Trauma
I Was Watching the Clouds – Reflections for Mother’s Day
I was watching the clouds this morning lying on a dock hearing the gentle waves wash over the rocks below. Occasionally, the dock would rock, creek or moan from the motion. The clouds were not moving as I watched them but if I looked away and then back they had moved apart and reconfigured. This happened over and over again. This apparent non-movement which is actually very dynamic.
I think about this as I begin to unwind from the huge project I undertook to recreate a Wellness Weekend for women here on the shore. The configurations of so many moving parts that came together and then dissipated into what will be next. A new configuration like the clouds.
I know I won’t be a leader of this again. I am not sure if I will have a role in it at all. I am a cloud looking for my next cluster yet also not moving and in continuous motion all at once.
…
When the weather moves
I get very excited when I watch a weather system move in across the sky. Here on the Bay I watched one the other day. It was bright and sunny on one end of the beach and ominous black clouds build up on the other end, moving across the sky towards me. I felt energized and excited. I remember a time sitting at a winery with my then five-year-old grandson. He is drinking “the best lemonade he ever had,” and I am drinking a glass of Chardonnay and we are both equally excited watching the weather move in across the mountains. It looks dramatic and in minutes we are forced inside by the gale.
Why does this simple movement of weather invigorate me so? I sit with this question as I watch the storm begin to scatter rain around me. And the answer is simple. It is a rare and wonderful privilege to witness cause and effect. So often we wake up in the morning and experience the weather we are having. We are ‘in’ the weather but we did not see the weather in the making….
Scar Tissue
Oops! I had a pretty bad accident in June. I fell onto broken glass.
I have not written a blog post in a while (since March) and part of the reason is that, for a while, I could not type. A trip to the emergency room, six hours and fourteen stitches later, I was back home with bandages, pain meds and a long healing road ahead. Fortunately our local teaching hospital has top hand specialists, and all summer I have been working with a Physical Therapist Angel named Hannah. Lately I have backslid a bit working to get feeling and movement back in my thumb and index finger. “It is because of scar tissue,” Hannah says.
A Google search turns up all the information I need. …
Spring Gardening
In my garden this year the weeds are plentiful. Especially one kind of weed that is very satisfying to find and pull out. It is wide and can spread out its lush and large tendrils for several feet in all directions but at its base is a small ball and if you are lucky and pull it out just right you get the very deep central small single minuscule little root. I am always amazed that such a small yet tenacious root can give rise to such a prolific plant. Buckets of this weed come out of my garden and into the compost. A Taproot, as it is called, turns out is the first root to appear from the seed and remains the central root of the plant.
I love this as a metaphor.
While we may, in our lives, spread out in many directions with flashy, fleshy greenery we have one central root to our lives and it has always been true. In the Pathwork this is called our Soul Task. The promise is that finding this task and staying true to it is the secret to a satisfying life. Recently, my husband Tom found a letter that I wrote him in 1988. We had been married for 7 years and I was about to turn 35. In the letter I say that I feel like I have checked important boxes in my life: kids, self employment and married for life. While all this is great I go on in the letter to answer a question Tom has asked me the week before. He asked, “Do you think we will ever make the Big Time.” He is referring our fledgling technology business at the time. Reading it all these years later, I am pretty astonished at my answer . I write, “I think we will — but on a different track than what we are on now. I think the contribution we can really make is to share with others who we are and how we are and that is our most marketable product!” I go on to say that I am clear I can only keep going in this business for two more years….