Ghost Story

Two years ago, at Christmas time, T made a grave blanket for Master's mother's grave.  She explained to us that this was an old German tradition, and she would just have none of anyone trying to talk her out of doing it.  She took it to the cemetary on a very cold and very snowy Saturday when Master and I were away at a meeting in the state capital.  She got it anchored into place, and took some photos to share with us and with "grandpa." 

If you look at the picture below, you may notice a small, bright, white spot in the lower right corner...

Here's an enlargement of this little bit...

We came to believe, over time, that what T had captured with her camera that day, was an orb.  According to Dave and Sharon Oester (from GhostWeb.com), this kind of orb represents the soul of a departed person. The soul being the essence of who they were in life, complete with their intelligence, their emotions and their personality...

In the nearly two years, since His mother's death, we've been "visited" a number of times by the spirit of Rebecca.  Mostly, she seems to show up on T's side of the household, banging on things, shuffling along the carpet, standing wisp-like in the corners, and generally scaring the willies out of poor old Prazer cat.  Our common response to these mom appearances was to reassure her that grandpa was fine, being taken care of -- "don't worry, Mom, all is well."

Theirs was a long and almost unbelievable story...  They were both orphans of a sort.  She'd grown up never knowing the man who fathered her, and her mother died in a fire when she was very young.  She was taken in by relatives; cared for; fed; given a place to sleep -- but, in her own mind, she was the Cinderella in the family.  She never fully got over missing what she missed in her childhood. 

Walter's parents divorced when he was 12 years old, and he found himself abandoned in the midst of The Great Depression.  Somehow, left all on his own, with nowhere to go, and completely without any support, he managed to graduate from high school at the age of 16.

Walter met Rebecca, and the two of them fell into a love as vast as the great gaping lack of love that characterized their youths.  They wanted to marry, but the world was ablaze with World War II, and he did not want to marry her, and leave her to go off to war -- perhaps to be widowed before their life had even begun.  They waited... and waited... and waited, and the draft notice that he anticipated did not come.  Finally, after years of delay, they decided it might not ever happen, and so they got married.  Six days later, the notice they'd been expecting for so long arrived, and he was called to the war in Europe. 

Rebecca waited -- for the first time (but not for the last), for her Walter to come home.  We've got a number of stunning "cheesecake" style photos that she had made for her soldier.  Eventually, he came home, and they did make a life together.  He worked as an insurance claims adjuster, traveling a good part of the time, and coming to be very well thought of in the industry.  Although he never pursued any formal schooling beyond high school, he was a man of great curiosity and intellect. 

Master was their only child, and the little family of three did everything together.  They wrapped themselves around one another, and through good times and sometimes enormous struggles, they made a family. 

In retirement, they enjoyed traveling, and it was not at all unusual for them to take off on a road trip, visiting places and friends that they'd made in one or another place where they'd lived and worked over the years.  They loved their two grandchildren, Master's son and daughter, and delighted in their successes and achievements.

In the days, since Walter died, the universe has seemed oddly calm and quiet.  We've had no Rebecca visits since Tuesday morning.  While we came to accept her ongoing presence in our lives after her death, there is no sense at all that he remains "hanging" around our lives and homes.  It seems that her life-long habit of waiting for him has, at last, come to an end.  We are left with the sense that they have been finally re-united and have gone on to whatever it is that encompasses the energies and personalities of our souls. 

Here, there is still sadness and a sense of surprise at the suddeness of it all, but there is also some sort of shimmering wonderment at the amazing love of these two remarkable people.

swan

Desperado #4

Desperado,

Ohhhh you aint getting no younger.

Your pain and your hunger,

They're driving you home.

And freedom, ohh freedom.

Well that's just some people talking.

Your prison is walking through this world all alone.

Don't your feet get cold in the winter time?

The sky won't snow and the sun won't shine.

It's hard to tell the night time from the day.

And you're losing all your highs and lows

aint it funny how the feeling goes

away...

There are so many bits that resonate for me in these lines--
 
When a person grows up in a difficult situation, it is pain and hunger that can drive us to find our way, finally, to our true and real home.  Some of us are born into the place that is, and will forever be, our heart's home, but for the rest of us, home is a place that we need to find -- or perhaps create.  We grow up in places that are not "home."  We suffer, often invisibly, from the pain of not belonging; from the pain of being always the outsider; from the pain of not finding a welcome in the place where we are.  That reality creates a hunger that will not be satisfied.  Outcasts in our own families, those of us who grow up apart from those to whom we are born, are driven to seek and search and find our way home.
 
