MOTHERING COUNTRIES

I  have recently been grieving the loss of two close friends.  One I have known for 48 years and the other for under 20.

Both were somewhat sudden, the loss slicing into me like sharp knives.  The initial numbness leading to that stinging high pitched note of pain.  Each of these people held very different locations in my time, my history and I in theirs. I am struck by the stark differences in those places.

How could there be such separate and disparate zones within me that could each house whole acres of relationship unknown to the other?  We are rich with love. We are rich with our inner diversity.  We have space to entertain tribes and clans of folk in our inner world.  Each deep connection to another human nurtures and mothers our core, our direction, our compassion, and our outlook. Each, like our mothers, take  us on enormous and important excursions.

We have the ability to travel to those delicious sidings and stopovers and challenging treks.  These are vast undiscovered countries whose passports we are only given in specific and particular relationships.  These are places we could not visit without that other person by our elbow or within our minds and hearts.

Find those people.  Cherish those people.  Celebrate the continents that you are allowed to visit in the realm of your friendship.

Hold the images close to your sensibility and relish the sweetness of the journey.

It is all passing.  I like to think that when I reach end, that my human passport will be filled with a myriad of stamps and visas from long lists of sweet friendship.

Blessings and peace to you on this Mother's Day, 2014.  Misty

TAKING THE CALL

I have been busy with a guest for the last  few days, but last week I was playing.  Creating candles.  I unearthed by candle making box when I was cleaning closets for the yard sale.  I thought about how long that bin has been waiting for me to have time to play again…. And then the day appeared.

I have spoken many times in this blog about the creative impulse.  How important it is to our wellbeing.  The act of creation is a meditative state in which you might say you are crazy.  That is, you are not in your right mind….if your right mind is the linear, rational one.   Sure, we use our intelligence, reasoning, thought in the work of creating, but we do it in the context of something so much bigger than us.

It has been argued that both meditation and the creative process are the same as prayer, in that we are communing with energies far larger than our human vision.  Carl Jung might have said it was dipping into the “collective”.  The collective unconscious that was the wellspring available to all, at all times.

However we enter that space, it is so special and sacred that we are often drawn into silence.  We seem “away” from ourselves.  You know this, but a reminder that it doesn’t have to be ART, LITERATURE or some grand thing.   It can be the act of gardening, making dinner, rearranging furniture, placing a stone on a pile along a woodsy path.

This place is so healing and restful to the soul.  It is always calling to us.  In the next three days……take the call!

TRAPPED IN THE NARRATIVE

I have for the past month been doing that thing called SPRING CLEANING.  For the last three years I have participated in a city wide garage sale.  A whole town puts their things out to sell and cleans up their yards and garages and closets.  People come from many miles afar to wander through the streets and re–imagine the purpose and value of someone else’s castoffs.

Last Saturday I sold or gave away many things that had been taking up space in my life that had clearly passed it’s date of expiration…at least for me.  As I said I have done this for three years now, and YEP, I still had a van full of goodies, many that people were only too happy to take home and weave into their lives, if not garages, yards and             closets of their own..

I have to say that other than the drudge work of lifting and toting boxes and figuring out how to price things so I wouldn’t have to bring them home, I enjoyed the sifting, and most immensely the letting go of things that I think have defined me, or somehow I thought they did.

The narrative of my private life played out in art objects, mementos, crafting materials, office supplies, furniture, clothing and kitchen tools…I am pleased to say I went though every box, closet, shed, cabinet and drawer in my house and LET GO of more of my story.

There was plenty of time to consider how tied we get to who we WANT to be, who we THINK we are, who we want OTHERS TO THINK we are and who we HAVE BEEN.  It is a funny thing when you retire and move to a new area where people only know you NOW.  How important are those stories?  The ones we tell, and the ones we keep.  How much space do these stories take in our day to day living?  Is there room in our lives, rooms, walls to make a new picture?  To step out of the narrative and allow for new visions of ourselves to develop or emerge.

I can only tell you what a relief it was to leave all of those things elsewhere.  I felt as if I was let out of a cage of sorts…. Of course I will still remember those stories and they will remain a part of who I am today, but I do think that AT LEAST after 50 we have an opportunity to stop sitting on top of our pile of stuff  and calling it the whole world.

Take a moment and imagine meeting someone new.  Now imagine that you cannot tell them one thing about who you have been or what you have done.  They can only know you by how you act today?  Is that a comfortable feeling?  Scary, or Fun?

Not only can we  finish the story differently, but we can write new books about ourselves and about ourselves in a state of discovery and innocence.  Before we started acquiring all those things that define us, we were in a state of discovery and innocence.  It was fun………and the world was wide open……. 

As it could be now.  Keep the memories…  otherwise….start clean!

FEEDING ROOTS

I can feel the sap rise,

today my blood is green with Spring water,

my boughs, my bounty

will soar,

But only as far as my roots are deep.

