Gratitude and Thankfulness

Hello Friends:

I wasn't going to add to the many lists of thanks out there, I really wasn't. But after reading all the well-thought-out and moving expressions of thanks on your blogs ... well ... I felt an urge to express some of my own gratitude to the universe.

So I went looking for a neat picture to express my feelings, and found something absolutely perfect. I love the image and so made it bigger than I usually do to show off the amazing detail. Here is what the artist has as text associated with the picture.

"The stained glass ceiling inside the Thanksgiving Chapel spirals upward to 58 feet in a crescendo of color, harmony, and form. It is called the Glory Window and designed by Gabriel Loire of Chartres, France, one of the greatest stained glass master of the 20th century.  Gabriel Loire describes this progression: '...to express all life, with its difficulties, its forces, its joys, its torments, its frightening aspects. And then bit by bit, all that falls away and your arrive finally at a burst, an explosion of gold; you arrive at the summit.'"

The part that resonates with me is the idea of connecting the difficulties with life with the glories of life. I don't happen to buy into the imagery of climbing stairs to reach a summit of perfection - I do not see that as a helpful metaphor. I prefer to imagine our lives and our understanding as a flower blooming or a cocoon opening, each revealing the beauty that was there all the time. Still, this is so gorgeous, and somehow was a perfect expression of gratitude for me this year.

And here is some of what I am thankful for ...

1.  Being alive. This is a stretch for me, since there are still times I wish I hadn't been born so I wouldn't know about pain. But I no longer want to check out now that I am here. I feel more brave. Or maybe just more stubborn, although that's much harder to imagine. In any case, I am glad that I have the options that life brings, the greatest being the chance to know what it is like to deeply love another person.

2.  My spouse. The person who makes my continued healing possible, and gives me great reasons every day to want to keep at it. Constant help, love, and support. And lots of tea.

3.  My family. Especially a sister with whom I am very close. Since I've had to part ways with some members of my immediately family, I cherish even more the connections with those I can maintain, and which are mutually edifying and beneficial.

4.  My projects. I am glad to be well enough to really get involved in several creative endeavors that I have always enjoyed. Writing, making jewelry, doing crafts of all kinds, blogging, and so much more. These are the day-to-day things that give me the chance to be me.

5.  The necessities of life and more. A safe home, plenty of good food, clean water, nice clothes, and fresh air.

6.  My support network, mental and physical. Psychologist, psychiatrist, general doctor, physical therapists, acupuncturist, obgyn, spouse, family, friends, stuffed animals, and everyone who reads my blog, too! And a good network would not be possible without good health insurance - which I wouldn't have if my spouse did not have a good job. Really a blessing in tough economic times.

7.  My friends. From close confidants, to beer buddies, and onto folks I chat with only occasionally, it is great to have all kinds of friends. Every moment they spend on me is a miracle, life is so short. Each of those minutes is a gift.

I could go on and on. Which is very, very nice to consider.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: Heaven and Soul Connection by alicia-lee-07 on Flikr via Creative Commons

Poetry, Halloween, and Healing

Hello Friends:

It seems like a really strange combination; poetry, Halloween, and healing.  But the triple-point of these topics has been on my mind as October rolls forward. (And I thought it a perfect topic to finally get in on The Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse, supported by very friendly blogger Marj aka Thriver on Survivors Can Thrive!  The carnival is being hosted by Tracie of From Tracie.)

I have been a reader and writer of poetry since I was fourteen. Given the, shall we say, 'unsettled' nature of my childhood, I felt I had plenty to write about. So naturally, like many other young people, writing became an avenue to express my inner turmoil, to help me view it more objectively, and eventually, to try to heal.

So why is Halloween in this picture? Two reasons. I have a sort of gothic alter ego who has always loved moonlight, monsters, the sound of dry leaves, and tales of things that go bump in the night. So the first reason Halloween is part of all this is - when I write poetry that comes from a dark place, it has this sort of gothic feel to it. Sometimes it is subtle, and other times not so much. But edgy goth, or even horror-like imagery is how I often express the mess inside. Here is an example; a poem I had published in The Newsletter Inago in 1999. It seemed apt for the 'harvest' time of year.

Missing Seedcorn

Sorrow reaps the harvest

of frustration's seed

as the mirror of each

pool or lake holds something

a little further from the dream.

It was ... what?

Besides, who can remember

the words out of the warm dark,

whispers from night's fertile seed

of cornucopia secrets, now

starving in your barren brain.

Malnourished, stagnant pond;

an early frost has come.

Newsletter Inago, Vol. 19, No. 6, June 1999

Being able to express this sort of inner pain, the sense of a seed losing its potential in neglect, is a healing act. For me, writing poems like this is an act of faith, and one that empowers me to confront my inner darkness. It's a chance to tap into a part of the brain that lies just below the conscious, and to bring forth images that need to be addressed. And might not be addressed any other way.

