There are some words from the AA Big Book that I was reminded of today :
Just for today I will be unafraid. Especially I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful and to believe that as I give to the world, so the world will give to me.
Reading these on the Friends of Bill W page on Facebook reminded me of the concept of foreboding joy that Brene Brown talks about a lot.. This relates to those times we can feel our heart bursting open with soft. tender, miraculous or joy filled feelings and then the fears start up, mostly the fear of losing that very thing..
Writing this also brings to mind a quote from William Blake that my first serious therapist Wendy Bratherton told me in that rocky period where I was struggling with my decision to return to Australia in October 2001,
He binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged thing destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise
As the Buddha reminded us all is change, all things come and go except eternity which I guess is the vast mysterious field within which our souls and earthy beings operate.. Starting to read the novel The Waves that Virginia Woolf wrote in 1931 at the age of 49 this morning I am reminded that those who struggle with so called mental illness so often touch those vast and infinite realms only later to be dropped back into the hard black fog of earthly life and an emotional reality dogged by early abuse, trauma or loss that lays hidden.
In the case of Virginia it is known she was abused by a relative when young and she must have carried that truth silently deep inside of her. As Jeanette Winterson writes in the introduction to the 2000 Vintage addition of that novel within her beautiful prose ripe with sensory imagery we can only sense the emotional truth of what she lived.
A moment ago I had one of those conversations with my Higher Self, it had to do with those touched by Pluto when young, which is those overpowered by someone else’s will or energy they could not control, later in life my guidance showed me those of us so often overpowered or overwhelmed struggle to keep control, most especially over the hidden thing that wounded us and that those attempt at controlling the uncontrollable may derail and totally limit our life in all kinds of difficult ways.. The unprocessed thing may also lead us, in the end, to seek a way out as Virginia did when she took her life with that truth buried deep inside of her.
Never the less what comes across in that book is how completely in touch with the magical present Virginian so often lived.. In a movie of her life I watched a year or so ago Virginia is shown running away from an artistic gathering to go close to a dark, black, churning sea, that seemed a potent image of her emotional depths.
I am a bit tired to explore these themes more fully today but the insight came on the day Pluto turned retrograde that being so powerless as a child may lead us to become over controlled as an adult or doomed for most of our lives to battle hidden demons (Pluto lived underground only making limited appearances above it for brief periods and when he did he wore a black helmet as a disguise.) that are always threatening to overpower us… And I was reminded today too, that grief and loss do make us feel out of control, they may lead us to shut down or seek the person responsible even if the loss happened due to no one’s fault..Sometimes the person we are most likely to turn upon and blame is ourself.
Just like in the novel I am reading at the moment by Marian Keyes Rachel, Again in which Rachel losses a baby and then comes to battle the aftermath of depression and sleeplessness, Rachel seeks the reason it happened perhaps to maintain some kind of illusion of control or logic but in the end these losses just happen and it is we who are left to manage them in the critical, overwhelming and confusing aftermath.. I will post a post after this on the relationship between unnecessary guilt, self blame and depression..
Sometimes shit just happens because that is the way life rolls and it may be asking of us a way through grounded in developing surrender and acceptance if painful emotions over time, to seek more effective ways to battle with harsher Plutonian realities in order to deepen to our fate, since so much that happens is in our control once we learn how to respond to rather than react put of trauma, so much that happens and even how we respond to in the case of Post Traumatic Stress is not before we find that acceptance and mastery.
Emerging From The Dark Night 