ancestors

it had been so long. and everyone showed up.
since Samhain i hadn't heard any spirits at all. i feel so alone so often.
keep your eyes open she said, serious, my mom's echo. maybe he? i couldn't figure out who, different energy, large, solid, sure, very old, somehow proud of me and interested to see me do well.
had started out wondering if i should just go straight down my mom's path after all. ask for a child, throw myself into it. to pass on everything. but that's what i've been trying to heal instead, to choose differently. hoping by listening more, practicing more, loving more, being more open, staying open, feeling more, that things can be different, better, good, beautiful even. joyful. together. woven together.
they let me yell at them. for leaving, for being bad at loving me, for making me learn the hard and slow ways, for making themselves sick and then leaving me alone. all four of them.
i understand i have learned so much with them gone.
i understand this time i have learned so much in 2+ months. pain focuses me. horrible as it is.
i understand i am practicing. every day. with someone(s) new.
i am so grateful to do the job i do. it allows and forces me (i chose it/keep choosing it to force me) to practice.
i begged for some hope. to have it not be for nothing. and of course it's never wasted. practicing love. i still want reassurance, hope, a vision, a dream, to keep my sails full.
i tried to reconcile if he chooses to throw me away, like the fool, to be a widow, except to be like my mom, losing her person because of his choice mostly, and how i could do it better. hence the thought of children, or fostering. and yet. that path is very likely ugly without dedicated help. without a teammate.
the problem now is not knowing, what he'll choose.
even knowing i'd have to keep practicing every day either way, to not loose hope or focus or perseverance, for life, and that it will still end anyway, regardless, but not by choice, even if all ended up going in a direction i'd prefer.
my grandfather's mistakes and love and being partly right- they haven't made fools of me. but so far, they've been fools.
bozena's mistakes and teaching me how actual love feels. thank heaven for her understanding and persistence and not giving up on me, not entirely.
my mom's horrid beliefs, but such love. teaching me to laugh and question.
my grandmother's insistence on shame, and love, and that discipline didn't have to mean not-love.
is it that i have to let go and let things be, to 'we'll see' my way through this?
it is so hard letting go of knowing of shaping of even trying to paint.
it felt good to be talked to.
practice.
keep your eyes open.
we love you. love you. love.

green vision of home

There's this email thread to myself I kept for years, calling it my green vision of home. It was an edited, curated, carefully detailed summary of my desire for what a safe and loving home would look like. But in my mind and intention, it was home defined by another person, and how I would feel based on the relationship. Which, fine, I guess, to a point. But it's time to stop defining the idea of 'being safe at home' based on a fictional human. A dream of home, a once upon a time fantasy.
There are a couple other email threads to myself about myself, what I wanted to be, I am statements. Aspirations. And as my close friend reminded me last night, the only person I can do anything about is myself, and I need to focus on what kind of partner I want to be and work on that.
So my recent massive failure has been very constructive.
I love easily, and forgive easily, and too much at times, largely because of my desire for connection and family and acceptance can become desperate when I fear someone walking away. "I love you but I can't be with you" I have heard second-hand since I was 2 years old. This year felt like that, and I didn't see it at first, and when I did, and tried to call it out, my panic seems to have made it worse. Sigh.
When stressed (by physical pain or life circumstance), I back myself into a familiar place, and put up walls, become more unskilled at listening/seeing, and too often turn fear to anger and demands to try to control someone's behavior when I'm hurt or failing to receive support or not feeling cared for. That didn't work at all, as you'd imagine.
I have thought that 'helping solve' was needed, that my small compassion (a rudimentary version based on my experience, because I was assuming I understood more than I actually did, and too quickly closed off my curiosity to seeking more information thinking I had the answer already) -  when understanding (and clear failure to understand) should have led to more questions, more listening, more quiet, so the other person could feel safe to be honest.
I failed badly. Failed to help certainly. Failed to connect. Failed to listen.
There's a note to myself from 2011: "people DO change, but don't attach to that. be love. change yourself." I have been trying to do change myself, over the years... but this year was so hard, I didn't have enough energy to pause and look deeply at what was happening, nor to see enough to change myself during a time it seemed I had to use all my available energy to not fall apart (and pass my test, and be in physical pain, and not have a functioning partner but a mostly absent troubled roommate instead).
I have made progress though. I thought I was being listened to, which was new. I thought I was being told truth from a partner (maybe just not the important or whole truth). I was able to say what I seemed to need (even if I was unable to listen? still progress) and what I felt. I just should have sat with my thoughts and feelings first before sharing or reacting- I did at the beginning (I had more time, forced, which at this point was another flag I missed), and when I thought it was settled and safe, depending on circumstance, I got lazy, complacent, frustrated... disconnected. So that blame or anger or neediness was easier when I was exhausted by anxiety and pain.
So when I thought I'd run out of energy, when things came to a crisis, like they will do, I didn't fall apart this time. I saw my supports, I talked to them, I felt them, I listened, and they helped. I had not ever experienced inner strength clearly before. So that was a gift of this time, this crisis, this unhappiness, this suffering.
I am still scared, and hurt, and unsure what boundaries I need in my current state (because I am not a buddha yet, I would love to not need boundaries, but, alas, I am still human, and very unskilled), so I am frustrated and still have discomfort leading me to desire a less uncomfortable situation.
I guess that's what I sit with until I have more information, or more information arises in myself.
Life is good. I would like to share it more deeply. I will practice.

