Lessons in Receiving

To take into one's possession; to have something bestowed, conferred upon you; to have delivered or brought to you; to be burdened with; sustain; to hold, bear, or contain.

My Gnome Home

These are definitions of receiving. I have been thinking about receiving a lot over the past couple of weeks.  The holidays heighten gift-giving and gift-receiving rituals.  I love exchanging gifts. I love giving in all ways. But I find a particular tension with receiving. Receiving, from one vantage point and level of intentionality, leaves me feeling loved, thought about, considered, a part of the world.  From other vantage points and levels of intentionality,  receiving leaves me feeling at a disadvantage, indebted to others, unable to live up to expectations, separated from the world.  It is a terrible feeling, because it exposes all my insecurities.  A beautiful and loving gift triggers shame for me. This beautiful and thoughtful gift from Matt made me realize how hard it is for me to receive something so loving.  What did I do to deserve this beautiful gift? Did I give/do/be enough to earn such a gift?  What do I need to do to level the playing field? 

My Gift

In my typical fashion, I needed to deconstruct, pull apart the meaning to create a new line of entry. A rhizomatic line of entry that enables me to find joy where most of my life I have learned shame, guilt, conditionality.

To take into one's possession. To have something given to me out of kindness and thought. The idea that this gnome home is now mine. The idea that somebody would think of me enough to give me something so meaningful.  But I didn't earn it, did I?  Did I earn it because I gave something to him or did I earn it for some future expectation of my allegiance?  This is so cynical of me. But I honestly struggle to feel deserving. Yet, what in this definition says anything about having to be deserving? Or to have earned it? Nothing. 

To have something bestowed, conferred upon you. To be given something as an honor.  My doctoral degree was conferred upon me. I earned this.  I worked hard for six years to receive my degree. How does one earn honors?  Through hard work, right?  How else would I have something bestowed upon me?

To have delivered or brought to you. I have things I bought delivered to me: books, furniture, teas.  I earn them (so to speak) because I could afford to purchase these items. 

To be burdened with. This one I understand.  I often feel burdened when I receive. Burdened because I wonder what I did to earn this gift. I wonder what I'll have to do to make sure he knows how much I appreciate it.  I wonder what I can get them that is as meaningful and caring.  Of course, worrying about all of that strips me of any ability to act out of love and grace and to give back in an organic and meaningful way.  I'm so worried about relieving the burden, in other words, equalizing and quantifying the relationship, that the quality dissipates. 

I think back to when I was in about the 2nd or 3rd grade.  Our class had a secret Santa gift exchange for Christmas and so each of us had to buy a gift for some unknown other student. My family had such little money that I was immediately rapt in fear over asking my parents to buy a gift. That fear shifted to whether or not my gift would be nice enough to bring to class.  

I found a stocking with a mix of things--coloring book, puzzle book and a few trinkets--that my mom said we could afford.  It was one of those plastic mesh stockings that you can buy with an assortment of cheap toys and items.  I chose that particular one because it seemed the most interesting.  But I worried it was too cheap for anybody to really enjoy and I felt guilty bringing it to school. I secretly hoped I would draw my own gift to spare myself any embarrassment.  But I went to school with it all wrapped up. 

Sustain. This definition, at first, did not make sense to me.  What does receiving have to do with sustaining?  But I can't help but think about how receiving is sustenance.  It is what sustains us as humans in relation to ourselves and one another. I am sure this is not the intended definition, but it is what touches me deeply in my struggle to receive and it is something I know I need to learn to do gracefully, lovingly, and with humility. 

When we traded, I ended up with a fun toy from a friend in class, but I watched the look on the face of the boy who received my gift.  I could see he was underwhelmed.  The kids in class started to compare and trade gifts to get the things they wanted, so I decided to trade what I received for the gift I wrapped so carefully.  I went to him and asked if he wanted to trade. Puzzled, he looked at what I had and asked if I was sure and I said confidently, "Yes. I really like all that stuff." 

We traded, but when my friend came over to ask how I liked her gift, I vainly tried to hide the fact that I traded her gift away.  I could see her crestfallen face when she saw I had traded it.  I felt so guilty and I didn't know what to say.  I had disappointed my friend out of my own shame.  I couldn't receive even in the 3rd grade.  Where did I learn this? 

