Vision of Wholeness

I've been a practicing ceremony celebrant for over a year and a half now, and it's a more fulfilling vocation than I could have imagined.  It's really confirmed for me the value of ceremony and ritual as a tool for transformation, as well as celebration.

There's a place just outside of Taos on the Rio Grande that's become a "sacred spot" for me, where I've now done five ceremonies, beginning before I was even a celebrant when I scattered my brother's ashes there.  In a significant way, that was the beginning of my journey into celebrancy, although I didn't know it at the time.

Since then, I've performed two weddings there (both same sex), a baptism (the bride in the second wedding I ever did requested it), and a personal ceremony that was one of the most meaningful, important, transformative things I've ever done in my life.

It was a ceremony for forgiveness, healing, and closure with my ex.  He had begun a new relationship almost a year earlier, and I had a very hard time dealing with that.  Long story short - when I mentioned in my last post that I went through a period of utter misery, that's what it was about.  But I had to find a way to accept it, if for no other reason that we have a child together, and there was now a new mother-figure in her life.

That process began last fall, when I had a dream about my ex's new partner on what happened to be her birthday.  In the dream, we were talking across a table, and there was a palpable feeling of love and tenderness between us.  I woke up feeling the same way; in fact, it permanently changed the way I felt about her.  I felt compelled to reach out to her, and I sent her an email message, to which she responded with such openness and kindness that it moved me to tears.  It still took several months after that for us to connect in person, but when we did, I knew we had crossed a threshold into a much more pleasant and positive part of the journey.

Meanwhile, my ex and I decided to do the forgiveness ceremony.  I'd found a resource online for us to use called 6 Steps to Completing Relationships.  It entailed writing down resentments, apologies, things you forgive the other person for, things you're grateful to the person for, and things you appreciate about them and will miss; and then expressing all those things to each other.

It was an incredibly powerful thing to do this.  When we were done reading our lists, we burned them together and threw the ashes into the river.  We cried and hugged and knew without a doubt we had truly moved into a new way of relating with each other, a rebirth of a relationship that was not just about raising our daughter, but was based on a love and willingness to grow with each other, and that now included his new partner.  I felt expansive, clean, whole.  At peace.  Full of joy and acceptance.

Fast forward to the present.  He and his partner have been going through some really difficult stuff related to a health problem she's been having, and the other night he and I talked on the phone about it.  When I got off the phone, I was shaken up.  I felt the need to process the complex emotions I was having about all of it and to in some way focus healing intentions toward these emotions, and her, and him, and the whole situation.

I had a sudden urge to make a collage (which I haven't done since I made my 2014 collage last December).  My plan was to give it to my ex and his partner, and I would keep a photo of it for myself. I got out a bunch of magazines, put on my awesome Pandora shuffle, and sat down at my dining room table for the next few hours, staying up way past my bedtime.

During the whole process of making the collage, and especially when I stood back and gazed at the finished product, I felt that same sense of healing and wholeness and expansive warmth I had when I first connected with my ex's partner, and when my ex and I did our ceremony.  The feeling that we are all together, part of a great tribe on a momentous journey.

"Vision of Wholeness"

The Year of Curing Sadness

"Red is the ultimate cure for sadness." ~ Bill Blass

I do this thing from time to time when, after I've finished writing a journal entry, I go back and look at that day of the month's entries for all the journal's previous months. In this way, I can see what's changed, and, hopefully, progressed.

Last night I did this for the first time probably this year, and was shocked when I realized how much my overall state of being has changed in the past few months. The final sentence I wrote in last night's entry was, "I am basically content." When I went back and looked at the entries from this past winter, (I started the journal December 26th, 2013, being that it was a Christmas gift), I was reminded of how utterly miserable and harrowed I was at that time. I wrote things in those months that amount to, "I believe I'll be miserable for the rest of my life; I dread the future."

My color this year, I had decided, was red, and shortly after I'd begun my geeky research stage into the significance of this color, I discovered the Bill Blass quote above. It seemed like a good sign and gave me a measure of hope, but the sadness I was immersed in was so deep and all-encompassing that I honestly couldn't imagine what it would feel like to be cured of it. To be healed and whole. To be content.

My 2014 collage, which naturally I titled, "The Ultimate Cure for Sadness"

And now, just a few months later, I am more healed, whole, and content than I have ever been in my life, than I believed was even possible for me. This is because I have experienced the loss of the thing I wanted and needed most, and genuinely moved beyond that want and need. But, it's also because, in another sense, I've experienced the thing I wanted most, and moved beyond it. For the first time in my life, at the tender age of 46, I finally reached the point where I no longer felt the need for a relationship, a romantic partner to prop me up to live.

