What’s in a Name?

It turns out a lot, even if you aren’t unfortunate enough to be “A Boy Named Sue”.

“It’s that name that helped to make
you strong…

And I think about him now and then,
every time I try & every time I win.”

I share that sentiment!

It was a bitterly cold Sunday afternoon in February 1955. Shortly after my birth, the doctors started to take seriously my mother’s complaints of feeling unwell. It turns out she wasn’t ‘just’ a first-time mom not up to the rigours of pregnancy.

It was nothing less than an acute gall bladder, requiring a surgery that was nearly too late – peritonitis had set in. Whether she ever held me, I’ll never know – but it was more than a month before she would have the chance to hold me again. Much that I have come to understand about myself since reflects the loss of that bonding.

That’s a tragic beginning for any infant – the most fundamental experience of being connected to a secure place in the world is lost forever.

Kenneth Allen – near Drumscra, Northern Ireland

But it was accompanied by a gift.

I’m reminded of the dock leaves that grow alongside nettles – pay attention and you will find the cure for the sting close at hand.

That same day the Universe provided a cure – the first of many women who would step in and mother me over the course of my lifetime.

 

My hospital discharge was to come 5 days later, before my mother had become fully conscious.

Infants in those days could not be sent home without a name and this presented a problem.

My father was insistent I be called Margaret Mary after his mother. My maternal grandmother asserted rank and demanded Concettina – which, beyond the decidedly ethnic – in her dialect, was not as lovely sounding as it might appear.

Enter a woman whose name, ironically, I never knew.

She was a nurse, described to me often as a God-fearing Southern Baptist woman recently arrived in New York City from somewhere in the Deep South. She bore a faith-based authority and strength of character that stood her in good stead when dealing with my fierce, 6’5″ Irish father.

She sat with my mother through her intermittent periods of consciousness insisting that she name me. My mother – quite sure she was dying had little interest in entering the fray. She finally relented saying – “Think of the first woman’s name you can think of”.

It was a simple as that – she gave me the first woman’s name. She used my mother’s name in the middle – and that rescue comes to mind whenever someone points out that my initials spell my name.

The power in that name is that it distinguishes me from the needs and wants, expectations and desires of what went on to devolve into a very toxic family. It also bonded me to the woman who bore me – in spite of the wounds that kept us unavailable to each other in life.

I have also learned in the telling and retelling of that story, that sometimes the Divine enters the world in the guise of strangers. Others like her followed – people whose acts of kindness shaped my life and my orientation to the world. I expect it was that first intervention which allowed me to be open to her successors when they appeared.

At age three and a half – long before nursery schools existed – a paediatrician, Mary Pfaff – made it possible for me to enter a convent kindergarten. In those pre-Vatican II days, the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary were addressed as “Mother”. Mother Catherine – was precisely that for the 9 months of the year I was in her care and through the letters she wrote me in the summertime.

By six, my mother’s best friend’s parents – Rose and Abe Goldstein entered my world – becoming significant in the years after I left the safe confines of Marymount and lived – just a few blocks from them – in Manhattan.

At 13 it was a nurse – at 15 an Aunt who was reintroduced to my life. At 25 no more unlikely an advocate than my father’s first wife, the mother of my two half-sisters who appeared to fill a void at the time of his death. At 27 I met my dearest friend who mothered me through the early days of my marriage and my first pregnancy – arriving at the hospital for the birth of my eldest and triggering a moment of panic when the nurse announced that “my mother” had arrived. The ‘real’ one as it turned out.

And then there was Alice – another God-fearing Southern Baptist woman transplanted from the Deep South. God may not have promised us tomorrow, as she often reminded me – but she witnessed that what we need is delivered if we’re willing to accept it, from unexpected and even unlikely people.

She and a tribe of other mothers helped to rear my children. They shared their wisdom and their experience of having been well-mothered – they modelled and taught what they knew and I did not.

The purpose of this introduction is not to tell you about them – but to ask you to imagine who you might be or what you might bring into the life of another, especially a child – if only for a moment.

None of these people was ever-present. The total time spent with some would hardly amount to a day or with others, a week – but when I stop to consider their impact on the quality of my life and the chances for my future – especially as compared to my brother’s experience – each in their way was life-saving, life-giving and life-affirming.

Each in their way sustained me.

We don’t have to aspire to “be the change you want to see in the world”.

We can easily be the change someone needs in their life today. And that may amount to only a smile or a kind word – something we can all afford.

