Happy!

I’ve been really happy lately.  It’s the ugliest time of the year with piles of dirty snow, dead grass, all the garbage reappearing.  It’s even uglier when the snow is all gone, and it’s still cold, and the wind blows sand and dust around.  And I’m perfectly content with what is!  After being badly depressed through the belly of the winter, to feel this happy and contented is a miracle.  I know it started with the talk about Journey into Courage at the UU and its good reception, and reminding myself of that piece of work that I was part of.  A big piece of work that changed lives, changed the world, and is still going on doing good.  Then the One Billion Rising and feeling part of a huge global movement.  Especially learning the dance.  That music and dance have brought me up whenever I started to feel a little blue.  I also remembered that my father had molested me when I was twelve, and I had been orally raped by a date when I was sixteen.  I don’t usually think about those events at all, and I don’t think I ever actually cleared them from my psyche.  That little bit of darkness has been there until I started breaking the chain, over and over and feeling like I was performing a ritual, and it worked!  That chain is completely broken!
Another big thing was recognizing the pattern of sabotaging my success, and then having successes — Journey into Courage and Break the Chain — and not losing them.  I don’t think I’ve ever had a difficulty that just vanished when I named it.  O but I’ve been working on this one a long time.  I remember the moment when I learned that it was OK to feel good about myself in the women’s retreat back in the middle 70’s.  I’ve been struggling with that issue for almost 40 years.  Maybe the pattern of not letting myself feel good about a successful event has had the last little support piece knocked out, like dismantling a huge structure, painstakingly removing pieces — until one day I remove a crucial piece and the whole thing comes crashing down.