Saturday<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t posted to this blog in a long time.\u00a0 I moved into Kendal<\/a> on November 20, and since then I have been overwhelmed with myriad details that have to be dealt with in a move.\u00a0 Though I was glad I didn\u2019t have to sell my house before coming, and could continue to sort things out, it\u2019s not easy to be living in two places.<\/p>\n I have been so busy with moving, and having to get a lot of practical details dealt with (getting a new phone, registering my dog and car with Kendal, etc.) that I haven\u2019t been paying attention to my inner process.\u00a0 I have made a lot of silly mistakes, mostly losing something I just had.\u00a0 My therapist suggested that it might be due to my attention being dragged off to some inner process.\u00a0 So I spent some time trying to sink down under the practical stuff, and make space and safety for whatever it was to show itself.<\/p>\n Friday<\/p>\n What came was it\u2019s about \u201chome.\u201d\u00a0 There\u2019s a way in which I never felt at home anywhere.\u00a0 The music in my head a couple of days ago was \u201cIn the early mornin\u2019 rain<\/a>… she\u2019ll be flying\u2019 o\u2019er my home in about three hours time…\u201d\u00a0 Then David sang it last night.\u00a0 I can only think of moments when I felt at home.\u00a0 Flying over Ireland in \u201877 or \u201878.\u00a0 The Mound of Kerkado.\u00a0 Sitting in the house on Bickford Hill watching chickadees come to the feeder, and not feeling the push to do something “useful.” \u00a0In the Rochester Zendo, by myself, on my sitting cushion, realizing \u201cI\u2019m going home<\/span>.\u00a0 That\u2019s what this is about.\u201d\u00a0 Possibly dancing to the music of Alan Stivell<\/a>, and feeling my Celtic ancestors rise up in my blood.\u00a0 Possibly the Chalice Well \u2014 \u201call burdens laid down.\u201d or the Ocean of Compassion<\/a>?\u00a0 I felt held.\u00a0 Kindred Spirits<\/a> and the Recovery Community and feeling at home with people who tell the truth.\u00a0 Feeling like I belong, being able to let down all my defenses, feeling safe to be myself.\u00a0 That\u2019s what home is.\u00a0 Feeling safe to be myself.\u00a0 I guess there\u2019s a way it doesn\u2019t have anything to do with a particular building and\/or belongings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I realize that I\u2019ve never really felt at home in the world.\u00a0 The house where I grew up, at one time I thought it was a good house and deserved better than an alcoholic couple and their five children who were left to bring themselves up.\u00a0 When I think of it now, I see it as narrow and dark, and musty with neglect.\u00a0 I remember going \u201chome\u201d for a week in February, when I was living in Portland Maine.\u00a0 It was cold, and the house in Cincinnati had not been built for cold.\u00a0 No storm windows and the furnace couldn\u2019t keep up.\u00a0 Not only was I cold the whole time I was there, but I was in a state of frozen terror the whole time.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t understand it at all then, but now I know it was the \u201cfreeze\u201d that happens instinctively when the creature cannot fight or flee.\u00a0 The house in Biddeford Pool felt like home when I was a child, but when I grew up, and it began to change, the magical country of childhood faded.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think I ever thought about feeling at home, I suppose having never felt at home as I was growing up, I had no idea what it would feel like.\u00a0 I do remember something I called \u201cthat twilight feeling,\u201d that I felt in the evenings when I was twelve.\u00a0 Mom & Dad had gone to a cocktail party and I was left to feed my three younger siblings and get them to bed.\u00a0 Then I would wander around the house as it got darker, feeling like my life stretched forward into grayness forever.\u00a0 I remember when I first knew that I was suffering from clinical depression, and the therapist I was seeing, a specialist in mood disorders, asked me when I first felt depressed.\u00a0 I started telling her about \u201cthat twilight feeling\u201d and realized that it was depression.\u00a0 When I finally got on medication that worked, I was astounded to find that normal brain chemistry was something I had never experienced.<\/p>\n \u201c… for home to me was certainly never anything remotely material.\u00a0 It consisted, I have decided, in something I sensed as refuge: an atmosphere of safety in the love between my parents.\u00a0 It came in a tone of voice, in the preparation and eating of meals, in conversations during washing up and being busy in the garden.\u201d\u00a0 from Dennis Severs, 18 Folgate St…. \u00a0 quoted in Deborah Crombie,<\/a>\u00a0Necessary as Blood, p203<\/p>\n Saturday<\/p>\n In the morning I talked to Erica.\u00a0 It is so hard for me to get that what I am doing is a big deal, that my system is involved in processing a complex mass of material.\u00a0 Talking to Erica, I began to see that I needed some art materials, I need to work with color and shape and pattern.\u00a0 I realize that my job is not to try to put it all together in coherent fashion, my job is only to be aware of how it is today, and make a picture of it, or perhaps a visual rendering, or perhaps just an approximation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Note: \u00a0I often hear music in my head and I pay attention to the song as a message to me from my subconscious. \u00a0Nearly always relevant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Saturday I haven\u2019t posted to this blog in a long time.\u00a0 I moved into Kendal on November 20, and since then I have been overwhelmed with myriad details that have to be dealt with in a move.\u00a0 Though I was … Continue reading