To hold, bear, or contain. This definition gets deeper into the core of my struggles with receiving.  To hold space for the relationship, the space to nourish, foster, develop something filled with joy and life. It scares me. Receiving shouldn't be a burden. It should be a responsibility born out of love and respect.  Not a burden born out of fear and expectation. Receiving is part of the larger practice of friendship, love, intimacy.  Much of my life receiving has been a burden.  It usually came with expectations, unquestioned loyalty, forgiveness for unforgivable actions, amelioration of guilt.  It was almost always conditional.  I have been trying to feel, really feel, unconditional love. But it scares me. It feels like a responsibility that I can't live up to. I worry that if I don't return in kind I will fail to live up to whatever it was that initiated the giving.  I don't know how to contain. I get so scared of failing to meet expectations that those beautiful thoughtful gifts sit like hot potatoes burning through my hands and so I must quickly pass it back in kind or everything will fall apart in the relationship--the love, respect, all of it.  And as I reflect, I feel sad that this is how I think about receiving.  I get angry that I have not learned the skill of receiving by this stage of my life. Resentful. 

When I got home with my own gift, my mom asked me how that happened.  I told her I wanted this gift and that it was by chance that I ended up with it.  I never told her that I traded to get my own gift back. Until now, I never fully understood why I had traded to get my own gift.  But in light of my exploration of receiving, it is clear how deeply this rhizomatic shame runs within me.  The funny thing about a rhizome, though, is that I can dig in the dirt a bit more and find a new direction.  I so much want to find the thread to joyful receiving. 

I am a lucky person.  Full of wonderful people.  I have a life that is meaningful and awake.  And this is reflected in the beautiful gifts I receive day in and day out not only from those wonderful people in my life, but also myself and the universe. I look at this gnome home and I see it as an exploration in receiving. It is a practice in seeing myself as something more than my childhood self.  This gnome home feels like the conglomeration of all the missteps and victories in my life. The intricate little pieces, each thoughtfully placed with incredible detail. Thought and intention. That somebody would do something for me so rich in thought and cost is beyond my comprehension.  It was the trigger I needed to delve into. Matt has given me a gnome home that is filled with hidden treasures to explore.  Our relationship always provides the space to grow and reflect and now there is a tangible reflection of our relationship. Receive, Christina. Joyfully receive. 

Gnome Home Full View

Resistance Revisited

It is a curious thing.  I have been intermittent with my entries to the blog over the past month or so and I know it is resistance.  More than a month ago, I gave myself the assignment that Maya Tiwari calls "Ancestral Journal-Keeping."   I journaled on my parents for over a month and it was a trying time throughout. Intense sadness and anger kept rising to the surface. Part of the assignment is to return to what I wrote and read and reflect on it.  I know I have been avoiding reading those entries.  I have been creating busyness for myself, focusing on the drama of my work life and allowing things to get in the way.  This is such a pattern for me.  I could have been writing about other things, but since I was avoiding the reflection, all writing ground to a halt. 

"If anger or any other emotion prevents you from being able to write, put down your journal and practice a food, breath, or sound sadhana...." --Maya Tiwari

I know I need to reflect. I can feel it all the way down to my bones. But I also feel the fear of doing that reflection exercise all the way down to my bones.  Competing feelings—one of fear and one of trust--leave me frozen and agitated.  Hence, the focus of the last blog post (November 29th).  Fear and trust are so deeply intertwined their entanglement clog my creative fire.  Sitting here writing this I am overpowered by the fear.  Yet I am still writing.  I’m staying. 

"...When you engage in the practice you move energy and breath through your body, which allows the rhythms of your thought processes to become more fluid...." --Maya Tiwari

Malasana. That is why I took the challenge of doing malasana each day (see November 8th entry). And I did it. I sat in malasana for five minutes each day for a week—and it felt amazing. Energy was moving. I could feel the pose grounding me—bringing me to earth gently and with love.  My hips are often the place I hold intense emotions and I could feel the muscles simultaneously fighting and succumbing.  But I allowed curiosity to settle into those spaces.   I found a way into the dense and complex musculature of that region of my body.  No, I have not mastered malasana.  Each day with the pose is different.  Some days it’s easy to sit there; other days it feels like I’m going to freak out.  But I realized how much I love the pose and how much my vata nature needs the pose.  I haven’t been doing it everyday, but I do it often. 

