The Scent of Light

In the Cherry Blossoms shade
There is not such thing as
a stranger
Kobiashi Issa

So, it's all pink and girly.

I know.

I almost feel as if I should apologise. I didn't want it to be quite so, well PINK but there was a shortage of non-fussy, non eye-hurting backgrounds that went with my beloved cherry blossom picture. So - pink and girly it will have to be. At least for a while.

I'll keep it brief as the natives are getting restless. Something to do with a nappy change and some book reading I believe.

Spring has arrived.

Oh, I know there's another few weeks of Winter left according to the calendar, but I'm with the trees, particulary my beloved cherry blossom trees, which are in full and an unembarrassed flower around our way. Even the bossy magnolias are getting their showy flowers out for the passers by. So to me, it's spring.

I am unwillingly drawn into the activity that Spring seems to demand. I mean, I have actually cleaned my windows. This is something not undertaken even on my best days. I tidy restlessly and hoover angrily but I'm not big on proper cleaning. As long as things aren't covered in crap, I'm relatively happy. So cleaning the windows, unencouraged as I was, is a little strange and definitely one of the symptoms of Spring Fever.

I am still deep in my winter longings so this early awakening is not entirely welcome. I can feel my soul stretching towards warmth and the scent of something green floating on the wind.

That's quite annoying as you can imagine.

I am unready to come out of my hibernation. I have not yet experienced the deep stillness of the snow and I am unprepared to move forward into new life again. I still need the deep, dreamless sleep of winter and so feel distracted, uneasy and ill at ease in my own skin.

Still, the cherry blossoms cheer me. As does the pussy willow. I want to cut some of the cheeky pinks and furry grey-white branches and put them on my dining table. Bring a little of that spring inside, so that I can sit with it for a while and gently unfold myself from my heavy layers and my dark days. Their bright little bodies make me ache a little.

It is still cold up here in the hills and I do love that. But you just know when a change is on its way and I can feel it. I have always been able to sense the seasons changing before the calendars. There is something unique to each seasonal energy. Some pull that takes you spiralling upwards and outwards, as in Spring and Summer. Or diving deeper into the 'Sshhh' that is Autumn and Winter. I like feeling those connections, especially as I am someone for whom connection to life and to the Divine is somewhat sporadic and unreliable. Probably because I simply do not allow myself time to be still and do nothing. This is what winter is for, for me. A time of silence and deep reflection. Of course, that doesn't take into consideration the needs of a life full of child centred activities and needs. Still the virtue of a good practice of prayer and contemplation is that it can be easily brought back into even the busiest life with a little attention. It's just whether you want to pay that attention or not. Sometimes I don't.

And so, in this strange state of half awakenedness, this heart will try to sit. Hopefully the next step, the next shape that awaits me, will become clear in a little while.

There is some kiss we want with our whole life,
The touch of Spirit on the body...

Rumi

The Challenge of Acceptance, The Art of Nourishing

Storms

Have this playing as you read this.

I would love to come to you healed and say that all of your words had made a difference. They did. They do. But they do not undo, unknot, unravel the many shields of my self. I am deeply grateful for such kindness as has been shown to me and ever humbled that people whom I will most likely never meet, have taken the time to share their experiences, offer wisdom and advice (all of it good, sound advice) or to simply 'be' with me for a moment. It has been unexpected.

I am feeling a little less 'Noir'. There are moments of light, laughter and happiness - of course there are. It's just impossible at this point to tell what is going to happen next. I am, for once, not anxious to 'fix it'. I am allowing the 'what is' to visit and not feel like I have to escape from it. I know that I have been touched by some sort of sadness that goes very deep and that will not let me loose just yet. No matter how much I struggle against its silky grip.

I'm so tired and so weary to my bones of trying and getting nowhere. I'm so tired of never living up to my own expectations. So tired of always falling short and getting up and trying all over again. And so I have decided to stop. Not stop living obviously, that would be stupid. Just stop striving all the time. Stop trying to sit on my anger at the expense of my passion, my joi de vivre, my soul's yearning to be heard, to be free. Of course, it is easy to say and not so easy to do. Not so easy to 'surrender' when one does not know how to bend to the prevailing winds. How do you describe the act of surrender? What does letting go look like? Feel like? How do you know when you have achieved it? And what of anger? My anger is a part of it all too. I have yet to learn how to express my anger in more appropriate and manageable ways. I have sat on it for so long, all of my life really, and now it wells up at the slightest provocation and is destructive to the one person I want to protect from it more than any other. And yet. I don’t know how to let go and it’s not something anyone else can tell me how to do. How do you explain the process, the art, of surrender to someone who does not know what surrender feels like, what being empty feels like?

