I no longer feel alone

A great miracle seems to have happened in my life over the past few weeks.. I feel the great loneliness I felt for most of my life is no longer as lonely, instead I am beginning to find the great healing gifts in solitude…and I am also beginning to feel that source of love so very very close to me such that lately when I feel it filling me up, I no longer long for any love outside of me at all as I used to do, feeling myself to be so empty.

What a blessing God and life had given me through being able to face up to everything. And most especially to be able to just go and be with my sister twice on the weekend, meeting her exactly where she was at, that was a gift too and filled my heart with happiness.

I now also realise I was born into a family, but I felt set apart from that family for a very long time.. I did not feel anyone completely present with me who saw me much, apart from my older sister who left… I now see how sick my older sister was for most of the second half of her life and how much she struggled.. I feel so blessed I got the gift of my sobriety back in 1993 as God showed me there was another way to live and that I could understand the long ancestral fate I was born into but destined to become a witness to, and separate from as well.

I am also realising lately that each and every time I looked outside of me for my support, it was actually my own heart I was seeking. And so such attempts were bound to fail.. That was not a mistake BUT GOD WORKING IN MY LIFE. That said finding a therapist who saw into me and was a full round, alive natural person has helped me beyond belief and how blessed was I to be guided to Kat around the time I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Kat seems to have always understood and got me, in a way others did not. And I am grateful for that. I am also grateful for the gift of this little house I live in where the dogwood is now in bloom along with the apple and plum blossoms.. Driving in a moment ago and seeing my garden in full flower made soft by an overnight fall of rain I had such gratitude. Really in my life I have been given so much and I am so grateful. I am grateful also to fellow bloggers who have stayed by me and me by them; for WordPress,my dog, books, poetry and amazing creative souls.

A moment ago I listened to the Stage Show on Radio National where Michael Cathcart interviewed Australian actor Hugo Weaving and a fellow actor on their latest play, childhoods, and acting experiences, as well as their experience of being men growing up in Australian society with all of the challenges that presented them. Part of the interview contained a speech performed and posted online by Hugo Weaving by the Sydney Theatre Company during earlier Covid theatre lockdowns.. It was Hamlet’s soliloquy, To Be Or Not To Be which is one of the most significant speeches of Shakespeare to my mind… Weaving performed it with an energy of complete exhaustion and the lines about the possibility of slipping into sleep, there to confront the deeper consequences of earlier actions really resonated with me today..

The question of when to act and fight and when to surrender is a massive one and there are times we need to do one or the other, times we are prevented by either inner or outer forces from doing one or the other and times we get so overwhelmed by ‘a sea of troubles’ spoken of in that speech. For me, the sea of troubles has often been the world outside of me, particularly the ocean of family drama and family generational wounding that it has seemed to be my destiny to be swept up in and buffeted around in. Now that I am seperating out of it all and beginning to see it more clearly life feels freer, though at times my heart fills full of the sadness for the way one of my siblings still seems to be so trapped. Luckily, these days I am not as paralysed and I can sit with the ones who are and see so clearly how the paralysis came about while knowing that at times a freeze may be part of a longer process of outworking of personal or collective trauma.

I am grateful to have found the way lately to be able to witness my feelings and rest in my heart.. I love Tara Brach’s approach in line with the Buddhist one, that we can create a place of refuge within where we can listen to the cry of our soul and ask what the various body pains or pulls may be trying to tell us as well as our oscillating thoughts and emotions.. I think of how longing and need can become so repressed for some of us and of how some of us had to cut off essential parts of us that we must find the way back to if we are to become liberated from living in a permanently ‘split state. Our society does not always encourage liberation of the shadow and we see it played out every day in the news and dramas of people in prominence.. We can also witness natural forces step in at times to correct the arrogance and hubris of the powers that be and offer a reality check.

In my family that reality check came towards the beginning and middle of the 1980s, my sister and I are still dealing with the outfall of those years in many ways… Our family fractured and broke apart and the family I was born into was a very different one to the one both my older set of two siblings and other sibling were born into… As the youngest sometimes we end up achieving a distance from the heart of the family.. for my self being pushed out and away but still feeling the longing to connect back has some kind of ancestral theme, but I am also recognising that often the ones who seem most like ‘family’ are not necessarily related to me by blood.

Anyway I just accept everything now. I accept that the family who live close have no desire to see or be related to me at all. I see that I am not able to fit into their world and so I have to take steps to make my own world on the outside of family.. I will continue to stay connected to my sister for in many ways I am the only surviving member of a highly traumatised family that carries her memory. She is just so often on the receiving end of judgement from immediate family who are (perhaps rightly) so self involved that her feelings and deeper needs are ignored. I saw my sister try so hard to come to life after her last hospitalisation and trying so hard to connect in a world so busy in its rampant material individualism and struggle to survive that made connecting almost impossible. And I hear and read every day in certain group forums on line how many are now opting for a life of solitude lived in harmony with a deeply inner spiritual life and earth/nature connection. I no longer pathologise myself for seeking the inward way, for until I could know, love, accept and embrace myself completely how could I know, love, accept and embrace any other living person.

I know now life isn’t a conspiracy by God designed to thwart me, as long as I am here for myself and able to be fully present and loving I will be okay. And being here for myself does not mean I am not also here for others, only that sometimes being my own best friend has to be my utmost priority on any single day.