"...You may find positive solutions to problems or emotional issues that seem insurmountable and have made you feel stuck." --Maya Tiwari

Although I'm less stuck as a result of the malasana practice, I'm still struggling to write and reflect. One thing that arose for me today is how much I am struggling with vata. Usually kapha is a wonderful place to lay blame during this time of year for my general lack of energy.  I have felt tired and creatively drained over the past month or more, but this morning I realized it's not out of the lethargy and the heaviness of kapha.  I had a deep sleep last night and awoke refreshed and alive.  It was glorious. Reflecting in meditation, I realized I was drained because I have not been sleeping well.  My mind has been busy at night, waking me up, spinning around my thoughts. Vata-mind.  Often, I am afraid that if I indulge vata too much, I will push kapha into imbalance. It's as though I prefer to be in vata-excess out of fear that kapha will stomp her way into my life.  She will dominate me with her wet, heavy, earthiness, leaving me lost in her darkness. Yet sometimes we need that darkness.  Seeds must grow in the wet, heavy, earthiness. Yet we need light air and space to keep energy moving. But as my yoga teacher reminds me, winter is the time of opposites. That means our work is to find balance, and since I am a vata-kapha, that is a big task.  I’ve struggled with kapha imbalances in the past. It is a difficult energy to get moving when it gets too heavy.

Although vata and kapha are largely opposites, there are things about these two doshas that make them complementary. And not always in the greatest ways.  They both lean to the cold side of things.  They both thrive on fear.  And they both can be tremendous roadblocks to creativity: kapha for its pull to stasis and lethargy; vata for its pull to frantic lack of focus. Sitting in meditation this morning with my mind jumping from one thing to the next, I realized that vata has been frantically unraveling my creative focus.

I found this picture online and I couldn't stop looking at it. It mirrors my internal state.  The frenetic flight of the bird's wings on a crumbling facade.  There is part of me that knows some of the facade does need to break down and crumble. I sense the reflection process will lead to crumbling.  Hence, the resistance. The frantic bird shuttering to hold onto that facade.  I look at the picture and keep thinking, "Why can't I just let go?"  

Winter: States of Trust and Fear

Trust is the word this week and it is the work of this juncture.  I have been working on establishing trust in my yoga practice and must now turn the trust lens toward my work with Ayurveda.  Trust is not an easy thing to establish—even within oneself (or maybe especially within oneself).

When I looked up the work trust, descriptors such as reliance, truth, confidence, and faith emerged in a variety of ways.   Confidence in something or someone.  Faith in oneself or another.  To be able to rely on something or someone—or oneself.  

And right now I’m searching for trust in the work I have done over the past several years. Trust that the work I have done can help me stay the course as I move into places that do not look familiar.  Yet in many ways things do look familiar.  The way we move through the world. Pressing up against the seasons. Each year winter has a similar smell, taste, and texture.  But the air is different.  The crisp cold sun that shines down is not the sun from last year.  It is new, yet the same. Winter brings with it different challenges each time it cycles into my life. New challenges.  Deeper challenges.  I want to feel like I’ve mastered the art of winter.  So I try to engage the same strategies and routines I established last year.   I seek out familiar feelings even as my body reminds me over and over that those are not what I need. I want to default to what came before because I struggle to trust what is next. I do not feel confident in myself to handle what is to come, so I look back and try to hold tight to the familiar.  I realize how much I lose myself in that process. I lose out on possibilities. I lose out when I forget that there is an art to winter.  There is an art to establishing trust and finding joy in those new winter spaces. And when I forget that, I sit frozen in fear because I am scared of what comes next. 

The opposite of trust could be fear. 

Fear has words such as dread, apprehension, distress, and danger to define it.  Impending doom, whether real or imagined, is a great definition for fear.  When one cannot trust the unknown, fear settles in. When I cannot trust myself to handle the unknown, fear settles in.  It seems that the fear of the unknown has been growing for me in this juncture.  

My routines have been shifting and I am still searching for new routines, but I’m struggling to hear what I need. I’m struggling to figure out what is going within me. 

