It was a delightful surprise to realize today that Scott & I share a core belief - that we're put on this planet to live to the fullest of our being, full throttle. That less is a disservice to the air we breathe, the space we take up on this big blue-green marble spinning 'round in what may be one universe among many.
As discoveries go, it's right up there with connecting with Ian through caring for Jada & her kitties. It's certainly as big a surprise. Totally taken unawares.
What a spur that is to put ye olde pedal to the metal!
Monday, July 23, 2012
NORMAL*
Everyone in my class,. from primary school through college, knew I drove my teachers batty. Made them nuts that I had so much talent & so little ability, that I could clearly see what was needed to be done & rarely did it or did it well. Most shared Miss Wilde's opinion, "She'll go far, if she ever gets those little feet on the ground."
She saw me a dreamer, someone who built beautiful castles in the sky without giving them any foundation to become real. She, like so many others, didn't begin to grasp that I was simply doing what it felt, from my very peculiar background, WAS normal.
Normal is an interesting word. As an adjective, Merriam-Webster defines it as, "conforming to a standard, usual, typical, or expected," but as a noun, it's defined as "the usual, average, or typical state or condition." So it can be normal for someone to act in very unexpected ways, if that is typical for him or her. But it does NOT make that person normal within society.
As a person, I am at my most normal whenever I dig & delve to discover more about issues. At the same time, that very characteristic - perhaps defining characteristic - made me abnormal within a family that seemed equally comfortable with letting things pass, accepting cursory explanations for serious matters or simply turning a well-intentioned blind eye.
No small wonder that I also drove my family batty - or that I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why. To me, digging & delving below the surface to get to the deeper reality was as natural, as normal as breathing. Looking back, it's easy to see that my standard was beyond abnormal to them. A s-i-l once informed me that I was, in her clinical experience, the most psychotic person she'd ever encountered. Being me, I immediately set about researching what she might have meant by that, was there any truth to it. Discovered that, In some core ways, she was spot on ~ if you use our family as the environment in which she experienced me, because in THAT context, my behaviors were way outside the norm. And, in my opinion, thank god they were!!
Pity my teachers, who didn't grasp that the way I was within the classroom was a perfect reflection of my personal experience & understanding of normal, as learned & modeled back home.
Just one teacher bucked "standard procedure" and talk directly to me about it; a new teacher, she hadn't yet become inculcated with the educational norm that teachers funnel such problems via report cards or special meetings with the parents. Had she acted normally, my parents - acting within their own norm - would have promptly done nothing about it.
What Miss Wilde didn't understand was that, to me, my feet WERE on the ground; that to me, I was acting in a totally normal way. I never understood why my teachers got in such a flutter over my having great ideas but rarely working them into reality.
Wasn't the ideal life all about setting a glorious intention? I didn't dread the grunt work needed to make it happen; it was more the question of why would I diminish all that potentially COULD be into the mundane of what ultimately was.
Even now, it goes against my nurtured nature to see forming an intention as a step toward the ultimate goal of COMPLETION rather than as something that would inevitably lead to my own disappointment over the final product. How much better to have it intact forever in my mind? Crazy? Absolutely!!
How abnormal, from society's perspective, that completion was never part of my nurtured nature's normal. Which is doubly confusing to me, as leaving things unrealized goes against my discovered true nature, which sees oneness as life's goal.
Oneness - intention resulting in completion, desire reflected in action, even simply knowing what I really want to do. A lot of that is still relatively foreign to me - there's a long way to go until I master it.
SGL was totally spot on - we've only got one life, so we need to try like hell to be all that we are. What a waste of time to be society's standard of normal rather than our own; anything less is a waste of precious energy, so utterly not worth the trip.
*While writing this very early post - started around 5:30 a.m. - on what's NORMAL, took a moment to check back on something SGL posted on FB, which I'd commented on. First time I'd seen his own comment on mine, which spun this blog posting into a different direction than I'd expected. Serendipity!!
