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A Beacon for Hope

Posted on April 23, 2013 by jenny

My house has a cupola. It’s not big enough to climb into,
but it has a light. When they were building the house,
and I was living across the street at Neskaya, Greg put a work light in the cupola so I could see it from across
the street. It gave me a nice warm feeling, like there
was somewhere safe to go. There’s been a light up there ever since, except for a couple of times when I
was so badly depressed I felt that my light had
gone out. Most of the time I see it as a symbol, like the Statue of Liberty I hold my torch high to say that another world is possible.

(Written in November 2004)

Sitting here thinking about the light in the cupola, how it supports me emotionally, and the fire supports me too, even tho it’s not as efficient to add logs slowly. I feel bad about the “waste of resources” and tune into the elementals —— and they say they are glad to give to support me emotionally. “This is what wealth is for, to support the soul.” There’s a spirit in this house that holds and comforts me, loves and supports me. So much love has gone into the building of it — and now I find it’s all still here, surrounding me with warmth. I do my best to take it in.

(Written in July 2005)

Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I’m pretty totally discouraged and bummed out. I’m ready to quit and stop trying.

Dear Jenny, it’s absolutely fine for you to “quit” and “stop trying”. You are making a passage, and you know how to do this passage, and it means complete surrender — which is not the same thing as “quitting”. Yes, stop “trying”, trying and effort are getting you no where. You must just trust that there is a process and it is carrying you through. We think you should do art, as best you can without pushing yourself. Turning your light off is OK, as a signal that you are in retreat, but your light is not really off. In offering yourself to the process of darkness, descent, not-knowing, not-doing, you are still a beacon in dark times. All the damage in the world is being done by people who are refusing to make this passage.

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Guidance

Posted on April 22, 2013 by jenny

(Written in April 2005)

Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, my heart aches and I keep talking to David in my mind. Please help me.

Dear Jenny, you are doing just fine. This is another layer of deep old grief. You are mourning for what you did not get as a child, the firm foundation that would have made it easy to lead a life of creativity and love and actions that show in the world. The fact that you’ve spent your life’s energy in work that is for the most part invisible, does not mean that what you have done is not worthwhile or lasting. Your life has been lived with an enormous amount of creativity and love, action and service, all directed toward healing the roots of your own life, and that means healing the roots of suffering for all. None of your effort has been wasted, even tho you can see now how much was misguided. All your hard work is bearing fruit now, when you have finally come to medication and S.E. — as your life opens up and expands you are able to use all that you have learned and developed in yourself during the hard times. You have not yet found a relationship that will satisfy your passionate nature. You do not know what will happen — we do not know what will happen. Anything could happen. The fantasy conversations take you away from the present moment, and your life only happens in the present. When you catch yourself fantasizing 1) pay attention to your heart. If it hurts, be with it. 2) talk to us instead. Look at what you are needing to share with another (human) being, look at what parts of you you are needing to have seen and accepted. Remember that we love you.

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Somatic Experiencing

Posted on April 20, 2013 by jenny

(Written in May 2005)

The work with Brad was pendulating between the cold grey frozen place, and the colorful place filled with life. I described the “World of Diversity” and Brad said I had brought it out of all the life and color that’s inside me. He asked what if I held them both together — the suffering and the life. But I’m not sure the grey frozen place is suffering, I think it’s denial of suffering, refusal to feel suffering. But I think bringing life to the frozen place helps support it or ease it or something. Makes it possible to let myself feel the pain because there’s a sense of hope.

Now I see that I blamed myself as though “denial” were conscious which I don’t think it is. There are times when people are given a chance to see that they are in denial and they can choose to see it or not. But the “frozen state” described here is the frozenness of trauma, there is no choice involved.

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Smashed Life

Posted on April 19, 2013 by jenny

I’m finding it fascinating that there are so many passages in 2005 that resonate for me now: the loss and grief and pain, the depth of the wound that’s been opened, the way the meaning drains out of my life. I can see that I’m so much better now, how quickly I recover, how clear I’m able to be that this pain is not about the person who triggered it, it’s about the wounding that smashed my life at the very beginning.