"The miracle of the psyche's ways is that even if you are halfhearted, irreverent, didn't mean to, didn't really hope to, don't want to, feel unworthy to, aren't ready for it, you will accidentally stumble upon treasure anyway."

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Also in this past year, I stumbled upon the joy of reading comic books, and have been happily exploring this world of treasure ever since, to the point that I'm now writing a comic book series, and have realized that this is the medium for fiction writing that suits me best. My writing-medium soulmate, if you will.

That may seem like a strange and random topic shift, I know. If one of my students had written that, I'd probably tell them, "You need a transition there." (But that's the beauty of blogging; no one's grading me).

The thing is, there's actually a strong connection between my emotional healing and my newfound love of the comics medium. In fact, there's a process there that's worth describing, which is why I'm writing my first blog post in over a year.

"In [the Curanderisma healing] tradition a story is 'holy,' and it is used as medicine. The story is not told to lift you up, to make you feel better, or to entertain you, although all those things can be true. The story is meant to take the spirit into a descent to find something that is lost or missing and to bring it back to consciousness again." ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I have wanted to write fiction for a very long time. I did write fiction when I was a child, and again a bit when I took creative writing classes as an English major and grad student. But I have generally avoided it, and written in pretty much every other genre instead. Why? Because when I sit down with a fictional story to write, I get utterly consumed by it. All I want to do is write. I forget to eat, and worse, I forget to feed my kids.

When my kids were younger, this was a very bad thing, but about a year ago, it occurred to me that I had reached a point in my life where I probably could fit some fiction writing in, not just because my kids mostly know how to feed themselves now, but because I'm more disciplined and balanced these days, and could do it without completely losing myself in it.

The other thing that got me thinking about writing fiction again had to do with the relationship I was trying to get over, a relationship I had been obsessing about for years. What occurred to me last fall was this: I am obsessive by nature, but instead of obsessing over that tired old relationship story, maybe I could apply my outstanding powers of obsession to the writing of an awesome fictional story. The problem was, though, I had no such story in my head at that time.

Meanwhile, I had recently been told I was going to get to teach an English class I could design myself. It was October when I found this out, and I would start teaching the class in January, so I immediately began planning it. The class is technically "Expository Writing," but I would be able to organize it around a theme, and it didn't take me long to decide that the theme would be "the hero's journey," a la Joseph Campbell. I'm not going to go into detail here about all the wonderful things that class consists of (you can read more about it at our blog, here, if you so desire), but the important part for this discussion was that I knew I wanted to include a comic book or graphic novel in the reading material.  Because clearly you have to talk about superheroes in a class about the hero's journey. (And also just to mix things up and free the curriculum from canonical slavery.)

But it had been years since I'd picked up a comic book. (I should mention at this point that I was married to a comic book aficionado for 15 years, but in all that time of having those long cardboard boxes full of comic books all over the house, I probably only read about three. Comic books were "his thing," not mine.)

I Googled something like "best graphic novels" and this is how I discovered the brilliance of Alan Moore's Watchmen, which I ordered because it was on Time's "ALL-TIME 100 Novels" list, and because I read a review that said something to the effect that it was a subversion of the superhero genre.

Did I mention it's fucking brilliant? And it made me fall head-over-heels in love with superheroes, comic books, and Alan Moore, all in one fell swoop. From there, I went on to read the supremely helpful and informative Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (sort of a "The Glory That is Comic Books 101"), the first volume of the original Invincible Iron Man comics that started in 1963, V for Vendetta (also by Alan Moore), and a really good, surprisingly scholarly book of comic book literary criticism called How to Read Superhero Comics and Why by Geoff Klock. It was this book that showed me the way toward what to read next, so after that I ordered The Planetary Omnibus by Warren Ellis and all five books of the Promethea series by Alan Moore (my absolute favorite so far).

Being that it was October when I read Watchmen, naturally I decided I needed to be some kind of superhero for Halloween. It was still my gold year at that point, and I had this long flowy gold skirt that I had planned on using as the foundation of some kind of gypsy-fairy-princess costume. But the more I read about superheroes, the less interested I became in gypsy-fairy-princesses. I realized that my entire life I had been aspiring to be a gypsy-fairy-princess, dressing up as some variation of that for Halloween, waiting around for some gypsy-fairy-prince to kiss me awake, and now I was thoroughly sick of the whole thing.