She saw me a dreamer, someone who built beautiful castles in the sky without giving them any foundation to become real. She, like so many others, didn't begin to grasp that I was simply doing what it felt, from my very peculiar background, WAS normal.
Normal is an interesting word. As an adjective, Merriam-Webster defines it as, "conforming to a standard, usual, typical, or expected," but as a noun, it's defined as "the usual, average, or typical state or condition." So it can be normal for someone to act in very unexpected ways, if that is typical for him or her. But it does NOT make that person normal within society.
As a person, I am at my most normal whenever I dig & delve to discover more about issues. At the same time, that very characteristic - perhaps defining characteristic - made me abnormal within a family that seemed equally comfortable with letting things pass, accepting cursory explanations for serious matters or simply turning a well-intentioned blind eye.
No small wonder that I also drove my family batty - or that I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why. To me, digging & delving below the surface to get to the deeper reality was as natural, as normal as breathing. Looking back, it's easy to see that my standard was beyond abnormal to them. A s-i-l once informed me that I was, in her clinical experience, the most psychotic person she'd ever encountered. Being me, I immediately set about researching what she might have meant by that, was there any truth to it. Discovered that, In some core ways, she was spot on ~ if you use our family as the environment in which she experienced me, because in THAT context, my behaviors were way outside the norm. And, in my opinion, thank god they were!!
Pity my teachers, who didn't grasp that the way I was within the classroom was a perfect reflection of my personal experience & understanding of normal, as learned & modeled back home.
Just one teacher bucked "standard procedure" and talk directly to me about it; a new teacher, she hadn't yet become inculcated with the educational norm that teachers funnel such problems via report cards or special meetings with the parents. Had she acted normally, my parents - acting within their own norm - would have promptly done nothing about it.
What Miss Wilde didn't understand was that, to me, my feet WERE on the ground; that to me, I was acting in a totally normal way. I never understood why my teachers got in such a flutter over my having great ideas but rarely working them into reality.
Wasn't the ideal life all about setting a glorious intention? I didn't dread the grunt work needed to make it happen; it was more the question of why would I diminish all that potentially COULD be into the mundane of what ultimately was.
Even now, it goes against my nurtured nature to see forming an intention as a step toward the ultimate goal of COMPLETION rather than as something that would inevitably lead to my own disappointment over the final product. How much better to have it intact forever in my mind? Crazy? Absolutely!!
How abnormal, from society's perspective, that completion was never part of my nurtured nature's normal. Which is doubly confusing to me, as leaving things unrealized goes against my discovered true nature, which sees oneness as life's goal.
Oneness - intention resulting in completion, desire reflected in action, even simply knowing what I really want to do. A lot of that is still relatively foreign to me - there's a long way to go until I master it.
SGL was totally spot on - we've only got one life, so we need to try like hell to be all that we are. What a waste of time to be society's standard of normal rather than our own; anything less is a waste of precious energy, so utterly not worth the trip.
*While writing this very early post - started around 5:30 a.m. - on what's NORMAL, took a moment to check back on something SGL posted on FB, which I'd commented on. First time I'd seen his own comment on mine, which spun this blog posting into a different direction than I'd expected. Serendipity!!
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Becoming ONE
"In the face of everything life has to offer, to become ONE with the Universe each of us must share in its confusions and work through its conundrums to the point of spiritual maturity." ~ Welcome to the Wisdom of the World ~
Interesting to realize that I was thrust into DEEP spiritual thinking at a remarkably young age. At age 7, I was introduced to the first GREAT SPIRITUAL TRUTH that I can recall hearing.
At 11, my brother, Ian, died a sudden, violent death. Death & violence at his best friend's house, where they'd been horsing around, as 11 year old boys do.
Gone.
