PAINT ON PAPER

Spiral
I’ve just returned from an extraordinary week of process painting in Taos, New Mexico. Two days before I left to drive down there from my home in northern Colorado, we had about ten inches of new snow. I was hoping the mountains in Taos would not be full of the remainder of that snow and make the driving tricky. It is May, after all.

For most of the week the sky was that magnificent New Mexico blue that comes from low humidity with fat, contented white clouds sprinkled here and there around the mountain tops and over the rooftops of the town. Only once did we get a real spring thunderstorm rumbling and crashing through one afternoon, beginning and ending over the course of a couple of hours. For a few minutes rainwater poured off the roofline of our painting studio before quickly disappearing, leaving the sage and juniper lush and fragrant in the temporarily humid air.

The Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos is a wonderful place to retreat and live in seclusion for eight days of hard work. Our group had a lecture on the nature of creativity and painting every morning with the creator of the process I find so brilliantly stirs my soul. Her name is Michele Cassou, and her process is all about living without rules. Of course there are some “suggestions” about what that means as it applies to paining, but the whole point is to try to free yourself from expectations and judgments enough to just paint for the joy of it. This turns out to be much harder than you might imagine.

The mind, it turns out, is not a happy camper without anything to grab onto. “Start by picking a color,” says Michele. “Just let the paintbrush find its way. Follow the line around. Creativity always knows where it wants to go. It will never let you down.” Oh my, so much easier said than done, I think.

The few days after I return home are full of insight. It seems as if my intuitive soul has been cleared and opened. I see subtleties of color in the awakening plants as spring spreads over the land around me. I hear the slightest emotion in the words people speak to me. I review the paintings done while I was in Taos, and remarkably the process seems to have picked up where I left off so many years ago. The imagery is no more or less colorful or descriptive, but I can see my own evolution as a person.

The process is ever so much more profound and deep even than therapy, and I’ve had hours and hours and hours and types across my life. It is ever so much deeper and quieter and gentler than what I know of religion.

I think I am beginning to understand the meaning of what she is saying when Michele suggests that this type of painting can be, and to her actually is, a spiritual path. What is “creativity” but the creative power of our life force flowing through us? And where does that come from, one might imagine. To me the answer is at once simple and profound. I did not give myself life. I do not sustain my own life, except to feed myself and do my best to keep myself healthy. There is a Power far greater than me at work. Even if I try to copy an image that appears in the painting of one of the other members of the class, the way it comes through me is different. Each of us is, indeed, unique.

“The Universe is benevolent,” Michele said to me one day in a workshop years ago as I was sobbing over something I had painted that brought up very deep feelings.

“Yes, it is,” I can say now. It doesn’t matter that some of what I’ve gone through in life has been hard to bear. It doesn’t even matter that some of life has been beautiful, or full of love. What matters to me is that I realize I am part of a greater whole. The fact that I can’t define it, or limit it, or put words to it leaves me in awe. To me this is proof of “things unseen.” The hand of God, in other words. I am so fortunate to have taken this workshop.

The drive home through the mountains in New Mexico is beautiful. Here and there snow still touches the tops of the peaks. I can wind down and enjoy the landscape before I hit an Interstate again. I can preserve the inner space that helps me remain open in the week that follows. I look forward to how this experience will continue to blossom in my life. I feel it at work, stirring and moving. “How will it show up?” I ask myself. I can’t answer that right now. I am only left with one certainty. All is well. No matter what is to come. All is well.

ORANGE-CHESTED ROBIN

Forest View

A large, orange-chested robin stands sheltered under the rear bumper of my neighbor’s car, looking out at the snow madly whirling and falling on this first day of May. The birds are chirping and calling and flying after each other in spite of the weather. I saw several earthworms roiling around in the shallow gutter water as I put my recycling out on the curb for pickup earlier. The ground is too warm for the streets to hold the snow, even as slush, but it is gradually building on the grass and trees. I think it would be rich pickings for the robins inspecting the puddles and gutters for breakfast.

