Economics, Liminal Life, Profiles

I Met Sandy Today

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Having just come from getting fingerprinted so I can teach in the local schools, I was sitting in my car emailing a response to my friend about a Creativity Circle she is orchestrating. Hell yeah — I’ll hit that! Part of my self-defined Creativity Quest and Dragon Whispering syllabus includes a weekly meditation workbook by Lynn V. Andrews called The Love and Power Journal. Guess what it’s about? Making room for Love and walking in Personal Power.

Week Five’s assignment is to be mindful of mirrors: those upside-the-head-with-a-wet-fish slappers that we dismiss in our-whacked out, dis-integrated Western lifestyle. Think heart-grabbers, emotional triggers, places where we get stuck, and surprise meetings. These things facilitate our spiritual and emotional health if we can discern them when they show up and extract from them their lessons. It is worthwhile to attend to these ‘mirrors’.

I’m still in the car, clumsily emailing from my phone: yes, sign me up for the Creativity Circle! when my eye discerns activity. I look up.

An oversized, dingy-pink fleece zip up jacket and grey stretch-waistband pants carry a nondescript woman down the alley, cardboard fruit crate in tow. They weave their way over to a motley batch of soon-to-be-discarded buckets and bags of potting soil loitering at the side of my garage. As the responsibility of a procrastinator, the buckets and bags may be there for some time, so I generously hop out of the car to offer her the chance to take them off my hands. I’m a giver. (It is that kind of neighborhood. Had a guy  take a gas stove off my porch and thanked him sincerely for asking.)

“Hey, feel free to take any of that stuff if you could use it.”

The nondescript woman begins to speak. She has no teeth. “My husband died a week ago of a heart attack. I don’t have a home, and I am looking for food.”

Sensing a shift in agenda, I offer the arms-length suggestions that come naturally. “Have you tried any of the shelters?” [I’m already thinking about what I have in my car that can help this woman. Without getting too involved. Ah, a bag of clothes about to be donated (truth be told, they’ve been in the trunk about as long as the bucket/bag gang squatting next to my garage). I just bought a big water and some Mango Green Tea from Trader Joe’s. Internal dialogue racing: ‘The Green Tea: really? Can’t we keep that?” I hope she doesn’t ask for a sleeping bag. Mine’s a good one.]

“Yes, they won’t take a woman by herself unless she has a husband or a child. I went to the places where they serve meals and they just say ‘kitchen closed’.” I would be more skeptical if I hadn’t called for resources to help in the event that my ex went postal when I left. (He didn’t of course, but I felt better knowing what was at my disposal, and… not much.)

“You were living somewhere a week ago. What happened to your house?” I’m out of the car now, somewhere between suspicion and Pollyanna, heading to the trunk for that sweater.

“His family came in and kicked me to the curb. And they took my grand-daughter,” she follows me to the trunk. “I haven’t eaten for four days, and I keep praying but God isn’t answering. Maybe He’s testing my faith.”

Okay, well there’s its own book.

When my kids grow up, I hope they aren’t still expecting me to tell them what to eat for dinner, and yet I understand need. I’ve spent $400 on organic gluten free shopping sprees which included agar agar, bean flour, Himalyan sea salt, and organic beets. I’ve also stood in the line at DSHS, hoping to get my kids on state insurance. I don’t judge quite as much. But still need is disconcerting. My own mostly. Other people’s by an order of degrees. And guess what? The bottom feels rickety.

She extends her hand. “I am Sandy, she says.” Her pointer finger has a small open cut on it. I shake around that and make a note to wash with plenty of soap and warm water.

“Hi, Sandy. I’m Kaley. Sounds like you’re in a spot, huh?”

And here is need. Hungry and without teeth, asking for a blanket and a book. “I really like to read.” Though I don’t have a lot of extra resource right now, I have enough to help. Even without dipping into anything that would really impact me to give, I have plenty to give.

We go through my trunk and find a baseball cap, some Christmas-Book lifesavers, a pair of pants to go with the sweater. I say, “This Mango Tea is probably too heavy to carry?”