And there I was, at 7, left to make some sense of it. Left, I realize now, with a family whose approach to any sort of upset was to turn aside from the unpleasant. (For all the years after that unimaginable calamity, Mom would tell about how she had to put aside her own feelings to be support for the parents of his best friend, who felt overwhelmed with grief that it had happened in their house, under their watch. I saw my father weep over Ian's death, never Mom.)
So how splendid it was that Kenneth Stroh - only Kenneth Stroh - made the time to talk openly and forthrightly to a little girl about the big reality that her brother was gone. And when I asked him how Ian would look when I saw him in heaven (was I wondering if there'd still be a gunshot wound to his head?), "Mr. Stroh" explained that he wouldn't look like the Ian that I knew in this life, but that I'd recognize him immediately by his loves.
And that answered what was apparently my biggest question. It worked. And worked incredibly well. Although at 60 years, am still a little awed by how fully my 7-year old understood & accepted what Ken said. Incredible that a really little kid was comfortable with BIG QUESTIONS - to which I also expected good sound answers.
It wouldn't be until the early 1990s that the 7-year old's connection with BIG QUESTIONS came back to the fore. Forty years - wow! Oh, I kept asking them, just never got any answers. So I figured it was something amiss me, with my lack of any intellectual depth.
Sometimes I grieve those lost years, when I could have been collecting a range interesting experiences & knowledge, as much as I do my lost brother. I never developed the quality of mind that opens up & extends conversations that revolve around ideas & concepts. Never developed a storehouse of topics & life experiences which could serve as bridges to others. Some part of me still yearns to be the sort of person others enjoy talking with over a lingering glass of wine, but I never learned the grace of charming, engaging conversation.
Here comes the all-glorious BUT ~ whatever I turned out to be is what John Richard Murphy fell in love with & married. And that trumps every other wish for something else I might have entertained at one time or another!!!
And why was I allowed the great gift of GETTING that we're created in order to share in life's confusions, to work through its conundrums, that only by so doing can we get to the point of spiritual maturity, of oneness? It felt - still feels - like others around me were invested in brushing aside the very things I perceived as learning tools, as paths for getting to ONE.
Which leads me to, "(Our spiritual process) is the task of becoming awake to the Divine, to the natural, to the wisdom that even now lies within us, waiting only to be tapped." ~ Welcome to the Wisdom.... ~
Interesting to realize that I was thrust into DEEP spiritual thinking at a remarkably young age. At age 7, I was introduced to the first GREAT SPIRITUAL TRUTH that I can recall hearing.
At 11, my brother, Ian, died a sudden, violent death. Death & violence at his best friend's house, where they'd been horsing around, as 11 year old boys do.
Gone.
And there I was, at 7, left to make some sense of it. Left, I realize now, with a family whose approach to any sort of upset was to turn aside from the unpleasant. (For all the years after that unimaginable calamity, Mom would tell about how she had to put aside her own feelings to be support for the parents of his best friend, who felt overwhelmed with grief that it had happened in their house, under their watch. I saw my father weep over Ian's death, never Mom.)
So how splendid it was that Kenneth Stroh - only Kenneth Stroh - made the time to talk openly and forthrightly to a little girl about the big reality that her brother was gone. And when I asked him how Ian would look when I saw him in heaven (was I wondering if there'd still be a gunshot wound to his head?), "Mr. Stroh" explained that he wouldn't look like the Ian that I knew in this life, but that I'd recognize him immediately by his loves.
And that answered what was apparently my biggest question. It worked. And worked incredibly well. Although at 60 years, am still a little awed by how fully my 7-year old understood & accepted what Ken said. Incredible that a really little kid was comfortable with BIG QUESTIONS - to which I also expected good sound answers.
It wouldn't be until the early 1990s that the 7-year old's connection with BIG QUESTIONS came back to the fore. Forty years - wow! Oh, I kept asking them, just never got any answers. So I figured it was something amiss me, with my lack of any intellectual depth.