And freedom?  Always, the question of what it means to be "free" strikes a chord in my slave's heart. Those of us who carry that self-descriptor, are often confronted by people who make judgements about us based on their own visceral reactions to the word.  Over the years, I've had people who knew almost nothing about me -- total strangers -- declare that what I do is grounded in emotional neediness, immaturity, co-dependency, abuse, and a whole host of other ugly and bizarre judgements.  None of those things have any truth or validity, but they do reflect a prevailing view in our society.  I've had to learn not to put much stock in "people talking."  I can, if I allow myself to see myself through the jaundiced eye of mean-hearted strangers, find myself in a lonely prison built out of the wisps of their words. 

I have to remember the central and essential paradox that MY freedom derives from the deliberately unequal balance between He and I.  I am most free when I am completely and securely His.  What makes the world seem cold or dark or flat or without joy is to find myself outside of His control.  When that becomes the norm and the regular pattern of our days and our weeks and our months, then, and only then do I find myself in "desperado" mode.

swan

Sad News

Master's father died this morning. 

He was found by the staff at "the home" in his apartment.  At this point, because it occured in an institution, there is a police investigation and Master and T have not yet been allowed into the apartment. 

I am at school, trying to rearrange my afternoon so I can get away and get to them.  I should be able to leave in about 15 minutes. 

Right now, we know very little about what actually happened, and we are all just stunned.  It was just a couple of days ago that grandpa was at our home, having dinner and telling jokes as we celebrated his grandson's 21st birthday...

We'll be back around when we can.

swan

Desperado #3

Don't you draw the queen of diamonds boy, She'll beat you if she's able.

You know the queen of hearts is always your best bet.

Now it seems to me, some fine things

Have been laid upon your table.

But you only want the ones

That you can't get.

This second stanza seems to be about knowing what you have, and knowing what is and isn't valuable and good. 

I've always thought I was a free-thinker -- that I was not susceptible to the typical socially programmed group-think that defines what marks us, each and all, as "in" or "out."  I've prided myself as someone who walked her own way, chose her own path, and didn't give a good goddamn about what others thought about that.  I've been willing to relinquish ties to other people when those ties kept me from making the decisions that I felt were necessary if I was going to chart my course according to my own lights. 

But, I find more and more, that I am easily wounded by the judgements of the culture within which I live.  I've declared that the common rules of the society do not impact on my life, and so I go about living in a non-traditional relationship; without the sanction, rights, or benefits of marriage; with very few social links outside the boundaries of our own home.  I am a woman who lives a pretty socially closeted existence.  There are very few outside our family who know anything at all about my life.  I keep a very great number of secrets.

One thing that is clear is that I really did make choices to follow the lead of the "queen of hearts."  Love was the motivator for making huge changes in my life a number of years ago, and for good or bad, I continue to follow the way my heart leads.  For all of us, there have been things we've given up in order to be able to make the choices we've made to become "family."

I live a life that is full and abundant, and still, when I fall into the darkness, I can name all the various things that I want and cannot ever have.  In turning my attention to those things that I lack; the things that are missing, I loose sight of all those "fine things" that have been given to me in this life.  I seem to forget, on a pretty regular basis, to be adequately and appropriately grateful for all the very good parts of my life.

So, there's another lesson imbedded in this old song -- notice what you have, be grateful for what you have, don't be hungering after things that you can't get.

swan

Desperado #2

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses

You've been out ridin' fences,

for so long - now.

Ohh you're a hard one.

I know that you've got your reasons.

These things that are pleasin'you

Can hurt you somehow.

I remember that when I first heard this song, way back in 1973, I understood it as a plaintive love song.  In my mind, I understood that the lyrical advice was aimed at some distant and aloof  "cowboy" who was guilty of keeping a lover at arms' length.  I never once, in all the years since, ever imagined that I'd hear this tune, and "get" that the aloof and defended one was ME. 

In 1973, I was a wounded and solitary young woman with a deep and growing cynicism about my chances of ever forming a positive and affirming intimate love connection with anyone.  Even then, at the tender age of 18, I bore the emotional scars of my upbringing and lonely childhood.  I knew better than to count on anyone, and I was utterly convinced that there was no one at all that I could really rely on to take care of me.  I was already an expert at protecting myself, and I lived my life inside some pretty formidable emotional walls.

Hard.  That was me.  I might have looked like a wide-eyed, frightened waif of a girl-woman, but I was closed off and prickly.  I trusted no one, expected nothing, believed that the world was a hostile place.  I was more than ready to go to war with anyone at any moment.  I had my reasons.  It all made perfect sense.  It still does.  I absolutely honor and love that young woman.  She survived and made a life.  She made some dreadful mistakes, but she kept her wits and lived to love another day.