I have always known what I have to do. (Have to?) I have been searching for a way but seem incapable of actually doing it. Incapable of finding that middle pathway between self-loathing and self-love, between anger and passion, between nurturing others and nurturing myself. It was quite the revelation to discover that I don't trust myself. I don't think that I know how to.

My acupuncturist, Aisla, is an amazing and intuitive woman. Today, as I dissolved into tears in her office (yet again), grateful for just a moment when I could be 'me' and let the overwhelm come and not pretend to be on top of it all, to be coping, I realised that this is who I really am. This tear streaked, overwhelmed, oh so tired mummy who wants so desperately to be a good mummy and not a bad mummy all the time, who wants so much to be all that she hoped she would be as a parent, but isn't. This is it. This is as good as it gets. At least for now. And in her office, for those few moments, it's ok. Or at least, if not ok, ok that its not ok.

She sits her needles into my skin and they crawl or throb or itch and then she asks me what I think that I do well. I am quiet for a long time. Then I realise that I can offer her nothing. I can say nothing good about myself. Find nothing good to bring forward for us to talk about. 'That's very telling.' She says in her quiet way. 'Your inner critic is dominating. You need to bring out your inner encourager.' Yes. I'm sure I do. But what I need most of all is to let it go. Let go of the striving for constant perfection (especially when I don't know that this is what I am doing). I was moulded for the challenge, for the winning of battles, for being the best at stuff and honestly, it pretty much came easily to me. I didn't fail that much. But I did get scared of making mistakes. I don't know how else to play. So now I sit with the knowledge that this parenting, nurturing thing may be one battle that I cannot win. And why is it a battle anyway? Surely these things should be soft edged and soft focused and easy, not iron and unyeilding and frosty. If the way is hard, if the road you are on constantly brings you back to the same stiff, cold place of hatred and angst, then you are on the wrong frigging road. You'd think that would be obvious wouldn't you?

But its not. It never is. We can never see the beauty that stares us in the face or the courage we have in the face of adversity, when we are the ones doing the looking. I am well aware that this applies to me, of course I'm too busy looking at you.

It's not that I want to be someone else. I don't. I do sometimes entertain wild fantasies about being somewhere else, but I don't actually want to be someone else. Unless that someone is Cate Blanchett perhaps or Kate Bush. I'd trade lives with them for a day. But then I'd want to come back here and be me again and cuddle my girl and hug my man. So no. It's not about that. It's about not knowing who I am. It's about not being able to find something lovable, something bright and good and inspiring about myself to offer up to this life. It's about truly not understanding what about me makes this path so bloody hard when I have so much love to give to it.

If I abandon everthing to a single moment,
then I reach you.
O light-hearted beautiful of the world,
give me that heavy cup.

Give it,
and then I'll be saved
from sorrow and helplessness both.
I'm so tired of feeling oppressed by anxiety
and all of anxiety's troublesome friends.

give it to me,
for then I'll be drunk with God's glass
and be annihilated completely.
I'll open my wings in absence and fly away to the placeless place.
RUMI

I have spoken before about the process of 'becoming'. And it is to this that I want to surrender. I have no choice really because what I am doing is breaking me into a million tiny little pieces. But how? How do I reach into the deepest still beating part of my heart and bring it forth into the light? How do we touch that little part of ourselves that is Divine and allow it to lead? I am so used to putting my intellect before my heart. My mind over my body. But thinking has brought me to here. Again and again. There is no thinking my way out of this.

Nurturing
And what is nurturing?
I can tell you what it is not. It is not driving yourself daily to accomplish the impossible. It is not running like a greyhound around the same well worn track after the same scabby rabbit who is always out of the reach of your snapping jaws. It is not trying to make yourself something that you aren't and never were. But I cannot tell you what it is. I could reel off some trite magazine worthy observations about 'time for you' like having a long soak in a hot bath (my bath isn't long enough to lie down in - why do they not build them with a sodding head rest for Gods sake?), or taking a mini-break (not when you are mini-broke), eating well and getting enough rest. But then what if you don't cook well or just simply don't enjoy cooking? What if your rest is held entirely in two chubby little hands over which your deepest desire to get a full 8 hours have no dominion? What if you truly don't know what nourishes your deepest self? What then?

Nurturing does not come naturally to me. I've said this before. I can't tell if its because I'm lazy (as I sometimes am) or because I am just lacking in energy and inclination (does that class as lazyness?). Right now, with so little time and energy and freedom, it feels like I have nothing left to give. I am having to learn about nurturing myself and my family one day at a time when I thought that it would all come so easily to me. I realise now that I simply don’t trust myself to be a good parent. I believe in instincts, just not mine.

* Sadness & Light

Acceptance.
So in this place of 'no trust' I sit. In this place of 'self-loathing' I wait. Inbetween these moments of sadness and light, I open. I wait to accept myself and this and it. And I know that nothing can truly change until acceptance seeps as deeply into my skin as the striving I wear like a tribal tattoo. I am unravelling and it feels raw and frightening and my skin feels blistered with all my shattered hopes and dreams. What comes out of this blistering darkness I wonder? I guess there's only one way to find out.