Sometimes I grieve those lost years, when I could have been collecting a range interesting experiences & knowledge, as much as I do my lost brother. I never developed the quality of mind that opens up & extends conversations that revolve around ideas & concepts. Never developed a storehouse of topics & life experiences which could serve as bridges to others. Some part of me still yearns to be the sort of person others enjoy talking with over a lingering glass of wine, but I never learned the grace of charming, engaging conversation.
Here comes the all-glorious BUT ~ whatever I turned out to be is what John Richard Murphy fell in love with & married. And that trumps every other wish for something else I might have entertained at one time or another!!!
And why was I allowed the great gift of GETTING that we're created in order to share in life's confusions, to work through its conundrums, that only by so doing can we get to the point of spiritual maturity, of oneness? It felt - still feels - like others around me were invested in brushing aside the very things I perceived as learning tools, as paths for getting to ONE.
Which leads me to, "(Our spiritual process) is the task of becoming awake to the Divine, to the natural, to the wisdom that even now lies within us, waiting only to be tapped." ~ Welcome to the Wisdom.... ~
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Jericho
Reading Making Your Way Through A Wild New World, encountered a guided visualization.
Now, I'm notorious for NOT doing well with guided visualizations. And this one started with envisioning myself in my favorite room in our house - I have no favorite room. In all of my life, in all the houses I lived in, I only had one favorite room ~ the living room at 2501 Woodland Road. Never fully comfortable in any others. Just the one. And this visualization clearly seemed to be talking about a present room.
Sigh... Okay, picked the room I was in, the den. Let's give it a try... And it clicked!! WOW!
At the end, the other who entered the visualization - a small black cat who may or may not be Amory - gave me a box, within which was a hammer & a chisel. I had shared with the other my primary problem of being encircled by a low wall, no more than two feet tall, which is keeping me penned into where I am. They are for chiseling an opening, but all I really need to do, the cat advised, is to lift my leg & hoist myself over. "But that is too simple for your human brain, which trusts difficult answers instead of simple solutions."
Which got me to thinking. Ever since I was 24, I've scaled wall after wall, the tallest being the first. Was never discouraged to find another wall; it seemed reasonable. Getting over walls became my most important activity. I called it getting clarity. But always, in the back of my mind, was the expectation of another wall.
It's pretty obvious that there is no wall after this last one. Just a red brick wall encircling me, about two feet high off the ground, with a top fashioned like a round bench, so I can sit down comfortably. Inside, of course.
So, now I have a hammer & chisel to chip my way out. When I get tired, I can sit on the top of the wall to rest. Or, if I am very clear & very bold, I can lift my leg & hoist myself over my final wall of Jericho.
Now, I'm notorious for NOT doing well with guided visualizations. And this one started with envisioning myself in my favorite room in our house - I have no favorite room. In all of my life, in all the houses I lived in, I only had one favorite room ~ the living room at 2501 Woodland Road. Never fully comfortable in any others. Just the one. And this visualization clearly seemed to be talking about a present room.
Sigh... Okay, picked the room I was in, the den. Let's give it a try... And it clicked!! WOW!
At the end, the other who entered the visualization - a small black cat who may or may not be Amory - gave me a box, within which was a hammer & a chisel. I had shared with the other my primary problem of being encircled by a low wall, no more than two feet tall, which is keeping me penned into where I am. They are for chiseling an opening, but all I really need to do, the cat advised, is to lift my leg & hoist myself over. "But that is too simple for your human brain, which trusts difficult answers instead of simple solutions."
Which got me to thinking. Ever since I was 24, I've scaled wall after wall, the tallest being the first. Was never discouraged to find another wall; it seemed reasonable. Getting over walls became my most important activity. I called it getting clarity. But always, in the back of my mind, was the expectation of another wall.
It's pretty obvious that there is no wall after this last one. Just a red brick wall encircling me, about two feet high off the ground, with a top fashioned like a round bench, so I can sit down comfortably. Inside, of course.