Yesterday I flew home to Colorado from Oregon where spring is erupting everywhere in lush shades of green and the dogwoods and wild cherry and rhododendrons are blooming. My two friends and I were blessed with being able to hike some of the Columbia River Gorge with a medicine man from the Wasco tribe who is the husband of our mutual friend.

He is one of the last true wisdom-keepers, full of plant knowledge and the oral history of his people. He is one of the last of his tribe who can speak his language, he says, and he is forgetting because he has no one with whom to speak it. He pointed out all the wooden platforms along the river where Native Americans are still allowed to catch the salmon that come to spawn and take them as food. He also pointed out places that have been turned into parking lots where the elders used to sit and talk and dry the fish for winter food.

This is not knowledge of times past, but part of the legacy of the 20th century and how our government still treats the tribal members with whom treaties were signed shortly before Oregon became a state. Only very recently, he told us, has the state allowed the sovereignty of the Indians to be returned to them, and only in limited ways. These are not things publicized, but things he knows from living through them and seeing the changes with his own eyes.

“There were two longhouses there when I was a boy,” he points, showing us where, as we enter a box canyon along the river. The park service requires a permit to hike some of the areas he took us, but he is a native. They can’t require him. We saw a couple of magnificent waterfalls roaring over cliffs, their water so clean the foam is bright white and the water itself a tropical green.
“There is wonderful fishing in those pools below the falls,” he tells us. “The trout are huge and delicious.” He pointed out fish spawning in the rocks of the roaring streams. Brown trout so well disguised they matched the streambed perfectly, but he could see them. “They come up here in their third year and spawn” he told us. Then they go back to the river and the ocean. “They live for many years,” he tells us. “Not the five or six years they tell you in books.”

He is going to be 80 this year and I know he is going slowly so we can follow easily as he marches up the sides of mountains and along the switchbacks, but I have to dawdle and catch my breath here and there. He shows me a fern and removes a small frond from a clump growing along the cliff. “Here, take a little bite of this,” he says and hands me the frond with a fat, short root. I nibble a bit. It tastes like liquorice. He takes the frond and carefully plants it back among the others. He shows us wild celery and mugwort and red cedar. He knows all the plants and their medicinal and food uses.

He talks to the park service rangers he meets on his journeys. They consult him about the history of the land. He knows where the ancient petro glyphs are buried by rockslides caused by the earthquakes, and by the building of the railroads. He worked for the railroad for 36 ½ years. He points out the trout and fish in the streams way up in the mountains above the towering waterfalls to the park service rangers. “How did they get up here, so high?” they ask.

“That’s where the Creator put them,” he says, a look indicating the ignorance of the questioner crossing his face as he tells me this. He is at once a man of mystery, and complete practicality. Not only is the wilderness an alien land to me, but so is most of what we are walking through as we trail behind him. He brings everything into sharp focus, full of life. I regret my careless attitude. I label myself with one of my father’s favorite words, “ignoramus.” I see the land with new reverence. He is simply teaching me to respect the world so blithely ignored and discounted by the white settlers.

Outside the snow is still falling, smearing the trees with wet stripes and white snow on the windward side. I remember a story we were told about the grandfather of our medicine friend. He lived in the wilderness with a blanket and a couple of skins for warmth. Even as a very, very old man he stayed warm, fed, and lived in harmony with his Creator without any of what I consider essential for survival. I wouldn’t make it through the first blizzard, never mind a winter with what I know. Perhaps I should take a class…

CALLING GOD

Giant Tulip
There is a certain happy advantage to technology these days. I like to drive and talk out loud to God. Some people might think of this as praying out loud. I think of it as having a conversation with my Creator. I am grateful for cell phones when I’m stopped at a traffic light and glance over at someone in the car next to me only to catch them staring, perhaps because my mouth has been moving. I immediately think of people I would see talking to themselves in cars before the advent of cell phones. I instantly assumed they had to be a little coo coo. I mean who talks to themselves out loud without being a little coo coo?