“You’d be surprised what you can carry.” In a cardboard fruit crate. Fine. This is a worthy cause.

Sandy steps onto my porch as I go inside. Prudent to leave her outside? Feel guilty for not inviting her in? For a bath. For a meal. I get plastic bags in various sizes (ad hoc suitcase, staying dry, bartering), some apples, some of those new individually-sized Jiffy peanut butter packs, cheese sticks, pretzles, crackers. (I’m thinking fats and proteins. It’s cold tonight.) Zach really likes the Rajneeshy colored checkered blanket, but he won’t notice it’s gone. Jane Eyre.

I meet Sandy back on the porch. We cram provisions into her house-in-a-box. She tells me her husband was her soulmate. They got pregnant their first night together and he looked at her and said, “I hope you’re pregnant.” Their ‘perfect son’ Sebastian is heading home from deployment in a week. Only son, so the Service is letting him out. “I’ve got some money saved up, Mom,” he told her. Just keep it together for a week. We’ll get her back,” Sebastian was referring to her grand-daughter and, I presume, his daughter. Sandy tears-up telling me about him and her soon-to-be rescue, and I am reminded that we are all just a breath away from being stripped as humans. Again: it feels rickety at the bottom.

“You know, I woke up under Burnside Bridge this morning and there was a Bible next to me. You might think I’m losing it, but I could feel my guardian angel standing there watching over me,” Sandy recounted. “And I could feel a tear. She said, ‘Don’t worry, Sandy. Today you will meet someone who will show you great kindness… I think it might be you,'” she tells me.

And I had been thinking the same thing. I am to be on the lookout for unusual situations that are gifts to teach me what I need to learn. I’m just not sure what I’ve learned yet. It was satisfying to be able to help someone with very simple things. It felt good to engage with real need and be able to help without getting lost in it — helping others adds to us, maybe… The comment about God testing her hit a nerve, and not sure what that’s all about. I’m still growing into the idea of taking responsibility for my reality, and I don’t like the passive victim of fate that was my story for so long. I don’t like the feeling of waiting for a rescue: it is disempowering. It will take me days to process this mirror more…

Sandy with no teeth because her grandparents made her brush her teeth with salt. Sandy who really misses her recently deceased husband and all the more because her first husband brainwashed her and locked her up for seven years. Sandy who is heading over to stay at a condemned motel on 78th and Hway 99 until her son gets back from overseas to help her out. “Some guy told me to take some of his rat bait if I was going to stay there, but rats are the least of my worries. I think they’re afraid of me.” Hmm. I hadn’t thought about rat bait in my preparation for the apocalypse. Makes sense.

“Sometimes it’s a good thing to have people be afraid of you,” I offered sagely. I’m imagining life on the streets for a woman.

“Bless you, Kaley,” said Sandy, and off she went.

“Bless you, Sandy.”

 

 

Liminal Life

Birthing into the Invisible

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Precipitous leaps into inscrutable voids.

Letting go of the vines with right hands and holding out left’s, hoping to find other vines because:  BLINDFOLDS and FAMISHED TIGERS, milling below.

Burning Encyclopedias of Known’s for books we aren’t certain exist.

Sacrificing Destination on the alter of Journey.

We do these things when we decide to live intentionally.

What bravery!

*****

I went to the gym today. (Pausing for applause and plaque engraving. K A L E Y)

I emerge from last year’s emotional hibernation by coping a la carbs (here you may clap again before adding a line to the plaque — because it wasn’t sex or overspending, drugs, alcohol, or gambling and that is pretty freaking amazing). The chub is more than I want to carry by more than I wish to confess.  But because I do want to get naked again at some point, I want it all gone now. But it cannot be gone now because today it is just the right amount of ‘goddammit’ to remind me that I may not be where I want to be in my journey, but I am here. Because of me. And that’s okay. I have access to a gym and I can walk and I made it through another volcanic year.