Elephants

It's almost comedy how, after years of meditation, I can simultaneously notice, allow, understand, and be annoyed by my mind avoiding something unpleasant.

Today, like every day, I went in seeking truth. And also not really wanting to see it.

I am the blind men describing the elephant- except I have only blindfolded myself, and seem to sometimes intentionally fixate on the toenails or ribs of the elephant, rather than allowing myself to understand how each part makes up the whole of it.

my Work: my intention to relieve suffering - my refusal to submit to a system I despise: my Inaction.
my Love: my desire for relationship and connection - my repetition of past patterns: my Solitude.
my Home: my longing for belonging - my loves spread all over the world: my Restlessness.

Independence, Gaining Knowledge, and Relationship. These were the three things my mother helped me identify as my main motivators. I am persistent, enthusiastic, and love to teach. I've been told I am passionate, nurturing, and brightening.

I went in today seeking truth. Instead I saw how everything connected, I felt the skin all around the elephant, I felt my mind refuse to name it, refuse to take the blindfold off, and I turned away imagining a to-do list for my evening meeting.

I wonder when I will finally open my eyes. And what I will see.

life from death from life

So last autumn was rough. I fell through the net I'd incautiously woven. To a rough landing. But I landed.

Strangely, during a slow recovery and decision to try to live again, I found myself at a meditation retreat in October. This ended up being the place where I let myself go all the way through to the other side of suicide. I experienced the only birth I remember, without having to harm myself or anyone else to get there. After all the years of thinking about this and avoiding it, I was able to see my death, and my life, and return to my body in an entirely new way.
My first birth involved my cord around my neck, a noose made of my own cells and my mothers', the connection to my past and my life source that was in the wrong place at the wrong time, near to killing me because I didn't know how to remove it myself.
I sat in the loft of a barn. I sat with several others, many times over a few days. One afternoon, I became brave or reckless, and looked at my thoughts about wanting to leave the earth, wanting to leave my life, to leave my personality, and then, as follows, my body. And I wondered if one could choose to leave. And I wondered if one could choose the time. And I wondered if I chose right then what would occur.
And I saw it. My eyes closed, my breathing calm in meditation, my mind intense and focused on this line of questioning.
I saw my body suddenly crumple to the floor as my spirit rose above it.
At the exact moment I was overcome by a wave of love in my chest so strong I could only cry out in my mind "oh, love, no no no no no I'm so sorry I didn't mean it!" at my abandoned collection of cells, symbiotic bacteria, neurons, organs, suddenly left without animation, a doll tossed aside by an ungrateful child.
The wave of emotion was completely separate from my mind or thoughts, it was an instinct, exactly the same as if a close friend's child had suggested no one loved them or they deserved to be hurt, exactly the same as if my love had said someone had abused them, exactly the same as if I were my own mother, but still myself, and had heard my child, myself, say that life was not worth living, that I was so alone, that I never did anything right, that I was no good to anyone or anything.