The version of the costume I wore
to Denver Comic Con this summer

Thus, I turned the skirt into a cape and made up a superhero. I bought leggings at Wal-Mart for $5; they were black with bewildering gold applique zig zags all the way down them in rows. I got a gold mask and shiny black high heeled zipper boots. I decided my superhero's name was Ora, and that her superpower was the ability to remove evil from people with her special gloves. So I bought long shiny gold gloves from a costume shop in Santa Fe. 

That is how The Fantastic Fortune of Ora Moore, the comic book series I'm now writing, was born. The story began to form in my head, plot points tumbling themselves into being in my imagination before I ever wrote a word.

And guess what? My hunch about replacing one obsession with another was right; it totally worked.  For the first time since I was four (I'm not exaggerating), I wasn't obsessing about a relationship. But furthermore, what dawned on me with a dazzle and velocity equal to the flash of Ora's cape, was that maybe, just maybe, the reason I'd spent my whole life obsessing about relationships was because I had been trying to fill a void that only writing stories could fill.

A Monumental March

March 2013 was a monumental month for me.  Pivotal.  Epic.  Seeds that had been planted in the first two months of the year quite suddenly burst up through the soil, so to speak.  Just to give you some context, between the beginning of the year and March, I:

1. got ordained through Universal Life Church so that I can perform weddings (and then I performed my first one on March 5th)
2. found out I was going to become a grandmother this fall
3. realized that my long-term relationship, after years of wimpily limping along without really being anything, was FINALLY.  REALLY.  OVER.
4. turned 45 and, largely because of items 2 and 3, was faced squarely with the fact that I am entering "middle age," and will never have more babies; thus, my long-held dream of a specific domestic bliss in which I raise a child in a loving marriage to the child's father is gone forever.  Forever. 

So....in short, big changes were afoot, and I decided that I wanted to meet them with grace.  Some of you might know that I'm fond of giving things up for Lent (even though church itself was one of the things I gave up in Lent of 2010 and never really went back to).  I no longer consider myself a member of an organized religion, but I do still see meaning and value in adhering to some of its practices, and in immersing myself in some of its stories.  Lent, for me, is a good opportunity to focus on what I can shed in the interest of becoming freer from attachments, to explore the alchemy of death and resurrection.  (Which is especially meaningful to me right now as I'm finishing up my funeral celebrancy class.) 

This year, rather than give one thing up for the entire period of Lent, I did a three-week cleanse in its second half.  A cleanse is something I had considered doing for years, but never could find the resolve.  Most of the ones I had looked at were juice fasts, and seemed too extreme.  But this one is different.  The first week is mostly vegetables with some fruit and nuts/seeds; some of it is juices, but it also has soups, salads, and some cooked dishes.  The second week, you add back fish and legumes, and the third week you add back gluten-free grains and eggs.  It's available on the Whole Living website, and all the recipes are provided, which makes it very user-friendly.  A friend of mine does it about twice a year, and seeing how well it affects her was a big selling point for me. 

Amazingly enough, I made it through the entire three weeks without cheating (and I was surprised to find that my biggest temptation was not coffee but macaroni and cheese).  The first week was hell, especially with the caffeine withdrawal, and I briefly considered switching to a juice fast just to get it over with sooner, but I'm very glad I didn't, because it opened me up to a whole new way of eating and has had a permanent effect on how I shop, cook, and eat.  Some of the recipes were actually gourmet-level delectable, and I will continue to cook them on a regular basis.  I tried foods I thought I didn't like, and learned that I actually do.  I lost weight, which was an unanticipated but welcome side effect, especially losing that nasty belly bloat.  I firmed my lagging resolve to consistently avoid wheat and dairy; in fact, I haven't even much wanted those things since finishing the cleanse.

Grilled Salmon and Bok Choy with Orange-Avocado Salsa.  My absolute favorite recipe from the cleanse.  Get it here

And the effects were not just on the physical level; the ultimate value of doing the cleanse was in the very deliberate act and enduring commitment to care for myself.  It was a demonstration of self-love that has moved me into a new way of being.  This change actually began a year ago when I started doing weekly yoga and meditating on a daily basis, but the cleanse was a quantum leap in this direction.  I feel a greater acceptance, appreciation and gentleness toward myself now.  And then there's that wonderful feeling of accomplishment that I did it!, and the sense of strength and confidence that comes with that.

I planned the last day of the cleanse to coincide with my son's birthday on the 26th, and with a truly monumental event that was planned for the 27th, on the full moon:  a ceremonial photo shoot that I did with three amazing women in the wee hours of the morning.  It involved a labyrinth, an ordination ceremony, and lots and lots and lots of gold.

But I'll tell (and show) you all about that next time.  

