodea (Eastern Body, Western Mind)
It’s hard to believe I was emotional road kill only a few weeks ago. I sit here now, firmly grounded with every chakra open; my heart open wide and my throat, although not as open as my other chakras, is doing great. I have shifted from writing to talking and in doing so I have cleared the pathway to my heart’s desires. I know what I want now and, although there are no guarantees I’ll get it, I’m prepared to pack away the petulant child and be patient with the evolution of things to come.
In a recent, and not so rare, moment of self- flagellation, I accused myself of having stunted self-awareness. I read up on chakra three and chose all things yellow. And I returned to my healer and soul mate, who admired her handy-work before offering up her word cards. I picked Play and Reliability from the first deck and Earth and Air from the other. And there I was. No mystery involved; just pure Contradiction. And, yes, I am and always have been aware of it. I can’t help but wonder then if perhaps it isn’t so much a lack of self-awareness as it is a total awareness … of a self that makes no sense.
“Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.” – Goethe
So I question the belief that it is only when I can bring the two poles of my personality together that I will be whole. And I wonder if I can really only be complete when I can be consistent.
“I don’t phone you as often as I would if I didn’t know exactly what you were up to anyway. It’s not good to be so open, Penny. You really should try and keep something to yourself,” she said.
One of my oldest friends is also my biggest critic and she doesn’t let me get away with anything. She won’t give opinions when I beg her for them and gives me a lot of lip when I don’t. But each time she knocks me down with her lack of compassion or judges me for things that don’t fit her profile of reality, normality and common sense, I have to remind myself of the theory that each friend we have is a reflection of a part of ourselves and I use it to learn from her, something about myself.
So I’ve kept quiet for a while, I’ve bunkered down and the blogosphere has been calm for a couple of weeks. She still hasn’t called though.
When my car broke down and the old Beetle I was driving broke down too, I was rescued by another friend of mine; someone who, with a tremendous amount of compassion, discusses life in ways that make broken down cars seem like clever subliminal ways to be rescued by friends who have messages for you they might otherwise not have given. Hers was given with trepidation considering her knowledge of my tender heart. “I don’t mean this as a criticism,” she ventured, “but what you will probably discover one day is that when you are ready to let all of your stuff bounce around in your head more and feel less inclined to put it all out there, using your blog as a venting tool to push it away from you, that’s when you will be emotionally well.” You know when the joke sounds different but the punch line is the same …!?
I totally get it though. And I totally get that the same applies to emails and text messages that I push out there as though I can intellectualise my feelings and shun responsibility for my words. It’s my purge … my emotional bulimia.
What’s good for me is not necessarily good for my blog, and vice versa. So perhaps it’s when I’m blogging profusely that I most need that call to check up on what is really happening in my life … because when you are reading something here, I am ensconced in crisis and when I am quiet, the world is just a better place.
She’s connected to me … but only just. She is practically the same person, but there is just this partial separation. I sometimes don’t really know who she is and I certainly can’t keep up with what’s going on in her mind.
When I started writing this blog it was anonymous. I couldn’t deal with people knowing it was actually me who was thinking these, often morbid, things about baby and relationships. I was so accustomed to searching under carpets for spaces to shove things; I was ashamed and sure people would judge me.
And then something happened. My mind did what the earth did when the tsunami hit Japan – it shifted – and all the stuff that was under the carpet was washed out by the impact. And I stopped caring. I gathered the trash and I recycled it into bulletproof garments. I claimed my opinions and my ramblings and my crazy attitude to babies and the world in general, and people judging me … well, they just couldn’t touch me.
But claiming my own mind was only partial. When I put my name to the blog, a kind of separation occurred … the person I am and the person who writes, somehow, split. Me, and the person who writes as me are kinda the same person but not totally. I occasionally go back and read past posts and it’s like I’m reading them for the first time – I just can’t believe I Wrote some of the stuff … I can’t believe I Knew some of the stuff. And when people quote my ramblings back to me, I often don’t even recognise them as my own.