How I feel and carry myself when I am at fighting weight is probably kind of obnoxious. But it feels amazing and I want it back. Empowerment. Physical and existential strength knowing that I am the responsible manager of Kaley, Inc.

To create the me that I am, I am going to have to Birth into the Invisible.

Birthing into the Invisible means drinking water, eating protein, and walking even though the scale laughs. Fucker.

Birthing into the Invisible means that tomorrow starts clean for you too, no matter how many times you’ve ‘failed’. Or not even bothered to start.

Birthing into the Invisible means starting today to learn the tools of crafts we’d give our front teeth and favorite sweat shirts to have already mastered. (Like scenes and character development. Or goat husbandry.)

Birthing into the Invisible is much like wanting to pee in private but having three small children who Adore and Worship you and absolutely have to accompany you to the bathroom. Again. Because of love.

Birthing into the Invisible is the ten years of working your fingers numb with scales and riffs before becoming an overnight success.

Birthing into the Invisible is knowing that you can’t fail at birth. That sucker is coming out whether you get in its way or not. It is trusting the blueprint for LIFE that establishes inside you when you become pregnant with dreams. It is doing the next best right thing you know how to do. Sometimes that is just breathing.

Birthing into the Invisible looks like being glad you are ambulatory and can afford a gym membership — and drinking more water. It looks like being thankful for new beginnings which stem from oft inauspicious endings and believing that you are a wonder of Creation for simply being, warts and all. It looks like wearing your favorite sweatshirt as you write horrible obstacles badly for characters you struggle to infuse with authenticity — and not quitting. It is being grateful for flush toilets and unconditional cuddles from healthy kids. It is wearing callous with pride and being able to tune your own guitar.

We Birth into the Invisible when we don’t know what that means. When we’ve hidden behind defining ourselves by what works for everyone around us instead of listening to the voices of the characters we are put here to play and we finally come to our senses to step on stage.

This is how we do it.

 

 

 

 

 

Asides, Tips / Hacks / Tools

Book Stack

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The Quest by good friend Heather Strang, tawdry romance novel filled with Soul and great sex. She just finished narrating the audio book and the production crew is scouting locations for the film! (@hkstrang)

Sally Jo Survives Sixth Grade: A Journal by another dear friend Karen Keltz. A heart-felt and interactive coming of age journal for thoughtful tweeners. (@KarenKeltz)

Fire Starter Sessions: Soulful and Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms by Danielle LaPorte. Heart-based, Get It Done, Kick You in the Ass Guide. (@daniellelaporte)

The Love and Power Journal: A Workbook for the Fine Art of Living by Lynn V Andrews, an interactive weekly journal exploring the path of the wandering soul. (@lynnvandrews)

Mugging the Muse by Holly Lisle, practical diagnostic on whether or not you are built to be a professional writer and logistics on crafting meaty scenes and characters. (@hollylisle)

The Four Hour Work Week, updated and expanded by Timothy Ferriss, iconic Four Hour lifestyle designer takes on automating income and outsourcing the minutiae to be able to include living into your life. (@tferriss)

Culture, Rants, The Progeny

It’s about all of us, Stupid

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Last week we were collectively raped by a troubled young adult whose supreme act of cowardice and evil resulted in the tragic passing of 26 souls. We are shocked; we are violated beyond reckoning; we are pisssssssed. We are filled with questions, mostly unformed, which swirl around the central theme of WHAT. THE. FUCK?!!

And we are looking for someone to blame because we need this fixed and we need it to go away. NOW. This is one of the ways we process the rage fueled by powerlessness.

We’ve all sat in front of the TV before, humming our ‘oh-dear-we-need-to-do-something’ mantras somewhere along the spectrum between raw brokenness and those-poor-bastards-over-there-ism. But this time it is different. He targeted our kids.