I barely pay attention to anyone “talking to themselves” any more at all. Even the people walking down the street or in the grocery line next to me busily blabbing with someone on their headset has become simple to ignore. It’s easier for me to get away with my unusual habit and do it invisibly these days because of things like this. Lest you think I truly am “coo coo,” let me tell you I have a friend who reminds herself to “take God with her” wherever she is going by literally opening the passenger door of her car to let God enter, shutting it, and then going on her way.

We have shared a laugh or two over stories of people’s occasional peculiar reactions to seeing her do this. Doing things literally, like speaking out loud, or opening car doors, is a way to bring contact with God a bit more physically into this 3-D reality. In my mind, not unlike lighting candles or burning incense before we pray.

“Why on Earth would you want to do this?” you might ask.

“I don’t know,” I might answer. “Perhaps because it makes me feel better.”

I live by myself these days, except for my little yellow dog, Chippy, and sometimes his bigger, older sister dog, Mojo. While they are sweethearts of the first order and I love them dearly, they do not fill that space in me that longs for some deep and meaningful connection of a higher order. It’s a space that really isn’t ever even filled by friendships or family or bags of potato chips, though I’ve tried all three. It remains empty when I seek the rituals and dogma that soothed me in earlier times in my life, like going to church and the once comforting religious tenets I found there.

I want to know why I’m here, why I exist at all. I want to know what I’m supposed to be doing every day with my life, my health, my well-being. Surely I can’t be here just to sit in my house and wonder on a warm Saturday in early April. Surely who I am and what I’ve lived through could be helpful to my fellow human beings, somehow. On mornings like this when it’s so quiet the only sounds I hear are the ticking of the old clocks in my house and the hum of the refrigerator in my kitchen, I get a little frantic.

“Okay, God,” I say. “I’ve done my meditation and praying this morning. I’ve read some spiritually comforting pages, this morning. Right now, writing these words, is a kind of talking to you, too. What is it I should be doing today?”

The only thought that comes to mind is that it’s time to get out of the house. I put on my gym clothes and plan to head to the rec center. I won’t have much to say to God in the car, since I’ve spent a bit of time writing about all this just now. If I’m lucky, however, I’ll find the peace and quiet in myself to listen.

A bit of birdsong might drift through my open window and cheer me up. I might overhear a snatch of conversation when I get to the rec center that makes me think of a friend. A small child holding her mother’s hand as they walk by might look up at me and smile. Then I will know that my talking with God has been answered. I am where I am supposed to be, doing what I am supposed to be doing. It doesn’t matter what that looks like to anyone else. I’ll know I’m watched over, that I’m never alone. All is well, indeed.

SUNDAY BUZZ

Two Trees
It’s a beautiful, sunny, promising-to-get-very-warm early Easter Sunday at the very end of March in Colorado. The air has that watery, almost milky quality as I look out over the fields on my way home from the grocery. I had to dance my way through a cloud of ecstatic fuzzy, yellow-ochre colored bees swarming the Easter flower display smack in front of the doors, next to all the grocery carts.

There were lilies and tulips and hyacinth and daffodils, among others. It smelled wonderful to me, and even more obviously to the bees, who had discovered this treasure trove of flowers in an otherwise totally barren landscape of acres of parking lot, cars, and humans frantic to get in the store and get last minute food. Thanks to the bees, not very many people even glanced twice at the flower display with intent to buy.

I was intending to go to church this Sunday to see if I can find a spiritual community that even remotely fits my beliefs without glaring contradictions, like the subservient place of women in the church. Instead I went to a twelve step meeting to pick up the collection for my friend who is the treasurer and couldn’t be there today. Twelve-step lets you find a God of your understanding, but some part of me is yearning for that sense of belonging that long ago I found in the church of my upbringing.

I liked the granite walls and oaken pews of that church. I liked the stained glass windows and the voices of the choir as they stood in their beautiful robes and sang. My friend’s father was in the choir. He sang Tenor and was often in shows on Broadway. I liked the fact I knew the man singing the beautiful solos. The brass pipes of the organ filled the altar alcove below the huge multi-colored window that was the back end of the church. These things were as meaningful and comforting as any dogma I might have heard preached.

