making enemies and the warfare of love

i have inadvertantly made an enemy.

i do try, in my people pleasing way, to make people like me.

i like to be a good person.

i see good in situations.

when i am filled up, by my creativity and my spiritual connection and the beauty of simple things i am strong enough to see my faults and my foibles and be generous with myself and others about these things... generally, all of them wounds.

and recognise that love is the way to meet them.

but i stuck my head above the parapet
i am getting the hot oil treatment

and to continue the medieval warfare metaphor
i am tempted to grab my trebuchet and hurl big rocks back

i am scared
i am hurting

but the bigger part of me - the God/Goddess part of me - quietly reminds me that love is the way to meet them

it is harder to hear these whispers right now - i am in a period of business - trying to do good (and the process is how i got my self into the fightyfight in the first place)

i am not making time to create
or to listen to the voice of God

so it is easier to hear the voice of the combative,defensive,scared little girl inside me

but i am reminded to soothe her with loving words, make her feel safe

get her to put the trebuchet down

to walk away from the war and towards the life that makes my heart sing

to walk away from the feelings that make me crabby and a bitchy Mum (how can i take out my frustration on the people who love me??)

i am reminded to create, to not be out in the world in a way that is motivated by wanting to be see to be good, enough...

and to be authentically in the space that says "this is what you are here for"

and to once again, choose love - self love,love for my family, love for the beauty in the world, love for the injuries others have recieved.

not to be tangled and sodden with the bitterness and fear

but to constantly refocus on the love

and i will be where i need to be.

Enough.
Loving.
Free.

TELLING OUR STORIES

i don't usually use capitals

but the title is in capitals today because more and more i am being prodded to see how essential stories are in our lives.

when i say essential i mean life saving.

not some pretty little add on that you can only make time for if you are a child, or you have a child, or you are a librarian...

but stories are ESSENTIAL, CRUCIAL, VITAL.

We are truely genetically programmed to learn through stories - that is how we learnt as cavemen... we sat around the fire, cramming mastadon into our gobs and hearing about how it was only by creeping up slowly that Ug managed to get close enough to get a good shot...

and so we learned and it was easier next time...

We passed myths from generation to generation because within them lies the meat of our souls...

the clues to the building blocks of who we are as humans

the blueprints for how we get out of sticky messes

of how we are not alone

and that is the crux of it for me...

So many of us in the Western world feel alone.

There are many ways to reach out (which is exactly what i do when i type away here on my couch in New Zealand... hoping to be heard)

and technology can aid that

but the power of story is being lost...

but i was blessed with a storyteller Grandad

and to meet Tanya Batt, a New Zealand Storyteller..

http://www.imagined-worlds.net/DisplaySite/ and learn from her about how story is like a stool with 3 legs - one the story, one the story teller and one the audience... how these need to balance and accomodate each other... how it is dynamic and alive -

and TV - as engaging as some stories on there can be (damn it, i even cry at some advertising) it is not alive in that same way...

and now we don't sit around the fire and just tell the story of our day, or the story our grandparents told us...we lose that path to learning - that connection to each other through our humanity....

i had a miscarriage 3 years ago.

It was inutterably sad.

But it was only when i was open about my grief, and our loss that others opened up. I heard how i wasn't alone mourning a child i would never hold in my arms. And within the space of sharing that story both myself and the others i shared with could truely comfort each other. And some of those wounds were decades old, and had never been heard, let out in the light before....

And i hear about people who have a crisis of confidence in their own lives and make radical and often painful changes. And i think if only they spoke to me - i could tell them it is not just them who question so deeply, digging into their souls, that the ordinary parts of their lives seem, for a time at least, meaningless...and then with all that digging new things grow...

And i spent some time with my beloved friends yesterday - people i have formed a bond with, people i don't see every day, but who hear my soul when it talks, or cries or jumps for joy...

And we told our stories.

We were authentic.

Some of it was painful, some hilarious.... but we became joined by our truths and that although we live radically different lives, the same threads of humanity run through our stories, our longings, our secrets, our dreams, our lives both seen and unseen.

this is part of the gift of authenticity, of clarity

but it also the key to being human

Please tell your story.

and thankyou for hearing mine.