Special thanks to Sally Murphy for her recent presentation – at her Re-Stór event with Shane Breslin. She inspired the writing of this part of my story – for which I’d never quite had all the words.




Dear Daddy…

I miss you. And Happy Father’s Day.

I miss your sense of humor, your wisdom and the very un-Irish, Talmudic way you drove home your messages, with questions.

And yet, even selfishly, I’m not inclined to “wish you were here”. The world you imagined has not yet materialized.

How lovely it would have been had your story neatly concluded as did Judy Collins’ My Father story in her song.

I miss your rabid environmentalism…

Remember telling my 5, 6 & 7 year old self all about the natural world?

All about Five Acres and Independence?

You’ll be pleased to know it’s still in print. Good thing too – because while it was meant to teach subsistence living to a post-depression generation – there are a few generations coming who will likely need it.

More on the economics of that another time.

mde

Recently, I found a musty old copy of “The Silent Spring” which looks a lot like this one here.

Though a funny thing happened as I re-read it. I heard your voice. Not while reading Rachael Carson’s words – but in remembering all your asides. You know – the ones where you imagined that I’d live in a house with a rainwater cistern built into the plumbing or irrigating the garden. Where the sun and wind would contribute to my energy usage. And where I’d be using grey water from the dishwasher and washer to flush the toilets.

Sadly though, not yet. And not even likely in my lifetime.

Do you remember telling me that the oil embargo in ’73 was a good thing? We were going to drive smaller cars, rely less on fossil fuel and run cars on electricity. Electric cars took another 40 years and they’ve still not caught on. Cars only stayed small until we forgot. Less than a decade on.

We recycle now, as you said we would. Though not universally. Landfills overflow, and the oceans are full of plastic. A dead whale was found in Thailand with 17 lbs. of plastic in its gut. Even fresh water streams are polluted with micro beads of plastic from the synthetic clothes we wash.

And while the bald eagle is back, I’m afraid the last male Northern White Rhino died this year. Few seem to notice that we’re losing about 150 plant, insect, bird and mammal species every day.

I miss your compassion and concern for others…

Another lesson came to mind recently, on encyclicals, labor and social justice.

I was six.

How much did you think I could understand? Did you know we wouldn’t have enough years to talk about these things when I was grown? Or was it just the heady, optimistic times in which we lived?

I can still hear your belly laugh when I came home from First Grade with the campaign rhyme –

Kennedy in the White House talking on the phone, Nixon in the doghouse chewing on a bone.

And then he won. An upstart Catholic in the White House! You were sure that meant there would be attention paid to social justice. Sure wasn’t that why the “Power Elite” fought so hard against “the papist”?

And it was John XXIII’s time. I can still here the passion and faith with which you explained why you’d been an organizer, why labor unions were so important and how it had been the words of Pious XIII’s Rerum Novarum which inspired all that in you. You explained it all in my Communion year. You wanted me to understand the significance of a that year’s Papal Directive on Christianity and Social Progress.

For what it’s worth – the only part that really sunk into my young brain was the point you made about my uncles, your brothers. They were steel workers. You said they worked harder at back breaking work, than you did at a desk. You could do your job to 65 or 70 or beyond – but their bodies wouldn’t last to pension age. That was why a balance between labor and capital – as well as respect for the difference in an earned vs. an unearned dollar – was important.

How did you know that I’d remember enough?

Is that why you went on at great length about social justice, job provision and social safety nets? By then I was 10, 11 and 12.

I miss the power of your storytelling…

I loved the long drives and vivid recollections you shared during our Sunday visits – driving through the reservoirs, parks and forests built by CCC workers.  It wasn’t until years later that I understood it was your own experience of poverty framing your description of life in those camps. Bleak as it was, it offered the only housing and work available.

I remember all the buildings we visited – most artfully embellished with friezes and sculptures owed to the New Deal’s WPA architects. And that you appreciated the pragmatism born of desperate times, enhanced by a respect for the creative.

Often I recall your awe for the power of what the public and private sector could accomplish in the sheer depth and breadth of the infrastructure projects, iconic skyscrapers and the monuments you’d point out in our drives around New York City, upstate New York and New England.

I even miss “the look”…

I live in Ireland now.

In my imagination, we visit and I giggle most Saturdays mornings in all but July and August. It’s then that I bring in wood and peat for the stoves. It makes me recall your beleaguered expression and shaking head when you described life in Ireland on return from Grandpa’s funeral here. You always began with – “Kiss the American ground you were born on…” followed by vivid and unattractive descriptions of the third world country Ireland was then.

