Keeping the Dream

I revised my website tonight. And worked on a story.

I feel tired in that wonderful, glorious way you feel when you’ve exerted yourself and accomplished something. Not that I haven’t been accomplishing quite a bit with all my endeavors of late…but it wasn’t my creativity. Not my artistic creativity.

Without a doubt, homeschooling is one of the most creative – and satisfying – endeavors I have ever engaged in. But it’s not like writing a song or penning a story or finding a way to let your soul speak through imagery, tone and color.

I need that. How many times will I need to remind myself? Oh, well…at least I do manage to find myself back to the place where I always wonder how I ever left. But I’m there. Tonight, I am there.

I took off work. Partly because I’m still not over my virus, and the physical symptoms are starting to scare me. Better pay attention.

And partly because I just thirsted for a long drink of silence. Right now it feels warm, like a hot cup of tea falling in slow motion into your stomach, a soft landing, a slight explosion of comfort radiating outward.

And I think I just might be able to sleep tonight. I just might.

I have horrible insomnia. It’s gotten worse. Used to wake up in the middle of the night and not fall back to sleep for a couple hours. Now, I find myself wide awake as soon as my head hits the pillow no matter how tired I am, and stay awake until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. Which makes those days I have to wake up early – which is just about every day – really hard to get through.

I think that’s why I got so sick this past week, why it hit me so hard, why I’m still not back to full speed, why I haven’t been for a number of years now.

Anxiety, I guess is what keeps me awake. Getting older doesn’t help either, but it’s anxiety that’s the main culprit I think. When everything is quiet, my fears speak louder, and I’m feeling more worn and less able to resist what stresses me these days.

But not tonight. Tonight I fight back. What can I give? I thought as I lay awake. I can’t fall back asleep and I refuse to lie in bed and be consumed with worry about survival and finances and stuff like that. Not tonight.

So what can I give? What can I do to defy the feelings that I’m a victim of circumstances? To make the statement that I’m not lacking, that I can give fully from a resource rich and deep?

And then I thought of my music, my CD – those CD’s – the “mistakes”, the ones (1,000 of them) that we had replicated before we realized that two songs listed on the face of the CD were in reverse order from the way they were recorded on the CD. We had the opportunity to send the CD’s back, but when I realized the company would just destroy the CD’s anyway, and didn’t care if we removed them, Stacey and I had an “open 1,000 CD cases” party.

I have approximately 1,000 CD’s sitting in my office on a dowel anchored on a wooden base. I say “approximately”, because we had passed a few out to friends to leave in random areas, and I had left a few here and there. Our intention was to take these misprinted CD’s and share them, leave them in places for people to find. It was my belief, those who needed to hear the message on the CD, the people for whom the songs were intended, or for whatever reason, those who would not likely purchase or even become aware of the corrected CD’s would find the misprinted ones.

Either way, the songs would be heard as they were meant to.

But somehow, life came at me so fast, this project was forgotten…until tonight.

So what do you think? Would you like to join me?

I got out of bed, placed a CD in a case, and wrote a post-it note, “If you have found this, it is a gift for you to keep or pass on”, and stuck it on the CD. Tomorrow, if I go out, I shall leave that CD in whatever public place calls out to me to be discovered, claimed or gifted further to someone else. I have several such CD’s to place in my bag.

Random gifts of music.

There’s a smile on my face now…and I’m sleepy. I think I can go to bed now, and lay my head down on a soft pillow of a dream.

It’s interesting the last post I wrote here is entitled “Losing Our Childhood”.

What about our present moments? What about your life? The one you wanted to craft, the one you dreamt of creating, the one that’s supposed to be rich in experiences with those closest to you, with your creative passions and love.

You can’t have everything, and the closer toward the end of my life I travel, the more I appreciate just how true that is. So priorities become dearer and each moment is cherished all that much more.

These are not moments to be used up in anxiety or hurt or anger or any of those emotions that suck the life out of you.

I want my artist life back. Heck, I want it fully and wholly for the first time. Because everything I have ever done has always been on borrowed time, has always been with some kind of apology or after some kind of struggle to wrest a piece of it for myself. That’s why it took me four years to create our first CD from the time we started recording to the time the CD was pressed; why it took me so long to ever write the songs.

I don’t regret any of the time I have spent helping loved ones who truly needed my help. I do regret not protecting more of my time with my children from people who had no right to it but took it anyway. But in these past couple days, I have realized that I really do need to make a change. I need to make a change in my life and embrace that life like I never have before.

I’m an artist. That is not a dirty word. This is not a confession. It’s a declaration.

I’m an artist who needs to write – not just spend countless hours journaling out my feelings over having been verbally abused or emotionally slammed or strung along or betrayed or disrespected or some other natural consequence that arise from toxic situations, but to truly write – manuscripts and songs, to learn the musical instruments I’ve always wanted to learn or improve, to pick up a paint brush and perhaps even paint.