So I go back to a photograph, capturing a place where fear and trust coexist.  Trust takes a great deal of courage and I think about my hike up the Cog Rail at Manitou Springs, Colorado this past summer.  A straight hike up. I was excited for the adventure. I didn’t know what was ahead and there was no dread.  I trusted myself to make it. At every level in which the trail grew steeper, I trusted myself to make it.  I was scared at times.  Tired.  I had moments in which regretted my decision to hike.  But I never doubted that I would make it.  And I did. In the golden warmth of that mountain, I trusted myself to face the unknown.  In the steely cold of these plains, I am riddled with fear.  It’s silly, I know.  I can trust myself to make it up a steep hill, but I am terrified of presenting my research to the community.  If only I could channel the feeling on that mountain and bring it here. Bring it here to calmly and slowly make my way through challenges.  To feel my body with each word, each step. Taking my time.  Enjoying the view. I need to figure out a way to cultivate trust in this time of year.  

The opposite of fear could be trust. 

Resistance and Malasana

Resistance.

That is probably the best way to describe what I have been experiencing these past few weeks since my last entry. As per my usual process, I will try to delve into the word to better understand what it is I'm experiencing.

Resistance, according to Merriam-Webster: the refusal to accept something new or different; effort made to stop or fight against something; the ability to prevent something from having an effect.

I seem to be in resistance mode.  My sense is that I'm trying to fight against the shifts naturally taking place this time of year.  If I think about it, it's a big shift.  We are moving from a time in which we are in full bloom throughout summer and into a time of shedding those dying blooms and retreating inward to strengthen our resources, our fire. But it doesn't feel that way.  It just feels like everything is drying up and blowing away from me. I feel like I have to work harder to see and feel the beauty of the world.

At the same time, the sun is present less and less.  She is fading through the changing angles and motions of the earth and I just don't like it.  I realize that it has to happen. I'm trying hard to embrace that transition, but it is not easy. I'm trying to be kind to myself as I experience resistance, but I can feel by body stiffen, brace itself, worry, fortify, and do everything I can to resist things I can't control.  Futile, perhaps.

Iyengar's Beautiful Malasana

Symbolic of this struggle is my relationship to the yoga pose, malasana.  Garland pose. Iyengar does this pose so beautifully.  But me?  I am the purple bear below trying to access the pose.  Except I'm not smiling. I get angrier and angrier with my body when it won't do what I want it to do.  I stiffen, brace myself, worry, fortify, curse, and stop listening to what my body wants me to hear.  What I know, though, is that the angrier I get, the more impossible it is to do this pose in an effective way.

I will say, though, that I had a moment of serendipity as I started this blog post, because I was looking for descriptions and images of malasana online.  I found a random blog called "five-minute yoga" (http://myfiveminuteyoga.com/411/take-the-five-minute-malasana-challenge/).  The post asks its readers to take the five minute malasana challenge for seven days.  I have been sort of doing this each morning--taking several minutes to practice malasana and get angrier and more upset with my limitations.  But it redirected and reminded me that the point is not to look like Iyengar, but to embrace my heavy-bear moments. It became clear to me this morning in my yoga practice that when I come to this pose, I stop feeling. It becomes more a matter of conquering, accomplishing, this pose.  Why, though? To feel good about myself?  What happens if I stop and just feel the pose?

What happens is that I truly experience the discomfort of my tight hips. I fully experience the fear my body holds with the idea of letting go.  Total resistance.  I realize I need to send my hips love and compassion so they know it is okay to relax and let go.  They do not feel safe in my brutal attempts at fighting my way into the pose and it makes the pose miserable. I can't feel where the tightness centers itself. I can't feel my body at all. I'm on the surface of my skin, bossing my muscles around and as a result, they resist.  They do not want forceable change.

Not unlike in malasana, my body fights against the changes that start moving me into winter. It's like I try to strong-arm myself into accepting the transition from summer through fall and into winter.  I sit at the surface and try to boss myself around and tell myself I need to just be okay and pretend that the world around me isn't changing.  So then my body resists enjoying fall and the release of the beautiful blooms. I try to hold on so tightly to some sort of forever summer and I know it is not sustainable. Yet, I often don't even realize that is what I'm doing.  I lose intention and no longer really know why I'm doing anything that I'm doing.  I'm doing things totally out of habit (even if it is a good habit). Or I do the same practices expecting the same results all the time. That is when I know I'm not doing any of those activities with intention and I can't reap all the benefits that I could.  Fall is the time of harvest. It is the time to reap benefits, but instead of reaping those benefits I find myself worrying and waiting and bracing for some storm to arrive.