At Christmas this atmosphere was enhanced by the smell of the evergreen wreaths which hung from the heavy, dark wooden ceiling beams and the flicker of hundreds of candles that lined the aisle from the entrance of the sanctuary to the altar. It was a familiar place, full of families whose children I mostly knew. At Easter the altar was lined with hundreds of fragrant white lilies donated in remembrance of loved ones, both dead and alive. The choir and minister wore white; the congregation was clean, well-dressed, and colorful.

I talked to my shrink once about how much I liked that style of church and the sanctity it created for me. When I was in my early thirties I went back to the church, hoping to find that place again in my heart that I thought of as God-space.

“You’re not looking for God,” my shrink snorted with disdain. “You’re looking for your father.”

“Typical shrink,” I thought. “He’s really missed the boat.”

Yes, my father had died a few years before and I still missed him, but I knew I was looking for so much more.

Unlike my mother, whose gods were money and social status, my father had some real faith. We never really talked about “God” as such, but he moved through the world, lived a certain level of union with “All that Is,” that was and is the root of my own spirituality. He is probably why I have always been attracted to Native American spiritual traditions, and their earth-based, grounded realities.

My father was a commercial landscape architect. We lived on the northern edge of New York City where even fifty or sixty years ago there wasn’t much “wild” space left at all. When I was quite young, he would take me out to the eastern end of Long Island to the plant nurseries and tree farms to “help” him select plant material for his commercial jobs. All that open space has gone to summer homes for the mostly rich and famous now, but at that time was truly rural.

I loved putting the red marker tags on trees and bushes. I inhaled deeply the smell of the dirt and the tinge of salt in the air from the nearby ocean. At one farm I got to feed the mules still used to plow and haul loads around in wagons. My father took me sometimes to see a job when it was still just a foundation of a new building going in, and then took me back when it was done; a glass and steel box glinting in the sun surrounded by a park of flowers and grass and trees. To me it was magical, full of mystery. Even long after I understood his job and how that transformation of the landscape took place, it still felt magic.

I live in Colorado now, a state as full of rugged and wild natural beauty as anywhere I could choose to live. I’ve been to visit most of its most beautiful spaces and I have indeed become less of an urbanite than the first forty years of my life would indicate. If I am to be truly honest here, however, I consider myself more of a nature watcher than one who actually gets out into the real wilderness.

Living on a few acres of land and tending a couple of horses, driving all over the state to rodeos in teeny tiny towns out in the flatlands east of the mountains taught me a bit about a more rural life. The moon rising orange on the plains to the east and setting along the sharp crags of the Rocky Mountain’s “fourteeners,” moves my very soul. Here you can still see the Milky Way on a clear night, crossing an indigo sky. These things are “nature” to me.

I will always be, at least on some level, an urbanite and a New Yorker. Like the trees my father used to dig up and move to a new location to grow and thrive, it took a while for me to recover from the “shock” of leaving one home environment, and learning to adapt to a new home in Colorado. My spiritual search is taking me many new places these days, too.

I find myself envying those bees flying around the display of Easter flowers. There is no delicate, sweet scent reaching far across a tarred and barren landscape to call me home. All I have at the moment is a “still, small voice” gently tugging, tugging, tugging at my heart. Though gentle, it is a far stronger call in the end than a sweet scent. I’ve just got to keep moving.

MARCH MADNESS

White blossomsIt’s almost the end of March and the moon hangs full in the eastern sky as I drive home tonight. There is some humidity and it has been warm today compared to earlier in the week, so the moon is murky behind the damp film of moisture, and pieces and streaks of gray clouds are backlit here and there. I enter my house through my garage, walk across the kitchen and out the door to the little patio, the better to continue staring at the beautiful light. There are stars, too, but they are harder to see not only because of the moon but also the fact that my little subdivision is getting built up and there is more light pollution to compete with the dark.

