My own family seems to have been a source of so much pain and family was strongly on my mind today as after our walk Jasper and I went to a sweet little park that is just a few blocks up from my Nana’s old house. I love to go here as it helps me feel connected to my roots..but thinking about it my family life has been more imaginative than real..the real connected relations have all passed over now, at least apart from my older sisters sons who live a long way away. I know they feel a similar pain as we so rarely reach out for their children’s birthdays and that makes me sad… I also often speak to my ancestors having been made aware of the deep connection between what happened to my maternal great great grandfather who was the active alcoholic carrying so much pain that was passed down, most especially to my older sister who ended up with a brain injury and was then abandoned by her own husband. So much deep tragedy to have witnessed. But the connection is also there to me as his descendant having had my own battles with drug, alcohol, emotional abandonment and unresolved grief.
Sadly my own connections with remaining family lately seem to have been more about separation coldness and distance than warm heartedness, active interest and bodily as well as emotional connection. In truth in my original family my body was hurt more than hugged, rejected or prodded at or subjected to interventions more than adored and cherished.. I am sure that is the case for so many of us and our body/souls carry that silent hidden burden.
It is a sad memory I hold of seeing the state of my Mum’s aging twisted about body a few months before she died. Mum.lived through so much abandonment and loss herself and the that final suicide attempt by my sister really rocked her to the core as well as a botched knee replacement surgery that left her with two huge cuts down both legs. Like a lot of older people she had a lot of falls in the final years, often because she was trying to be there for others, rather than take care of herself. With all her deficits my Mum really did try her very best to be there for my sister and I even if at times she also hurt this living sister.
Today at the park several young families passed by. I shed some tears knowing I’ll never be able to change the truth that I didn’t come from a warm connected emotionally engaged family. I tried to make up for this since coming ‘home’ in 2011. I am perhaps more connected now, too, in an authentic way with a handful of people, my therapist and of course Scott. This last connection has been hard, people have told me over and over he is not real. I am not going to say too much but in my heart I know the truth.. I was crying about him earlier. these guys give so much for their country or to protect people.. Scott was actually raised in a missionary family so that need was perhaps inculcated in him. Now its a matter of trust that will dictate if he gets free or goes onto Iraq but the thought of that just tears my heart in two.. but maybe its God’s will. I just do not know.
I draw close to my family in spirit all of the time.. I pray to them. I was reading back an old post written just a few months after my mother died in 2017 and it spoke of how Dad was connecting with me in spirit a lot and telling me things about himself as well as showering me with a lot of love he could not show to me in life.. I just think my Dad was a young boy on the run from a home that was so under siege by European forces of darkness. I do not know if we can fully understand how it felt to be around that Nazi energy but I listened to an interview with psychotherapist and wisdom man, Carl Jung yesterday and in it he spoke of the profound psychic changes our collective has undergone facing those two world wars as well as the rise of technology.. For those who do not know Jung had prophetic dreams of Europe bathed in blood shortly before the outbreak of World War I. At that time he was undergoing what traditional psychiatrists may have labelled a ‘psychotic break’ in his life after he broke with Freud whose ideas on the psyche were too rigid and shallow for him.. During that ‘break’ (which was actually a Neptune transit (shattering of his ego and spiritual transition or emergence).. (and its to be noted like me he had the Sun in square to Neptune – but in his case from Leo to Taurus) ). Jung ended up developing many of his pivotal ideas of the shadow and the collective unconscious during that time.. He let himself revert to childhood (Leo Sun) and played a lot in the sand. Earlier in his career he also spoke in that interview with John Freeman about his realization that a patient who was labelled as ‘schizoid’ gave voice to strong symbolic images from ancient cultures that there is no way they could have known about with their own personal background.
Anyway I seem to have digressed.. I was talking about my Dad being on the run and thinking of how much he kept locked up and silent inside of him.. As a young child I wanted a connection from my Dad but he was remote, as is my older brother.. Today I have been crying about the way my brother has treated not only me but my dead sister’s second son when he came to him seeking help to move back here shortly before my sister died.. Maybe it was not meant to be but it just seemed that he and his wife treated my nephew so coldly.. with no emotion or a single shred of empathy at all.. Maybe I am wrong maybe it was a better financial choice for them to stay where they were.. I just wish my older sister could have had some family closer for those final years of her life.. Maybe with her anniversary of death in three weeks she is strongly on my mind today..
Well life is as it is.. hard sometimes, painful a lot of the time, we have longings for things that don’t come to pass and hopes for things to turn around and heal that often cannot due to the other person’s defenses or our own.. There also often seem to be forces of darkness and fear that work as hard as they can to keep our hearts separated from love and connection. I do not want that for Scott and I. I still pray he and Jasper and I will one day get to be a happy family…even if he goes to Iraq we will be in touch maybe not as much as this is a combat/war situation more than a peacekeeping one.
Today too my brother and my Dad are much on my mind.. That longing to be seen and connected to brotherly and fatherly forces is deep to me so I turn myself towards my heavenly father in prayer.. To be honest I am more of a believer in a loving all containing primal Goddess force and am of the view of spirit as being implicit in nature and not separate from it in any way. So nature is often where I go to connect and pray, but for now I will also cast today’s burdens on my fatherly source of heavenly and earthly power as well.. I pray for the courage to endure, to have faith and not allow forces of fear to defeat me.. This has been a long long journey for me… I needed my sword but I also need those times of dissolving in love, times of being held in love by something I sense to be both larger and more all encompassing, without that connection my life just tends to lack any sense of deeper meaning.
Emerging From The Dark Night 