Impending doom, as Brene Brown calls it.  I can't enjoy the moment, because I'm so afraid of some other shoe dropping or some bad thing happening to somehow reinforce all my negative talk. You know that talk when you convince yourself that you do not deserve to experience pure joy.  It is such a tender area for me. And this is such a tender season for me.  I need to remember that and be kind.  Therefore, I will take the seven day malasana challenge and practice it with kindness.  I will practice it with intention, reminding myself that it is time to shed the impending doom voice.  Or, at the very least, not let it be the dominant voice in my busy mind.

I hereby promise to report back next week on the outcome of this practice. I will spend this last week of fall holding myself accountable to the season and to malasana.

Grounding, Organization, Focus

As I enter into my third year of intentional focus on ayurveda practices, I am starting to find clarity in my work for each season.  The resonance of what I need to keep working on as autumn continues has strengthened over the past week.  

Grounding, Organization, Focus

Challenging practices for me in this season.  

What became clear over the past week was that my coping strategies for stress deteriorated.  I could feel myself fall into a vortex of self-critique and numbing.  Older residual habits that I've managed to avoid over these years.  And that is the issue.  I have out run some of those old habits, all the time fearing the moment they come back to dominate my life.  That means those habits are far from gone; they leave me reactive and at times responding in ways that are not always true to who I am now.

When I sat in that revelation for a few days, I could almost feel another layer of my older self peeling off of my body.  And what I realized was that I had to admit that those deeper fears of myself still had a pretty firm hold on me.  Bringing those fears out of my unconsciousness and into my conscious, intentioned self, I knew I needed to develop ways to handle that process with awareness and clarity, so I do go into reactive mode.

Grounding, Organization, Focus

Muscles I need to locate and strengthen.  

Grounding: To place on a foundation; to fix firmly; to settle or establish.  This is probably one of the hardest practices for me.  It is easy for me to loose touch with all that is beneath me. I forget to feel the earth. Attempts at settling down often produce greater unsettling. I can remember to ground in my yoga practice, but off the mat, it easily slips out of grasp. Yet, I know that in order to pay attention to my reactivity, I must stop and actually feel the ground.  Feel the world around me.  Feel the hardness of the ground. Feel the soft carpet tickling the bottoms of my feet. Feel the pointed tips of the grass between my toes. Feel my feet shuffling through leaves as I walk through my backyard.  But how do I remind myself of grounding in the moment? That will be my challenge.  


Organization: The state of being organized.  But what does it mean to be organized? I found an interesting definition: "to give organic structure or character to."  I like the idea that organization emerges organically, responsively to what is happening.  But not reactively. It means, for me, that the practice of organizing has to be done intentionally and with awareness. And even in the past few days, even the tiniest task to organize with intention has provided me calmness and relief.  Clearing out my dead and dried annuals and putting the planters under the deck provided the space for me to observe the way nature prepares for and responds to the changing seasons. Organizing my deck helped me embrace the end of a season of outward growth and welcome autumn's preparations for pulling inward. 

Focus: An act of concentrating interest or activity on something. To have focus on something, for me, means finding flow. Finding the zone.  Finding total absorption in something always puts me in a euphoric space.  I want to get in that zone with my research and writing.  Not simply to do the work in order to soothe some arbitrary ego requirement, but to feel the joy in the work.  I want to keep myself attuned to those spaces that bring me joy.





This is my work for the season. I have to stay awake and intentioned.  Focus, organization, and grounding. They all work together. They reinforce one another.  They feed and work on one another. 

Synchronicity: Where Kali Dances

There is a quote from Cixous that has stood out for me in my reading of her book, Rootprints. 

"What ties me to my elective relatives,
what holds me in the lure of my
spiritual guides, is not the question of
style, or of metaphors, it is what they
think about incessantly, the idea of
fire, over which we maintain a stealthy
silence, so as not to stop thinking about 
it. No complacency. Only the admit-
ting of the fear of fire. And the
compulsion to confront the fire. We
need fire." (p. 26)

I think of Cixous as an elective relative.  She is poetic, metaphorical, elusive, academic, but not an academic, and a woman who writes with her whole being.  Everything I strive to be.  

No complacency.

There is something in her language that aligns with the work I have been doing over the past year.  Interestingly, I have not picked up anything from Cixous since I taught "Laugh of the Medusa" about a year ago. I have not read Rootprints in quite a few years. She and I grew distant, but I see how her words settled into my unconscious, like a footprint, a rhizomatic set of memories of her words and metaphors.  Root. Print.

