Vein of Gold

"All actors have a certain territory, a certain range, they are born to play. I call that range their 'vein of gold.' If you cast an actor within that vein, he will always give you a brilliant performance." -Martin Ritt

I think of it as the creative flow. The space where you feel yourself moving with the ocean in harmony and equilibrium.  Effortlessly, yet doing the real work of the heart. 

But the mountain that bleeds gold in its veins also carries something that required breakage.  Breaking to open the flow. To find the flow.  This reminds me of a form of pottery I attached to nearly a year ago: kintsukuroi.  

The veins of gold are not unlike the fusion between broken parts of pottery.  The place where several things came back together to form something newer, stronger, and perhaps in my own assumptions, closer to its true form. Perhaps finding my vein of gold will help me embrace a deeper relationship with my real self.

More to the point, it is in those broken spaces that I will find my vein of gold flowing, alive, ready to be seen.

"I feel that Art is a way for each of us to discover your intuitive power and source of inspiration. It can provide a basis for understanding our own humanity and that responsible role we have as caretakers of the natural world." -Richard Newman

Synchronicity

Gnome Home-Pier One-Procrastination
I'll start with the most recent and most tangible synchronicity I've had this month.  This came with my new gnome home that Matt had made for me.  I was looking for a way to display this beautiful work of art.  I wanted it to be seen, but I wanted it to be safe.  So Matt and I decided to get a shelf for it. We both kept procrastinating, though. We finally went to Menards and found a board that I would stain and we would brace it to the wall so the gnome home could sit safely.  I stained the wood and then Matt began to second guess if this was the best way to display the gnome home. When we went to hang it up, we couldn't find a stud to hang it securely.  This solidified Matt's assertion that hanging was not the best idea. We needed a stand.  I was growing frustrated. I wanted it displayed. I was feeling hurried and impatient.

So I procrastinated more.  I couldn't really find a stand that worked.  Finally I decided we just needed to go to Pier One--just for a quick look. To get some ideas.

There is was. The perfect stand.  I walked around and suddenly I saw it.  The stand is metal with a glass top.  It has three thin metal legs. The legs were fashioned into tree branches with metal leaves and a metal bird perched on one of the branches.  It was perfect.  Matt was not sure it would be secure enough with the three-legged set up.  But I knew I wanted it.  Then he thought about it and realized that the round wood I had stained would be a perfect platform for the stand. He could place braces on it and secure the stand to the wood, so it would sit securely.  I found this a synchronistic moment in which patience payed off in the form of a beautiful and perfect moment of collaboration.



Defiance-Veiled Prophet-Family
My family research has been heavily concentrated on my maternal side.  For good reason.  My mother's side has been the one with the greatest support and influence.  My maternal grandparents were almost like a second set of parents. I lived with them off and on over the time I was growing up.  They were there when I really needed them.  They came to my graduations and would visit me often when I moved away from California.  As I often call them, they were the grounding posts of what I considered my family.  This isn't to say that my paternal family is unimportant.  They are very important.  And synchronicity reminded me of that.

About a month ago I stopped by Matt's house and he was watching a television show called Defiance.  A futuristic show on the SyFy network.  When he told me the title, I paused and said, "that's the name of the town where I lived.  It's where the farmhouse of my childhood was located."  He went on to tell me it was a post-apocalypse show that's set in St. Louis. I started watching and the Arch factored into many scenes. All I kept saying as I watched was, "whoever created this show has to be familiar with the area to know the town of Defiance." Missouri was not done with me yet, though.

My dad's family are largely from Missouri. St. Louis to be precise.  I remember one summer in particular, my maternal grandparents took my sister and I to Knoxville, Tennessee for the World's Fair.  I was pretty young, but it was the first time I remember going on a summer vacation.  Most of our vacations were moves from the west to the midwest.  Back and forth between Missouri and California.  This time was different. I'd get to stay in a hotel for the first time I could remember.  No camping or sleeping in the back of the truck. An actual hotel. It felt luxurious.