This coming Sunday is Easter, a time of resurrection not only of Jesus Christ but of the Earth herself here in the Northern Hemisphere as we supposedly shift into spring and longer days and the advent of the first flowers and leaves and the grass greening up. Easter is early this year but I am hoping we have a bit of rain or snow to slow what is promising to be another year of drought.

My children have moved into adulthood but I still go out and buy an impossible amount of sweets and jelly beans and plastic eggs to fill with chocolate so I can make them Easter baskets. My daughter can feed it to her boyfriend’s family and his younger siblings the way she used to feed the candy to her roommates when I brought a basket to her house while she was still in college. My son is a little different. He is 4 ½ years younger than his sister. He will be 22 in May.

He came to my house before he went to work today because I had to get him to sign a legal paper. I fed him lunch and gave him his Easter basket. “I know you are a man, now,” I say to him with a smile, “but it is still my pleasure to give a basket of candy to my disappeared little boy.” I say things like that in hopes that he will hear how much I miss that little boy at the same time I am proud of the young man before me. I am pulling his leg, in effect, though there is truth in the emotion I express.

He surprises me and responds, “Not quite, Mom. Not quite all grown up. I’ll eat it.” A moment of sentiment seems to hang between us.

“If you don’t want all that candy, you can bring that to work and let everyone inhale it for you,” I say.

The sentiment disappears in a second as my son looks at me with disbelief. “Do you know what kind of shit I’d get if I brought this to work?” he asks, holding up the gaudy basket filled with treats. He works a welding job, and most of his workmates are men close to his father’s age. I smile in return. Yes, I can just imagine him bringing that to work and telling these hardcore men his mommy gave him an Easter basket. I had no idea what I was signing up for when I decided to have children. I love them so fiercely it is sometimes like a knife in my chest over the simplest things, even the silly ones. He takes his basket and gets in his car to go to work.

Last night at this time I was sitting with a Hospice patient in the quiet of her darkened room as she approached the end of her life. Sometimes I catch myself thinking perhaps it is time to stop serving in a death-oriented capacity, i.e. as a volunteer for end of life service. Then something happens to make me realize just how sacred life is, and how precious every moment really is, like making baskets of candy. On some level I am more alive because I can be with people on the edge of death…at least in some situations. I have friends who can’t imagine doing what I do. As if it takes some extraordinary capacity or skill they think they could never find in themselves. I simply wanted to give my time somewhere I felt it had meaning. Millions of people do what I do. To me it is not so special. It is what I learn that makes it so special.

In the days after I volunteer as an 11th Hour companion I often pay so much more attention to the simple things that feed my being. The shadings in the color of the moon tonight, for instance. The temperature of the night air and how it feels as it flows in and out of my nostrils and lungs as I talk to my friend earlier this evening. The click of my little dog’s toenails as he stands and dances in joy when I come in, squeaking his excited greeting through closed lips and waving front paws. My focus is sharpened. I am more connected to life.

It is easy to become complacent. I have my own comfortable small house to call home. I have more than enough food to eat. I can afford not only to put gas in the car, but to own the car to begin with. I have work to do most days that means something to me and that I like. I have some very nice friends. People about whom I care so deeply, like my children, also care about me, like my friends. The irony is that it can all be over in an instant. I try to keep that in mind as I let the chocolate melt in my mouth from the piece of candy I have stolen from my daughter’s Easter basket. Tomorrow I’ll bring it over to her house.

OPEN SEASON

IMG_0043 (2)IMG_0044 (2)

I am a “patient volunteer” for a local hospice organization. What that means, usually, is that once a week or so I go to a hospice patient’s home and offer something called Comfort Touch to the patient and/or the occasional family member, too. It’s a mix of massage and acupressure techniques for shoulders, hands and feet. It’s relaxing and offers a bit of physical touch to people who are near the end of their lives and really don’t get touched much anymore, except for medical procedures.

