Grief Dances

Posted on July 16, 2015 by jenny

In my work with Erica, a lot of grief has come up.  It’s not all for my own broken life, it’s for all the suffering on our planet, all the beings being poisoned or driven out or raped, the gang members in LA who suffer from a “lethal absence of hope,” the women in the Congo who have had hideous things done to them…   I have to delete emails that show the gratuitous suffering of animals for some economic reason, I can’t bear it.  I had to find some way to move this grief.  I have heard that Malidoma Somé said of this country “your streets are full of unmourned dead,” and that Matthew Fox said if people did 15 minutes of grieving a day, it would liberate a lot of energy.  So I decided that I wanted to create a grief ritual.  I put together a sequence of Circle Dances that we do, some of them are traditional, some are modern choreographies.

Yeeftos Yeni Yol — Gypsy —those who keep being driven out. They were also sent to the ovens along with Jews, retarded people etc.

Dar Gorani — Armenian prayer for the lost homeland. The sadness of losing your home, its safety and beauty, and the hope of finding a new home.  It’s a contemporary piece of music, the dance was choreographed using traditional Armenian movements.

Vrlisko Kolo — Yugoslavian — women stepping over the dead bodies on the battlefield.

Goodnight Saigon — America — song by Billy Joel.  They weren’t allowed to play it on the radio during the Vietnam War.  We dance the suffering of soldiers, especially in a dirty war which wasn’t about saving their country at all.  The line that breaks my heart is “We were so gung-ho to lay down our lives.”

A little known fact about that war.  About 60,000 soldiers died in the war, and more than 150,000 veterans have died by suicide since the war ended.

Heartsongs — Corsica — Two people standing on the beach, looking out to sea.  The boat sailed away and hasn’t come back.  This is for the pain of the families of the disappeared, the missing in action, all the ones where you say “I never knew what happened to them.”

Goç — Armenian — leaving the homeland.  The steps are slow and reluctant, caressing the earth you love and are leaving behind.

Shoror — Armenian — lullaby to the future.  This is from the Oratorium in Memory of the Victims of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.  I see a woman, carrying her baby, on a death march: Armenian, Cherokee, Dakota, Navajo, …   The dance is a modern choreography using traditional Armenian steps.  There is a part which recalls the forced marches out into the desert, which is a more cruel way of killing people than shooting them.  I heard a horrifying thing which is that the Turks got the idea from the American Genocide of the Cherokee, the “trail of tears.”  At the end of the dance we walk into the center with our hands raised, representing the last movement of the Oratorium which is “Armenia with a Thousand Wings.”  Laura Shannon, the choreographer, says this “This beautiful music is a traditional lullaby melody arranged within a modern composition using traditional Armenian instruments, a beautiful example of the creativity with which Armenians have responded to the loss in this century of so much of their music, dance and other art, as well as the loss of so many lives.”

Omal Red Rain — the musicians are Greek, Turkish and Armenian.  We do it as a prayer for peace between ancient enemies.  The first time I heard this music I saw a bombed out town.  Buildings crumbling, small fires, cars overturned, dead bodies, a few people walking dazedly through the smoke.

WORDS TO DANCE SONGS

Yeeftos Yeni Yol words.  Translation:
I have no country, I have no hope
No nation will miss me
And with my hands and my heart
I build tents in my dreams.
And our legs, when they dance
In the perfumes which enchant you
Make bodies move…
And enfold you in their embrace.

Shoror words:
‘Night, light of the moon falling on your face
My love is always for you
May no evil hand reach you
You are my only hope, you are my innocent, noble little one
I will rock you with this lullaby
So that you may grow older quickly
And quickly become the flame in the hearth of your own home
You are my dream, you are my sun…’

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“In Touch With Who I Really Am”

Posted on July 15, 2015 by jenny

The two days of feeling “extraordinary” were an amazing experience.  They didn’t feel amazing at the time, nor did I feel “extraordinary.”  A good friend didn’t like the word “extraordinary,” she thought it referred to people who were an elite, so I puzzled over it a lot.  There’s actually a way in which the meaning of “extraordinary” wasn’t the important thing.  Though if I translate it as “outside the ordinary” that’s certainly what my experience was.  It didn’t feel special, but it did feel totally different from how I usually feel.  It felt extremely comfortable: comfortable in my body, in my life, not worried about anything.  It occurred to me that when Erica said “extraordinary” it totally wiped out all my parents had taught me about who I was.  I finally came up with the words “in touch with who I really am,” but I can’t say anything more about what that means, what that looks like, what characteristics or image that “person” has — I’m not even sure it’s a person.

