The Betrayal of the Self and the Transparency of Love

Isn't this picture amazing, this is exactly at various times thought of when I think of LOVE.  That joy of the color in the black and white world, that stretch to another who will meet you and bridge the gaps in your life, the person who understands you and wishes for you what you wish for them...joy, peace, serenity, and then there's that romantic part of my brain that kicks in to see that angle of this picture...it's lovely in it's simpleness and it's simplicity..  an embrace that fills the heart and the soul of each other.

I am going to reveal something about myself that is about as vulnerable and honest and transparent as a human can be...I've done things for love that are embarrassing, awkward, sad, sorrowful, and pathetic.  All in an attempt to win the affections of another. This last year has me taking a VERY VERY thoughtful and rigorously honest inventory of myself and my part in all that has happened.  So in being honest and transparent here is my part in much of it...I was weak, I was vastly unaware, my expectations of myself and others were too many and too much.

LOVE is a four letter word or a VERB it depends I think on how you view your higher power.  Love is described in every religious and spiritual text as that to which we attain to seek and find within ourselves and share with each other, not in a stingy manner, but with grace and forgiveness.  I've been reading the bible lately...(I know don't faint, but remember where I am in the world, the Christians here are NOT big on me calling myself a Christian and can get down right offended when I do and don't mind to tell me about it).

There are various quotes in the Bible referring to Love:    Take a look at the Bible's definition of love. Romans 8 says that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God. First Corinthians 13 says that love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Ephesians 3 says that the love of Christ is so great you will never fully understand it. Second Corinthians 9 calls it an indescribable gift.


So how does this match the worlds' look at and take on love???  Not very well, because the LOVE between humans is always flawed with it's senses, it's human egos, it's inability to see the other as self and not as other.  I was raised to believe that God is LOVE, period...and in order for God to be love well we need to love others as we would love ourselves, but therein lies the true issue of this...How many of us really do understand that love of self, that ability to love ourselves, to nourish ourselves, to give to ourselves what it is we really need.  I don't know that I see the love between humans as really possessing "an indescribable gift"....we all have expectations of each other and many of them we never share out of fear, shame, unreconciled differences from our childhoods, young adulthoods,or even our mid lives, we don't want someone to get that close to us...we don't want to have to be that open, to be vulnerable, to be transparent, to be whole with another, it's easier to just put up the masks and make our way through our daily lives pretending that we're all (FINE) and OKAY and in some cases perfect.


Our society has sold us such a bill of goods when it comes to what love needs to be a looks like..it's not what I've witnessed in my life...love for me has been crying over my first husbands body in the morgue alone, touching his skin and wanting to feel him alive one more moment with me, but knowing I will never see him again in that form, it is taking care of my mother at home as she bled from every orifice and died a painful and not peaceful death, but holding her body as she died in my arms, love is putting my hands out when my then 3 year old step son had to vomit in the middle of church and in order to not get on the carpet, I opened my hands and there it was.  Love is being able to move on when you just think you can no longer, and to accept others exactly where they stand without projecting your own conscious or unconscious judgments on them.  It's not gossiping about the weaknesses of others as that only makes you the weak one, for me it's ACCEPTANCE of what is...not what was or what will be, but solely what is.


Here's a huge revelation about me that came from this year.  Because C had proclaimed love for K (the other belly dancer) I didn't want to lose C and I really at this point didn't know what to do, so I did what I felt was best which was to be friends with her and accept her as she was, but what I really did was betray my own soul for a LOVE that wasn't real with C...he wanted to be close to K and even if that meant that I was friends with her and she could come to our house, that was fine by him.  I betrayed myself for his love. This is a HUGE piece of truth to swallow about myself and my side of the street, I didn't friend K to be mean to her, she's actually a funny, witty and intelligent human with some big flaws like all of us, but I did do it to get C to love me or accept me more...


So what was the outcome of that betrayal???  Well as you can imagine..C didn't love me anymore and really I only sold myself out for petty change on that one...my whole soul got damaged in that sell but it's a huge lesson for me.