While we were gone, my parents went to the Veiled Prophet Fair. At the time, I knew it as the VP Fair.  It was that summer, while we were all gone from the old farmhouse, that somebody attempted to steal my beautiful doberman, Ussay.  When we returned from Tennessee, we heard the story of my parents partying at the St. Louis waterfront. Ussay soon returned with a tar scraped face from what I can only guess was him jumping out of a truck to return home.   To me, the VP Fair was a crazy Fourth of July party that nearly ended with the loss of my dog.

Then a few weeks ago, Matt and I were watching the show, Masters of Sex.  This is a show about Masters and Johnson, early sex researchers.  I've been intrigued by the show because it touches on many taboo topics from sexuality to race to gender in the 1950s. Also, it references parts of the St. Louis area that were familiar to my childhood. Forrest Park.  University of Missouri.  Everything that seemed so big and overwhelming to me as a child.  It brought St. Louis back to me.  Anyway, this particular episode focused on the Veiled Prophet Fair. Something I hadn't heard referenced since I was a child. A lost memory that started to reemerge as I watched the show and started to understand the deeper history behind this event I only knew as a Fourth of July party that nearly ended with the loss of my dog.  From the show, I realized the fair was something altogether different than I knew.  So I Googled the fair to see if I could find out more about its history.

I stumbled upon this article in The Atlantic Monthly:  http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/fair-st-louis-and-the-veiled-prophet/379460/

Talk about a wellspring of material.  There were so many linkages to the history of Victor, Colorado, that I could finally see how Missouri and Colorado are a tangled history-beyond just the history of me.  This could only be called synchronicity. Inspiring further thought.  Deeper thought.  Opening my eyes to new and exciting journeys.

Meditating-Veins of Gold-Mountains-Creativity
Entering into my reading of Julia Cameron's Veins of Gold, I have been hit over and over again with the metaphor of mountains and mining.  The symbolic meaning of mining for gold is more about tapping into the creative spirit in Cameron's book. My creative spirit. Yet, the reality of my journey into creativity is through the literal mountains of my grandmother's childhood.  It is interesting to think about how important mountains are to me when I'm currently living in the flattest of flatland.  But what that means to me at this moment is that it requires a deeper symbolic journey into the mountains of my life. The mountains holding fire, heat, and incredible resources.  Why do people strip mine?  To exploit all those beautiful resources.  I don't want to exploit.  I want to mine to revel in those resources. What became clear is that this deep winter season is very much about diving in.  Going deep into those veins, finding the larger source of energy and creative fire.  Golden fire.

My recent meditation reminded me of that.  I was meditating on Kali.  And she didn't hold back. She dragged me deeper into my inner landscape.  Pulling me down, down, down.  After 20 minutes of meditation, she was still dragging me down.  The next day in meditation, my visualization went right back to the downward sailing until I landed on a strange beach.  The beach had an organic structure that looked like a large furnace that funneled upward--from where I came.  She was building the fire and I walked to be beach and saw an infinite ocean.  Water and fire together in this place.  And as I stood there taking it all in, I realized how it was the place I have been, but have been too afraid to allow myself to consciously address. I was no longer afraid and I knew this place was exactly where I needed to be. No longer afraid.  I know it sounds a bit trippy, but meditation is often a waking dream for me.  More vivid than most of my dreams.

And it is in this space that I begin the juncture into deep winter.

Ancestral Memories; Total Abandon

The new year is supposed to bring in reflection, but I had an early start on that reflection.  I finally read through the ancestral journal practice that Maya Tiwari outlines in her book, The Path of Practice (see December 15th entry). I was met with a variety of emotions: anger, desolation, exhaustion, sadness, boredom, furiousness, and a smattering of hope.