What blew me away in the quote were the lines: No complacency. Only the admitting of the fear of fire. And the compulsion to confront the fire. We need fire. This sums up the complex work I have been doing over the past year with ayurveda.  Facing fire. Facing fear.  

In meditation this morning, I was working with Kali.  My mind immediately took me to the place I often go to in my meditation.  I would call it my internal fire source near/around my third chakra. It's a dark primal space. There was Kali--dancing around and grabbing me and pulling me into her circular vortex. She was dancing around the fire source, but I didn't realize it at first. It was as though the fire source was camouflaged.  It was covered with dark gauzy cloth.  Lately, I've been feeling stagnant... Not stagnant.  I have been feeling myself wanting to revert to a place that no longer exists within me.  And Kali refused to let that happen. She, rather violently, pulled me into the vortex, which made me look more closely at the black gauzy formation.  I pulled it off and realized that it was my power source.  And there were red hot coals pulsing and emanating heat.  She made me stay with it.  Kali made me dance around with her and stoke the coals until flames started to rise from the pit.  Then I sat there shedding layers of myself and throwing them into the fire. All the gauze, clothes, masks, skin, that was inhibiting me.  It's wondrous to think about how all this can happen in 10 minutes of meditation.  But my mind took me there immediately. 

No complacency. Only the admitting of the fear of fire. And the compulsion to confront the fire. We need fire. 

Could Kali and Cixous be any more direct with me?  I don't think so. 

---------------------------------------------------transition----------------------------------------------

I've been struggling to understand the difference between synchronicity and serendipity.   I looked up each of the words in the dictionary.

Synchronicity: The simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

Serendipity: Supposedly, the first use of the word in the English language was by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann. He said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of."

On the surface, these words seem very similar to me. But for some reason, I'm more comfortable using serendipity.  Happy accidents. Reading the definition and history of the word, I have become more fascinated with it.  "Accidents and sagacity." I love that these two words aligned.  Training yourself, focusing yourself, putting yourself into the right mind frame to find the thing we were not looking for, but what we, ultimately, needed to find.  Following the rootprints down into something more.

At the same time, I know I often bring divergent ideas together. Things that seem to have no apparent connection align to bring new knowledge, new ideas.  It seems to me, that it is the cornerstone of creativity.  Opening myself up to things that seem unrelated.  One could say our lives are constantly moving and tangling up in all kinds of synchronistic potential.  

These are two words to think about more. They deserve contemplation, because I know they have guided me through some difficult moments. When I trust in the things that my gut--that space where Kali dances--tells me, I know I'm doing the right work.  I just have to keep focused enough to remember when I feel most distant and remote from my elective relatives (and myself). 

And just when I feel most distant from everything, something tangible arrives that grounds me back to this earth.  A solar wheel to remind me of the energy and power of light. And the energy and power of each serendipitous, synchronistic moment. 

Juncture: Between Roots and Flight

“And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.” -Cixous

We are in the middle of the juncture between early fall and autumn.  

Right now, I do feel afraid.  I do feel myself walking on a dizzying silence. I think it's because I've been struggling to find the perfect metaphor for what has been going on this past week or so.  Perhaps it's because  I am trying to build my words upon the emptiness of time. I just haven't had enough time to contemplate all that has been going on.  I need that open space.  I need the blank page. I need to face the blank page and sit with the silence. The discomfort. The fear of flying.

Flying.  My dreams keep filling up with air and space. So much vata.  I have recurring dreams of flying into space and taking plane rides to new places that terrify and excite in equal measure.

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.
Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” 

With moving out of the time of remembering my ancestors, I decided to return to another  family. My intellectual and emotional family.  Hélène Cixous is one of my divine mothers.  Her book, Rootprints: Memory and Lifewriting is one of my favorite books. And it has occurred to me that for the remainder of this juncture, I need to read that book.  I know she will help me find the right metaphor.  She is my mother bird nudging me out of the nest.   She was that for me years ago when I embarked on my intellectual and academic career.  It is time to return to her for yet another push.

Between roots and flight. That is the juncture in which I sit. A cross section of contradiction. 

"Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.” -Cixous

It's time to laugh.