Okay, so the second reason Halloween makes me think of poetry - it has to do with my recent spate of poem writing in April. April is National Poetry Writing Month, and I chose to write a poem a day to 'celebrate' (or torture myself, depending on your view of that sort of commitment :)  I knew I was going to use art to inspire my poetry, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn't going to be just any art. The art that was inspiring me was quirky, dark, semi-humorous horror art, like the sort created by Tim Burton. This art also has a focus on the fears of children, which played into my own memories, and ended up inspiring about twenty poems about the darker aspects of childhood.

Normally, I don't like to put unpublished poetry in blog posts, since most publishers consider that published or at least it means that "first electronic rights" are already taken. But this post seems like a good cause, so here's a draft of a poem that came from my April poem run.

Pins and Needles

The muslin doll has

X's for eyes and a smile

drawn with black marker.

There is a large hatpin

with a red ball end planted

squarely in the middle of

her forehead.  There is

another in her stomach,

two in the chest, several

in the back and legs, and

just one stabbed through

the right hand.  The doll

doesn't mind except it

makes it hard to walk;

arms straight out, legs

bowed.  She trips a lot,

and when she falls she

always hears screaming.

Copyright Blue Morpho's real person, no touchy

I like the ambiguity, here. Who is screaming? Who is it that is using this apparently even-tempered doll for their voodoo dirty work? It makes me sad - literally in the poem the doll falls, driving the pins deeper, and causing pain to the target of the voodoo - yet just the image of someone screaming at a child when it falls, instead of feeling sympathy, really tweaks me. I like the idea that the doll is a metaphor both for the neglected child, and the act of the child seeking revenge. She causes pain to those who have hurt her, but note that in the process, she hurts herself.

It is in this that I find some healing. This reaffirms my growing commitment to not become the thing I hate. To not become the same bitter, depressed, self-absorbed, self-hating, mangled thing that caused my neglect, abuse, and subsequent mental illnesses in the first place. I may want to find ways to enact my revenge fantasies, but I have to realize that getting too caught up with that is not healthy. When I use those pins, it's me I'm hurting.

So what are your feelings on this? Does this dark aspect of poetry appeal to you? Do you find any catharsis in the creepy Halloween season? Read any Poe recently?

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: Happy Pumpkin by Dave Hogg on Flickr via Creative Commons, CC 2.0

Spiritual Crises: Trying to Make Sense of God

Hello Friends:

Religion and spirituality have been on my mind a lot lately. In truth, they often are. For whatever reason I'm a spiritual person. My being trained as a research scientist does not conflict with this at all - but that's the subject of another post. (Or an entire book. And you know I think I'll put that one on the list of "books I really gotta write one of these days.") Instead, what I wanted to focus on here is the idea of spiritual crises and their relationship to anxiety and trauma.

I've been doing a lot of reading into PTSD recently, since (as I've mentioned in previous posts) the PTSD appears to be the core motivator or prime mover, so to speak, of my disordered psyche. I was very surprised to see that in the lists of responses to trauma "spiritual crisis or loss of faith" is in almost every one of them. I don't know why this is a surprise to me. After all, going to the therapist is usually another lesson in "No duh." (Did you know there is now research supporting the fact that people with three or more co-morbid anxiety/depression disorders are less able to remain functional at jobs and in work environments than those with fewer or no disorders? Did we really need a peer-reviewed paper to tell us this?) And yet, I still get taken by surprise by the obvious. If life sucks for you, then you generally don't have a great relationship with the Almighty.

For some people, their religious crisis stems from the reality of suffering. After a major traumatic event, people often think "How could God have let this happen to me?" and "How can a good God allow these sorts of horrible things?" Through their trauma these people are confronted with a brutal reality that is so at odds with their previous world view that they cannot find a new working middle ground. Their faith is seriously compromised or abandoned as a result.

I don't happen to wonder about suffering in the world, and this may be part of the difference between PTSD sufferers (from a single event) or Complex PTSD (multiple events or extended duration events). I've been subjected to trauma from birth, so it never occurred to me that the world was a nice place. My ideas of religion grew up in the context of a scary world. My crisis didn't come about from a sudden bad event, but instead from years and years of traumatic pressure slowly changing my point of view.

Although I can point to the triggering moment that I chose to stop praying, and thus sort of ended up with me and God no longer on speaking terms. I read a book where the author was saying that the accident that made her a quadrapelegic was actually God's answer to a prayer. She prayed that He would bring her closer to Him, and the next week she was paralyzed from the neck down. This was (and is) about the most horrible thing I'd ever read. It crystalized my lack of trust in God - apparently if you prayed for things, he would give them to you, but in a nasty 'Monkey's Paw' sort of way. Better not to pray at all, and then at least you know the bad stuff comes from random chance.

"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread." - Mahatma Gandhi

I have always loved this quote, even when I was on 'good terms' with God. Surely, I felt, God is compassionate and giving, and knows that starving people don't need sermons, they need FOOD. But then being squished through the eye of the needle that is Fundamental Christianity, my views on God became torqued. I saw God as scary, judgmental, angry, unapproachable, requiring perfect prayer, constant sacrifice, and incessant vigilance lest I fall away and be tossed into the fire. This, by the way, is also an excellent description of how I felt about my parents, who provided many of the traumatic experiences that continue to haunt me. If you cannot get unconditional love from your parents, you certainly don't imagine you can get it from God. God, like my parents, became someone whom I thought it better to avoid.

