Grief & Roses...

It was complete synchronicity that I wrote yesterday about feminine beauty past and present, using photos of French model Isabelle Caro to exemplify how far the pendulum has swung into the realms of unhealthy and horrible...

I didn't even know her name, or the names of the other young women pictured.

And today I read the headlines that she had died (in November)... At the age of 28, after a 15-year journey through the hell of anorexia...

Synchronicity?   Was I "tuned in" to other energy fields and picking up what was going on in her life?

Whatever, I feel sad for Isabelle in what she must have endured... and sad that an artificial world, the creation mostly of men, enabled her in that torturous and tortuous travail...

These roses are for Isabelle and all the women - young and old - who have felt so unloved and unaccepted/unacceptable that they fought their minds, bodies and spirits to become someone/something else...

 

Ring Out, Wild Bells...

A Facebook friend today posted the following extract of a poem, saying that for him it:

"strikes the perfect tone for the dying of one year, and the birth of another. 

We know, if we've lost someone in our lives, how that loss has many qualities that continue to unfold for the rest of our lives. 

These qualities seem to travel on parallel paths, often intersecting, to keep life rich with complexity that is equally often difficult to fathom...we press on.

We celebrate that our breath still feeds us through all struggle, and of course when the ease of it is similarly astonishing, we are breathing then as well, though perhaps those breaths are not drawn so deeply, or somehow the lightness of them belies the depths they plumb..." 

 Excerpted From: 

In Memoriam A. H. H., by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

 

 

It's Been A Hard Week...

 

It seems it's my time to break some more old, unhelpful patterns and face up to shortcomings that sabotage my capacity to live a full and abundant life...

“Who ever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn himself into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” - Nietzsche

John Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare

I've been fighting (for quite a long time) internal grief about loss in my life - loss of innocence, self, family, roots, connection, belonging, home - and most recently losing the home I created 2.5 years ago for myself and my son. 

I've also been fighting my resistance to change, to acceptance of the reality of our situation, and feeling a sense of despair at what's going on in the outside world and not wanting to participate in that paradigm any longer...

All of which have left me feeling stuck, paralysed, not knowing what to do for the best, nor willing to take any steps forward...

I've been feeling like I've been straddling the abyss... one foot in my old life wanting to hang on to that, the other foot in my new reality knowing that the old patterns will no longer work - not for who I am now or for the world that is coming into being...

But I'm frozen in that place - I can't go back to the old but I'm feeling too scared, that I don't have enough momentum, to jump into the new...

I'm not confident there's a safety net there to catch me, even though inner guidance says there is, that there's nothing to fear, that the fear is False Evidence Appearing Real...

For many of us, the inclination is to resist change until the pain/discomfort of a situation becomes unbearable... 

Well, life has this (nasty) little habit of pushing us into a corner and forcing change, if we won't go there voluntarily.

I've been 'hiding' from the world and from success... I've been spending all my time, energy and focus on social and education activism, working to change things on the outside, hoping to avoid having to change things on the inside.

I know what I've been doing is valuable and has had an impact - people write and phone me from all over, they stop me in the street to thank me for what I'm doing, people across the globe read this blog... 

And for me, the panic, pain, discomfort is around financial shortage... I haven't been getting paid for spending all of this energy and time and my efforts to "save the world" have left us financially impaired... 

There are other factors in that financial equation over which I have no control, but I'm the one who's been making the choices about what I focus on and how I spend my time...

This past week, I finally ran out of wiggle room and now I need to get 'real'  - find/generate/manifest meaningful quantities of income immediately... 

I need to acknowledge my responsibilities to myself and my child, "save" us first, stop waiting for others who owe us energetic and financial debts to "do the right thing" and step up...

I need to acknowledge, own and put right those areas in my life and those relationships where I'm out of financial and energetic integrity with others...

I need to feel the grief I've been avoiding and keep moving forward anyway...

Sometimes all that's needed is the recognition and owning of what's going on for the shift to happen; more often though, what's needed is action in line with the new understanding - and that's the bit I've been avoiding...

But the cost of being an ostrich in this particular situation, is more than 10 times the cost of dealing with some of these issues when they first arose - an expensive (but obviously necessary to get the understanding!) experience...

And I need to soften towards myself in that... 

Healing from the wounds that have brought me to this place inside first takes awareness and then love and time.

We're all doing the best we can with what we've got...

If we could do it any better, we would...