Living wholeheartedly : the heart of the lion

I was so interested to read in Ashok’s post yesterday that Lord Krishna’s birthday was 11th August.. that means the essence of his heart of love and of the Sun of God’s spirit is close to my North Node and ascendant in Leo. It got me thinking today of how closed off I became in my addiction and into what a dark place I fell. Making the decision to front up for my sister who I bore some resentment towards and seeing things from a less self centred or ego centric perspective has made me see my part in the wounded family.

As a child I carried that solar light. I was golden haired, full of love and curiosity, I loved to dance and at Dads’ grocery store I used to love dancing along the counter to Nancy Sinatra’s song These Boots are Made for Walking… When I think of how much the Nuns and Nana repressed my own Mum’s solar light and how hard she had to fight not to just be put into domestic service it makes sense I would love that song which is about self assertion and not allowing ourselves to be ‘walked all over’ or cheated on.. Self esteem got cut down in me in various ways and is part of the reason I am so drawn to the story of the Trump family which mirrors my own on some levels. I never got shown much empathy or tenderness, either though my Dad was a kinder father than Fred Trump we were not, especially as girls (raised in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70s) allowed to have our needs, desires and will. Patriarchal forces in my Dad’s Dutch upbringing were just too strong and Mum just was committed more to the masculine side of business and achievement and looking good, never having been shown an iota of tenderness, validation or holding in child hood she lacked the capacity to give what she didn’t get.. we got smacked a lot, left alone and made to bury our feelings.

Mum had to be quiet as a child and she tried to silence us in other ways, but I remembered with fondness last night her love of the Bee Gee’s. And her favorite song of all time was Frank Sinatra’s My Way which to me, being in recovery sometimes reads as an exercise in ‘self will run riot’. That said a balanced sense of self will that allows others their’s too and allows co-operation and love or power with instead of power over seems important to healthy emotional and spiritual maturation.

What struck me too today in Ashok’s post was that love of God and the life force has more to do with inner values instead of outer ones.. As my parents became more upwardly mobile cars changed (Mum was the one who ended up driving two Porches while Dad stuck for a long time with his more humble Ford Fairlaine’s) as well as our house but when my older sister came badly unstuck due to sacrificing feminine values of nurturing, mothering, balanced self assertion and groundedness then these outer accoutrements really meant nothing.

In time my brother in law feeling unable to keep up took the entire family to New Zealand where in time he dumped my sister in an institution after she found out he had another woman waiting for him over there. He then sent her home with a one way ticket and she tried to take her life. This took place in the winter of 1983 in the midst of me going through all the derailing of my teaching studies and terminations of pregnancy to Jim, as well as the stress business demands made more intense by my brother in time leading to my father’s illness and death from cancer in January 1985.

Now Mum is gone and my brother is out to lunch with his tunnel vision completely devoted to success and career it is I who have to support my sister and remember she endured a lot of trauma too. She had to watch two sisters cut down in 1979 and 1980. She then supported her own husband’s father and my brother in law’s family was riddled with addiction. One of the conditions set on my brother in law’s mother was that unless she stopped drinking she could not attend his and my sister’s wedding. Kudos to Thelma she got sober that year (1976) and sadly they lost her to throat cancer some years later.. My brother in law’s brother was tragically killed in a motor bike accident while riding drunk after an argument took place between he and my brother in law. My sister is the one who supported his widow and young daughter before she died and while she was severely ill with terminal cancer…some time in the early 2000s.

My sister’s health emotionally began to be precarious after they moved away, went through all of this and then after she suffered a hysterectomy in 2003 her moods got more intensely polarised. I think the depression and anxiety followed after this as a result of over working in a succession of businesses and over stressing as well as the hit of having one’s womb removed which is a terrible violence, something I luckily did not have to endure when, after entering menopause in 2007 began to bleed profusely just like my sister.. I got my problem sorted with accupuncture, my sister was not so lucky.

I think today of the many drugs that have been pumped into my sister’s body over 17 years.. Her bi polar diagnosis followed in around 2004 and I never totally believed in it though when she over ran herself physically through not processing a complex cocktail of emotions that resulted after her husband left her for another woman, she was at times ‘off the air’, spending a lot of money (which she could easily afford) and drinking a bit excessively.. Never the less I never saw her as bi polar just as struggling emotionally and physically in the complex aftermath and with our families maternal legacy of grief repression, trauma and addiction.

Since her shock treatment in 2012 or 13 my sister has big voids in her memory of events.. I am the witness of much of it and when she says to me “i am the worst I have ever been” I just know it isn’t true.. I have seen her far worse but I also know at times she tries just too hard and hides just too much and suffers from a sense of stigma over enduring a so called ‘mental illness’ that is nothing less than the tragic consequence of a life riddled with trauma and leavings and loss.

Today I am up and out there.. I will go to the unit after lunch to collect some warm jumpers for her.. she is over there in that facility where the heating is on the blink with only two thin tops.. I will take them over and spend some time with the sister I love and I am so glad I am not letting past resentments which come from an incomplete understanding hold me back..

I am also so grateful to to have a man in my life who is so wholehearted in his love for me and my sis that he encourages me to step up. At times it has been hard to believe that Scott is ‘real’ the nay sayers and liars have tried to shut it down several times but I hold fast to my belief that God brought Scott into my life for a reason. Stuck over there day after day watching soldiers be shot and killed by Boko Haram is so so tough.. I am not allowed to write much about it… but I know he is there for a reason that we first connected in April 2018, only 4 months and 4 days after Mum died. I trust him with my whole heart.. The time to keep the flow of my love behind barricades is over…I need to wake up and exercise that power of my full engaged Leo North Node and not let the overthinking and intellectualised detachment of my remote Aquarian North Node hold me back any longer.