'Some hearts are ghosts and they drown in dark waters,
just as silt grows heavy and drowns with the stone.'

Come As You Are

"If you surrender yourself to your essence,
the whole world surrenders to you."
Come As You Are ~Rumi

So, I have changed the name of my blog and in doing so, I have changed its reason for being. In the beginning The Dark Mother was upon me, with me and working her shadow magic through me. I believe that I am emerging, blinking, into the light of a new day. It is as much a decision as it is a process. I no longer wish to dwell in darkness. I no longer wish to mother through shadow. Who I am is splitting open and I am more ready than before to face the discomfort and joy that this journey will bring. I am ready to face that which I have previously turned away from and to sit with it. In this change comes a promise of peace.

It's not that I expect that my life will continue onwards without darkness. I know that it won't and I don't think I would enjoy it if it did. I appreciate the dark. I love the night and the end to striving that it brings. I would not more be without the dark as a balance to the light as I would be without the night as a balance to the day. I still hit the edges. I still struggle with my vulnerability in motherhood and my anger but, despite this, I simply want to refocus my attention on the possibilities for awakening that are present in this journey. The new title comes from a book I'm currently reading by Pema Chodron called Starting Where You Are (see What Mummy is Reading). She refers to Bodhichitta which is the awakened heart - the art of living in our wounded, softened heart. I don't know why but it spoke to me. It is a journey I feel I have been unknowingly working towards all of my life. My spiritual journey, though sometimes confused, has always been towards this state of Bodhichitta. I long to soften and awaken my heart and begin the process of unravelling those places within me that are battered and bruised. Not because I want to wear them as some sort of badge of honour - 'look what I have survived' - but more because I simply want to let it all go. Those who have visited here before will know how hard I find it to surrender and it is precisely because of that that I am walking, head down, into its powerful wind.

What I love about this idea of the awakened heart is the capacity for joy it contains. I have been inspired over and over by *Erin from Bluebirdbaby and she refers to this state of unadulterated joy for the simplicity of life in her recent Butterfly post. She is another woman who, like me, struggled with motherhood initially before learning the subtle art of surrender and the joy that it contains. She really has 'got it'. She explains her experience of it better than I ever could, so please pop over to her blog and enjoy her own words on the subject.

It has taken some time but I have finally begun to understand the true nature of the statement 'with our thoughts we make our world' ~Buddha and, this being so, I needed to step voluntarily out of my own shadow and into the world of lightness once again. I am someone, who despite a natural tendency to be sentimental and soft-hearted, leads with my extremely sharp mind. I am not a scientific type or a maths and numbers type, I am a creative sort who is held hostage by my overly analytical brain and because I am so soft-centred, it often leads to unhappiness with the way things are. I punish myself severely for all perceived mistakes or wrongs and I never give myself any credit for the things I do right. I am not tender or kind or compassionate to myself. I am not patient or understanding of my faults. And so I am here, at this strangely quiet internal crossroads, not walking but waiting until the path becomes clear to me. I am here learning to be compassionate and kind to the only person that really matters on this journey. Me. It sounds terribly selfish doesn't it? I know. I have a hard time putting myself first in any situation but its true. My spiritual journey has nothing to do with my hubble or my child. It is only about the unfolding of my Self. Sure it may impact on them - positively or negatively - but it is not about them. What they think or experience is not the focus of my spiritual journey, only awakening my heart and following my soul's guidance is important here. In this place I am more present and therefore more able to love well than when I wear myself weary to the bone trying always to put them first. In the place of the awakened heart there is joy in every moment if we are awake to see it - how could that not benefit them?

I am beginning a new type of meditation this week - *Shamatha-Vipashyana - just a conscious watching of the breath and an awareness of my self-talk which is simply labelled as 'talking' and let go of. I'll let you know how I go. My meditation has been sporadic of late due to my daughter's somewhat unpredictable waking and sleeping cycle. She's been waking up at my meditation time again recently and crying out for me. I am powerless to resist the pull of those sad little 'mamma mamma' kitten cries. I think i have been a bit stagnant of late actually and reading Pema has put me back on track once more. I am not a buddhist, nor do I have any aspirations to become one. I am simply drawn to the simplicity of that way of life and wish to try new things. I will always be a daughter of the Goddess because my wild green heart demands it of me.

So - I will leave you with a poem from Rumi to contemplate. It is one which I think perfectly describes my state of being.

Come as You Are

Where is Islam's accent
when it comes to the language of love?
If you surrender yourself to your essence,
the whole world surrenders to you.

Every day spent in separation feels as long as a year.
But when you come out of separation,
where does the day go?
And what becomes of the night?

