Pilgrimages

(To get us through on this journey a poem by R.S. Thomas)

There is an island there is no going

to but in a small boat, the way

the saints went, traveling the gallery

of the frightened faces of

the long-drowned, munching gravel

of its beaches. So I have gone

up the salt lane to the building

with the stone altar, and the candles

gone out, and kneeled and lifted

my eyes to the furious gargoyle

of the owl that is like a god

gone small and resentful. There

is no body in the stained window

of the sky now. Am I too late?

Were they too late also, those

first pilgrims? He is such a fast

God, always before us, and

leaving as we arrive.

There are those here

not given to prayer, whose office

is the blank sea that they say daily.

What they listen to is not

hymns, but the slow chemistry of the soil,

that turns saints’ bones into dust,

due to an irritant of the nostril.

There is no time on this island.

The swinging pendulum of the tide

has no clock; the events

are dateless. The people are not

late or soon; they are just

here, with only the one question

to ask, which life answers

by being in them. It is I

who ask. Was the pilgrimage

I made to come to my own

self, to learn that, in times

like these, and for one like me,

God will never be plain and

out there, but dark rather, and

inexplicable, as though he were in here?

-R.S. Thomas

Fare Thee Well, Ivory Girl

Technically, the ole girl has no monetary value whatsoever. Indeed, probabilities are high that she's the kind you'd stumble across discarded behind some smelly, old tires in the corner of a thrift store, her only companions "Chopsticks," clunking children, taunting their chasing parents with temporary locator spell melodies.

No one, is likely to pay money to take her home for the night.

But She was there, like the Giving Tree, waiting for me day after day to take a seat. She was there in so many of the moments of overload where the lump caught in the throat. She was there when the fingers longing to send the melancholy into her bowels, refused catharsis because the soul yolk was just too deep to spill all over her keys. She held the silence like stone for months between the notes in spite of this being the antithesis of the purpose of her being. She was there, waiting. She had my back, as friend of my soul.

But He was there too. He saw the creative connection we had and didn't understand it or like it. Maybe, he was jealous of her. Maybe somewhere in his traumatic past, the Dementors had sucked his soul away, because he didn't really understand soul anymore, perchance he ever did.

Her fate was sealed by my deep love and soul connection to Her. If only I'd known to hide my love for Her a little bit better. A Michigander we'd rescued, She'd ridden the bumpy road to us on the back of a pickup truck when homelessness had threatened as some church decluttered. But the truth of the matter is that She was the one who rescued me.

She held me close many the dark night of the soul when the light in my thread bare heart nearly disappeared behind the veil. She offered shelter from the emotional abuse and gaslighting swirling in the living room air like desert dirt devils. She soaked up my tears like a sponge when there was no shoulder to cry upon, as I held my breath hoping the thin walls did not betray me, telling Him of my fear in the dark.

During the divorce proceedings, He held her as ransom. She unwillingly became his pawn. He could never understand her creative capacity for space holding. He could never understand Her soul holding. He could never really see Her true value, She was just a decorative piece of furniture to Him that mattered to me.

She was no Bosendorfer, no Steinway & Son, no Fazioli, but she mattered all the same.

He needed Her only for the sake of my isolation. He needed to have Her only to destroy me. He needed to separate us like a teacher keeps the young school girls apart to keep them from giggling in the corner of class too much. He needed Her to crush the good and kill anything soulful, anything foreign to him--that which He will never understand. He will never get the realm of soul. You can't if you have none.

But, he didn't count on this: you can't kill something that has sporified into something more. If He'd even understood the ethereal realm one bit, he'd know from the Velveteen Rabbit that you can't destroy something that has transformed itself by the act of love and sacrificial space holding.  

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And so I let go of you, dear friend of my soul, ethereal Ivory Girl. I bid thee farewell. May you find your way to another in need of your musical healing. May you continue on in your work. And though mere spinet melody holder to some--to Him, somehow, you were and always will be so much more to me. Somehow, like the Velveteen Rabbit, you crossed thresholds. You became something more real. You came to inhabit the immaterial, invisible land of soul. And I suppose once you inhabit this land, no one, not even a narcissist who knows nothing of real, nothing of soul, nothing of the beautiful, creative invisible realm, can ever rob you of this bit. Farewell my beautiful dancing Ivory Girl.

just walk

If pilgrimage has taught me anything it is this... some days are just about walking. You just keep walking. You just keep putting one foot in front of the other in some sort of ritual.

Some days that is all you can do. And that is ok.