With each filled basket, I can conjure the look. Your loving eyes are firmly fixed on me from over the top of your glasses. I hear you exclaim, “You silly witch, did your grandfather not see to it that we were born in a world of boilers and indoor plumbing?”

And so he did.

But clearly there was a circle in need of closing.

I returned a century after he left. Nearly 50 years after he died. I wasn’t actually aiming for ‘his Ireland’, though I find myself stuck in it.

As penance for some as yet undetermined failing, I work at telling your stories, sharing your wisdom and hoping that as America has abandoned its promise, moving forward, perhaps Ireland can adopt it.

The call to ‘my Ireland’ came after years on an annual course. The week-long events were set in Sligo, Cavan, Antrim, Donegal, Down and Mayo studying Jung and archetypal psychology.  Here I met Bridget, Grace and Maeve – in a place where feminine characters and the land dominate in myth. That divine feminine is what called me and where my hope for this place resides.

Here I experience the ancient and natural worlds as you shared them. Living close to the land demands a respect for riotous springs, abundant harvests and the work of just showing up for the hard labor in between.

It invites us to celebrate the way seasons punctuate our year.

We closed a circle there as well. I am at home with an agrarian, eight season calendar grounded in ritual and festival. I felt it while rearing your granddaughters in a faith tied to festivals like Imbolc and Lughnasa,  known to them as Tu Bishvat and Sukkot.

And I live in medial space…

Literally. On the border of Ulster – just beyond the Pale. And not far from Mary Gale Earley’s home place. Her journey informs so much of my understanding here. From Ireland to America, Protestant to Catholic, who could have imagined that a quote from John Henry Newmans faith journey printed on her memorial card, would provide insight into my struggle to understand this land of them-uns and us-uns?

And figuratively. I live as you did. Devout in your faith, and excommunicated nonetheless. Neither in nor out of Rome’s good graces. I too, live as the other – an American neither Catholic nor Protestant neither in or out of communion with my neighbors.

And always, I carry with me your good humored observation that…

We’ll get there, by degrees. The way an Irishman goes to heaven.

And while ‘we’ll’ not get where you thought we were going in my lifetime, I am confident that your granddaughters will move the world in the direction of your dreams.

They made those very same road trips, they heard you marveling at those miracles of social and economic progress albeit in my voice, and learned the optimism and sense of possibility that your “Greatest Generation” brought to the world. And I’m reminding them here.

I too, offer every 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 year old too much information, enthusiastically – knowing that something will come of it. Even if it takes a generation or two.

So for now –

Good-night; ensured release,
Imperishable peace,
Have these for yours,
While sea abides, and land,
And earth’s foundations stand,
And heaven endures.

When earth’s foundations flee,
Nor sky nor land nor sea
At all is found,
Content you, let them burn:
It is not your concern;
Sleep on, sleep sound.

Reciting Parta Quies comforts me.

And it makes me smile to remember another look over the top of your glasses, with a beleaguered expression and shaking head. All while lamenting over your lot to have had a daughter who favored the work of Houseman over Yeats, Joyce and countless other Irish poets.

He was, in your words, “That drunken, gay, Brit”.

Sleep on, Daddy, sleep sound.




On depression as a necessary winter before the spring…

suicide placardImagine if we, as a culture, could embrace depression. Imagine that in any life cycle there are, as in nature, seasons. Depression does not always have to be viewed as pathology.

The industrial age introduced clocks, the digital age upped 9-5 to 24/7.

We are not meant to operate outside of the natural order of things. Riotous springs are followed by productive summers. In fall, as energy wanes we’re motivated to prepare for winter and muster the energy to get things done. In winter we accept that little grows, days are short and if we give over to the darkness and rest, we’ll recharge.

I’ve learned from the creative people around me, as well as my own experience, that a depression is a terrible thing to waste. We will emerge from them. When we do, we can allow for the riotously creative personal spring that follows. It will be there when were ready to embrace life again.

To every season there is a time and a purpose.

Accept the winters. And please keep faith, your personal spring will follow.

 

Courtesy GardeningAtTheEdge.wordpress.com

Courtesy GardeningAtTheEdge.wordpress.com

See also: The Rose, Bette Middler’s timeless hit.

“Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows,
lies the seed that with the sun’s love in the Spring becomes the rose.”

Reframe your understanding of it. Imagine it as a love song for yourself.

Seasonal Affective Disorder” (SAD), is also predictable and seasonal, but the above reflection is on the experience of major depression.




