This blog has been sitting here taking up space (wait, is there space in cyberspace?) while I got my body healed and my priorities straightened out. It was difficult to grapple with the fact that I would be better off not to follow #215800 to its logical conclusion with the intensive retreat. Instead, I’ve done the best I can on my own. I’ve been reading lots of writers’ works on writing, the creative life, and kicking my creative self in the butt (with greatest compassion, of course).
The big shift has come, and it is this: I do not need to hold on to the disturbing details that defined my childhood just because there is so much good material there. I do not need to be the next Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris just because my young self was in a lot of twisted situations of questionable benefit to developing minds and characters.
I finally had a conversation with myself that echoed one I’d had with a dear friend I’d once coached through a very dark time. This person had put heart and soul into creating something that was practically carved out of his own being, and while there was a haunting beauty to it, while it was evocative and compelling and showcased his talents beautifully, it was not gaining the recognition he had hoped it would, and he was not having the success he’d felt sure would follow his efforts. For all its virtues, it was also incredibly depressing by virtue of its content and focus. I remembered a time early in our friendship, asking the difficult question, “Is this really what you want to be known for?”.
When you have received an awakening, it becomes your responsibility to shine more light on the world than shadow. Even at those times when you are completely overshadowed by the shadow, it is up to you to find a way to, as my friend now says, “show it to the light”.
The awakening came like this: I was in a treatment room where I was expecting to receive lymphatic work to support the final stages of healing from July’s surgery. Instead, the practitioner said she’d like to do some energetic work and began asking a series of questions. I found myself saying outright that I resist healing a troubled relationship from my childhood because it would diminish the material I have to choose from when writing.
Oh dear. One of my best-kept secrets was suddenly out there, and irretrievable. Like good merlot on a white linen shirt.
Our best-kept secrets are the ones that surprise us when they’re revealed. They’re like some unknown bit of us has snuck out the back door, come around the side of the house and up behind us while we’re on the front porch. We may have an inkling something is there, then it leaps out like a mischievous little brother with a water balloon, yelling, “Surprise! Can’t catch me!”. And the challenge, of course, is to not try to catch it. To let it be free. Because when we hear the secrets we’ve been keeping from ourselves, so much space opens up inside. It’s like we’ve had a boarder in the house who suddenly vacates and now we have this whole room back. Now we could have an office, or a sewing room, or a nursery, or a yoga studio... We are now free to clean the space out and do something useful with it. Meaningful, at least.
When my childhood vacated the “potential material” vault in my awareness, there was a period of mourning. There’s still work to be done with that past, if I and the other parties choose to do it, but I no longer have to keep transformation at bay in order to ensure the authenticity of my “abused kid reveals all” bestseller, because that tome is no longer even a twinkle in my future. However popular it might have become, however many millions I might have raked in, the practice of dredging through what’s already happened, and which messed up a good portion of the first third of my life, is not a good way to spend time- recreationally or to make a living. It’s not right living, at all. So I had to temper my shame and anger at even harboring the idea in the first place (secretly or not!) with the incredible sense of lightness and possibility that followed in its wake.
Suddenly there is so much to write about, so much that is important and true and hopeful and imperative and useful and genuine and very, very exciting! Suddenly the things and thoughts that are truly of value to me can breathe again! So much passes through this head of mine that, if put into practice, could really be a transformative force for positive change in the world... and now I’ve been freed up to show all of it to the light.
Now I am on the verge of a whole new world, where everything has turned on its head. How else can you explain the life-path that, in two weeks' time, shifted from house-shopping in a town I don’t really love, because the market is good and the timing of finances says it has to be this year... to blogging my way across parts of the country and across the ocean (hello, Scotland, my ancestral home!), visiting sustainable communities and ecovillages in search of the source of that which draws me to them.
First, of course, comes the unloading of all the stuff that’s in my physical spare room (and back porch, and office, and... you know the story).
More soon!
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