Real Riches

Our Real Riches are Our Ability to Feel 

Seriously, it is true, our abundance lies in our ability to feel our feelings and to know that we are connected to all of the world, if we are connected, we then have access to everything. We are made of stardust and ocean and all the other things that grow and thrive and continually become stronger until we rejoin the earth in a different form. So, I am going to make the intention to be grateful not just for the things in my life, but for the ability to feel, and for each different, nuanced feeling that I experience. To be grateful for each second that my body is alive, feeling, and connected to everything else in this amazing web of life. To see things as related, not separate, to see things as a whole, not parts, to feel awe, to feel supported, to feel belonging, not because I conform, but because I exist. 

Punished

There have been many lessons I have learned as a parent, and one of the most valuable lessons that fortunately I learned early on-- is that punishment does not work. Does not work, I repeat this, because we are so marinated in this construct that we can hardly remove it from our lives. But seriously, it does not work, and not only does it not work, what it does is destroy trust and relationship. If we believe, really believe that we will be punished for doing certain things, it only tells us that what we are doing is wrong, it does not open  up possibilities for what is right. 

Punishment makes people feel so unsafe, it boxes them into a corner, where their creativity which is needed to see possibilities is shut down. I found a wonderful explanation of this, this morning, reading through a clinical book called Trancework by Michael Yapko, this is how he puts it; “In simply punishing someone for doing something wrong, there is nothing provided to tell the person what the right thing is to do. The person merely learns what not to do; receiving repeated punishment with no alternatives provided leads to frustration, anger, and finally a point where punishment is no longer effective” (p. 286). 

For me, it was as simple as spanking my child and realizing that they would do the same thing that I spanked them for over again, so I could spank them again and again and again and they would still do the same thing. As explained above, the spanking produced no change in the behavior, but what did change, was the relationship. I felt horrible, my child felt betrayed and then I somehow had to repair all that on top of finding alternatives to the behavior which started the whole thing. What I also had to do, was examine why it felt so awful to even want to punish someone. What thoughts, beliefs, did I actually hold about people, to imagine they needed to be punished, and that I was the one to do it? 

Finally, reading this, and put so succinctly, validates how I came to view how people grow and change, how people create loving relationships. In safety, with encouragement, with alternatives, not punishment. Although I don’t consider myself a Christian, there are still Bible verses that bounce around in my head, and this one comes to mind, perfect love casts out all fear. 

There is no fear where love exists. Rather, perfect love banishes fear, for fear involves punishment, and the person who lives in fear has not been perfected in love. 1 John 4:18. 

As I raised my daughters, I read the Bible regularly, I held onto the verses that made sense to me, that made me feel like I could trust myself, especially as a parent. There were some verses that when I internalized them, and acted on them; made my life and my relationships better. This I believe is wisdom, finding and accepting words that most affirm our best selves, the selves we strive to be, that create the relationships we want to have, that build the places of safety and growth in our lives. So, whether it is a clinical book, or a book a wisdom, words help to affirm and to guide us to articulate and share where we are most loved and most human. 

Road by Walking

There are times when I forget that I need to write for me. Sometimes, it seems I can write and the words flow, and it all makes sense (at least to me), and then there are times that come and I am worried that putting words to whatever is going on will just make it too real. Or, how do I in linear fashion put down on paper all the whirling, swirling thoughts and emotions that I am capable of experiencing? This is where the poets excel, right? 

A metaphor, like the wind through the top of a full, leafy tree comes close to the feelings. Slivers of sun, glimmer on the shiny side of the leaves, while the strong wind carries the branches up and down and the leaves shimmer and shake. I too shimmer and shake, and feel the current take my limbs  up and down and yet I am firmly rooted in the ground all the while. It feels like a storm inside me, and yet, all anyone might see is a glimmer in my eye; all they might hear is a long sigh. 

Nobody told me that the changes that come about when we grow from child to adult just keep coming about, year to year, as the seasons change, we too change. From naive to learned, from free to committed, from childless to grandparent, from in love to mourning, and then back again to free and in love. We ride the currents of life in a small or large boat, with many, with few, alone. What remains for us except the orb we stand on, the sky above. I thought I would grow from child to adult, and have all that I would need on my journey. 