When I go back and read the bible (parts of it) and I look to and read my other spiritual texts it comes back to that unerring and completely accepting love from the higher power to the human.  That somehow we continue to seek for it outside of ourselves and in others, who truly aren't capable of giving us the LOVE that we are really craving. 


It comes down to accepting the humanness in another and if you can do that then you're getting closer to understanding love between humans, there is no golden moment, no golden prize or red carpet of love,it's understanding that we are all flawed, we have goofy and effed' up expectations that we voice or we forget to voice, that we work along spiritual lines in order to get from the ego part of love to the part of love where our higher power recognizes us and we our higher power in order to be embraced by what is and can be termed LOVE.


Maybe by the grace of god we can all be willing to do a bit more accepting of ourselves and others and a lot less judging and persecuting of ourselves and others...to be open to the sunshine of the spirit.

Do You Know what Time It IS...Tell me do you know???

So there's an old rap time filler that uses the audience when the rapper asks, "Do you know what time it is, tell do you know, do you know what time it is?"  Of course I love old school rap, I am a teenager of the 80's and rap to me meant a form of moving from one socio-economic status to another through the creation of a whole new and completely invented genre.  Young people from all over had the ability to create this new urban music that reflected life for them.  My close friend Gordie and I LOVED rap and by LOVE it we bought album after banned album and I know we both still possess some of these gems, not just as relics of our youth, but of the abandonment of the closed down norms of liking just the one genre of music which you somehow "represent" externally.

We were punk rockers indeed, torn clothing, mohawks and all and yet we could break dance and loved the genre of music that allowed us to experiment with it as it was being invented and created by many amazing and still amazing musicians.  Now I know many will poo-poo this idea of Rap as the genre itself has grown like many over bloated, full of egos and full of nothing really to say, but back in the day when they would ask you if you knew what time it was....you knew you had NOW.  Old School Rap for me begins with such lovlies as Kool Moe Dee,  Grandmaster Flash, Bootsy Collins and his forays into the genre, or Public Enemy and Anthax...how did those two meet and do an amazing cover???  They did!  Afrika Bambaataa, Doug E. Fresh, Kurtis Blow, Funky Four plus One, these were all amazing groups, that morphed into of course the Sugarhill Gang (which if you know me, you know that I can rap the full song of Rappers Delight fast and slow, without missing a beat). These were all the precursors of a generation that morphed into something more...so why rap and why in this post???

Well rap reminded me during my punk rock days that ANY.THING.CAN.HAPPEN.ON.ANY.GIVEN.DAY.

This is true for us NOW...in this moment, ask yourself...what are you thinking???  What are you putting your energy toward???  Anything positive?  Anything sad, or unhappy or maybe you're wasting your energy on situations that you know are not "real" and are not really for you?

Since my last post I have had many personal emails about how terrifying it is to just say no to the NORMS that can bind us and ultimately tie us to something that we didn't realize we would be tied too.  Our egos tell us that it's exactly what we need or where we need to be, but remember that is your ego...not your higher power speaking to you. I found it amazing and realized that we all have our terrors, and that letting go of the things we can blame when something goes wrong is terrifying.  What will happen if I risk just being myself?

That is exactly what punk rock did for me, it allowed me to be myself and in that I realized that there were and are all these genres working to be heard and to be heard now...so go out, blend the genres a bit,enjoy the diversity is out there...next post will be on my punk rock music days...oh "good times"  ...

Enjoy the diversity that life has to offer, the now of it and ask yourself once in awhile if you know what time it is and if that time is NOW...what are you doing with your now?  Is it true to you?

So much to be grateful for...
Love,
Dogs,
Kids,
Life,
Friends,
Peace,
Serenity
another in a long line of many sober days!!!
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The Post of Bliss...