And so it was that I learned what self-compassion felt like.
I will never be the same.
Thanks be to all that is good in the world.

Voices

it seems to you I do nothing

sitting, walking, reading, writing, thinking

and in a sense I agree

there are days when doing nothing

means I stay here-

it is a meditation,

incredible restraint, non-doing-

when the pressure to escape

is a fault line ready to slip

when each imagined new path

is met with screams of ‘impossible’

when memories of children and fathers

explain that I will always be irrelevant

when I have exhausted my grip

sleep is less adventurous than death...

and so, this evening, 

when you ask what I did today,

I can extend my arms to you,

alive,

and smile,

and say, ‘nothing’

monastery

I wake up to silence

every morning in this castle

without my trusted dogs this time

choosing to be alone then

sometimes wallowing in loneliness

the rejection I projected

reflected back to me

I am learning

how I create

watching my addictions

going along with them

following them home for tea

enjoying the fictions I imagine

here I can stay undressed

until I take my body for an adventure

walking it instead of a dog

trips to the store alone

cooking for one

I always make too much

next door two terriers sometimes worry

about a deer, quietly munching in this yard

squirrels tirelessly attack the bird feeder

a cardinal waits until they’ve tired

not noticing he has no head feathers

and I wonder about pesticides and bees

the floorboards creak as I walk

the air stirred gently by the fan

a microclimate of solitude and quiet

day night and in between

surrounded by cicadas and frogs

500 yards away cars pass by

twice a day I practice sitting

once a day I tire myself outside

often I pace the house reading

I distract myself far too late into the night

I try to find discipline to write

I bask in gratitude for my guardian angels

but really I am pausing

letting the unnameable work

so more often I will notice

when the quality arises

that allows me the clarity

to see many things better, but also

to know why I still dream about you

Krishnamurti tea

Hope is a belief that something will improve in the future. Despair is a belief that nothing will improve in the future. Hope contains a belief that the past and present are no good. Despair contains a belief that the past was the best possibility and the present is no good. We swing between both, ropes creaking, gripping tightly, burning our palms.

The mind adores routine, worships the known. It will perform all kinds of gymnastics to cling to certainty. Routines of life are built and polished, decorated and painted brightly to evoke permanence. Predictability is comforting because it supports the mind's story of what life is. Patterns of thought and reaction build, until the expectations created from the foundational beliefs the mind has carefully organized from its limited experience are perceived as needs, causing desire to become grasping and attachment.

Desire can only be tamed by that which cannot be named by the mind, but what might be known as love. Otherwise, desire is a wild power, and from what the mind narrowly perceives and has already experienced in the past desire creates an idol, a story. The image inflates into a mirage of epic proportions until all possibility of seeing truth is lost. Until it ends.

"There is always an ending to that which is incomplete."

And so I travel. Then I stay. Here I am silent. There I participate. I am inside and out, sometimes at the same time.

Some of us have trouble seeing clearly.
Some of us want truth so much (and also, clearly, do not) that will we again and again try to leave our certainty behind. And then we notice that we've brought our certainty-seeking along. The judging deciding organizing mind. We still use the mind with the will to discipline, define, illuminate, understand, control... and we still hope to understand truth with insight the mind can grasp.
Again and again we tear down the false walls we keep building so beautifully, and we dive forward past what we know to be illusions, seeking truth. While building a new structure each time.

But eventually we see that seeking is the problem. Hoping for truth means we believe it is not with us right now. Right here.

So some of us keep changing our here. Keep changing our now. Then staying here. Staying now. Then changing again. Inviting contrast, swinging from hope to despair, from certainty to fear, from illusion to devastation...

And in the space, in the brief moment where the pendulum is centered, clarity dawns.
And the mind overtakes and swings again!

But there is a space now open for truth.
In case at some point I want it more than the gratification of the search.