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Terrified

Posted on July 14, 2015 by jenny

I’ve been trying to get off Ativan, an anti-anxiety drug that I’ve been taking for a while.  It turns out that new research has shown that it’s one of a class of drugs that cause problems with memory and other cognitive functions.  So the motivation is very great.  I reduced my dose from 1.0 mg to .75 mg over the course of the last three months.  But trying to reduce it still more hasn’t worked.  I started feeling more fear, then occasional days of terror, and now this continuous state.

I remember reading, some years back, that the despair and terror felt by a trauma survivor are qualitatively different than that felt by normal people.  I found this comforting, but it also explains why other people can’t understand what’s happening to me.  The quote is, I believe, from Lenore Terr in Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories Lost and Found (Basic Books, 1995)  I loaned the book to someone, asking that it be returned, but it wasn’t.  I probably quoted it in my journal, but that was likely during the period from 1995 to 2003 when I wasn’t typing it up.  It’s important to me to be able to give references, so I’m sorry I can’t give this one.

Trying to describe what terror feels like is very difficult.  It just occurred to me that part of the difficulty is that the feeling is a flashback to infancy, when I was non-verbal.  The dynamo in the chest is familiar, also finding it very hard to do simple things.  I went through my breakfast routine – which is good because it doesn’t require me to make choices – but it was much harder than usual.  Instead of doing it automatically which is what I usually do, I had to force myself to do each thing.  I did do my supplements, a few days ago I just skipped that, but I didn’t do my stretches.  Too hard to be with my body.

I can’t think, and I can’t see.  Not seeing is odd because I do actually see things, it’s just that they seem flat, no third dimension and there’s some other way they seem unreal.  Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp25-29) describes the experience of people who have been blind from birth and had their sight restored.  They just see “color patches,” they don’t see individual things.  Being able to see separate things is something that we learn, not something that we have automatically.  This made me think that a baby would also see “color patches” with no meaning, so that’s how it would look to a baby.  Another piece of evidence that I was traumatized as an infant.

The question of what I was afraid of intrigues me.  Often if you ask “What is my catastrophic expectation?” you find that it’s either something highly unlikely, or something that you could handle.  When I try to describe what I’m afraid of, it’s very difficult.  It’s not death, an infant has no concept of “death.”  The best I can do is it’s feeling totally helpless (a baby is truly helpless) and some nameless doom is coming down on me, I can’t stop it, and it’s going to last forever (a baby has no concept of time).  One way I have tried to describe it: imagine you are lying in the street, for some reason you are unable to move, and a big steam roller is coming down the street, aimed right at you.  The driver can’t see you, there’s no one nearby who would answer a cry for help.

From my journal
Saturday, July 11
Feeling so scared toward the end of the day, despite good talk with Erica, massage with Cory — it somehow got to beyond what I could handle by talking to younger selves. (See post for June 27)  It was that whirling dynamo in the chest, breathless, feeling.  First I took Calms (a homeopaths remedy for anxiety) which helped a little, then I took 1.0 Ativan last night.  This morning I woke OK but the terror came in pretty quickly.  Very very hard to get up.  It’s also chilly which normally I welcome but today feels hostile or indifferent.  Mocha stayed on the bed so I miss her company.
My guides said that medication was to help keep my life workable.  It is not workable now.  O gosh I just want to hide.  I wish I had someone who would come stay with me and comfort me.
Called two friends for help, but they haven’t answered.  This is very difficult for a trauma survivor from infancy whose basic trauma was being left along too long.

(I was unable to find that guidance piece in past posts.  Because my parents were alcoholics, I was very resistant to medication, and kept trying to get off it.  Every time was a disaster.  When I asked my guides about medication they said “Medication is neither good nor bad.  Your life has to be workable.  You need medication for your life to be workable.”)

Sunday, July 12
This morning there’s a lot of tightness and clenched energy in my stomach area.  I feel painfully lonely, a little scared, a little angry.  I haven’t been able to find God.  I haven’t been able to look at my broken self with compassion.  There’s sadness here too, and just a hint of headache.  O gosh I feel so cut off — from everything.
Erica has disappeared again.  (This is again an infant’s experience if it’s before the age when it learns “object constancy” — that the thing is still there, ever though you can’t see it.)
Pain and fear and lostness.  I feel so alone and cut off.  I think if I could find compassion for my broken life that I wouldn’t feel so lonely.
O gosh I’m so scared I can’t think.