A second hospice program I’ve joined is called “11th Hour.” This is a relatively new program that only recently became an official one for which you receive volunteer training. I’m sure that it’s been around for as long as hospice itself has, it just didn’t have a name or formal structure. “11th Hour” volunteers sit with someone literally in the last hours of their lives. Medical staff may know a person is about to die, but they can’t say exactly when. It might be in a few hours, it might be a few days. The volunteer is there to keep the person who is passing company, so they don’t have to die alone.

Even in nursing homes and hospitals with 24/7 staff, the dying patient doesn’t always have someone right there with them. Families get tired and need to go home to rest. It’s not just the wee hours of the night, a morning or afternoon can be as empty as any other time. Some hospice patients literally have no one; no family, no friends, and no caring human support left in their lives. I feel this time of imminent transition is a very sacred time. There is something special about it, holy even. With hospice the person is kept comfortable on every level. The hospice I volunteer for even takes indigent people, regardless of their ability to pay. Such was the person with whom I sat not long ago.

As a volunteer I know very little about the patient. I am given part of their paperwork to read. Rarely is it more than things like name, age, their immediate family members and a few sentences of summary about their condition at intake, namely the physical condition that brings them to hospice.  An email is sent to those of us who volunteer for this end-of-life service, and we get to choose to be available or not for a three or four hour shift. I chose to volunteer a few days ago.

This was a patient who had no family. He had no children, no spouse, no relatives, no friends. He had come from a jail where he was serving time for DUI. His body was in the last stages of acute alcoholism. He had gone to college. He had served in Vietnam, but there was no one left as a support system. The staff at the care center had asked for companion volunteers to be with him.

I walked into the quiet, pleasant room and stood for a minute next to the bedside of this man. He was so very thin. “Hi, my name is Chris,” I said. “I’ll be sitting here for a while to keep you company.” We volunteers introduce ourselves regardless of the condition of the patient. Hearing is the last sense to go, we are told. He was oh-so-still, except for his deep and regular breaths.

His bed was spotless, his hair combed, the sheet pulled up and folded across his chest. I pulled the comfortable chair up close to his bed so I could be near him. I put my hand on his arm and left it there, patting him every once in a while. Then I sat back and was left to my own thoughts.

My father-in-law died of alcoholism. It is an ugly journey whether it is quick and consumes a life early, or it is prolonged over many years of struggle and suffering. It is called a “cunning, baffling and insidious disease.” It rips lives apart and wounds family members in ways that don’t always show physically. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous calls alcoholism a “spiritual illness.” I’ve known lots of people, in my family and others, who have struggled with addiction. The miracle is that anyone ever gets into recovery at all, and that millions of people have been able to pick their lives up and begin again.

I watched as this man lay breathing, his skin stretched across the bones of his face, his mouth open against the pillowcase. I thought of how ironic it was that he could come from the circumstances he did…being in jail, no friends or family…to being where he was as he passed from this life. The smell of fresh baked cookies wafted softly through the partially opened door to his room. Caring and gentle staff came to check on him periodically. His pajamas were clean, his limbs arranged comfortably across his body and the bed, under the sheet.

I believe very strongly that our existence does not end with death of the body. As I have gotten older and have some life experience under my belt, I also am certain there is a larger purpose to life than we as human beings can ever know. What I see as tragic, or hopeless, or horrible might not be the only way to see things, and my judgments do not make those circumstances true in the Big Picture. As it says somewhere in the Bible, “not the least sparrow falls without My knowing,” so I believe it is with each of us. I believe we are watched over and guided by something infinitely greater, whom I choose to call God.

I remember struggling through one inconsolable day after my brother died of cancer. Nothing I could do or think of helped me relieve the pain and grief. Out of nowhere a thought occurred.  “What if there is no death?” a seemingly disembodied voice whispered. It stopped me in my tracks. “Yes, what if?” I asked myself. The question makes me so much less afraid and more hopeful, even as I sit with someone on the very edge of life.