So, now I have a hammer & chisel to chip my way out. When I get tired, I can sit on the top of the wall to rest. Or, if I am very clear & very bold, I can lift my leg & hoist myself over my final wall of Jericho.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Dynamics v. Situations
Is it a GUY v. GAL thing, or is it me, this focusing on the underlying dynamics of a situation while my Keet focuses solely on situations? By rooting through to what appears to be the underlying dynamic, I can spot similar occurrences - or it feels like I can - while John sees/experiences strictly what happened.
Hence, John's absolutely sincere desire, after doing something that unintentionally wounded me, to never ever do it again - except for that to happen, it has to be the EXACT same thing or it doesn't connect.
And if I do something above & beyond the call of duty - such as dealing with FIOS whenever we have a problem with the cable (because I'm better with the computer) - it doesn't connect with the Hubster because it doesn't register with anything in his personal experience.
So, seems John needs to increase his range of experiences. Will leave it in his hands to get the FIOS TV problem resolved. I spent hours & hours yesterday trying - aggravation & frazzed nerves waiting waiting waiting then having FIOS mangle the situation even worse than it was, then spending 90 mins on the phone hearing endless muzak before finally hanging up at 11:15 p.m.; apparently, the rigors of all I experienced didn't sink in on him.
Small wonder ~ he's never done it himself. See, if he processed things in terms of dynamics, what I went through (to NO avail) would connect; he doesn't, it didn't. Not wrong, just his style.
And a style that tends to end up with me doing the grunt work for such wretched stuff.
Now, it will become a learning experience for both of us instead of an arduous (to put it mildly) chore for me.
If John wants the TV back in operation, HE can make it happen.
Will he rise to the occasion? Absolutely! And if he gets it done in record time, without aggravation, than I'll kick myself to not have thought of this sooner!!
Hence, John's absolutely sincere desire, after doing something that unintentionally wounded me, to never ever do it again - except for that to happen, it has to be the EXACT same thing or it doesn't connect.
And if I do something above & beyond the call of duty - such as dealing with FIOS whenever we have a problem with the cable (because I'm better with the computer) - it doesn't connect with the Hubster because it doesn't register with anything in his personal experience.
aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
So, seems John needs to increase his range of experiences. Will leave it in his hands to get the FIOS TV problem resolved. I spent hours & hours yesterday trying - aggravation & frazzed nerves waiting waiting waiting then having FIOS mangle the situation even worse than it was, then spending 90 mins on the phone hearing endless muzak before finally hanging up at 11:15 p.m.; apparently, the rigors of all I experienced didn't sink in on him.
Small wonder ~ he's never done it himself. See, if he processed things in terms of dynamics, what I went through (to NO avail) would connect; he doesn't, it didn't. Not wrong, just his style.
And a style that tends to end up with me doing the grunt work for such wretched stuff.
Now, it will become a learning experience for both of us instead of an arduous (to put it mildly) chore for me.
If John wants the TV back in operation, HE can make it happen.
Will he rise to the occasion? Absolutely! And if he gets it done in record time, without aggravation, than I'll kick myself to not have thought of this sooner!!
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Amazed
It's amazing how relationships defy labels. Every time I tried to put into a simple word or term my awe over the relationship I have with John, ended up utterly stymied. How to put into words something that so clearly embodies the wordless?
Maybe the best description is that he's the best learning lab possible. Of course, I've long believed our family provides an invaluable learning environment, that being our personal petri dish could be its highest calling. Imagine that on steroids & you've got my experience with marriage.
It's not about the amazing stories we've lived over the past 23 years, but the lessons learned from & through those stories. As John would say, being married still isn't easy, still is a learning process. It's not me, it's not him, it's not even us, but a whole different something that's impossible to pin down & amazing to live.
Maybe the best description is that he's the best learning lab possible. Of course, I've long believed our family provides an invaluable learning environment, that being our personal petri dish could be its highest calling. Imagine that on steroids & you've got my experience with marriage.