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“Tray of Cups”

Posted on July 13, 2015 by jenny

Written June 12

It cooled off thank goodness.  Now it’s grey.  Feeling fine last night and then waking in the morning feeling totally bleak.  I remember this from the past.  I feel like nothing’s changed, despite all my work.

Some of the things I worried about came out fine — like Medicare B — and others have involved long struggles — the email not working for four weeks, Mocha’s peeing, her allergy.  Most of it is now trouble with Mocha.

I feel like I just touched “the truth of who I am,” and immediately lost it again.  I remind myself of the “tray of cups theory,” and the idea that when you have a big step in healing, then a whole new layer of stuff appears, that you weren’t strong enough to look at before, and now you have to deal with it.  That comforts me.  There’s still work to do, and I’m willing to do it.  I wish I could see better what it is I’m supposed to do.  It’s not cognitive work.  O yes, I still have my assignments: do grief dances, play with Mocha, communicate with younger selves through drawing.

The “Tray of Cups” theory was one I made up from the image of the trays of cups that sit in a large metal box in a cafeteria.  When you take the last cup off the top tray, and remove the tray, a whole new tray of cups rises up.

This journal entry was written about a month ago.  Today I am terrified, have been so for days, have not been able to do my “assignments,” have no idea what will help except that it’s probably caused by trying to reduce medication.  I’ve gone back up, but it hasn’t helped yet, and I have no idea how long it will take.

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April 4, 1968

Posted on June 29, 2015 by jenny

I wrote this in 1968, while I was living with Fred.  It’s undated in my journal

I don’t know where to start.  It seemed as though the volcano was going to blow last night.  I wanted to smash a window or something — perhaps because of Martin Luther King’s death?  Where is a quiet place…

What — what — pieces coming out in fits & starts — like pieces of vomit flying in all directions because I can’t channel myself toward a toilet — and vomit the whole mess & get rid of it so it doesn’t have to sit around in there — rotting & multiplying.

What’s in the vomit, the rumbling magma of the volcano — can i look ? easily — long years of lonely, of being different, of being intelligent and sensitive, yet having no reassurance from outside that any of these things were valuable.  [(fred loves me) (crossed out)     NO HE DOESN’T]  My parents always saying “Don’t think you’re so great”, never encouraging or praising, my father always focussing on tiny details as the basis for criticism so I think if i can clear up all the bad tiny details i’ll be alright and this keeps me so uptight the whole self is bound in fetters and cannot grow or be easy and free.  And then i clear up detail after detail — i no longer look at my bad skin or my big ears, but my self image is of the ugly adolescent — now i see details in my behavior that point out my selfishness, my closed-in-ness, my clumsiness and blindness — do i know how to care for another human being?      The convoluted wanderings of the dungeons of the castle i live (?) in — or defend vociferously.  Who’s down there? what ghosts wander?  My drunken mother bearing her heavy cross while the rest of us do the real work. and a dark and guilty ghost stalks after her, whispering to me, you could have done something you could still do something…

No, its not coming today. I’m just going over old ground — and if that’s all it is i might as well forget about it & try to live positively in spite of it.

Comment from today: I often do this, fail to appreciate what I am writing.  I thought this didn’t have enough flow and passion in it.  But now I see it as a very accurate analysis of my childhood and how it affected me.  At that time, I didn’t know about the trauma, and I believed that what my parents said had some truth in it.

Posted in Depression, Journal, Trauma | Comments Off on April 4, 1968

“This is the Work for Now”

Posted on June 27, 2015 by jenny

Dialogue between Jenny of now and Jenny in the hospital.  I was afraid the hospital Jenny would be uncomfortable with her much older self, and even with almost any adult.  I decided to be a “Great Aunt,” and couldn’t find the right name for her.

Jenny sitting on hospital bed, writing in her journal.  Older woman comes to the door.

Great Aunt: “May I come in?”

Jenny: “Sure” a little uncertainly.  GA sits on chair near the bed.

J  “Why are you here?”