I need to come back to that artistic center, my artistic self and do what I need to do before I die. Life is short, and death often comes unexpected. I don’t mean to sound morbid here, but the resource that is most squandered is time – and not one of us has so much we can afford to do that.

And if you don’t value yourself, don’t expect anyone else to. If you’re not considerate of your time, don’t expect others to be. If you don’t prioritize your art and its development, don’t expect others to set up your easel for you or fill your fountain pen. It’s your creativity. It’s your life. You have to live it or watch it slip away.

I’m back. I’ve been in a state of shock or mourning or loss or something. I’ve resurfaced and then gone back under. But today I come kicking back up to the surface, my lungs gasping for air. I’m mad. I’m inspired. I’ve been laid flat and I’m coming up swinging.

Things are going to change. And this time I’m determined my words won’t come back to taunt me.

This time they won’t merely be a record of what I failed to do, but the beginning of what I finally accomplished.

I’m not talking about through child abuse. Well, not in the sense we think of. That’s how I lost my childhood, abuse.

But losing our childhood is happening in another way and on a massive scale.

In a few minutes I’ll wake my little girl up. I let her sleep in longer in the mornings, especially in the summer, when we stay up real late. Although we do home school throughout the rest of the year and can be flexible, too.

Actually, referring to a “school year” is really a strange way of looking at life, when we’re not even in an institution that needs to run within that time frame.

Somehow though, the state regulations do make you, at least, aware of the schedule they run by and expect you to adhere to in some capacity. The reasoning is that its to make sure we are accountable and do right by our children, but I am not so sure the Department of Education, itself, is doing right by the children they are supposed to serve.

I’ve been thinking more and more lately about how oppressive our education system is becoming. Even if I did not have my other reasons for homeschooling, this insidious pressure to TEACH TO THE TEST, that all public schools – brick ‘n mortar and cyber – face, under the threat of losing their funding, would, alone, be enough for me to pull my daughter out of school if she was in one, and never let her step foot in one, if she wasn’t.

I went to our school district’s web site. It had a notice on the home page that stated that from now on, educational trips will be granted for a maximum of five days for the year. Anything over that would be counted as unexcused absence.

So if a child had an opportunity to travel to Europe for a couple weeks or go to NASA in Florida for more than five days, that child would be considered truant – even though their educational experience would far exceed anything that could be offered in a classroom setting.

Why? Because that child would not be in school getting drilled in facts that were sure to show up on the yearly state tests. The results of those tests is the school’s report card. Passing scores = receiving funds.

Students are required to provide job security for their teachers and administrators. Can’t let real opportunities for learning get in the way.

Not only are children coerced into spending more time in school – and they’re now talking about extending hours and days – in many schools across the country, they are given fewer opportunities in other disciplines, such as music, art and drama.

Even if scores were raised through these measures, what are we really attaining? It’s like feeding hungry kids junk food, and watching their weight go up. But are they healthy?

Are our kids educationally, intellectually or emotionally healthy? Are our kids learning the skills to be lifelong learners? Are they even learning what they’re learning in school? Is it even retained after the test and if so, for how long? Are we nourishing a child’s natural drive to learn, or have we beaten our kids down so low they have to be convinced, “learning is fun” or “can be fun”, because our experiences through school is that it really sucks, and we’ve all bought that as a given?

I lost my childhood because of a father who was inappropriate and a mother who was in denial. And it just makes me so sad to see a whole generation of children losing their childhood for institutionalized requirements.

I think I’ll wake Brhiannon up now, so we can go outside and play.

If I had just read the Daily Word for yesterday, I doubt it would have gone in very deep. After all, I’ve read similar words and sentiments before.

But I had just spent most of the afternoon pulling and digging out weeds, and letting the experience speak to me about different characteristics of healing. So when I read the words using imagery of planting seeds and pulling weeds to convey the process of prosperity, it more than spoke to me – it grabbed me.

Not only did I get the original intent of the message, but it spoke to me in volumes on a much deeper and personal level.

All night, I sat in the warm company of wonderful thoughts, thoughts of being spoken to, talked to and taught. About the caring that went into that. About not just being not alone, but supported and looked after.

That “someone” would take the time to reach me in this way, that I’d finally be alert enough to at least pay attention, to take note.

I pondered the process of weeding, going back in my mind how I not only pulled the weeds, but dug them out. How some were easy to pull up with barely a hold on the surface of the earth, and others clung in great clumps with a death-like vice, not willing to give up without a good amount of sweat and effort on your part.

And I thought, that’s how weeding unhelpful thinking and digging up disempowering patterns can be in your personal life. Some can be easily plucked out with a simple decision, and others take work, lots of hard work to uproot, only to find runners that have spread out and there’s more to deal with than you thought.

So this morning, I’m letting myself receive the fruits from this wonderful experience of yesterday, and in considering how much deeper and richer the lessons were for my having lived the imagery before reading them, I found myself wondering, what if that’s what this life is for?