That fierce young woman grew up and became an intensely independent and determined woman.  I worked and I scrabbled and I fought my way along in a man's world of work and internal corporate politics, and I was darned good at it.  No one pushed me around, and no one beat me to the punch.  I wasn't a whining, man-hating feminist.  I was a warrior woman understanding the exact nature of the world in which I lived.

I raised my children.  I kept my marriage going by sheer grit and determined stubborness.  I kept my "fences" in very, very good repair. 

In those days, I took my pleasures from my working successes.  I moved through the corporate maze with a sure footedness, and the financial rewards affirmed me in my chosen course.  My children grew up watching me fight the dragons of the business world in which I lived.  They became accustomed to my frequent and lengthy business travel, and they seemed content enough with the small gifts I always brought when I returned "home."  By the time I was 26 years old, my menses had nearly stopped -- I would have perhaps three or four periods a year.  After all, that monthly menstrual thing was for girls, and it left them weak and miserable.  I didn't have time for such nonsense, and my hormones seemed to get the message.  The things that would have fired my senses sexually were completely opaque to me -- there was no time for such frippery. 

I was hugely "successful," and living in deep and silent pain.  The woman that I was becoming was bound and gagged in the basement of my psyche.  You would have thought that the song lyric would have boomed loudly in my mind:  "These things that are pleasin' you can hurt you somehow."

I believe that the patterns we lay down in our early years are very hard to erase.  I'm no longer a young woman, and I don't have any need to fight the battles she found so compelling.  But...  Put me under pressure; introduce enough stress; leave me out in the dark and the cold for long enough -- and I'll dig around in the steamer trunk of my emotions and pull out all her old tricks. 

There have been stressors aplenty in the last year or so.  Master did a really good job of enumerating them in His comment on my "shy" post.  He's been ill and preoccupied with the recoveries from His surgeries.  He's had His hands full caring for His dad.  He's worried about T and her mom.  He's struggled to hold things together for His agency, and He's worried about where His career might go if He can't do that.  He's watched His children transition into adulthood, and experienced the pangs that so many of us encounter at that juncture in our lives.  He has loved me, through all of that with an unwavering constancy and intensity, but His focus has necessarily been elsewhere.  Without His steady hand on me, I wandered further and further and further out into the wilderness -- building and tending the fences that might make me "safe." 

That seems to me to be the lesson here.  I am certain that there will be more times ahead when the focus must waver, and when I will need to care for myself and my family in challenging times.  I have come through this last difficult passage, and I've discovered that I am still safe and secure.  It was never otherwise.  If there was ever anyone who should believe, unshakeably, in the safety and certainty of the love surrounding them, that person is me.  So, going forward, I intend to add the affirmation and reassurance that "I am safe and loved" to the internal chatter that can so influence my thinking and my reactions. 

No more "fences" for this one.

swan

Desperado #1

I've had this song running through my head today, and it seems I am walking around the place channeling Linda Ronstadt.  I am finding that the words and the music are saying things to me about where I've been wandering emotionally in the last few months, and I want to spend a bit of time trying to take it all apart and figure out where I got so far off my chosen path...

So, for the next little bit, I think I'm going to take bits and pieces of the song, "Desperado," and use the lyrics to jump off into a conversation with myself.  Feel free to listen in if you want.

For those who are not as old as I am, here are the lyrics --

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses

You've been out ridin' fences,

for so long - now.

Ohh you're a hard one.

I know that you've got your reasons.

These things that are pleasin'you

Can hurt you somehow.

Don't you draw the queen of diamonds boy

She'll beat you if she's able.

You know the queen of hearts is always your best bet.

Now it seems to me, some fine things

Have been laid upon your table.

But you only want the ones

That you can't get.

Desperado,

Ohhhh you aint getting no younger.

Your pain and your hunger,

They're driving you home.

And freedom, ohh freedom.

Well that's just some people talking.

Your prison is walking through this world all alone.

Don't your feet get cold in the winter time?

The sky won't snow and the sun won't shine.

It's hard to tell the night time from the day.

And you're losing all your highs and lows

aint it funny how the feeling goes

away...

Desperado,

Why don't you come to your senses?

come down from your fences, open the gate.

It may be rainin', but there's a rainbow above you.

You better let somebody love you.

(let sombody love you)

You better let somebody love you...ohhh..hooo

before it's too..oooo.. late.

Feeling Shy

We played this morning.
It has been a busy day, and I haven't found time to write about it.

Tonight, as we near midnight, I find that I haven't got words to write about our time together.
I feel shy, and very reticent for some reason.
Right now, I want to hold this close and turn it over in my own mind and my own heart...
For now, I want to savor the sensations and the memories.
I don't want to put this part of US out there.
I want to curl in with Him and pull the figurative blinds, and keep this part of our lives private.  At least for now...

swan