I was told to go to college and make my way in a church and find a good enough man. After I’d done all those things, I sat still and found pieces of myself that I would need to take with me for the next stretch of road, and that still is all I can do. I can’t see the journey’s end, I can’t see the future, but I can tentatively step by step, make the road, and night by night, make my peace and make my bed, rest and start over. 

More Wild

Taking care of myself becomes something elusive sometimes, I can feel that I need to be taken care of, I deeply feel that ragged sense that I am not at ease, not whole, not holy any more, and this seems to turn in on itself, to feed on itself as I grapple to get back to just a sense of everyday OK-ness. I tell myself of course you feel out of sorts, you have spent weeks of having your daughter move, then your mother move, and in the course of moving my mom, sorting through memories that I’d forgotten for good reason. And now, now I am behind in my own housekeeping, bill paying and general life upkeep. I am behind and I am left with this residual feeling of growing up in a home that was chaotic and thrived on fear and mistrust. I have worked really really hard to create a home that is filled with love and trust, and yet I still haven’t gotten the chaotic part totally in check. And I hate it. And it shows me exactly that my life is too busy and where I need to change. 

And so, to take care of myself in the midst of this chaos, I bought myself a book that I’ve been wanting to read, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Once I got past wondering if it would be as good as all the hype (it is), and being jealous that she is published and awesome (she is), I let myself sink into her story, her adventure, her own hero’s quest, and it dawned on me, how un-wild I have become. How fear has crept into corners of my life where I’d never want to admit it to anyone. How when I decided to make myself take a walk yesterday morning, I told Megan this story that I’d kept to myself for a really long time, before I left. Well, Megan, there is a part of me that is afraid to walk around the lakes, it sounds silly, I know. The lake I walk is always full of people, it is daylight, it is Minneapolis, for Pete’s sake. But a long time ago, when I was 12 or 13, and I walked around a city lake in the evening, I was in a bad mood, a defiant mood, mad at my family. And so when a man in a car called out, hey, do you want to go for a ride, instead of walking quickly away, I approached this man in a car. 

And when he said, get in. I did. Once in, I knew I’d made a mistake. He was not young and cute, but older and disheveled looking. We chatted, he drove down Hennepin Avenue and by the corner of Hennepin and Lake he had his hand tangled in my long brown hair in a way that made me feel sick. He turned down a side street lined in mansions and parked by Lake of the Isles. It was starting to be sundown, and I was starting to be afraid, and I was definitely afraid when he locked the car doors and grinned at me. I told him I needed to get home, and he wouldn’t listen. He started to undo his belt and I was trapped. As he talked about how he’d love to have a girlfriend like me, I went along with it. I told him I’d like to be his girlfriend, but we’d have to date for a while before anything happened. He told me he wanted to take me on a picnic and I agreed. I agreed to be his girlfriend, but he’d have to be nice to me, and he had to take me home, now. He softened, and agreed. 

I stupidly let him drop me off near my home. He knew my neighborhood, and I said I’d meet him at the lake the next day. When I never did, he started stalking me in the neighborhood, yelling things at me from his car. This went on for months. Of course I never told my parents, as they would (as they always did) have blamed me. And I blamed myself. And so, I told Megan this story, feeling a little like maybe she would think less of me. I have a few of these horrible men stories, tucked away, untold, unwritten, because as a young girl growing up, there were only two kinds of girls, good girls and bad girls, any evil men perpetrated on girls would then become internalized in the girl, the man remaining, well, only a man. If folks knew about the evil you were a bad girl, if you could hide it, pretend, store it away, you could fool folks into believing you were still good. I always wanted to be good, to be careful, not to be wild. 

After I told Megan this story I headed out to walk around the lake on a beautiful, sunny, Saturday morning. The walking path was crazy full of people. I walked a long time behind a couple of women talking loudly,  and so, I decided to walk away from the path, to walk on the sand, on the water’s edge. At first I thought, I will get my shoes wet and sandy, and then I realized that I’d become too careful, too worried, too unwild with myself. I thought of Cheryl Strayed, walking the Pacific Crest Trail, and I pushed myself to be more wild, and realized that what I thought was taking care of myself, was really, too often, living in fear. Fear still, of what people would think if they knew, fear still of someone lurking, fear still of not having the information I’ll need to keep myself safe. Fear that I’ll never figure out how to take really good care of myself and others, to be safe. Fear that the stories I tell should not be told. So, I just kept walking on the water’s edge, not caring if my shoes got wet and sandy. Instead of chatter and cell phones and the sound of shoes on paved path, I heard the water hitting the sand, I heard the wind in the trees, I felt the ground underneath me both soft and solid, unmovable and moving. I whispered to myself, become a little more wild, wild is not the undoing of us, it is us. 