So we have taken up our pitchforks, and in an effort to assuage our limbic fear, we have formed two mobs and are lunging at each other with our pokey tines. We are calling each others’ mobs names and we are being quite ugly toward one another. At least I am. I had to stop engaging on the topic of guns with some of my dearest friends because I realized every person truly only needs one exit for excrement and there are better ways to use my words. (I am, though, still waiting for the email from the guy who offered to send me a picture of his genitalia to prove that it is bigger than my hillbilly brain. And I might have threatened to post it on FB because, and I’m not going to lie, I love a good fight.)

About the time I was getting caught up in the energy caused by engaging with the open-minded liberal who had just called me a pussy, a dear friend of mine — a school teacher — posted about her day. Her high schoolers had been asking questions, making requests that would make them feel more safe.

Would she put some paper on the window? Yes.

Would she lock the door? Yes.

“Mizz Ed, would you take a bullet for us?”

To which Mizz Ed responded with teary-eyed conviction, “Every one of us in this building would.”

They needed to know that.

******

The night of the incident, I was reading an article entitled “How do deal with violent children.” I wanted to know why his mom and dad didn’t keep us safe from their nut job son. I can’t believe they were ignorant that he had issues and that they weren’t trying to get him help. No parent WANTS this for their kid.

Matt saw the title of the article. He’d just kneed his brother in the butt for hogging the WII remote and been met with the perfect amount of scolding. “Why are you reading an article about violent children?” He was wanting to know if his butt-kneeing was grievous enough to the taken to the Internet gods for a ruling. “No, Sweetie, I’m just upset by this whole thing today and I don’t understand how somebody can be so icky.”

They started talking about their lock down drills, so we snuggled up together on the couch while they told me about them. They sit on the rug, very quietly while the teacher locks the doors and puts paper on the windows.

1) What fucked up world has kids going through lock-down drills?

2) Thank you, teachers, for putting the kids through lock down drills.

Talk about lock down drills led to talk about their building and how it’s built for their safety. How the teachers are trained to keep them safe. How every parent that they see would absolutely do anything in their power to keep them safe. How law enforcement is trained and ready to protect them. How we as a family will keep each other safe. How the entire rules of the road are built around school buses. Because we are a society who loves our kids, and if there is one thing that brings us together as humans, it is the safety of our kids.

I left out that when something breaches that code, we feel brutally ripped apart. Together. They’re kids. They haven’t forgotten that yet.

We do this. We protect each other. We don’t fight each other with pitchforks and leave the real issues unaddressed and all of us more vulnerable. We become grounded, and proactive, and we expand to allow complexity and nuance as we walk together toward our solutions.

I’m including a link to an essay written by a mom of a kid at high risk of going wonky. It is very powerful, and it reveals the complexity we face and the ardent need for a proactive address of what we are up against as a society. Let’s do this the right way, Tribe. I promise not to post the picture.

Link to essay by Liza Long “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” <–

 

(Brene Brown writes an outstanding book about shame called I Thought It Was Just Me, But It’s Not. Excellent discussion on the insidious rooting of shame which keeps us separated from each other.)

 

Dragon Whisperer, Liminal Life

In which she trips on hands…

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I may have strayed too far into the Vortex today as I am tripping on hands.

I’ve moved. Packed and unpacked, scraped, cleaned, wiped down walls and floors, carried stuff. I spend six months writing in an ergonomically unfriendly way, and my hands are achy and tingly. So I was sitting in front of my heater spacing out as I was waking up this morning and I focused on my hands. Hands as object lesson.

Weird looking creatures. Attached to a wrist. Palm is a base from which finger appendages launch. There are five of them per hand, bringing a total of ten, the Hebrew number of accountability, to most people’s equation. Each finger is a symbol of a path to take and each has its own strength. When they work together, clasped together, pulling together in the same direction, there is tremendous power. Fingers don’t become other fingers when they cozy up to get something done. They pull together, get the job done, and still maintain their own space. Like we should with other people. Hands as how to interact with others in health.

In Hebrew the concept of clapping, the music our hands can make without further instrumentation, is associated with praise. Yadah. When we see something beautiful that resonates deeply, we spontaneously applaud. We do this in groups without worrying what other people will think of us, it’s so powerful. Yadah transcends ego.

