Confetti Heart

“Eternally, woman spills herself away in driblets to the thirsty, seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh – Gift From The Sea

I read these words and recognise within them my own self, as it is perpetually dribbled away into a million different needs and deeds. I feel sharply the sliver of resentment belonging to my wild gypsy self, who longs to give herself fully to the dance, to the work of art, to the concerto, to life. And is instead taught to be happy with creating only small wonders who may go on to become great masters in time. Is this all a mother is? A spinner of the threads of a future miracle? If so, that’s not a bad thing to be. And yet, surely beyond the sculpting and tender nurturance of these warm and splendid mini-selves, there must be something that belongs only to us? Something deeper and more profound than spilling ourselves away, droplet by droplet into others?

As I ponder my hubble’s suggestion to take a sabbatical, to retreat in the face of current difficulties in order to find my equilibrium again, I wonder if I know what peace is. Would I know peace if it came up and greeted me with flowers? Hell would I know it if it bit me on the ass? Probably not. I know what peace is not. It is not waking up with a tight jaw and aching eyes after a night of restless sleep. It is not this knot in my stomach or the nausea that comes from living with my shoulders as ear- muffs. It is not hearing myself laugh and being shocked at how alien it sounds. No. That is not peace. Peace slips in under the coat of solitude, holding quiet by the hand.

The Attraction of Distraction
Many of us spend a good deal of our time disappearing into different distractions so as not to find ourselves alone in a room with silence. Or worse - ourselves. There is tv, movies, books and music and all of these are noble and enjoyable distractions. We can pick up the phone, get online, text or message each other in an instant. If we don’t have someone actually with us, we have something in our ears or our hands or our mouths. We are contactable at every moment and we are available to each other instantly. And therein lies the problem. There are so many opportunities to be busy, to be distracted, to be involved but there are few opportunities to be quiet. Few opportunities for stillness. In fact, given half an hour of quiet we will fill it with a hundred necessary and important things and never even notice the glass of ourselves slowly emptying until it reaches the bottom and we are still required to give.

I love a good distraction as much as the next girl. I can easily lose myself in books or movies or even music. And yet, despite the almost constant thread of resentment at the level of sacrifice required of me as a mother, I spend my time looking at yet more ways that I can give to this little being. It’s as if I am searching for any hole in my psyche through which the ‘perfect mother’ can slip out. Surely, if I can bake the bread, or offer the milk or cookies, or make the doll, then I am one step closer to digging out this recalcitrant mother within. If only I can become the nurturer, the creative playmate, the laughing, relaxed mamma I know I can be, this depleted, worn out soul will be renewed. And so I continue to seek avenues of nourishment for this little soul I love so much. Is it martyrdom? It certainly can be. But it can also be simply what mothering requires. A slow disintegration of the self in order to have room to birth and hold and shelter these precious little beings. No wonder many new mothers are shell shocked in those first few months. Or, if you are me, few years.

I realise that I am not a natural nurturer. I have resisted domestication like a feral cat. I have chaffed at the bit of commitment until my mouth is bloody. Yet all the answers I seek, all the avenues I am currently exploring to find wellness again, are not for myself primarily. They are for her. For my beautiful, golden-haired Beanie girl. So that I may give freely and not feel poorer for it. So that I may lose myself and not care so very much about what is gone. So that I will stop trying to find and stick together all the little coloured pieces of my beautiful confetti heart.

I know she will be a masterpiece. I know, on all the levels that truly matter, she is my greatest work.

Yet I still hold dark dreams of a self that lives only for itself. That creates purely for the joy of creation. That follows the wind with a glad heart and a radiant smile. And who knows peace as a good friend.

Who’s with me?




*Photos from here
and here.

Zen-ing Out

I am holed up in bed. It’s two in the afternoon and it feels peaceful if slightly decadent. After the dark shakiness of this week and the rather long nights talking things through with the hubble, it feels like the best place for me to be. It’s actually the only place I want to be. Safe and secure in an oasis of snuggly white warmth. It’s raining heavily and the air smells metallic and dirty - wet earth and rain, a smell I love - and its peaceful. I'm listening to this album. It's lovely.