Was there enough rain,

enough leaf mulch,

and enough time,

to make

the bed

of my 

Summer?

B. Misty Wycoff

3/29/14

Photo from David Whyte home page.

GENEROSITY

 The world is generous.

Think of the sky.

Rest in the abundant visual of clouds.

Float along currents of air.

Drift over ridges and swoop the ether.

There is plenty.

Always has been.

 Ever will be.

find a way to be generous in your world today.

Happy Sunday.

 Misty  

                          Ink drawing, 1973, James Rosen

DAVID WHYTE CONTINUES MY THOUGHT

I came across this after writing last week on reflections and thought I would add to the thoughts of last week by passing this on right from David Whyte's website.  For more of his work, the link should take you to his page…  I woke early to the rain and wind, making me remember how big the world is.  Happy Friday!             Misty

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David Whyte CROSSING THE FLOOD …Looking into the waters of that flooding plain there was a sense  that I made some symmetry with the waiting world just by seeing and hearing and that I walked a frontier between an inward heaven and the great blue calling, bird filled, breathing we call a sky, and that I stood at the edge where two worlds extended both far away and close within, so that I raised my palms against the light to see that they were real and could hold the world between my careful palms, one horizon between two cradling skies, looking inward and outward, and astonished by the great everywhere both within and without like an invisible unspoken invitation radiating from where I stood, I saw everything given and everything taken from me, I saw the way I had come and the way I had promised to go, all in one movement as something I had become now and would be forever, the sheer generosity of being loved through loving: the miracle reflection of a twice blessed life. © David Whyte: Excerpted from CROSSING THE FLOOD February 2014 PHOTO © David Whyte 2014: Flooded Port Meadow: Oxford; England. David Whyte Many Rivers Home

REFLECTION, REFLECTING…MIRRORS

Don't we all love reflecting pools?  Somehow when one image mirrors another we are able to stop and look more closely at it.  The meditation today is see everything in your world as a reflection of something within yourself.

 

It could be about the faces around you and their expressions.

It could be about the state of your rooms or houses.

It could be about global conflicts.

Maybe we are just drawn into that place of contemplation where the reflections of the natural world settle us down and center us..



















In this place 

we might remember 

or think 


about these words….

                                       “We see the world not as it is but as we are.” – Talmud.



Blessed and thoughtful Sunday to you all..  Misty

LOVE LETTER TO SELF

Loving yourself is kind of like waiting for spring.  It can be hard to imagine.  I know all of you living through the “polar vortex” of storms this season must be having a challenge remembering that Spring is happening elsewhere.  In this post I have included some Vernal imagery to help restore your heart’s confidence that renewed life is coming, if not yet in your region…

But just like trying to remind yourself that somewhere, a daffodil is remembering how to make a flower and a magnolia tree is cracking open those big waxy blossoms, it is good to work at remembering that you are good.

Sometimes all we can see out the window is the bare limbs of a tree and we can't make the mind SEE what is slowly rising in the bough, or what is being worked on for the month of april.  Like this, sometimes we lose sight of our good parts, our pretty parts, our essential-to-us pieces that bring us joy…. so like this photo journal makes real the loveliness of new life, and reminds us to not abandon hope, so too must we recall for our spirit what is lovable, beautiful and meaningful in us… almost like a new lover would do.

You are perfect even like a Spring bush… many separate blossoms,  some imperfectly crammed into a too small space along the twig that gives it life,  

maybe some that have fallen and are not so pretty anymore, 




but all wonderful!

So on this Valentines Day, instead of either celebrating with that one special person, (other that YOU), or wondering why you DON’T have that one special person, let’s do something else.

Write a love letter to you.

Imagine going 

to the mailbox or picking up a text or email knowing it will be a love letter to you….  Imagine what you would love for it to say..    “You have the biggest heart of anyone I know, I love your  eyes, I cherish when we were at ……I will love you forever!

Let your words be a thousand petals on a blossoming fruit tree, full of light and promise of tomorrow's fulfillment.

Ok now sit down and write three lines to yourself.. 

It isn’t so hard…. Just three to start.  I love you because……..

Decorate it, and put it out where you can see it… read it… and remember that Spring is coming and that LOVE IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE.

Happy V Day.   Hugs, Misty

IRIS

Today my Scottie girl Iris, 13, died. She had a mass in her stomach. I dug her grave and then Zuzu and I went to the park for a walk and then to the Rock. The clouds were sliding up and over the top and then disappearing. The sea is dark with whitecaps but the sky is blue. I began imagining Iris's spirit sailing along with the clouds, up, up high and over the bay, seeking whatever peace there is for all of us, after. Those that knew her in the therapy room can say a little prayer for her loving spirit. Thanks for all the good wishes.

This is a photo of her with her sister Jasmine, on a trip to Bishop many years ago. She is on the right.

And this one is with Zuzu when she arrived.       We spent a great morning in bed, snuggling…  Farewell my friend.