Revenge

How to Exact Revenge on The Narcissist, or something to that effect was the name of a VLOG I recently stumbled upon on YouTube. I watched some of the video. To watch some is better than none, I thought, since most of me outright disagrees with the philosophy of taking revenge upon the narcissist.

But, I have always been the sort of person who tries to listen to other people’s ideas in pursuit of growth. And I find that I most often need some sort of stop-gap on low self-awareness when I vehemently disagree with someone’s ideas. So I had a listen.

And not being one for commenting on YouTube, I’ll respond here.  

While my own experience has demonstrated that healing from narcissistic abuse involves liberal amounts of "space allowing" for difficult emotions, including the desire for revenge, I think a distinction needs to be made between allowing space and allowing too much space. I believe that the pursuit of revenge creates too much space, lending itself toward a particular sort of imbalance, ultimately stunting the healing process in one’s self--forget the narcissist as reference point altogether.

By itself, the emotion of revenge is nothing more than intense anger coupled with a strong desire for justice. Typically, the desire for revenge surfaces when we perceive that we have been the recipient of intolerable injustice.  

In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with that.

But, in order to pursue said revenge strategy, we often have to go much further. We often have to foster, even conjure a deliberate imbalance in ourselves—in our own emotional alchemy, often by cutting off other emotions that might get in the way of executing said strategy such as kindness, empathy, and compassion. I suspect the reason behind this fostering is due to the fact that intense strategies like revenge demand Herculean amounts of energy to drive them to completion. Therefore, the energy we might have for other emotions gets requisitioned to our ORS--Omnipotent Revenge Strategy. Our potential energy that we damn up behind Hoover in order to exact our revenge strategy ends up finding its own way. It's worth remembering that once water is released below the damn, it has no agenda--as mere kinetic energy it just flows onto whomever and whatever is caught in its path. Such massive flowing energy might just land on us as we fall casualty to our revenge's course--just as un-damned water knows only to flow into empty space.

Furthermore, ironically enough, with revenge we often have a misguided notion that we are "taking back control." In all actuality, we are surrendering control as we knot and tether and tie ourselves back up to the narcissist. We reattach ourselves by making our well-being dependent upon his painful experience just as it was before! We want him to hurt, to suffer, only now we think seeing him wounded will somehow help us heal. This is akin to suffering a gunshot wound and thinking that shooting the perpetrator rather than going to the hospital will make the wound stop hemorrhaging. In so doing we push our healing locus of control outside ourselves and give it back to the narcissist who gladly takes it once again from us. We make our healing journey about him, which is furthering his narcissistic supply line. Why the hell would we want to feed that beast again? 

Put simply, this is not the path to healing our wound. In fact, this is likely the path to turning our wound gangrenous.  

Writing Exercise: Five Core Values

This comes from the book: Ensouling Language by Stephen Harrod Buhner.

Directions: Choose 5 deeply meaningful words, ones that approximate the center of who you are and evoke emotive content for you. Write them down. Any words will do--as long as they are meaningful to you.

Example. Earth, Stone, Green, Leaves, Plants.

Or another. Love, Happiness, Child, Wandering, Hope.

Here was my list: Soul, Compassion, Creativity, Healing, Intuition.

Do this part of the exercise now without reading the rest of the directions...

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Next. "Write five poems, each of which uses all five of the words. You can use as many other words as you want, nevertheless each poem must contain all five of the words you have chosen. Take as much time as you need..."

When done, read the poems in sequence. You might be amazed by what comes out. Here are all five of mine in order...

One
the soul of healing
grabs intuition
and holds on
birthing compassion
creativity's apex.

Two
intuition speaks from soul
breathing with compassion
creating a healing force
magical enough
that few believe its existence.

Three
the real trick in life
is ferreting out compassion
from soul
when poured empty
and used up.
creativity wanders in
searching for healing intuition
that has sporified
in order to survive.

Four
living the soul's creativity
heals the parts of
intuition, wounded by those
that sacrifice
compassion on pain's altar.

Five
healing
pilgrimage of creativity
to soul's center.
seeking out
bits that keep us human.
splinters
most wanting of compassion.
the inward glance
pains.
but, in the stumbling dark
intuition
holds our hand.

the Gym

Eyes on the floor, headphones on the ears, I hide out in the open, protected by my walls of being focused, aloof. They know not of lies and narcissists and webs and gaslighting. They touch not the holes in walls or pocketbooks or hearts. They feel not the anguished face of my child. They see not the ugliness of it all.

They know me only by my routine and my outward appearances of being strong. They see my training rituals aimed at remaining in the camp of the sane. They see how my invisibility cloak pulls me skyward, over the bar and back again, masking my inner weaknesses.

Here, in this space, I am capable, maybe even strong.