It was getting to be the end of my shift. I put my hand back on the patient’s arm. I mentally thanked him for his existence, and his struggle. I wished that at some point along the way he had known love, and that his heart had known peace. Perhaps somewhere, for someone, the pain and seeming ugliness that this human being had suffered helped that other person choose a different, healthier path. I felt so grateful for the thought process he had stirred in me, just by lying there in his hospital bed and breathing. “Thank you for letting me spend this time with you,” I said out loud. “I am leaving now. Goodbye.”

I hoped another person would come soon and fill that chair by his bedside. There was a blessing I was sure without a doubt that, just like me, they needed to receive.

TIMES CHANGE

AlaskaI heard the unfamiliar screech of a forklift dumping off supplies for the new house being built catty-corner to my lot this morning. As I watched it back up across the barren dirt to the street behind it, I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. The relative privacy I’ve enjoyed due to the housing recession is coming to an end. The open lots in my subdivision are beginning to fill. It won’t be long until there is a new house blocking the view from my back patio of open space and sky.

The tiny lots, so appealing to me five years ago as I moved into town from the country and the work it took to tend just over three acres, feel suffocating. The luxury of three open lots out my back door almost made up for the fact that my neighbors’ houses to the right and the left of me are each ten feet off the walls of my own house. I hear street noises and conversations and the clunks and thumps of construction that were silent not that long ago.

My little dog flings himself out the dog-door in the kitchen as he winds up a growl started across the house at the front window, legs flailing, claws scrabbling across the wooden floor, and bursts into a loud, short blast or two of barking at something, person or animal, daring to cross behind our property. He, too, thinks of the empty lots as his territory.

I love my house. If anyone could succeed at manifesting a perfect sanctuary in which to heal from a thirty year marriage and a lifetime of allowing other peoples’ (mother, husband, society) opinions to dictate who I was and how I should be in the world, I have certainly done so. Like the ancient maxim that a church would provide refuge from the law to a fugitive, so my house has protected me from a grudge-holding, secret-keeping, inflexible, angry manipulator who would have rather seen me left with nothing than stepping into my own life without him.

IMG_0199Don’t get me wrong. I am well aware that relationships, however destructive, are two-way streets. My husband could not have been the bully he was without, on some level, my compliance. He could not have stripped me of self-esteem without my giving it to him to begin with. He could not have physically threatened me, or stepped between me and my relationships with my children, if I had had the courage at the time to stand my ground. I didn’t. I look back on that time now and I wonder how I ever did find a way out. I tell people it must have been Divine intervention. And on many levels, it was.

I know in reality it was a series of steps, over a number of years, to finally live true to my heart. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror anymore and put up with the hypocrisy of what I saw. I didn’t want my daughter to look at me on whatever level and see a possible role model for being a woman in who I was in that marriage. I didn’t want my son to see a woman who would allow herself to be treated as I allowed myself to be treated. I was angry, vindictive and frustrated myself. I felt cornered, and like a wild animal with no room left to retreat, I attacked those closest to me, especially my children. I was like an emotional banshee.

I’m not that person anymore. I’ve worked very, very hard on myself and my perceptions of the world as it was, and is. The fact that I even have this house, this time, this space in which to recuperate is at least partially the result of a gift from the other nemesis in my life, my mother. My dear, sweet mother with whom I battled all my life gave me in death what she never could in life. I could buy this house, build this sanctuary, find this peace because she left me the funds to do so. When I first bought the house I used to keep a picture of my mother on my kitchen counter. I wanted her to see what she had given me.

I suspect it was always her intention, all across my life, to provide me with whatever I might need to survive. The fact that her ideas rarely if ever matched mine, made for a difficult relationship. But I am eternally grateful for my house. I am even grateful for her, and the courage she gave me in the end, to stand up for myself.

I feel the houses closing in around me as the economy recovers. I have to listen to music blaring on a car radio when a neighbor washes his car in his driveway nearby. My dog goes bananas barking at the kid who walks his dog across the last few weeks and months of the empty lot behind my back fence. Snow is falling gently from the purple sky, momentarily driving the forklift back to its garage. The quiet roar of my furnace and the ticking of clocks float through my house. Could it be I have outgrown this sanctuary? Could it be time to change, once again?