GA   “I’m your great aunt.  I heard from your Aunt Carolyn that you had some kind of breakdown and were in the hospital.  I’ve had a couple of breakdowns myself, so I know something about it.  I came to see if there was anything I could do — and maybe just wanting to be with somebody who knows what it’s like.”

J  (not quite knowing what to make of her) “Oh.”

(long silence)

J  “Are you -like –  a psychiatrist?”

GA  “No, I’m just a person with some experience.  I’m actually an artist.  I paint.  Painting helped me get through my breakdown.”  (pause)  “It looks like writing might help you the same way.”

J  “Yes, I’ve been writing a lot in my journal.”

(silence)

GA  “Would you be willing to tell me what happened?”

J  (after a pause)  “I met this guy.  He was a graduate student in anthropology and we had some great conversations.”  (pause)  “We talked about living together.  I went away for Christmas, and when I got back he didn’t seem eager to see me.”  (pause)  “He didn’t answer my phone calls.  I went to his office to confront him and there was another girl there with him.  I freaked out and drove my car on the back roads and yelled and screamed.”  (pause)  “Finally I decided I needed to make a life for myself.  I bought a door, to make a desk, and I went to his house to borrow his van to move the door.  He was there with another girl and wouldn’t answer the door.  So I went to my car, and got the jack, and started smashing his windows.”  (silence.  Jenny has been staring straight ahead while talking.  She takes a peek at GA’s face to see how she reacts.)

GA  (with a commiserating smile)  “Sounds like you were having a pretty rough time.”

J  (cries)  “I’m sorry.”

GA  “Don’t be sorry, it’s OK to cry.”

J  (cries some more until it stops on its own.)

GA  “How did you get into the hospital?”

J  “Turned myself in.  I felt like I was exploding.  I needed help to close back down.”  (pause)  “It was comforting that the doors were locked and the nurses are here.”

GA  “Yes.  When you’re falling apart, you need some kind of container, something to help hold all the emotions that have broken out.”

J  (deep sigh.)

GA  “In traditional cultures, when someone has broken down, the tribe and the medicine people help the person contain and process what’s happened to them.  They do this through ritual and dancing.”

J  “David told me about something called a ‘vision quest.’”

GA  “Yes, that’s when  person is transitioning from child to adult.  They go out alone into the wilderness and spend some time fasting and praying and asking for some sign to let them know who they will be now.  Sometimes it’s a totem animal or a name.”  (pause)  “Do you have any totems to get you through this time?”

J  (pause, a little uncertain.  This is part of her deep private life that she’s never shared.)  “Well, there’s my guitar.  And the Bambara Oryx I bought in Paris.  I have a black stone too, that I keep in my pocket.”  (She is silent, thinking about the words written in blood “Who if I cried out would hear me amid the hosts of angels”)  “There’s also the Persian Vase that I bought at Gump’s.  It’s tiny and hand blown and I think about 900 years old.  It’s translucent with iridescent patches.

(long silence)

GA  “I’m glad you have those.  Do you have a therapist?”

J  “Dr. Burgess is here in the hospital, and Dr. Asher in Woodland.  I drive up to see him every week.”

GA  “Are they helpful?”

J  (pause)  I think so.

This is where the dialogue ended.  I imagine Great Aunt saying some thing like “that’s enough for now.  I’ll come back if it’s OK, or we might go out and have lunch,”  and Jenny saying “that’s OK.”

Bambara Oryx 15_TchiWaraBambaraMali

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Darkness Before Dawn

Posted on June 26, 2015 by jenny

One of the chapters in Darkness Before Dawn spoke so well to me that I marked a lot of passages.  It’s called “Into the Dark Light” by Elizabeth Rabia Roberts.

She says “any loss that strips away the identity you have cultivated and become comfortable with can start a slide into a serious depression.”  pp121-122  I realize that I don’t have an identity that I’ve “cultivated and become comfortable with.”  I have an identity that I’m familiar with but that I have been trying to change for a very long time.  That identity is itself depression.  When Erica said I was “extraordinary” and then when she said what I believed about myself, who I learned was me from my parents, my familiar identity, was never true in the first place, it completely shattered that old “identity,” the picture of myself as worthless, cowardly, selfish, etc.  At first it felt wonderful, liberating.  See post from 5/17/15  Then I felt like I had fallen into a swamp of fragments of what used to be me and what might be me, and was floundering desperately.  Now I feel like I have a place to start.  I remember Dr. Asher saying “You must have been very frightened” and writing in my journal “It was OK to be frightened!”  I think that was the first thing that cracked the shell of who I thought I was.  Meanwhile, David had abandoned me, triggering the ancient wound.  For the first and last time I got angry about being abandoned, and went and smashed David’s windows, and then went into the hospital where they and I tried to close down the thing that had opened up. See Breakdown in Davis.