Hands are a primary translator between the Spirit and the physical. What the human feels, the hands do. If we feel aroused, our hands begin the dance. If we feel warm, our embraces bring the closeness; if we feel angry, our hands can strike out. When we need to protect, our hands are the first line of defense. We want to feel secure, our hands build homes. We want to feel loved, our hands support others. We want to feel safe and surrounded by beauty; our hands create beautiful things that they install in our spaces to express our hearts. We receive deep feelings and messages from what our eyes cannot see, and it is our hands that do the capturing in poems and making music and art.

Our hands begin clumsy and then become organized, tactile. As they accompany us through life, bringing the actions of our feelings and desires to pass, they are beautiful with smooth skin or tough and strong with leathery skin. They get beat up, like we do as we make peace between provision and self-expression — the physical and the Spirit. Eventually they get splotchy and wrinkly just like all of us do when our path has been long and well-lived.

So I look at these hands with a few spots and more wrinkles than I wish I had — the ones that are starting to look like Mom’s — with their night-time tingles and sometime aches and I think of all of the people I love and have loved. All of the anger I have had, all of the hopes that I’ve worked toward manifesting, the boldness to be creative, the frustration with working in places that didn’t serve me, the condolences I’ve given to friends, and received from friends, the words I’ve crafted, the dreams I created as I rubbed lotion over my swollen belly with these very hands. I marvel at these hands — the quiet servants and manifest-ors of the life that is in me — and realize that the signs of their wear are the signs of my life being lived well.

Liminal Life

Survival, Co-Creating, a Confession about Plant Life

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Life comes with a ‘Circumstances outside our control that seem like complete bullshit but turn out to be really good for us’ feature. For this feature to be operational, we have to be able to view life as Co-Creators, and some of us must over-ride a Victim default .

“There are great survivors and helpless victims on the curve of human ability. Most of us are neither. Most of us fall somewhere in between and may perform poorly at first, then find the inner resources to return to correct action and clear thought.”

— Laurence Gonzales, from his book Deep Survival

I’m not going to lie: victim is a role I’ve spent time developing, though I don’t think I would have called it that. It felt noble… comfortable. A victim can be intelligent and idealistic, righteously indignant even. Victimhood keeps a person very busy: finding  sympathizers, spinning stories to keep the identity in tact, and drafting for rescuers can be exhausting. But there are significant set backs to victimhood which remind one of a yeast infection.

VICTIMS:

BLAME | POWERLESS | PASSIVE |RESISTANT | STUCK | UNFOCUSED MESS | IGNORANT

CO-CREATORS:

RESPONSIBLE | EMPOWERED | ENGAGED | DYNAMIC | FLUID | FOCUSED | INVESTIGATIVE

Sit with those for a second and feel their emotional impact…

Reading the characteristics of victim-hood makes me want to crawl back into bed and watch TV with a heating pad. I need my rest. But the concepts that make up co-creation fill me with HELL YEAH. Book outlines are forming. Maybe one I can sell online for $1.99 and begin funding my washer & dryer! From that to eBook girl. And then ‘how to become an expert in a month’ girl. I feel so energized, I may alphabetize my bookshelves after I get this all sketched out!

(It’s important to be able to recognize the nuanced transition between manic creativity and straight up OCD. It’s also helpful to recognize when you use writing blog posts to procrastinate packing.)

Moving from Victim to Co-Creator happens across the vast and messy matrices of our lives in a see-saw manner. Maybe we feel great romantically but we can’t get our shit together at our work; maybe our family life sucks bong water but we win awards for community service. Maybe it’s all clicking along beautifully but we know mortality is lurking out there. And sometimes it just feels like it all sucks bong water. (I’ve never sucked bong water.)

Victims use these times to verify the unfairness of life and probably blame God if the man or the government or the ex or the parents aren’t available. A cosmic game of pin the blame on the other guy. They might be passive and depressed or they might be active and destructive; either way, it’s not abundance.