On this pilgramage, removing the dress
of your existence
is the cloak you must wear.
But who will be able to comply
with the conditions of this cloak?

Village and town, near and far,
the changing seasons,
all are on this side of the sea.
But on the other side, where is the town?
Where are the seasons?

Man's mind and reason have created
the cold loneliness of separation.
But when he warms up with that wine,
where is the mind? And what becomes of reason?

A bird in the cage
is under someone else's control.
But when he breaks the cage and flies away,
what becomes of the control?
Where even is the bird?

When the mind is confined to the head,
it tempts the body to commit sins.
But when the mind of minds explodes open,
where are the sins now? Where is the body?

If you drink,
go swaying to the land of secrets
without your feet.
If you're already drunk, then come as you are.
Where has your mind gone?
And where is the need to be something
you are not?

*Erin and I share quite a lot in common - particularly books and ideas.*
*This link is to a page with an excerpt from the aforementioned Pema Chodron's book which tells you how to do this type of meditation. Very simple.

My Twilight Dreams

*I added this picture purely because it's called Twilight and I love the simplicity and drama of the image. I haven't read the book or seen the movie but now that I've seen this, I might.

Ahhh - I love this time of day in Winter (which it officially is now). The day is emptying of its busyness as people move indoors to end their day and to maybe build a fire or perhaps prepare something warm and yummy for their families. At this time of day I like sit in my gorgeous bush garden just for a few moments as the cool mist starts to creep in. I breathe deeply and watch the sun slipping its heavy golden head below the horizon. It's a time to surrender the day to the Sun God and to welcome the Dark Night Goddess as her slivered moon rises slowly in the West.

Basking in those few moments of lingering gold I wonder how anything could ever be wrong in my world. We are surrounded by such beauty, such diversity and such wonder if we can just sit still enough to see it and, more importantly, let it see us. I am not someone who meditates regularly so these few moments in the twilight of each day are my time to reconnect with all that is most important to me. I can sing chants or simply 'OM' into the shadows while my wee girl chases our black furball around the garden. Poor Belladonna, not much of a chance for peace while the beanie is around but she wears it all well and is (mostly) patient with her rather rough ministrations. I am also not someone who finds it particularly easy to surrender - to anything, wanted or unwanted. I think that I am relatively highly strung by nature and so spend most of my waking unconsious hours clinging on to my life with ever whiter knuckles so again, these twilight times are my way of acknowledging that there is something, some Great Mystery that is so much bigger than me and yet is also a part of me and in which I am learning to trust. I can breathe and sing and let go. Sometimes this time brings me an wonderful sense of peace which I can take into my last activities of the day - preparing a meal for my family, washing up, following the usual bed time rituals with my girl and all the way into sleep. Sometimes it lasts just long enough to prevent me from snapping at my daughter as she paints the kitchen floor with my tenderly prepared soul food. Occasionally, it reminds me to forgo the tiny pleasures of the goggle box and to sit quietly with my Beloved man and read in companiable silence. On even more quiet spirited evenings, this glossy silence allows us to enter into the soul-gazing and generous lovemaking that we hope will result in another little soul being welcomed into our tiny family, to stretch our hearts and to expand our small world. And from these small adventures in my bush garden I am able to remember that I am, to coin a cliche, a spiritual being having a human experience which is, in turn, a reminder to be awake to each moment and to be grateful.

As I sit here in my study, candles burning, incense wafting through the warm air currents created by the ducted heating, I watch with growing love, my hubby and my daughter doing father/daughter stuff in the garden. He throwing her around like a stuffed teddy, she giggling with delight. Both waving up at me from the darkening green and smiling with affection and humour. I am blessed. I know this. The sun is nearly gone now and it is almost too dark in this room to see but I am loath to turn on a light and lose these cosy feelings of connectedness with everything. Electric lights seem to bleach all the atmosphere from a room and I am a creature for whom atmosphere is important. Still, I must go. Like many mothers my culinary expertise is needed in the kitchen and there is a cubed pumpkin with my name on it waiting to be turned into some hearty pumpkin soup.

It is a night for poetry of the spirit so I will leave you with an offering from my Beloved Rumi: Dance with the Bandage Torn Off.

Dance, when you're broken open.
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you're perfectly free.

Struck, the dancers hear a tambourine inside them,
as a wave turns to foam on its very top, begin.

Maybe you don't hear that tambourine,
or the trees leaves clapping time.

Close the ears on your head
that listen mostly to lies and cynical jokes.
There are other things to hear and see:
dance-music and a brilliant city
inside the Soul.
God said of Muhammed,
He is an ear.
He was wholly ear and eye,
and we are refreshed and fed by that,
as an infant boy is at his mother's breast.

Good night and may the Goddess of this deep and dark bring you strange and brilliant dreams.