Another thing she said, and Parker Palmer has said too, that on coming out of depression they experienced new growth.  This certainly has not been my experience.

She says “You are not alone.  Someone is holding the consciousness of your greater world while you do your inner work.”  p123  Our culture defines depression as “weakness,” as a consequence, “we feel bad about feeling bad.”  p125

“There is a lineage of both religious and secular literature reminding us that times of total darkness are a natural part of the human condition.”  p125  “These times were recognized as important and transformational because suffering is the predominant feeling of the process through which a human being must pass as the ego deconstructs and the transpersonal self is birthed.  …  Our ancestors identified these times of great confusion and inaction as ‘initiatory states.’  …

“To descend, submit, and die — the openness to being acted upon — is the feminine essence of the human experience.  …  If these dark times are a natural part of our spiritual growth, then the long periods of sadness, grief, inactivity, and inner suffering that can accompany them are not evidence of weakness or failure, as we are too often told.  Rather, they are part of a restorative and creative time in which we have access to previously hidden realizations and wisdom that can bring us into a new life.”  p126

Being acted upon, the author’s italics, is the root of the word “suffering.”  My experience right now is of “sadness, grief, inactivity and inner suffering.”  I surely hope that it will lead me into a new life.

Posted in Depression, Journal, Present Day, Spirit | Comments Off on Darkness Before Dawn

Depression

Posted on June 25, 2015 by jenny

I’ve been struggling with depression for about a month.  It’s the first time I’ve been depressed in a long time.  This is what I wrote this morning.

Woke up terrified with a bad headache.  I haven’t had this hard a time in a long time.  I remember the feelings from the past.  I took Mocha to Collman’s and walked along the river and felt frozen dread the whole time.  I wasn’t able to enjoy or even be present for the beauty of the trees and the river.  In the years after 1984, I forced myself to walk our dog Shenanigan on the Wilderness Trail with this same feeling of frozen dread.

I’ve been having odd confusions of temperature, feeling both hot and cold at the same time.  Very uncomfortable.  I’m trying to hold the fear, the headache (nails driven in) and the discomfort with compassion.  O yes, the hot and cold together is what I would experience when I had really bad cramps.

Lynelle left for Rhode Island last night.  It was sudden, I didn’t get to say goodbye.  That may be part of this fear, I’m all alone in the house.

I’ve been typing up from May 28, the time when, feeling strong from my “extraordinary” healing, I went back and read my journal for the time of Fred and David in the late 60’s.  I thought I was strong enough, but I see now that was a mistake.  I think part of the trouble I’ve been having is because of having revisited that painful time.  I talk about the letters I wrote to David from the hospital and how I would be ashamed to read them to Karen.  I don’t even mention Erica.  Ashamed.  I’ve been ashamed of how I am now too, both the not being able to function (according to the world) and the not being able to be present which is what I do want.

I have thought that having to revisit this material after coming to a new place of strength is giving me a chance to work through it.  I was going to say “again” but now I see that I never did really work through it.  In my journal for May 28 I say “This is the work for now” and how I want to go to Jenny in the hospital and try to comfort her.  Then I guess I got distracted by email, Mocha, etc.

The sun has come out.  The contrasts are painful.  The light is sparkling on the faucet and the spoons & forks in the dish drainer, and it just makes me want to hide.  The house doesn’t seem familiar, doesn’t seem to be mine, and when I walked around the yard yesterday evening it didn’t seem familiar either.  In “Darkness Before Dawn” there are a couple of essays on depression from a Buddhist perspective.  They say depression is very close to enlightenment because all of the things of the world don’t have any meaning.  They are “samsara” – “illusion.”  When I was outside I tried to see the trees as illusions, but couldn’t.  Just felt the painful cold of not being at home anywhere.  If it’s all unreal, then my pain is unreal which just makes it worse.