Only Love Lasts

little plastic pink colored babies, one with wings
mom what are these?
oh those are pro-life things
hmm, really, little one inch plastic babies
thrown in a drawer with old receipts, recipes, faded photos
can i thrown them away?
ok

after years of being clutter in a drawer 
we can finally throw them away
as my mom is down-sizing
really down sizing this time
to move from a large condo
to a small apartment
in a senior building

the things we save 
we think we’ll need
the power invested in palm fronds
that cannot be thrown away
because they are holy
and plastic babies saved
because they are not

an old photo of cub scouts in blackface
which turns into an ugly family fight
over whether or not minstrel shows are racist
about white privilege that my brothers have always had
passed on to them by my parents and my culture
when we are all old and should know better
as we struggle with the changes that life brings upon us
i know now that this privilege brings with it a price 

i never wanted to inherit this mess of stuff
along with the inability to throw things away
a horrible curse a spell that only my daughters have 
been able to break for me
to step into the living 
to care about the experience
to feel my feelings
to throw or give it away
throw it or give it away
only the love lasts

long time passing

Usually when I write it feels like a good thing, like if I’m not even really sure what I’m talking about at least I’m admitting that hey, I’m not sure here, but I’m writing it out. The past couple of months I’ve felt too unsure to write much, too unsure to open the pages and to put anything down, and this has somehow not made things better. I wouldn’t call it a writer’s block, I’ve never liked that term, because it makes it seem that all there is to writing is, well, the writing and it’s more than that. But what I have come across lately, that makes some sort of sense of all this, is that researchers studying creativity have found that people need to feel safe to be creative. 

Much of this research is being applied to the workplace, this of course, being the dominant place for most people’s lives (sarcasm). I shouldn’t go off on a tangent here about home not being a safe place for way too many people, women, especially, because, my brain is too tired for tangents lately, and this, this is partly why I’ve been not writing. I’ve been too tired from trying to shake off my past, trying to dart in and out of my family of origin, like time travel, like portals, like something sci-fi where your whole head is just not wrapping around the information that is coming in.  

This past week we moved my mom from her three bedroom condo in Edina into a one bedroom senior apartment in Northern, Minnesota. To a town just at the Canadian border, this I know, I drove the one hour into Winnipeg years ago with my two youngest. My oldest sister and her husband live there, and they are happy to be able to spend more time with my mom. This is actually a wonderful thing, a good thing for my mom, as her days in her condo this past year were getting increasingly difficult. It just has been a lot of me interacting with family members I don’t see very much, and realizing that family often just doesn’t not only not feel like family, they often feel like enemies. They feel like the ones you have to suit up for to protect yourself, and even feeling like this feels really awful, but then you have to admit it to  yourself, admit it and know it is true. 

It is also that I have been very close to my mom, for my whole life. For my whole life we have never lived more than an hour’s drive away from each other. For my whole life, I have somehow been the one my mom felt she could rely on. Being a daughter has been a large part of my life. Now I know this part of my life is not over, but it is changed dramatically. Between the managing this change, and going through the things my mother didn’t take with her, I find myself inserted into my past, like I have abruptly fallen through a portal to the past, remembering things and feelings that I’d just as soon forgotten. 

Suddenly remembering how unsafe I felt most of my growing up years, and then realizing how it’s taken me a long, long time to feel safe more often than unsafe. And so as I shake this feeling of sadness, grief and not-safe, I realize that to write out our feelings, to write out our pain, requires a modicum of safety. If I can step back into that safety, I can make sense, I can create, and in this circle of safety create my way either to, or back to a life that makes sense. I am retrieving that child that I was, carrying her out of the debris that was my life, and I don’t have time for the making sense of it yet. 

Chasing

Summer has run off from me, like some wild and unruly child, and all I can do is stand by the back door, staring off at them as they are too far down the block to chase after. I am tired, the summer was too full, my phone rang too many times. I drove too many miles back and forth across the city. Picking people off, dropping them off, going to St. Paul for Izzy's ice cream, barely able to savor it, before it melted. Then getting on the freeway again, time like dew, evaporating.