Why Write? “…it is human nature to write”

So said Julia Cameron in her introduction to The Right to Write.

We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes us directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and mediation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance as well.

Cameron’s best know tome is The Artist’s Way and it is regularly referenced in lists on the best books on writing. “Show up at the page” is the message – both in pursuit of your art and in the discipline of the “morning pages“. She uses the habit of three long hand pages of writing every morning on awakening as a means to clear the mind of distractions and anxieties, freeing up space for creativity to flourish.

She concludes her introduction to the Right to Write with:

It is my hope that this book will help to heal writers who are broken, initiate writers who are afraid, and entice writers who are standing at the river’s edge waiting to put a toe in.

I have a fantasy. It’s the pearly gates. St. Peter has out his questionnaire, he asks me the Big Question, “What did you do that we should let you in?”

“I convinced people they should write,” I tell him. The great gates swing open.

I share her fantasy.

For over a dozen years now I have facilitated groups exploring both The Artist’s Way and her three subsequent books on writing – The Right to Write (1998), The Sound of Paper (2004), the latest Write For Life (2023).

The lastest is the third in her series of 6 week/6 chapter explorations of The Artist’s Way.

It’s may be subtitled “A Toolkit for Writers” but what comes through is the generosity of spirit and goodwill in sharing her methods and process.

It does read like her “love letter to writing”.

If you’d like support in showing up at the page, get in touch!

Email, Book a Discovery Call, or join Empowering-Change in The Artist’s Way

 




Progress not Perfection

What would I do if I didn’t have to do it perfectly?images-1
A great deal more than I am.

Julia Cameron

 “Progress not perfection” is a mantra heard frequently in support groups. I repeat it often in my work with clients and when I am trying to be gentle in my own self -talk.

It’s a reminder that “good enough is good enough”. Whether one is recovering from addiction, writing a resume or adopting a new food plan – beating oneself up for “missing the mark” is self-defeating.

Perfectionism is paralyzing!

How many things haven’t you tried because you were afraid to look silly? I did and among others – missed an opportunity to learn to ski. I still mourn the courses I didn’t opt for in college because “I can’t afford a ‘C’. How much richer would my experiences be in the museums I love, had I been satisfied to “get” even just 2/3 of what an esteemed Art History professor had to say.

You get the point.

welcome progress road sign

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence

Vince Lombardi Jr.

Let’s take Mr. Lombardi’s advice on board – he never had a losing season while coaching in America’s NFL.

No perfect seasons – but all winning.

 

“If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.” – David Foster Wallace




On Communities Growing Professionally…

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead

People often ask me what BizCamp is. An unconference. What’s that? Quite simply: it’s a labour of love.

Congratulations to the BorderBizCamp team; the day was brilliant, every detail was attended to and operations ran like a well oiled machine. The speakers were outstanding, the range and quality was excellent.

It was as it should be everywhere. A small group of motivated and determined business people took what works best about their relationships with each other,  the local enterprise agency and the M:TEK  location  and modeled it for the world. You genuinely brought the best out in everyone.

Thank you also to the Monaghan Enterprise Agency staff for volunteering on the day; business is business and I have often heard it said that agencies “don’t get it”.

Not this MEA team; look at enterprise defined and it could be seen in the energy and enthusiasm of every volunteer.

[ √]  A project undertaken, especially one that is important or difficult or that requires boldness or energy;

[ √]  The participation in such projects;

[ √]  A company organised for commercial purposes

[ √]  Boldness or readiness in undertaking; adventurous spirit; ingenuity.

Among the synonyms suggested:

[ √]  plan, undertaking, venture

[ √]  drive, aggressiveness, push, ambition

They definitely ticked those boxes.

Thank you to the sponsors who fed us and to the young volunteers. In the end it’s about the children. They watched more than 100 people come together to create a prosperity to allow for enough jobs on this island. They’re entitled not to have to leave home!

That’s leadership.




Storytelling…What it Helps to Know

Kevin Kling came into his own as a storyteller when while in college he realised, “Saturday night was only as good as the story you could tell about it on Sunday”.

Stories are the way in which we share the full measure of our experience.

The onus is on the listener to ‘take what you like and leave the rest’. Carefully chosen words unconsciously deliver a multilayered, and full message.

Just how full becomes apparent not only in the first telling but when compared to subsequent retellings.

We in the West let go of the gift of storytelling in the last half of the twentieth century. Arguably, in large part, because we devoted ourselves to science. Science, we believed, would reveal explanations for everything “unexplainable”. We no longer needed to spin yarns for children about things like what the noise of thunder was or where the rain comes from.