This morning I took the cat, who seems to spend most of her time annoying the shit out of me, to the vet for her yearly jabs. I do feel for her, having a thermostat shoved up her bum at every visit, then being poked and prodded and jabbed with needles. She has a lump on her back that needs to be kept an eye on but apart from that, she’s healthy and a good weight for a big furbag. She’s happily sleeping on a huge pile of my Indian imported floor cushions like the princess and the pea. After I dropped her off at home (yes, I came all the way back to the house to drop the cat off home), I did what I always do when I’m down, I went shopping. I bought the Beanie some new PJ’s, soft and fleecy and a book called The Owl Babies, because she’s my little owl. Did I mention she can count? Yup. My two year old can tell you how many lady bugs or bees are pressed into a piece of play dough – she can do up to four. I’m pretty amazed by that I have to say. And then I took solace in my local bookshop coming home with Zen tomes (one called 'There is nothing wrong with you.' which made me chuckle) and a little book called 'Lessons of a Lakota' by Billy Mills because I have an interest in Native American everything.

I’m currently listening to The Painted Drum on audio by Louise Erdrich and it has been quite entertaining. I’ve also just picked up Buddhism for Mothers by Sarah Napthali on audio. I have read the book but I thought it would be good to have this in the car. I love listening to stuff in the car – it’s where I do most of my learning I think. I most often have Wayne Dyer with me or Louise Hay or, my favourite, Oriah Mountain Dreamer. I love her combination of spirit and honesty and her earthy yet lofty blend of Native wisdom and Buddhism. It speaks very deeply to me. She makes me feel peaceful just listening to her. Yesterday, when I was deep in the tremors, I opened ‘The Dance’ and from a chapter called Choosing a Joyful Dance, this is what I read,

‘Don’t tell me how wonderful things will be…someday,
Show me you can risk being completely at peace,
truly okay with the way things are right now in this moment, and again in the next and the next and the next…’

Are you willing to be completely at peace with how things are right now in your life? Are you willing for just one moment to let go of all your dissatisfaction, all of your suffering about how things are? Are you willing to let go of all the worry and tension in your body and simply breathe?

Am I? The thing that I struggle with (among many others) is the feeling that to accept myself as I truly am, in this moment, in this day of motherhood, is to accept something intrinsically wrong. My mothering is wrong. My discipline is wrong. My anger is wrong. How, I could ask, could one ask a murderer to accept how he is in the moment? I’m not really comparing myself to a murderer but I think that it’s somehow flawed to ask of myself, feeling as I do about motherhood, to simply accept that this is how it is. How I am. I don’t want to accept that this is how I am. I don’t want to be this. I want to be something different. Something better. How do I come to a place of acceptance about something which feels wrong in my heart? That is what I am struggling with today. I want to sit with my discomfort but I don’t. I chew over the fact that I fail every day to be the mother I wish to be, the mother my daughter deserves. I know that she chose me and on some level what I offer her is necessary for her journey, as well as mine, but I also believe that my desperate desire to do better, to be better, is also part of this journey.

When I look at my anxious, frustrated, impatient type of mothering, I am struck by how much like my mother I am. I grew up nurtured by a woman who would rather walk for 5 miles than wait 10 minutes for a bus. She pushed me, like a real stage mother, to win, to be better than every other person I could be pitted against, especially if it was in an area that she believed I would do well in, or an area where she herself wished she could have played. I was a smart and capable kid. I could do anything pretty well. I was adaptable and gifted in many areas (though not maths!) and so I did pretty well all round. This led to many difficult and stressful times for me, all brought about through my mother’s love for me and her desire for me to do well. I understand now that this was perhaps not the way to handle things but she didn’t know any different. She was motivated by many things, guilt and fear among them. She was by nature, a highly stressed individual, probably from living through the war and evacuation and poverty and then with my violent father for 26 years. I know that living with him would put anyone under severe stress and so its not really surprising that I have inherited, from pregnancy probably, the same traits of anxiousness and fear. I was born into fear and have lived most of my life with its shadow snapping closely at my heels. It’s not that it stops me from doing most things – it doesn’t. I am both fearful and stubborn. But I suspect that it stops me from doing many things that I don’t realize. Probably because I am unable to truly let myself break apart. Like last night. I cried but could not let go, not truly. I was worried that I would wake my baby girl. I hate crying. I both felt and wanted to break through the door that separates me from my true emotions and could not. I pulled back because it seemed less painful to remain where I am than to push through into that empty darkness that waits for me in the room beyond. I couldn’t move through that doorway because I don’t honestly know how to. How do you let yourself break apart? How do you give yourself over to the sorrow – to anything without holding just a little of yourself back?

