Some of this material was first published in October, in two separate posts. The Daily Good today (10/22/23) was an essay by Francis Weller on grief. When I first heard about his work from my therapist, I went to a retreat on the west coast. But I have been struggling with a lot of sadness, hopelessness, bleak feelings and when I read this I realized where they were coming from.
These are the words that touched me strongly:
“the places never touched by love” “These neglected places of soul live in utter despair. What we feel as defective, we also experience as loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth.”
“We anticipated a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, reflection … communal rituals of celebration, grief and healing that kept us in connection with the sacred. The absence of these requirements haunts us… ”
On Saturday, October 28 I wrote in my journal:
Woke up and was just lying there when I began to feel awful. Hard to describe the feeling: lonely, unloved, as though thrown out of the tribe, not labeled with a crime, but just being unacceptable. I realized I have to treat it as a part, and find some love for it.
Later in that journal entry I wrote:
My right shoulder hurts. I did way too many puzzles yesterday. I was feeling obstreperous. I’m going to have to look that word up, but the sound is so good to express how I felt — angry and perverse so I do something I shouldn’t because it’s bad for me.
[Margin: Obstreperous — stubbornly resistant to control.]
Now I understand that this is a part of me, rejected, criticized, and exploited by my parents, that I also have rejected, not quite sure why. I think I need to know why so I can apologize to that part, as well as comfort it. I remember a picture of me as a child, standing by a small table. I look very upset. They told me I had been running around and around the table, so they spanked me to make me be still and got a picture of a spanked child. Served them right. I think this has to do with anger that I’m being treated badly and learned that it wasn’t OK to express.
Surprisingly, I wrote about this same part in my journal for November 28, 1995, 28 years ago. Cycle of Saturn, which has to do with limitation. Was that why she showed up? She certainly feels limited and she’s blaming me.
Well, let’s see if she is here, that sullen angry hurt child. I have a hit of her age as being 8 or 9, and of Mother as a hurt angry sullen child herself. I can feel her presence, but she’s not ready or not willing to talk. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with grown-ups, or with grown-up advice, or with grown-up value systems. This sounds like someone who’s had unreasonable expectations laid on her, to be mature beyond her state of development, to be mature without having grown organically through the earlier stages, and then was given no support for this enormous stretch, or praise when she accomplished it. No wonder she’s hurt and angry.Well, I’m here to listen. Here’s the pen if you want to say something.
You’re a fine one to give me the pen. You don’t want to hear about what it’s been like to be me. I feel silenced, patronized, condescended to. I can’t express my anger in fine words, or coherent statements, and you devalue it as childish, as being about trivial things.
What am I angry about? I don’t know, I don’t know — I’m angry at feeling trapped in some goody-goody bourgeois room that’s narrow and full of little knick knacks and when I try to swing my arms to make room to breathe I knock something over and get told I’m being rude and I have a vague sense, or maybe it’s just a hope, because this place is so painful and tight and stuffy and boring, I hope that there’s another world out there, a bigger world, with room to move and breathe and beautiful things that would satisfy my heart and beings that I could talk to — but you tell me that’s just a fantasy, unrealistic. And so I make myself wrong for my hope, and try to fit in among the dusty artifacts, and try to nourish myself on fantasies that are limited because there’s nothing outside me to feed them. And now I find that there is a world out there, a world of mountains and trees, a world of artists and musicians and dancers, and you never told me about it, or helped me develop the skills I need to be able to function in that world. That’s why I’m angry.
Both these descriptions were posted recently:
See Obstreperous Child
and 1995: Sullen Angry Child
They were posted next to each other because I saw the connection, but I want to look at it more closely. I wonder why she didn’t appear more in my life. Maybe she was held back by a protector part, afraid of punishment by my parents. I also wonder about the one in me who “concludes I can’t do it” and stops her part way along. I suspect there are lots of creative parts of me who got shut down by “Don’t think you’re so great.”
Actually, I want to get in touch with that part, tell her that I’ve been able to enjoy the world of mountains and trees, I did Sierra Club trips, serious hiking and camping. Musicians and dancers — folk dance has been an important part of my life for many years. In fact, in 1995 we were getting close to finishing the building of Neskaya, a sacred space for sacred circle dance which was rooted in folk dance. Dear Angry One, you have access to all those things through me.
Furthermore, to go back to what Francis Weller says, “communal rituals of celebration, grief and healing that kept us in connection with the sacred” are something ancestral that we both have missed because of the culture we live in. But we created it in building Neskaya, so that was the realization of a deep, deep knowing and desire. Please congratulate yourself, because your anger and desire helped me push through all difficulties on the way to creating Neskaya.