(Written in November 2005)

A visit with Eleanor, my friend who also lives with PTSD. I told her about my struggles with the issue of being “grateful for the gift of life.” I said it made me angry because the “gift” had come to me smashed and I’d spent my whole life trying to mend it. She said she felt the same way.

Read through this whole notebook yesterday & today. It covers a HUGE passage from pain about David to feeling much better about my life. Talking with Eleanor about not being able to feel “grateful for our lives”, I see that we have taken on a greater task than just incarnating on the planet. We are here to try to turn the suicidal momentum of Industrial Western Civilization, and the only way to do that is to go straight to the root of it which is the abused, traumatized psyche. So we had to be abused, so that we could work on healing the abuse in our own bodies and minds because that’s the only place where we really have the power to heal. Everything else: working to save the ANWR, or clean up a river, or recycle garbage, is just working to support a natural process from the outside. The healing we do within is what really changes the human energy field.

I’m in a place of knowing —knowing that my work at Neskaya is important, knowing that I love Eleanor, knowing that my creativity is what will keep me out of depression — but I don’t feel any of this. It’s like my heart is defended. Defended and held up by walls of what? Knowing, I guess, solid intellectual knowing, so I won’t collapse like I did last Wednesday, but I’m also not in touch with the part of me that’s so lost, so far away. How does that feel in my body? Actually, it’s the container I felt with Brad: my body— arms, legs, torso, is warm and solid and alive — and my heart is tight and cold and numb. And that’s how it is at the moment. I can live with this only because I’m sure it’s not forever.

A sense of deep gratitude to my body for being able to hold me in this way.

Brad was my Somatic Experiencing practitioner for about a year. He was very good, but alas, he moved to California and never came back.

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Caring for my Life

Posted on April 18, 2013 by jenny

(Written in November 2005)

Seasons of Grace quotes Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me… I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf replies “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” This helps me separate myself from my life, see it not as me — wounded and defective and suffering — but as something given to me to care for. As though I had been given a poisoned field or a clear cut forest to care for. I would not feel angry and bitter, I would love the field or the forest for what it had once been, and might still be again even if I never saw it. And I would pray for the ravaged land, and tend it, dig up what garbage I could, purify what toxins I could, shelter what seedlings I could, bring what clean water I could, and not waste time and heart energy being angry at the ones who trashed it, or that I would never see it in its full glory.

Seasons of Grace by Alan Jones & John O’Neil

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Wild and Precious Life

Posted on April 17, 2013 by jenny

(Written in August 2005)

I was thinking about the line from Mary Oliver: “what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” and how it always makes me feel bad, like I have wasted mine. Well, have I wasted it? I think she’s talking to people who’ve lived small conventional lives, lives of denial. And what about lives of greed and power and cruelty? If my life has been narrow, if I’ve failed to live as wide and wild and courageous and generous and creative a life as I would have liked to, and as I think I had the talent and capacity for, it’s not because I was weak and cowardly but because I was up against major damage I couldn’t even see. And I have taken a stand for truth, for justice, for peace, I have fought against oppression, I have spoken out for the disadvantaged. I have devoted money time and energy to good causes. I have supported friends, sometimes at cost to myself. I have done my best to love unconditionally and to live with integrity.

Thinking again how in these times, when there are no recognized shamans and shamanic teachers in our culture, some of us who were to be shamans were initiated by the ordeal of being abused as children. Unfortunately, that meant for some of us, that we never got to step into our full power. Maybe that’s not important, maybe kindness and humility and working for healing are more important.

“Shamans know that those wounds are not their own but the world’s.” (Matthew Fox)

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Dealing with Rejection

Posted on April 16, 2013 by jenny

(Written in October 2005)

This morning I woke up with an ache in my heart and realized I was angry with myself for not being beautiful. Then my heart went out to me, and that helped a lot.

DAMMIT! Somewhere, at some time on the planet there must have been men who would appreciate me — who would appreciate my intelligence and my passion, and my woundedness, and how hard I’ve worked to heal from those wounds. Surely there’s a woman worth loving in there, one with value above a pretty face. and my anger and my pain and my ability to be present for someone else’s pain. Surely that’s worth something?