It's not about the amazing stories we've lived over the past 23 years, but the lessons learned from & through those stories. As John would say, being married still isn't easy, still is a learning process. It's not me, it's not him, it's not even us, but a whole different something that's impossible to pin down & amazing to live.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Taking a Different Tack
It stunned me to hear John explain that it was working a A.C. Moore & resting up from same that had significantly slowed his pace on the picture I'd requested. He worked three semi-half days until recently, when he started working only two.
Feels like John's core problem could be similar to mine - a profound lack of mindfulness.
Time slips away. And when we're aware of it, we poorly manage it.
I can't work on John, but I can work on myself. Take it step by step, until being focused on the next pragmatic step finally begins acting from a mindful place. Let the disappointment of the present situation fuel my personal desire to be more mindful, more aware, more productively active. Take the different tack away from head & hand bashing to spirit mending.
Feels like John's core problem could be similar to mine - a profound lack of mindfulness.
Time slips away. And when we're aware of it, we poorly manage it.
I can't work on John, but I can work on myself. Take it step by step, until being focused on the next pragmatic step finally begins acting from a mindful place. Let the disappointment of the present situation fuel my personal desire to be more mindful, more aware, more productively active. Take the different tack away from head & hand bashing to spirit mending.
smooshed
It's hard enough when John doesn't let me take a look at work he's doing for clients. It's devastating when he shuts me out of a painting he was doing at MY request.
My heart is smooshed.
Past tense. After weeks of working on the painting, it turns out he changed the position of the boa & turned the beautifully multi-colored feathered concoction into one shade of red.
It took him weeks to get that far, and it still was unfinished.
Am looking for a young artist to do the painting or make a digital re-imaging. Too bad the cure for a depleted trust account isn't so simple.
My heart is smooshed.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
The Light Dawns!
Impossible to remember a time that I wasn't trying to figure out what it was I did that seemed to make my family feel so irked with me, that could explain what made Kerry feel horrendously unhappy in my presence.
Now, 37 years after Kerry shared her deep antipathy with Mom in a letter, I GET IT. The light has finally dawned. Will never know for positive sure, but my guess is that it somehow connects with my always & forever driving need to know WHY people think the way they do. It's normal for me, so I just thought of it as being normal for everyone. It's not. And it's just my good fortune that it doesn't make John's skin crawl as much as it does others'.
When I asked John - three times - "How are things (i.e. traffic) on your side?" and three times he said NOTHING, it wasn't a slam to ask, "What were you thinking?" It was a genuine question. How many times have I said to John, "What was the basis of that thought/action? What were you thinking?"??? What was at the root of your action, what formed the basis of your thought. Not what was the trigger. What was the foundational concept that formed its groundwork.
If John HAD gotten to the heart of WHY he was so sure I was turning right, not left, that he couldn't answer a question that seemed contrary to that turn, he would NEVER have answered, "I don't know." He would have realized - as we both did, independently, later - that he expected I was heading to King of Tarts. Which meant a right turn, not a left. He didn't just think I would turn right, he had a darn good reason for thinking that. And if he'd said to me, at the time, "I thought you were going to King of Tarts," all would have been clear. But he didn't & that seemed utterly unlogical to me & utterly scary, since he didn't answer a clearly worded & repeated question.
It's impossible to imagine how being around that sort of life approach - wanting to know the fabric of a person's thought, not just the thought - could drive people right up a wall. And if I can't remember a time I wasn't trying to figure out what seemed to be experienced by my family as metaphysical fingernails on a chalk board, I sure as heck can't remember a time that wanting to know the deepest whys & wherefores didn't matter to me.
The light dawns. And although it doesn't change anything that was, doesn't change that I am as I am, it does make sense. And I feel total sympathy for how over-the-top, screeeeeetching bad it had to be for others to experience. Praise be, John gets it. Imagine if he didn't??
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)