And so today, I meander quietly through my life, seeking for something that will make sense of my experiences. Something that will give me hope. A book I picked up today is called, ‘That Which You Are Seeking is Causing You to Seek.’ I liked the title. The author, Cheri Huber, is a teacher of Zen. The explanation on the back of the books says, “What we are looking for is causing us to look. That’s why we need not go anywhere, do anything, learn more, figure anything out or worry about going wrong. We need only to stop, sit down, be still and pay attention.’ Easier said than done for this restless, mangled spirit. But I will try.

I will try.

May your caravan be filled with the music of silence.

The Stillness We Seek

I was lying alone on the huge sofa in the living room of my boss. He was overseas doing what Shamans do and I was taking care of his house and looking after the business. I had built a fire in the huge hearth and, as he had no television, had been listening to Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. The CD had finished some time before and night had fallen but I had been too busy staring at the theatre of fire to notice. It was so quiet. I became gradually, dreamily aware of a strange sensation growing within me. It was unfamiliar and yet not entirely so. I felt calm in a way that I had never experienced before and yet I knew this place or at least, I did once. This vast stillness expanded inside me until I knew only peace, only safety. I felt as if I were lying below the surface of a fast moving river. The surface of the river was covered in dead trees, leaves, debris from the banks and fields around it and I had a strong sense of knowing that life was like that debris. Lifes troubles, struggles and woes were like the flotsam that floats on the surface of the water but our truest nature, our deepest self was like the current that moves strongly but slowly beneath the surface. I knew in that moment that no matter what my life held, no matter what unhappiness I felt pulling at my heart and mind, if I could just remember this feeling of being held safely in the strong, slow pull of the deeper current of my life, all would be well. It was as if a voice had spoken to me from deep within that silence and stillness and said simply,'This is truth. Remember it.'

I'll never forget that experience because it is a place I long to revisit. I had never before and, even more sadly, have never since, felt that peace, that simple reassuring stillness in which I lay that night. Maybe I have simply never been that still since. I know that I am someone who finds it hard to be quiet, I move almost as ceaselessly as I talk. Even when my body is still, my mind is burrowing into ideas, issues and problems like a fat childs hand into a candy jar. I never really stop. Hell, most of the time I never even slow down. I throw myself into bed at night like a big man might throw a dodgy hitcher out of his still moving car. There is no stillness apparent. Yet I know it's there - not even out of reach just out of mind. And, even more frustratingly, I can often feel it hovering on the edge of my consciousness whispering to me, 'Slow down, be present and feel the hard edges of life melting away. Just flow on down stream.'

What was most magical of all about that night was the ease in which I found myself there. There were no months spent meditating, no soul-grating suffering in order to achieve a place of mindfulness which comes before peace, no tearing apart of the fabric of my reality in order that I might find 'truth'. There had been nothing out of the ordinary happening in my busy life except coming to terms with the ending of yet another unsuitable relationship and my tussling with the feelings that accompanied that. If anything, that should have really kept me way off centre and far away from any experience of peace. And yet, doesn't Rumi talk about that 'broken open place' within us and how through simply being with that experience, that rawness of spirit, we might reach God. Certainly, I have learned more about myself when I have been split apart by life, alone and sorrowing into the darkness, than I have by attending any number of workshops designed to enlighten me. All I know is that despite myself, my never ending mind chatter, my ceaselss, restless spirit - I attained a state of grace that night and felt safer in my life than I had ever felt before. There was a feeling of inexplicable happiness that accompanied it all. Not the jump for joy, wave fist in the air type of happiness like one might find on a tv commercial for tampons, it was like the smile of the Mona Lisa - mysterious, yet no less heart expanding.

I think it must have been listening to Oriah Mountain Dreamers 'The Call' again that brought it to mind again. The idea of surrendering oneself to the stillness and the silence at the heart of life. Of actively listening but without trying. Of becoming with all that 'trying' to change. In this place of grace I am loved and accepted, exactly as I am, with all my armour on, with my head a mess and my heart jagged and sore. I didn't have to be anything other than myself and I got there by being just that - me. The challenge is in remembering to be present IN the present. In remembering that 'doing' often prevents us from 'being' and in following the thread of our breath, in and out, until we find ourselves lost in the beauty of an open fire and, ultimately, found again.


This aloneness is worth more than a thousand lives.
This freedom is worth more than all the lands on earth.
To be one with the truth for just a moment,
Is worth more than the world and life itself.
Rumi

May stillness fall softly into your hearts like snow and stay there long enough for you to make snow angels.