Somatic Experiencing with Brad helped a lot. I wasn’t sure if I was even going to talk about the man who rejected me but it came up, with a lot of tears. At one point I became aware that my body — arms, thighs and butt — was making a container for the pain in my heart. That was comforting somehow. Then the image of the battlefield that appeared during “Red Rain” appeared again. Blackened earth, bombed out buildings, destroyed vehicles, corpses, a few lost people wandering around. Black sky overhead with a gleam of light near the horizon. Reminds me of the “bombed out village” I found in the work with Debbie. Brad asks if I can imagine someone there with me. I first imagine Mama Greene — but it doesn’t work, she doesn’t belong here, I can’t make her appear. I sit alone with it for a bit and then suddenly remember Joanna Macy who is immediately there next to me. I tell Brad about the workshop, learning not to be afraid of despair, knowing that I would not change how I’m living even if I knew there was no hope, because I can’t live any other way. Brad says “Because it’s coming from inside you. That’s true beauty.” I had said earlier how much it hurt that I wasn’t beautiful, and a little about being angry at myself for not being more attractive. Now I realize that my life was wrecked before it even got started, part of the devastation Western Culture has inflicted on our planet and all of our psyches. That burned-out landscape is the collective psyche of Western Culture, the flip side of the slick advertising and the neon lights. I realize that I’m not alone in my pain, that I’m not alone because I’m unattractive and worthless, I’m alone because this is a bad time to be a woman looking for a male partner among the shell-shocked victims of the ongoing world war. That helps a lot. I tell Brad about the last line of the poem: “How dare I be discouraged in this work by anything so trivial as fear of personal failure?” I realize that the whole issue about whether I’m attractive or not diminishes into the category of “trivial”. It’s much easier to imagine that there are men out there who would appreciate me, it’s just that my chances of meeting one are minimal.

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Abandonment Trauma

Posted on April 15, 2013 by jenny

Saturday I went to a workshop with Sal Rachele. He did some guided meditations. One of them helped me get back in touch with that feeling of being supported by the universe. So of course I was feeling enough better to have an old problem resurface. It has to do with being abandoned, usually by a man, but sometimes by a woman I was close to and thought I could trust. I went back to read my journal for 2005, which was the last time this thing was triggered really badly, and I see that I’ve increased enormously in resiliency. I’m rebounding much faster!

(Written in April 2005)

Feeling sick and sad. A huge hollow in my heart and tears in my eyes. I was able to sleep last night, and I was able to hold myself compassionately, but it feels so lonely — I so desperately want someone else to care about me that way. This feels a lot like the week or two before Shenanigan died. Oratorium playing — the music that helped with my pain about the divorce, taking it up into a larger context.

Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, my heart is hurting so much. Please help me.

Dear Jenny, we love you a lot and so do many other people. You are doing well with this grief, staying open to it. What you are really letting go of is not a relationship but an expectation. You will still have the relationship. Stay with the pain. There is another side, a new place to get to, that will be deeper and richer and worth the pain. Do not fear grief but stay open to it, it has lots to teach you. Don’t forget that we love you and support you and surround you. Let your painful heart rest on the Ocean of Compassion.

I’m feeling sick and sad and cold and scared. I can remember feeling like this at other times — usually when disappointed by a man. I think this is not so much fear of abandonment as it is the condition of abandonment. Having been abandoned. I see that frightened little kid, sitting on the rock by the road and hoping someone will rescue her.

Oratorium in Memory of the Victims of the Armenian Genocide of 1915

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Happy Egg’n’Bunny Day!

Posted on March 31, 2013 by jenny

In April of 1965, I was in the village of Naoussa on the Island of Paros for Holy Week. We went there because a Greek friend (who spoke good English) would be visiting her brother, who was the doctor in the village. Naoussa was so small that if you heard an internal combustion engine you knew it was either the taxi or the truck. Soula and Andreas introduced us to Frankie, who was the rich man of the village. He had spent most of his life running a gas station in Chicago, and was now retired on $25 a month Social Security.