Co-Creators know intuitively that deep soul gardening* is going on at these times, and they learn how to remind themselves of this as they do each next right thing. They survive and eventually thrive because they believe they are part of an expansive magnificence that has ample room for them to discover and implement and fail miserably and start over. Because they are part of something bigger than they are, co-creators feel safe to get outside them selves and truly participate in life as a creative process. They aren’t afraid of getting lost.

When we find ourselves in places we don’t like AGAIN, the journey from victim to co-creator is the only one to take.

Quite Possibly the Longest Sentence Ever Written about the Parts You Have to Wrangle to Become a Strong, Surviving Co-Creator:

These make all the difference: laying aside our expectations of how it should be for how it is actually presenting; acceptance that a rescuer isn’t coming — make or break is on us and our ability to get our shit together to take care of ourselves; a rational stock of available resources vs missing gaps; acceptance that all we can do is the next right thing; a deep belief that there is a plan for our lives, our feet are magnetized to the path, and that it is safe to step out in faith and do the next right thing.

So there is a plan, our feet are magnetized to the path, unexpected obstacles are chances to grow new skills. It is what it is, and all we need to concern ourselves with right now is the next right thing.

Time to pack.

__________

* Gardening is nowhere on my matrix. I buy plants only to kill them or throw them out after they’ve rotted in my crisper to the point that my need to rid myself of rot over-rides my guilt for wasting food.

Random

The Sweet Spot

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Not THAT sweet spot. The one where I am in a state of extreme gratitude for having lost everything. And when I say everything, I don’t mean a kid. I mean everything but a kid. And I don’t mean everything either in the sense of having to live outside.

Enough disclaimer: Here’s a list of what I’ve lost and lessons I’ve learned. There will be more perspective as time passes, but in terms of today’s gutcheck we have:

MARRIAGE: I miss the social acceptability of marriage but I like who I am on my own, my new friends, and I have a feel for what is important to me if I choose to share the journey with someone at that level.

HOUSING: From big house in the country to a one-bedroom apartment with three kids. Appreciate having lived in Japan where small is just the deal. I’m not defined by my stuff (stay away from my books, or I’ll eat your head) and I like setting up new spaces and new beginnings. My home is where my kids live with me.

STATUS: Separating my worth and identity from how much money I make or what position I have has left me bruised, bloodied, and gasping for air. How do I do a fix up project without my staff, my fleet, and my warehouse? But I depend on people more because I have to and this is putting a chink in my pathological independence. Still not comfortable, but I value my friends more — and have more compassion. The delusion that my resources define my worth will be a nice one to let go. Choices are vital to me. I will trade the uncertainty of creating my own way to have more autonomy.

FAITH COMMUNITY: Trading ‘neatly defined’ and ‘following expectations’ for living with freedom and abundance. I don’t like judgers and people who know what I should be doing in this new paradigm. I’m choosing a more creative path, and it makes people uncomfortable. I’m okay with that. My new tribe rocks. The intangible wealth that comes from struggle is largely under-rated. Permission to remind me of that if I start whining again.

Something inside me has changed. I passed the Mid Point on the ‘Life is Like That’ Continuum:

*———————————————-*——————————————————————–*

                        Life sucks, and I’m a victim                                   Life is full of amazing opportunities, and I Co-Create

 

Something I sincerely dig about myself is that some deeper intuitive part of me seems to make decisions for me that I know are in my best interest even when they don’t make sense to the fretful mask of me (quitting my job, trusting that I will make my way with writing). I’m going to honor that better part of me and start trusting her. She hasn’t led me astray, yet there are countless times that my fear and need-to-be-a-victim have sabotaged our forward motion. Just getting out of the way.

Having a text conversation with a good friend as I write this. “The whole thing of itemizing what used to be will forever prevent enjoying what you have now,” he writes. BINGO! He is a good friend.

Don’t think I would feel this alive if I hadn’t shaken it all up.  What I have now is pretty fucking fantastic. Take that, Dragon!

 

Culture

Your Choices: Tangled and Thinking About Leaving?