Fresh green leaves moving in the breeze, and they might just as well be a movie.  A movie would be easier to watch.  I think of Parker Palmer hiding in the corner with the shades down.  I think of the woman who lives with the depressed man, loves him, takes care of him, finds compassion for everything.  I don’t think she’s co-dependent, I think she’s amazingly loving.  She keeps saying to him “You’re worth it.”  I think of Dana stopping cooking for me because it wasn’t “fun” anymore, and worrying that he was “enabling” me.  There’s a lot of pain there.  He really let me down.

I have been asking for God’s help over and over, and I suddenly realized that typing up those passages — way early according to my habit of typing what I wrote a month ago — revisiting that old material is where the work is now.  That was what I’ve been wanting from God — though I wasn’t able to make it explicit — but I wanted to be shown how I was supposed to work on myself, what was the process, the next step?  I realize I’ve been so confused and lost because I couldn’t see what to do next.

Posted in Depression, Journal, Present Day | Comments Off on Depression

Tough Going

Posted on June 19, 2015 by jenny

Pain.  “What you feel you can heal”

The session with Erica was filled with so much pain.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much except maybe long ago when I splashed pain all over my journals.  Writhed with it, ran away from it.  Running through the streets of Athens at night, crying out “Thanatos!”  — the word means “Death” in Greek — did I really do that?

I was only able to let myself feel the pain because Erica was there.  It came in a hard hard painful squeezing and then relaxed.  I would sigh and sometimes yawn, and then it would hit again.  The yawns comforted me because they indicated that something was being released.  Erica said the pain was coming in waves.  I saw that I had experienced it in waves, but was still afraid (am still afraid) that it could last forever.  I see now that “forever” is what the baby experiences.  O I want to scoop her up and help her bear the pain.  I guess in a way that’s what I’m doing when I allow myself to feel the pain.

Finally I relaxed into what felt like a nothing place.  Erica asked what that felt like.  I said my lower half felt very heavy, butt and legs filled with BB shot, then butt and legs like a Henry Moore sculpture, massive, cast metal.  The top part of me felt collapsed on top of the heaviness and also held down by it.  Erica asked what was the wisdom of the heaviness, what did it have to say to me?  That was hard, searching and searching to find the feeling and give it words.  Finally I got “to hold you in one place” but I knew there was more.  Why did I have to stay in one place?  I didn’t want to, I’d do anything to get out of here     “…until you learn to…”  What? what!     “…rest.”  Gosh, what irony.  I’m so tired, I desperately need to rest, and yet I’m experiencing this being held as being trapped and fighting against it.

I can only remember experiencing pain like this during the David episode, and I splashed it out of me, smashing his windows, writing crazily, turning myself in to the Health Center where they filled me with tranquilizers.

Rest.  If I could truly rest.  I’m so exhausted.  I can sit still, often do, just staring, but it’s not rest, it’s more like lack of motivation to move.

Erica said “I’m so grateful to you for being willing to experience this pain.”  I asked why.  She said that it helped everybody else wake up more.  I guess that’s the same as my idea that I’m healing the human energy field.  If that were true, then I would know that my life hasn’t been wasted.  Some days I believe it, some days I don’t.

This pain I’ve been experiencing tells me that the wound is very deep and very old.  I see that it’s going to take a lot of hard work.  I don’t know if I’ll even finish it before I die, if I’ll ever have a “real life” except for moments like the two days of feeling “extraordinary.”  I told Erica something I told Kevin long ago, that I wanted to get as close to healing as I could, so that the next person who incarnates out of this energy will not find it such tough going.

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What it’s Like to Live with PTSD

Posted on June 18, 2015 by jenny

It’s sunny and beautiful out, and I can’t bear it.  It’s a day to go out and enjoy the world, and I just want to hide.  Yesterday was so much easier, it was grey with drizzly rain.

Now I understand something about why I have such a hard time with beautiful days.  I thought that I “ought” to go out and enjoy the beauty, but I couldn’t because of some stupid narrow reason of my own, and I got angry at myself to not being able to do it.  Today I see that I did really want to go out and enjoy it, but it was just too painful because I was so dark inside. The darkness was not who I am or what I chose but how I was wounded.

After breakfast.  Walked Mocha (the name finally given to my new dog) around the loop.  Came back breathless and terrified.  This is called “getting triggered” by a bright beautiful day.  I can’t think of any reason why, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not triggered, it means that the reason is far back and buried in the non-verbal part of my psyche.

Sitting here looking out at my beautiful woods, I think of the survivors of Chernobyl looking at the forests they love but can never again go into because they are filled with radiation.

 

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