There's a secret in all of us and Joseph Cambell definitely felt it as he laboriously researched and brought all that was and is us to us...the secret lies within each of us and we feel it at times in our youth, and our young adulthoods.  It's there but we ignore it, supress it, sometimes we even work our hardest to extinguish it's flame entirely, but it still and always resides in us.

Campbell knew that we all had a "bliss" button, not one that is hyper sensitive or gauged for addictive behaviors, although in my many addictive stances managed to use "following my bliss" for things as, eating too much, drinking too much, shopping too much, and just about everythinging too much but I could always rationalize these things in my mind and body and I could also manipulate others to think along with me that well, we all deserve this...why not, we're not getting any younger, we may die tomorrow so why not live like hell today.  They all worked for a short and intense period of time, which really is my twenties...

I woke up one day this past year, at the ripe old age of 42 and I realized that I am at my mid-life. What in the hell happened?  How did I get here?  I will tell you this, no women talk about it until it's over but the first two years into your forties are hell, they are times of reflection and tremendous change that no one really is capable of expressing into words well, go ahead try it...go and talk to a woman in her later 40's or 50's she will try to describe the aching and the longing and then finally the freedom that takes place in the heart and soul of the early 40's woman.  It's near impossible to put into coherent and cohesive words.

Then I realized one day, I woke up last week, but not like waking up from a nap, more like waking up from a 20 year slumber...the one that society gives you to dull the pain of growing and changing and dealing with children, aging parents, dying parents and family and friends...that slumber...eventually like Sleeping Beauty, we all wake up.  It's stark, scary and strange, like you are wearing a skin suit of yourself and it really doesn't fit that well nor look that attractive anymore...you know them they are the women who still try to be hip and cool past their due dates...it's not good and you need to reevaluate in order to find your skin...it's still there and it's still yours.

Society where I live in WV and Appalachia has some fierce mores and norms that are those of the sociological level of social control mechanisms, to define them here would take a thesis (which I'm working on) that show and detail the manner in which social control is laid out.  Many people here will tell me with no validation that they stayed here for their family or their own "kin", to me this is a strange statement because when asked or interviewed further they too had dreams and bliss to follow, but put it off until YEP  you know where this is going...IT WAS or IS TOO LATE.  They can no longer because of familial obligations, or ties not follow their own bliss and dreams. 

Do not get me wrong this in and of itself is NOT a bad thing to have family ties, or social mechanisms that lead us to have forms of social control, but I have noted that when you are denying yourself your dreams and bliss it turns inward on oneself, never I have lived anywhere where the rates of cancer are so high and many so young...this is what is sometimes seen as dreams and anger turned inward, the immune system attacks itself out of fear and sadness that the dreams are no longer there and the anger has turned inside because putting it outside would do exactly what you're thinking reader...it would then put it outside thus BREAKING THE SOCIAL NORM.

Well after the year of awakening I've had, there is no more Social Norm...it no longer fits me, it fits many but it certainly doesn't fit me and I don't want breast, lung, or any form of body cancer, I don't want heart disease or strokes/heart attacks at a younger age, I don't want to harm my own body/spirit in order to abide by a norm that isn't of my making and reckoning.

There are many who will follow the norms to their logical end, which means they will never fulfill their dreams and their goals in life, they will do what is expected and that has it's own rewards indeed, but I don't want H and J to grow up and not see that risking for your own dreams is what makes life sweet and amazing, risking and reaching your goals is what makes you feel that sense of responsibility and accomplishment that is not like any other.

I know and talk to so many here who have "given up"or say to me, "well I can't do anything else, my family depends on me to do this, or if I do, my family will/would disown me"  wow those are powerful statements of not living and of not finding your own bliss and your own true NORTH.

We all have our own true norths inside...what are yours...if you dare, post them in your comment to this blog with your goal and maybe if you're brave why you are working toward it, what fear is stopping you?

I refuse to allow my fears or anyone elses fears keep me from reaching certain goals anymore, or from not following my own bliss in a responsible and loving manner...

More to come and much love,
G