What if physical reality is a classroom for angels (and some would think, also demons) who need to learn hands on?

You know, angels, spiritual beings who need…or want special ed classes, because they’re “right brain” or holistic thinkers. Those lovely consciousnesses who languish with textbook type learning or for whom it’s not enough to understand intellectually, but need to feel, see, taste, smell and hear full dimensionally to really understand, to make their knowledge theirs.

And it changes things a bit for me to go from creatures who deserve to go to hell or beings who live in world created by the mistaken thought of separation, to a type of special ed class, delightful, terrible and filled with opportunities and choices for those special ed students who learn best hands on.

And you do realize, only those kids in institutionalized instruction are labeled “special ed” as if it were a disability. Those in other settings – like in the real world – are called inventors, entrepreneurs and at times even genius.

Not that the human race is particularly genius, but it is, I think, a beautiful example of a desire to engage, to learn and become more than what it was.

And in that is a beautiful vulnerability that can positively take one’s breath away.

…there is a garden. Really. Pulling back long runners of wild greenery, I find a garden, or at least a piece of one – variegated leaves of contrasting green planted as a part of someone’s vision of their home.

Could have been my Kenny. I can see him hastily digging a hole and planting his latest addition from the nursery. Got to do it NOW, you know.

Or maybe it was our son, doing one of the many chores assigned to him at the drop of a hat by his dad. Or perhaps Kenny’s parents, who in their turn, had passed away from one form or another of cancer, too.

But there it was, a little garden growing underneath the weeds.

Healing is like that. No matter how deep it gets buried, whether smothered or strangled, there is that life force within us that perseveres.

And do you know what else can be found under the weeds?

Space. That’s right, space. In some places, clearing the weeds away I found nothing – well, not exactly nothing. There were scrambling crickets and long wet earthworms hurrying to burrow back into the rich earth. But there was no garden, not even a remnant of one. Everything had been smothered away.

I looked at the uninterrupted brown – a wide open invitation for more weeds…unless I planted something in their place.

And healing is like that, too. Not enough to do the work of clearing things out and letting go. We need to choose what to bring in. We have to embrace.

And then I come back in, pleased with my mind’s pondering, and I check my email. There’s the Daily Word from Unity. It reads,

“My thoughts are like seeds in the rich soil of my mind…If thoughts of fear or lack pop up, I release them just as I would remove weeds from my garden.’

Of course.

And healing’s like that, too – coming to you with multi-layered meaning for your multi-layered life.

You know, sometimes with the passing of my sister and Kenny, I feel like an orphan. I know I have family through my children and grandchildren, and I can’t begin to tell you how blessed I am by them.

But when I look to the left and look to the right, there is no one standing beside me anymore. And it’s been a long time since I looked behind me, for I know there hasn’t been anyone there to lean against from my family of origin and theirs for more years than I care to remember.

But it’s days like today, when Life seems to speak to me through weeds and dirt and half buried flowers, and then taps me on the shoulder to whisper another delicious thought using those same images, that I realize just how not alone I am.

And I think maybe I’m not such an orphan after all.

I will not be so afraid anymore.

This is one of the things I have learned. That despite all my assertions to wanting to share my writings and music, I am actually afraid to do so. Sabotage in all its forms from procrastination to just plain stupidity provides me that false sense of safety over and over again.

And the closer I get to actually stepping out into the spotlight, as it were, the more desperate my attempts to prevent that.

Not that I actually succeed in that all the time, mind you. I’ve performed and written articles and what not, quite a number of times. But I hold myself back from what I could do and travel to where I could go.

I travel at a snail’s pace, and recently, it’s been brought to my attention that I would even hurt myself than to become who I am meant to be. Crazy isn’t it?

But it’s not all that uncommon. Too many people who have so much to offer hold back.

But I will not be so afraid anymore. I am looking this beast in the eye. I won’t fight it. That’s another act of sabotage. I will look upon this part of my being with compassion.

Then perhaps, it will choose to come along with me as the healthy sense of survival and discernment it’s meant to be.

It’s amazing who you can find to be your teacher. Everyone can teach us something, but sometimes someone so unexpected can change your entire world, how you see yourself, what you thought you always knew.

These are usually not the ones who hold degrees or positions in institutions of great learning, although we can learn a lot from them.

They are usually life’s teachers, the ones life sends your way when you least expect it.

I have met such a teacher. I can be a hard head. One of the hardest things to break through can be our own self image. I am no exception.

We are usually not that grateful to the one who challenges our comfortable notions about ourselves. I wasn’t. But in these early morning hours, after letting my thoughts ponder these new realizations…slowly, at first, but growing in depth over time…I wake up realizing that I have been blessed by the presence of a truly great spirit, someone the world would not acknowledge, but is, nonetheless.

I am still reeling from the loss of Kenny, but in wandering through my grief, my path has brought me to one who has delivered me a big dose of awareness and opportunity for growth, for which I am now truly grateful.