But this sort of pisses me off. I don't want my innate interests and desires for a more spiritual life to be another casualty of my abusive upbringing. So many things have already been broken by a past that was not my fault - I don't want to ditch the whole idea of spirituality as a reaction to something else. I need to find out if it is right for me, and how, and to do that I need to find ways to separate myself from images of the divine as a parent. I don't have a good model for a parent so I'm not going to want a deity that is one. What I want are influences that allow me to fully grow into myself as a person.

Which brought me back to the quote from Gandhi, and a way to begin to think of God, the Goddess, the Divine, Wisdom, Warm Fuzzy Life Feelies or Whatever as that which nourishes me. God can't come to me as a controlling, child-sacrificing slave-master, but God can come to me as bread. Or, in fact, as the love I get from my husband, the acceptance I get from my sister, the joy I get from watching the cardinals outside return in the spring. You know, good stuff like that.

Bread, of course, is already fraught with religious significance and imagery, not the least of which is the 'body of Christ' from Christian mass/communion. Not wanting to bog myself down too much there, instead of a picture of a communion wafer I chose a pic of challah bread. One of the many benefits of having married a Jew is the introduction to Jewish food (which includes great stuff like matzo ball soup, and some less great stuff like gefilte fish). If you haven't had Challah, it is amazing stuff; soft and stretchy on the inside, rich and dense, but yielding, with a crisp, thin crust. It makes the best French Toast on the planet, too.

Another benefit of a Jewish husband is that his operating system comes pre-loaded with the idea that is it a good thing to treat one's religious beliefs with the same intellectual honesty used anywhere else in life. The tradition of Jewish scholars arguing Torah in the Yeshiva lives on in conscious and unconscious ways. So I, WASP woman that I am, get the encouragement and the room to step back and consider what God really is to me.

Challah seems like a great place to start with that.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image is Challah by A. Ross from Flickr via Creative Commons.

Fear Passes and We Remain

Hello Friends:

I'll take inspiration from anyplace I can get it. Including science fiction. I happen to write science fiction so it seems fitting, anyway. One of the most quoted passages from Frank Herbert's novel Dune is the Litany Against Fear.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

When I first read the book I was in seventh grade and couldn't keep up with all the characters and factions and intrigue and invented history and all the rest. But still, the passage above caught my attention, as it has caught that of so many others. I found myself actually using it as a real litany, a meditation almost, and then felt bad for it because in those days I assumed if it wasn't direct from the bible, God would punish me.

Too bad. Because now-a-days phrases and quotes like this are very useful to me. Ways to center myself when I'm overwhelmed. I stand back and watch the fear itself, the path it takes. It moves through me and then I'm still there.

I've spent most of my life afraid, experiencing fear. There are times when I conquer it temporarily, but I always find myself with something else pushing terror down on me. As depressing as that idea is, it carries a core of hope. Fear comes and goes, and I remain. It waxes and wanes, ebb and high tide again and again, but I'm the sky, I'm the shore.

Right now I'm scared because I have to go to a meeting related to a contract, and I haven't done that in a long time. I'm not even certain that when the time comes, I won't drop the car keys on the floor and find I don't have what it takes. And I'll feel like crap if that happens. But the fear doesn't beat me anymore, I'm here to live another day, try again, and maybe find I can do something new tomorrow that yesterday was impossible. You never know.

Your Hostess with Neuroses

Image from xKimJoanne on flikr via Creative Commons

A Beautiful Sun

Hello Friends:

I don't happen to suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), which is nice since the six formal diagnoses I do have are plenty. But still, I love the sun - I lived fourteen years in the desert southwest and always felt the warm (even smoldering hot) sunshine was bliss. I have an iTunes playlist that I listen to as one of the ways I try to pull my mood up when I'm down. I named it in honor of my favorite song on the list. And this isn't really a song for me anymore, I sing it like a hymn in a baptist church. It's a psalm. A prayer.

Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get brighter

Some day, yeah
We'll get it together and we'll get it all done
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some day
When the world is much brighter

I'd like to crack my usual jokes about cheesy songs and modern wisdom, but I can't seem to do it about this song right now because I am too attached. I'll be irreverent about something else later.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Ooh Child - The Five Stairsteps

Cheesy Songs = Modern Wisdom

Hello Friends:

Day was a little tough, Monday's usually are with trying to get a grip on how much work is still sitting there and undone from Friday, or Saturday, or whenever I managed to stop working. I find myself singing antiquated song lyrics for moral support. I do this rather a lot. (I wonder if there is another acronym for that particular disorder - I have several and I'd like to add to the collection.) But whatever works, you know?

Why are you in so much hurry?
Is it really worth the worry?
Look around.
Then slow down.

What's it like inside the bubble?
Does your head ever give you trouble?
It's no sin.
Trade it in.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Help Is On Its Way by The Little River Band