Boundaries

Tomorrow is the last day of juncture.  Tomorrow is also the summer solstice. The longest day of sunlight of the year. I wanted to use this week's entry to think about the goals and focus of the juncture and how those goals have developed and transformed over the past month.


When I started the juncture there were three things that came into focus for me.

• To delve into the darker feelings of shame that I hold around intimacy and my body.
• Examine my boundaries.
• Make time and space to think about what it will mean to have my adult life away from my family come into contact with my family and the life I lived in California. 

It has been a juncture in which I was clear about the focus but could not follow all the routines of juncture that I would have liked. This was an opposite experience from previous junctures.  The last few I have been able to dedicate time to the routines, but I struggled to find points of focus.  What happened, though, was that I found a way to engage in the juncture practices that were abbreviated and irregular, but nonetheless kept me in contact with those focal points.  But these issues came to me in unexpected, and frequently scary, ways.

The boundary work came in and through all of my juncture work.  Boundaries with my family. Boundaries with my work. Boundaries with my personal relationships.  While boundaries might have been the underlying theme tying together my work in the juncture, the match that sparked that work was my visit to California and the convergence of my adult life and the life I left behind in California.  In a variety of different ways, I was forced to see how I struggle to be adult about the way I handle my relationships with my family.  I know I struggle to not revert to some girl who tries to please and accommodate.   The boundaries I keep in my adult world in North Dakota slipped and blurred as I shifted them into my family life in California.  The boundaries I manage with my parents when I'm geographically remote melted and smudged as I tried to accommodate them and be open to adjusting to their needs.  But what I realized is that my flexibility opened me up to some tough decisions about my relationship with my family.

At the same time, I started reading the book, Red Hot and Holy: A Heretic's Love Story by Sera Beak. This has been a book that keeps bringing me back to the most challenging aspect of my juncture work to write about in a space such as this blog--the darker feelings of shame that I hold around intimacy and my body.  The book has been a cathartic revelation in ways I cannot yet articulate.  Beak writes: 

"An interesting side note: apocalypse in Greek means revealing the truth or lifting the veil--a disclosure of something hidden from humanity during a time of falsehood. So a bright Red way to read the Holy Whore's description is that She is a truth that has been hidden from us. In Conscious Femininity, Marion Woodman tells us, 'The feminine, however disguised, is always naked, in the sense of "seeing through" in order to reveal. Apocalypse means unveiling.' In other words, you gotta take it all off (all external ideas, stories, and beliefs about Her) in order to truly see Her."

This juncture has made it clear to me that when I feel exposed, vulnerable, and out of control of a situation, I spiral into a variety of strategies to try to regain control of... I'm not even sure what.  But as I have been reading this book, I'm gaining a newfound connection to those feelings of vulnerability. The passage above struck a chord with me.  The idea of revealing truth.  The idea of seeing through in order to reveal.  And some of that includes the stories I tell myself about my past and how often I take those stories into present situations.  It's just when I let go of those stories, I feel lost. Reading this book, I can relate to her feeling lost and searching and searching and searching from something that is her story.  I am searching for something that is my story.  And I know that my story is buried within that boundary work.  I am so scared, yet so close, to grabbing onto my story and I know the answer is in those boundaries.  A boundary apocalypse.