Friday night we were at Frankie’s house, having had supper we were playing a game of cards, when we heard what sounded like wailing coming from the street. We went out to see. Down the street came 2 priests in their vestments, carrying crosses. After them came a small group of men carrying a flower-covered coffin, and behind them all the villagers, dressed in black, carrying candles, and wailing. It was the coffin of Jesus Christ, but I understood immediately that it was also a chance to mourn for all the dear ones who had died that year and in years past too, a communal time of mourning for lost ones, lifted up into a larger loss.

Saturday night at midnight, our friends took us to the church, gave us red eggs and candles, and disappeared into the crowd. Bettie and I noticed some odd looks directed our way, and realized that we were on the men’s side of the church so we quickly relocated to the women’s side. The priests were up in front, behind a screen, we could hear them muttering. Suddenly they emerged, carrying lit candles, and shouting what sounded like “Christas anastas!” “Christ is risen!” They lit the candles of the people in the first pew who turned and lit the candles behind them, also shouting “Christas anastas!” The light flooded through the church, the people poured out the doors, shouting and singing. There was a bonfire just outside where we were told they were burning the body of Judas. We were quickly educated in the use of the red eggs (which were, by the way, a lovely soft brownish red). You banged them on your neighbor’s egg, and the one that broke lost. You could still use the other end, but eventually most eggs were losers and a few were winners. We never found out any more about what it meant. The people poured down the street to the taverna, where they ate and drank and sang and danced.

It was clear that the celebration had its roots in something far older than Christianity. I enjoyed the wildness, the drama, and the obvious fact that the emotions of mourning losses and celebrating resurrection were very real among the people.

Just to make things clear about the older festival: our word “Easter” comes from “Eostre” the name of a Teutonic Goddess of Fertility. That’s where the word “estrogen” comes from, as well as all the eggs and bunnies.

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If I were Pope

Posted on March 30, 2013 by jenny

Read this today in Jan Phillips book and was so delighted by it that I had to share it.

If I Were Pope

If I were pope
I’d proclaim the end of my infallibility
and banish the word sin from the doctrines of faith

I’d ask half the bishops and cardinals
to replace themselves with a thoughtful woman
and complete their ministries in a prison or homeless shelter

If I were pope
I’d pay the mystics to write poetry all day
and have their words read at the Sunday Masses

I’d pay the prophets to upload their message
in five minute videos
for youtube viewers around the world

I’d hire a thousand displaced workers
to construct a new Sistine Chapel and cover it with mirrors
instead of male images

If I were pope
I’d announce a contest
for 10 new sacraments that celebrate
peace-making, justice, and interfaith creations.

I’d send envoys to the villages
to talk about birth control
and distribute condoms wherever they are needed.

I’d establish a tuition-free college in every country
to train young students how to think
non-violently and act ethically.

If I were pope I’d convert closed churches
to housing for the needy
and meeting places for the marginal and walking wounded

I’d buy farms in rural places
and dedicate each one to organic farming
and cooperative, sustainable, community-based agriculture.

I’d convert every old Motherhouse and seminary
into a training center for spiritual activists, cultural creators
and community collaborators.

I’d auction off my skullcap, my mozetta cape and my darling red shoes
to the highest bidder and send the money to Haiti
for the construction of schools and health care centers.

I’d sell my Fisherman’s Ring on ebay
and donate the proceeds to the Gulf shrimpers.

I’d trade my red and gold embroidered fascia
(the stole with the fringes) for a villa in Tuscany
and give free spa retreats to women who’ve served the church
for five years or more.

If I were pope, I’d throw a party at the Vatican
and invite everyone who’s left the church
because they didn’t feel welcomed.
(The overflow crowd would be treated to weekends
at Italian vineyards.)

If I were pope, I’d announce my retirement,
and as my last act in office, at the final party,
I’d ordain to the priesthood any woman who was ready,
marry any gay couple who wanted my blessing,
and marry any priest, male or female.

Then I’d get in my jammies,
say a prayer of gratitude,
and crawl into bed for a much needed nap.

Excerpt from Jan Phillips‘ book, ‘No Ordinary Time.’

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