I’m not saying I don’t believe in the stuff I write … it’s just that it feels sometimes like my Gemini twin has gone it alone … I’m the Talker and she’s the Writer. My mother always told me it was like her fourth child had turned out to be twins and my ex always claimed to have married a harem – he didn’t know who he was going to wake up with in the morning …  Gemini’s get a bad rap because we can do it all – as long as we want to! – but we’re not all bad … unless you’re talking about those emails and text messages. But if you think I take responsibility for any of those, think again! – that’s all Her.
Paulo Coelho wrote: “Words are tears that have been written down. Tears are words that need to be shed. Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end.”
Shakespeare wrote: “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.”
And A.A. Milne wrote: “A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself.”
So I meander here through a maze of other people’s wisdom and try to find my feet in tear-formed pools of grief where others have already trod. The eyot has sent me back to the garden where I turn my reflection to the spring sun and dive into Judith Anodea’s river of words, in Eastern Body, Western Mind, which I use to irrigate the weeds that are learning to grow amongst the flowers. “Those who are idealistic about love sometimes find the greatest pain. Wide-eyed they fall, giving their utmost to the beloved. Great is their dismay, when giving all they could and valuing this love above all things, they see their lover casually mistreat what they had regarded as sacred.” Just when I thought the gardening was all done, “… a painful situation triggers wounds from previous hurts that were never healed and we feel like we are re-experiencing every hurt that has ever happened to us.” Like driving a garden fork through your foot … and not just once!
“The emptiness of abandonment may be re-experienced every time it happens in adulthood, where the loss of a loved one leaves us feeling like we’re falling apart. The body itself may reflect this collapse, with the muscles chronically undercharged, the legs weak, and the upper back hunched over as if the spine cannot quite hold itself upright.” I don’t collapse and feel like dying anymore – well, not as frequently anyway – but my body has shut down. It’s had enough and no longer even heeds the call of my inner Forrest Gump. I can no longer fight it so I dose myself up with Tryptophan and I lie on the grass and find farm animals in the clouds, wondering if perhaps the dose is too high.
“When we fall in love, we strip ourselves of defences. We open to another and to the world. We expand and grow. When we are hurt in matters of love, we are hurt in our most vulnerable, trusting aspects. The purest form of self is wounded. It no longer feels safe to be authentic. Our system – wounded at the very core – shuts down and we lose not only our lover but ourselves as well. This is the deepest loss.” Each of our friends reflects a certain aspect of ourselves; they allow the different aspects of our personalities to breathe. When we lose a friend we lose that aspect of ourselves too. “The point of grief work is to regain connection with the self inside rather than increase our attachment to what was lost.” With a lover who you connect with on a cellular level, all those things he awakens in you are lost when he leaves and this is the part we truly grieve. “If the object of our worship should leave, fall from grace, or reject us, we are devastated. To heal, we must then reconnect responsibly to the self within, seeing it as an aspect of divinity in its own right, and much in need of love and understanding.” Ultimately we can get over anyone who leaves – even when it feels like an impossible goal – but we can’t get over the missing pieces of ourselves. My deficient heart has responded to the wounds by withdrawing and I find“… distance from others and defend against closeness and the risk of getting hurt again.”
I am reminded of a quote by Rumi: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that have been built against it.” He also wrote, “Lovers do not finally meet somewhere, they are in each other all along.” When my heart was broken I didn’t search for love. He was already in me. But I still had to put in the time, seeking out the barriers I had built against loving him, gradually breaking them down. And opening myself up. And allowing myself to love him. But as my heart opened like a lotus flower out of the cesspool, it was plucked by the knife of abandonment.
Rollo May wrote, “To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfilment and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.” And in this heady mix of uppers and downers, and waking up in Vegas where the broken down barriers lead to love and the love leads to barriers, which get broken down to expose the love … and on and on, I suddenly sober up and see that all I’m left with is “… the hangover and the memory of love.”
But when I feel like stopping there, Brandi Carlisle’s voice strains down the headphones cord, “But these stories don’t mean anything if you’ve got no one to tell them to. It’s true, I was made for you.” and the barriers stand tall with the reminder of what an irrelevant sentiment that is when love pierced my abdomen and stuck me in a frame to display my beautiful wings; preserving me when I would far rather have died.
But, hey, “Relationship furthers the evolution of individual souls and the collective soul of our planet.” So I slurp down bowlfuls of bittersweet soup for the soul, take one for the planet, and trust that the cycle will continue, just as it should.
