It seems to me that Mother Nature is trying to speak loud and clear in our national capital right now. I just went out to return some library books and its ominous out there. The sky is red again with dust and the wind is raging, trees are bending every which way in the wind. I get a sense of great darkness at times. Adam Hills was speaking on the Last Leg last night of how abysmal our government’s response to climate change has been. It made me feel ashamed of us, in a way. How much longer can powers that be keep turning a deaf ear I long for escape at the moment to amore progressive switched on country but then, at the same time, a loving force keeps trying to tell me that all is working out for good. My family are connecting with me more, the family friend who used to diss me has been showing real concern and empathy and today I feel just that bit more brighter after that past week of horrific dental trauma.
Never the less on the way to the library I thought of how hard it was at times to come ‘home’. How I fought it for a long time and then had the crash at the third attempt to stay away and forced myself to come back to Australia from the UK. My thoughts are very much on Europe at the moment. I would just love to go back to Dad’s home town, Maastricht and visit that side of the family, take a boat ride too from New York as I hoped to do, on the way. Its looking like a possibility. I just have to get my passport organised and maybe I may manager it later in the year if not next. That said I started writing this thinking how many of us have been forced inward by trauma and are waking up at a time of collective crisis (danger and opportunity). Never has there been a more important time to stay grounded in love and light when forces of darkness seem to gather as the feminine in Mother Nature cries out.
The teachings given by Jesus in The Course in Miracles has been coming to mind a fair bit lately. I got spiritual guidance on Sunday morning from my higher power to read a particular meditation on forgiveness because I was struggling with pain over what happened to me at the hands of my parents. I often hear them speaking to me from the ethers and in therapy on Monday with Kat I broke down with the realisation that the need for a being to experience love is SO PROFOUND that we will summon up spirits, angels and demons to survive the lack of it in our own lives. I got sidelined in a 12 step meeting after Christmas after talking about how around that time both my deceased parents were speaking to me in meditation and sending me love. Mum cut down the lively side in all of her daughters, sadly. She was more masculine and Dad more feminine really, all the women on Mum’s side have been very strong, leaving the so called ‘weaker’, softer men who were really very loving. I just think Dad buried his softness in the harsh environment of the 1920s to 80s. Even my GG Grandfather was only struggling with pent up grief in his addictive rages from what I figured out and its only our part of the family that turned their back on him. The younger siblings who remained in New Zealand stood by him and came to love him, from the little I have learned.
My older sister in some ways seems to have carried his trauma and it was no accident she married a New Zealander, as that is where my GG Grandfather immigrated to. At this time of year they were on board the boat to arrive in March and lost the second Eliza Jane baby shortly after arriving. My Great Grandmother, the third Eliza Jane was born later in NZ. Interesting that my older sister’s older son is visiting his brothers in a few days, this is the one who has cut me off for sending money unbeknowingly to a scammer. The later children of my siblings seem to have avoided the shutting down of their own lives, its only me that was so bonded to the trauma part that until now could not break away, but maybe is all part of the evolutionary trajectory and I must not dismiss or devalue the part my sobriety has played in joining up all the missing dots, nor minimise the depth of the wound I carried for the ancestors which I am now seeking to heal.
Maybe everything is working out for good and I just could not break away until now. Maybe the inward turning was all for a purpose. Maybe I am not as disconnected as my ego thinks and am in fact building ever deeper connections all the time both on here and in life. Something today is telling me to see possibility and glimpse hope through these the darkest of times, part of me is saying celebrate the positive within the painful, while not glossing over or remaining silent about things that are hostile to love and fully embodied, authentic life, lived in a balance with both past and present, as well as with nature and collective history and inheritance for good and ill. Something is urging me to see through paradox.
My other sister has come good because of the love and understanding I have shown to her and due to her own strength too, yes all three of us girls ended up being abandoned by our partners but maybe even that was a redress of old karma for Eliza leaving Thomas all of those years ago. Who knows? I would just far rather have a positive take on it all that has happened in the past, compassion and gratitude for how I and all of my family have struggled, and instead of seeing the negative and bad, see the positive and good that comes from and through integration of trauma and challenge. Maybe as Peter Levine recognises, trauma brings us back into connection with both divine and demonic forces and with a deepening spirituality.
Yesterday I posted on how lonely the pattern of retreat and isolation was that I carried but it was also necessary as I now see it. I want to get a lot of the writing I did during 2005 to 2010 off the hard drive of my old computer as I wrote at that dark time after my marriage of so many things and wrote a lot of poetry. That was when I started to work though the grief of ages I carried, and am now seeking to shed. But I also see that retrogression was not just pathology, hard as it was, but part of a far larger collective and personal journey, one that I must honour, for until we understand the painful things of the past we carry and release them how can we bring healing to the planet and each other. We must always seek to show compassion and a depth of insight into what is pushing for recognition.
Emerging From The Dark Night 