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Disclaimer: I am not a relationship counselor, nor do I play one on television. My thoughts are mine alone. Grain of salt and all that.

Talking authentically about unhappy relationships can be like broaching the topic of venereal disease at Bible Study. The response is likely to be neither neutral nor welcoming. Friends may have their own bitterness which gets stirred up by our wooden spoons; we might have to fight the ‘I told you so’s’ by the people in our lives who need better hobbies; our partners may be genuine turds who don’t appear that way to the world beyond our four walls and so WE appear to be the crazy people; maybe we just found out our love has betrayed our most sacred trust, and we don’t know how to begin the rebuild or if we want to; maybe parts of our support network are also unhappy and our admission of a shakeup pokes the elephant in their rooms which they respond to by getting angry at us. It’s easier than evicting an elephant. And, realistically, sometimes we’re just bored as humans and we blame it on our partners.

The tangles inside can feel heart-crushing, and when they do, it is a gift. Pain and discomfort are strong motivators, if nothing else, to stop and listen. What are our souls trying to tell us that our carefully crafted lives don’t have ears to hear? We resist going to these exploratory places inside ourselves because we intuitively know it will result in hard internal work and massive physical, social, emotional, and financial upheaval. These are not on par with decisions on what to have for dinner or which shoes look better with what skirt (always pick the boots!) — these are really big questions.

I am not advocating leaving relationships. I am extending the freedom to acknowledge possible tangles and presenting pragmatic options for consideration. Feeling stuck is, in my perfectly right and indisputable opinion, the WORST state in the world. And when we feel stuck and lonely with the person who is supposed to be our biggest source of comfort and companionship, it can be the loneliest kind of stuck ever.

The Choices: Whatever s/he’s done or hasn’t done or what we have or haven’t done, there are basically four tracks.

  1. Stay. Stay in the relationship and keep the status quo. Don’t change a thing. Carry on. See how long this can go on before true pathology appears or until our souls die.
  2. Stay and change. Stay and radically re-engineer it, probably with outside support. This choice may require purposeful and well-intentioned separation. Both partners need buy in, accountability, and support. (Givens no matter what — if we had the support we needed we probably wouldn’t have the feelings we do.)
  3. Leave. Go out on our own and get ourselves rebuilt.  Enter the game again when that work is done. That work involves a lot of self-examination and emotional digging and is not for the faint of heart. Start building support networks now.
  4. Take our dirty laundry and go start a new mess. Go get involved with someone else immediately. Deal with none of our baggage and set the stopwatch to see how long it takes until that implodes.

None of these is for the faint of heart!

Do we want to stay but only if vast AND sweeping changes are made? Or do we want to end this and need to figure out how? Do we not know yet? Whether we decide to stay and change or leave and go out on our own, there is tremendous change coming. This is okay. It is hard, but it is okay. There’s a reason that all the great faith traditions have parables about life coming out of death. Or the new cannot be brought forth without the passing of the old. It just seems to work that way. Our jobs right now are to be honest with ourselves, be gentle with ourselves, and start setting up a MATURE and supportive network.

I welcome your feedback and stories 🙂  I would love to hear stories from people who took all four of the tracks and what their processes were.

Dragon Whisperer, Liminal Life

The Warring Room

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I stand inside this warring room within my soul.
My head pounds from the bickering. The arguments.
From this platform, the room comes into focus.
They need me to speak. They won’t shut up until I speak
 
With my wolf hearing, each chorus becomes independent
The voices that say, ‘Don’t walk away, don’t give up, it is real’
The voices that say, ‘Enough already, this is not for you’
Shall I draw the curtain between them? Step to one side or the other?
 
Mom and Dad are on vacation
The elders are on vacation
The guardians are on vacation
I am alone with this noise in this chamber of war
 
And all I can think about is the bone-crushing nausea that floods my soul each time I say yes and it turns to vapors.
And all I can think about is the feeling of emptiness that engulfs me when I think of saying no.
Where are you, my love? I am here alone.
 
 
 
© Kaley Perkins, 11/07/12

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