Recovery

I have a deck of Medicine Cards; each card features a different animal, and the book by David Carson and Jamie Sams gives you an interpretation of the significance of each animal.  I don't consult them much these days, but my 3-year-old, Eliana, likes to lay them all out, naming each animal.  Often she'll do this when I'm sitting in my room reading or writing in my journal, and she's pretty good about putting them back in their box when she's done.  But recently I found one that had somehow made it out into the living room and was face down on the floor.  I picked it up and it was the Raccoon card, then I went to the book and read about it.  The gist was the need to consider the meaning and uses of protection.  Kinda random, I thought, but okay - I'll take it.

I started asking myself questions like, What is worth protecting, and from what?  What do I truly have the power to protect? 

I looked up the word "protect" in the dictionary, and was particularly caught by two concepts:  guarding and covering. I thought of the verse from the biblical book of Proverbs:  "Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life."

Since I was still musing over the "heart surgery" metaphor from my last post, this protection theme began to take on deeper significance, especially in connection with healing.  When I looked up the word "heal," there was an emphasis on "closing," as in closing a wound.  It occurred to me that one cannot heal until after the surgery is finished, because by its very nature, surgery is an opening, not a closing.  To heal is to re-cover.

Then a Facebook friend of mine posted a link to this article and video about baby bats that have been orphaned in Australia due to flooding and were found on the ground covered in maggots.  This post would get way too long if I went off on a tangent about the significance of bats for me, but I will just point out that they are pollinators, and I do hold a strong connection with them, which I may post about some time.  Maybe it is because of this connection that I was so profoundly moved by these images:

Or maybe it's just because they're so darn cute.  Regardless, this got me thinking that one protects what is weak that it may strengthen, what is young that it may grow mature, what is wounded that it may heal.

Then, a couple of days later at Abbey of the Arts, Christine posted the theme for her 49th Poetry Party and it was "Fierceness and Courage."  She asked, "What are the things of your life you are called to protect fiercely?"  I love the word fierce, and one of the best compliments I ever got was from someone who called me fierce.  (The same person also told me I "look good disheveled" - another of my favorite compliments.)

With some of the issues I've been working through regarding a severed relationship in my life, I began to see how all of these things apply in a practical way.

I thought about St. Paul's definition of the armor of God.  I realized that the only way to truly guard my heart is to bless from it.  I saw that the thing worth protecting in me now is innocence, and the only way to protect it is to bless.  This came out of a sudden understanding that my only choice in a situation that causes me great anger and pain is either to curse or to bless.  And because the temptation to curse is so strong, so fierce, I realized I have to turn that into fierce blessing.

Did you ever see the scene in Tomb Raider when the villain has thrown a dagger toward someone, and, while time is stopped and the dagger is freeze-framed in midair, Lara Croft has to turn it around and point it back toward the villain?  It takes an immense act of will, concentration, and strength; she has to use both hands, which she cuts in the process.  That's what it's like turning cursing into blessing.

The sense of being unhinged that I spoke of in my last post, the image of a cut-up chicken, the metaphor of surgery - in contemplating protection and healing, I began to see what the next step was for me.  Interestingly, around the same time as all the rest of this, I read in Sue Monk Kidd's The Dance of the Dissident Daughter:

In an old Sumerian myth, the Goddess Inanna, making a descent to the underworld, moves through seven gates.  At each gate she must strip a piece of her clothing away until at last she is naked, arriving without any of her former trappings.  At the depth of her descent she is turned into a piece of meat and hung on a meat hook for several days before being resurrected as a woman.

All of a sudden I can see my journey over the past year or so as an integrated thing.  Starting in October of 2009, I began posting around the theme of nakedness as a metaphor for what I was experiencing in my life.  (If you click here, it will take you to those posts.)   Now I've had the meat hook experience.  Which is exactly why protection has come up, I now understand.  I'm like those baby bats - I'm fresh and new (green!) and I've been through the wringer, and now I need a warm soft blanket around me.

The mistake I've made in the past is unconsciously believing my coldness and anger can protect me, but in thinking about what a blanket does, I'm coming to understand it a new way.  A blanket protects you by keeping the warmth you already have within you from escaping.

Epiphany:  Keeping one's warmth close to oneself is not the same thing as being cold toward others.

I'm not just the innocent that needs protecting, I'm the compassionate mother who weaves and wraps the blanket.  I'm the child who is healing and the resurrected woman both.

Taking all these signs and insights that are coming to me from multiple directions is how the blanket is woven.  Or maybe a quilt would be a better metaphor.  A quilt is, after all, a kind of collage.

And speaking of collages, I haven't yet told you how all of this connects with my 2011 collage.  I'll save that for next time.