Thankfully, filmmakers, songwriters, and poets never lost sight of the value of a good story. Interestingly, and notably in the case of popular films, consciously or not, they kept retelling the old stories.

  • If I said that StarWars was the Jesus story redux, a few might agree, some would deem me blasphemous, others just dismiss me.
  • If I argued that the Matrix was like the Abraham story, perhaps the same result.
  • And that some archetypal story in J.K. Rowling’s hands got a generation reading again!  Harry Potter’s adventures don’t require interpretation, but it too is a “hero’s journey”.

Monomyth is a term academics use to describe one story common to the mythology of cultures across the globe– the Hero’s Journey. The visual says it all:

Our task is to further explore how this universal story can inform our own. How we can grasp the significance of it in order to recognize a call to action in our own lives. There are heroes among us.  You are invited to explore your own story.

We live in challenging times. We can choose to despair, or allow our stories to be transformative. We can choose the journey. It begins with us.

If you are intrigued, these links may be of further interest:

The developer of the Matrix, Christopher Vogler, describes it in his words:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AG4rlGkCRU

A lovely comparison of the myths of different cultures and life stages can be found at: http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/00212/monomyth.html

Our own history on this island was well preserved by the efforts of the Irish Folklore Commission: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Folklore_Commission

Those archives are available to the public, and many on-line thanks to University College Dublin: http://www.ucd.ie/folklore/en/

 

 

 

 

 

 




On shampoo, toothpaste and aging…

Recently there was an “ah ha” moment in the shower; have you ever noticed that the last half of the shampoo (and toothpaste) last longer than the first? We mete it out more carefully when we are approaching the end – whether or not there is a “back up” under the sink.

That certainly explains a lot about my impatience in this “third half” of my life.

Irritability with folks “slowing me down” has crept up; oh I’ve always been the impatient sort, but the idea that folks are “stealing” what little time I have left on the planet is accompanied by a rage that is shocking, even to me.

I don’t know what’s worse: that I‘ve been downright uncivil with Sky, Talk Talk and BT while waiting over 4 months for proper phone, cable and broadband, or that I’m not embarrassed by or inclined to apologise for my incivility when I reach a call centre powerless to resolve my complaint.

Then there are the adaptive accommodations to aging I didn’t even know I was making.

My arthritis had been advancing markedly for years but when I moved my household from two years of storage, I was unable to use kitchen tools like the peeler and the paring knife that I had just unpacked, I was astounded. Unconsciously, when I’d only moved a few favourite kitchen things, I’d chosen the handiest and most comfortable. They were all the newer – with fatter, softer grips. Unconsciously, adapting all along, I hadn’t noticed just how disabled I’d become.

 

Joan Walsh Anglund is the poet, this is an excerpt:

I shall be older than this one day.
I shall think myself young when I remember.
Nothing can stop the slow change of masks my face must wear, one following one.
These gloves my hands have put on, the pleated skin, patterned by the pale tracings of my days.
These are not my hands! And yet, these gloves do not come off!
I shall wear older ones tomorrow, til glove after glove, and mask after mask, I am buried beneath the baggage of old women….

I was enamoured of her sweet, simple rhymes illustrated with charming drawings. This is the only one I remember; I was haunted by it. At fifteen I knew I was seeing my future.

If you have been in the way of my impatience lately – or experience it in the future, I apologise. I’d just like you to frame it with the knowledge that there is much to do and I’m trying to squeeze twice as much production out of the last third of my days.

All this is punctuated by crankiness over the fact that now that my head is screwed on right, my body is failing me… and customer service at BT needs a heads up, I’m calling tomorrow for a new line.




Gratitude…for George

George loved life and inspired all of us through this difficult time. He was most appreciative of all the support, love and encouragement that all of you showed him. He was a wonderful man.

Yesterday’s news from his wife. This “wonderful man” lived and died valiantly. His gift was two years of living life fully, making memories and reminding me that it is possible to “accept the things we cannot change” – even the worst of it.

We met 17 years ago, and disliked each other immediately. He and his young wife moved to the adjacent house, we shared a back yard. They were expecting their first child and my girls were 12, 8 & 5. When the baby arrived, one of mine announced: “she’ll be going to kindergarten the year Jennie goes to college”. I vividly remember thinking: “that’s ages away”. It wasn’t.