His Locker: Unpacking the Gift

It is the time of pitru paksa, the time of ancestral remembrance. It is also the year anniversary of the start of this blog, Life in Seasons. This has brought me to a lot of reflection over the past week as I move forward in my seasonal work, as I think about heading into another cycle of this life of mine.

It has also been a time of reflection upon the professional side of my life, because I recently signed a contract for my dissertation manuscript to be published into a book. I spent the past few weeks rereading and editing the dissertation, turning in all the material just a few days ago. It was scary.  Revisiting the place where my professional life started was frightening and liberating--in equal measure.  It meant I had to sit in the place where it all started: children of Vietnam Veterans.  It is a knotty and dense place for me. A place where everything meets: personal, professional, past, present, hopes, and dreams. Everything. To revisit it as a person who has grown and become something so new was disarming.  Yet it provided a way for me to see how my hard work has brought me to where I'm at. Here.  Now.  As I write this, I can see why the past week or so has been... challenging.

His Locker

The photograph, "His Locker," is symbolic of a lot of what has been happening over the past week or so.  It is a haunting photograph. My father gave me this photograph quite a few years ago--back when I was in grad school.  I had asked for photos from his time in Vietnam and this one struck me as intriguing, undefined, yet full of meaning.  It was his locker.  His Vietnam locker. Until now I did not know what to do with it.  As I read my manuscript, though, I hit upon a section in which I analyze parts of Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried.  Here is a section of my introduction:

"The Things They Carried focuses on one of the greatest hurdles in the process of remembering: putting traumatic memories to words. The quagmire of a lost past full of contradictory emotions, and the irresolution it carries, can (and often does) leave one paralyzed into silence.  O’Brien counters that silence through his disjointed stories that attempt to make sense of the things he carries. The book opens with a laundry list of things Lieutenant Cross and his men carried on their combat missions.  As we read the list of items, it soon grows apparent that there is a complex mixture of tangibles and intangibles.  With the guns, malaria tablets, and P-38 can openers, “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” (O’Brien, 1990, 21). Thus, while language is necessary to express memories of the past, the stories of the past carry weight that goes beyond words.  Included in the stories O’Brien tells us are the interactions he has with his daughter. Kathleen has more than words to make sense of; she carries the weight of her own memories with her father.  Enmeshed in those memories are the love and turmoil found in their relationship. Language provides a skeleton, but the meaning, the flesh filling out the structure within it, comes from something beyond the words themselves."

For me, this locker carries all of the baggage and emotion that my father brought home with him--and what he brought into my life.  It is part of the gift that he left me. It is the ancestral legacy that I must work through in my own way, in my own time. Another excerpt:

"Walter Benjamin, via Shoshona Felman’s analysis, invites us to ponder the residue of a traumatic history.

What Benjamin attempts, in other words, is to transmit the story that cannot be told and to become himself the storyteller that cannot be one but that is one—the last narrator or the post-narrator. The trauma—or the breakdown of the story and of memory, the fragmentation of remembrance and the rupture of the chain or of the “web of stories”—is itself passed on to the next generation as a testament, a final gift. (2002, 46—my emphases)

The ruptures emerging from the breakdown of articulation is what makes trauma visible; the pieces being the gift handed to the next generation. For children of Vietnam Veterans, piecing together the fragments of remembrance is fraught with uncertainty; yet, it is the process of piecing together that transforms trauma into a space of insight, creating meaning in the crevices between what is known and unknown."

That locker holds so many stories, but they are fragments for me to decipher. A suitcase, shirts, canteens, cups, bottles, and numerous unknowns. 

My Altar

I also look at this photograph and think about how my father's aesthetic is similar to my own.  I like photographs that capture meaningful things. Thing that are rich with meaning, yet undefined, chaotic, and full of metaphor.  Things I don't want to forget.  I think of my altar photograph and can't help but think about the ways in which we are both trying to communicate moments full of emotion. His locker (altar) is very different from my altar. But I can see how he might have gone to that locker for retreat, solace, and to get through a difficult time in his life. It was a space full of transformation and growth. He saw value in snapping that photograph.  That moment meant something to him.  And now here I am working through that meaning in my own way.

I'm not sure if the publisher will use my dad's photograph. I hope they do.

This time feels appropriate as a marker of the transition out of one cycle and into the another.  This book work, along with the ancestral work I have been doing during pitru paksa, is the perfect set of sadhanas to close out this cycle--and season.