Anger was dominant because my childhood memories are filled with loss.  My anger was pointed at my mother and father, but it was most severely pointed at myself.  I was angry at how little I really knew my parents back then. But then I started to realize how deep that sadness trailed, because I know even less about them now.  I thought about how much I miss out.  I miss out on not knowing my parents.  Honestly, what emerged was the growing realization that I don't really have parents anymore.  Anger turned to desolation.  Bleak and barren.  That is exactly what I feared would happen when I entered back into those ancestral journals.  The reality that there was nothing alive about my relationship with my parents.  All I had were memories and the memories I have are so filled with torment that left me dry, like a desert.

Soon the desolation turned to exhaustion.  I was just tired of reading the same things over and over again in my journal.  Just plain tired of the same stories to tell and the stories didn't really open up a door to something alive or new.  It all just left me with incredible sadness. The reality that my parents are strangers to me. The reality that my strong emotions toward them were no more.  They were more like dried leaves in the fall--just blowing, blowing, blowing away. I couldn't figure out where to go with what I was feeling. I kept sitting and drifting with the feelings, however faint, yet relentless they were.  And then the boredom came.  I was so tired of the words.  Reading the same narrative over and over again.  The victim narrative. The disempowered narrative.  I became so furious at myself. I could see how the memories of my parents are drenched with the shame I hold for them and the desire to be something, anything, other than them.  I didn't learn any deep life lesson from my parents, except how to survive.  Perhaps that is not such a little thing.  I have learned to survive.  I am a survivor.  But I never learned what it meant to thrive.  I never learned what it meant to experience unbridled joy. I never knew what it meant to be totally loved and totally safe in the world. I never learned what it was like to embrace an empowered sense of myself.  I must do that now. But to do that, much to my horror,  I need to let go of anything and everything I think I know about my parents.

I'd like to say that I learned something from the ancestral practice that left me alive and full of love for my parents, but I did not. I had growing anger toward Tiwari.  I kept thinking to myself, "I don't have your wonderful father, who held so many rich traditions and practices to pass on to you, his daughter. I have emotionally bankrupt parents, who can barely take care of themselves. I have to fashion my own practices and traditions.  I have to find something meaningful out of the rubble my parents handed off to me."  I was honestly pissed off at her as much as I was my parents, because she exposed another level of rememory in my life that I thought was resolved.

Not resolved.

"The pain of unresolved memories causes part of our psyche to engage in constantly blocking out the ancestral secret, even as another part is trying to unmask it. This doesn't make things easy for us.  But try to think of this paradox as similar to the opposing forces at work when we try to break a bad habit or go on a diet: part of us still wants the forbidden food or behavior while the other part wants to be free. With an ancestral memory, it's good for you to break through to the forbidden memory." -Tiwari, p. 197

What is the forbidden memory?  What is the ancestral secret? I have yet to figure these things out.  I want to be free of my parents and the incredible sadness that is enmeshed with them.  The idea of being free of what I know of them scares me.  It feels so finite. It feels cruel. What surfaced, though, is that I hold on to the hope that something grandiose and meaningful will emerge out of that shitty past.  I hold out hope for that beautiful pearl in the mud.  And the more I keep writing here, but more I start to wonder if the secret is that there isn't a pearl to be found there, in that relationship. In that past. Similar to Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved, there is a time when a person must let go of that memory before it totally consumes.  Sethe started to see how much life she gave that past and how little life she gave her present existence. Perhaps it's time to find the pearl of the present instead of grasping to refashion a faux pearl that blinds me from who I am here. Now.


I just finished the book Wild and at the end Cheryl Strayed writes,

"To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface was enough. That it was everything. It was my life--like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me." (p. 311)

I think for me, I'm holding on to whatever that was in the past, because I want to write about it. I want to touch it, rewrite it, make it more beautiful than it really was. Refashion that faux pearl. But I realize now that to write about that past, I need to fully let it go, so I can see it as it emerges, not as I want it be seen. I need to see it as the past imperfect. Imperfectly passed, but imperfectly present and so very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.

The very last line of Wild knocked me out: "How wild it was, to let it be."