George and I politely warmed to each other over the years. It would have taken less time had we realised we disliked only the reflection of ourselves in each other. Then life happened. Another daughter was born, his girls grew, my girls babysat; the families grew closer and we shared the wisdom gleaned from parenting. Mindfully we were trying to give better than we got as children.

And we shared Joy; no accident her name. Joy blossomed into the kind of mother George knew she’d be when he’d decided to wait the years it took for her to agree marriage. She is a formidable woman, a well-loved child of parents who modeled patient, disciplined, and unmitigated love. She mothered her children and mine. I learned from her and George softened toward me.

They co-parented my children across the yard, through adolescent parties, romances and disappointments the likes of which you don’t share with your own parents. They delivered friendship, qualified by parental concern. They were the safety net that was once natural in extended families a century ago.

They are what I refer to as “family of choice”. Part of my personally appointed extended family. “You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family”. Wrong! You can create healthy and supportive families – and while George and I didn’t know it in our prickly phase, we shared a common mission: Healthy and happy daughters, well-armed for anything life throws their way.

It took until 2008 – for us to become friends. When I left for Ireland we shared talks about what was important. He spoke of how he loved my girls and he loved that his girls were loved by them. I admitted how hard it was for me to leave my daughters. How important it was for me to compose a life before going to my grave resentful. I wanted a life not characterised by my roles as daughter, wife and mother. He’d already pursued his PhD in History, remodeling his career and composing a life that allowed him to teach, and to have more time just being a husband and father. We talked about death and dying before it was relevant.

Perhaps it is only the Jews and the Irish who are comfortable in this melancholy place, but we were. The dying talk went from “what if” to “when” as I returned home to the heartbreaking news of his diagnosis.

Thank you George, for the honesty and the process you shared in this long goodbye. I am sorry it wasn’t longer. Thank you for arming your daughters and mine for the worst life has to offer. Thank you for giving our friendship a chance.

Thank you, especially, for the gift of Joy in all our lives.




Gratitude…for Brigid, Floodgates & Rage

Brigid is the Celtic goddess of abundance traditionally honored on the Celtic cross-quarter feast of Imbolc  between Winter Solstice & Spring Equinox; now on February 1st.

A floodgate is the metaphor I used for years when describing a fear of being paralyzed if I unearthed a long-buried childhood trauma.

Rage, even the expression of mild anger, was forbidden in the household and schools in which I was reared.

The message was uncompromising:

  • Portray life as it “should” appear
  • Make everything look perfect
  • Don’t tell the truth about what’s really happening
  • Never let your feelings show

In spite of that, I’ve learned to trust that life is to be lived and not controlled.

Last week, I fully experienced the memory of a trauma that sent me into a rage. After half a century the floodgates were opened. A gift from my unconscious. I was blind to a toxic relationship – and the wounded little girl inside recognized what I did not. So she grabbed my attention- the memory was her SOS to me.

Pretending life was “normal” became impossible.

In that rage though, I reclaimed myself from the polite peace I was maintaining to make things comfortable and normal for the folks around me.

Apparently, I’d wasted half a century fearing I would drown in a flood.

Oh, the liquid metaphor was correct, but it turns out that I was dying of thirst. A thirst for the truth I couldn’t see if I didn’t allow for keeping up perfect appearances and letting my head overrule my gut.

I was reminded that the most important lesson distilled in the “Artist’s Way”, is that to recover an authentic, creative self, one needs to embrace anger; it is a friend. Not a kind or gentle one, but a loyal one.  It is truthful.

Another message is that the way in which we recover our authentic selves is one day, one step at a time. Our unconscious minds are to be trusted. That memory I’d feared and suppressed did not return until I was able to handle it.  It is for that I am most grateful.

If you are interested in taking steps to reclaim your creative self, decide to.

When we adopt a discipline of listening to our body and becoming mindful of our real feelings we’re no longer guarded. Being guarded saps the energy which would otherwise fuel creativity .

We are first and foremost human beings, not a human doings. When we “do” polite, living life to please others, it’s a lot of work with little room for play – rethink it.

Take a walk, a yoga class, have a massage. Feel.

I am often reminded of a catechism lesson of my childhood: “Who made you? God made me, I was made in the image and likeness of God”.

Let’s embrace the divine within us. And consider that the gods of our ancestors raged. One even sent a flood.

Yesterday was Brigid’s day, I’m particularly grateful that the gods and goddesses described by Christians, Jews and Pagans are consistent in their message.

I needed to be reminded that even an abundant flood of anger is empowering.

And it is a blessing that I have been sustained to reach this understanding.

 

An earlier version of this post appeared in February 2012