I suppose I need to fill you guys in on some of my past…or what I encountered that I’m trying to transform myself from after having been exposed to it. I haven’t talked about it here because while it shaped me, and while it makes me act or react in particular ways, the horrors of my distant past aren’t what I want to be about. And I always thought that putting my past behind me in my conscious mind would be enough. Turns out, once again, I was wrong.
Even though I’d worked diligently to bury it, my past reared its ugly head and bit me even harder than it had bitten me when it was originally my present. I’m still reeling from it, but I’ve been doing the required hard work to pull myself out of this vibrational alignment and get myself to a better place. I fully realize that we learn our greatest lessons by pulling ourselves out of the muck we find ourselves cast into, either by our own doing or by life.
My quandary is that I don’t want to ONLY learn things by being thrown full body into the muck. There are some lessons I should learn without having such a robust “teaching” event. Also, I don’t want to ONLY learn without teaching things, too. (Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.) Digging out of the muck isn’t how I want to spend my entire life, you see. I’ve got other things to get done, other books to read, other places to go, other people to sing to, to lead, and to nurture. I don’t know what lessons the spiritual me feels I still need to learn, but I can tell you this much: Somehow I ended up with some whoppers for this life so far.
If I only looked at the surface, I would tell you my spirit self thought that I needed to learn how to take a beating, literally. It must have also thought I needed to understand the ins and outs of sexual assaults or I wouldn’t have had so many years of them. Surface appearances would indicate that I needed to learn how to be betrayed and how to not love too deeply, because when you do love someone that much, they’re going to hurt you seemingly beyond repair. Or maybe I had to learn that it’s ok to love someone that much, and that even when I lose them either through betrayal, death or mental illness, that I can survive that, too. If I only looked at the surface, I would tell you that I needed to learn that I didn’t matter, that I had no reason to feel love from my fellow man.
There was a poster at my first boss’s office that seems somehow appropriate, even today. It said: “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that the initial objective was to drain the swamp.” I’ve spent the better part of my life up to my ass in alligators. Now I’m taking the time to see which ones bit the worst, which are just scary looking at first appearance, but not so much on the second…and I’ve had time to watch some of those alligators so I know when they’re threatening me and when they are really going to bite me. That wasn’t always the case, unfortunately. Some of them bit me so severely that I almost wasn’t able to survive it.
As this post is getting too long, I’m going to divide some of those events up for you at a later date. I’m trying to figure out how to reveal enough without just writing an entire book about torture.
So for now, I’m peeking out of the trenches, fearful of what life might drop on my head, but anticipating joy rather than crap bombs. If the Bird of Paradise decides to take a dump over my head, at least I know now that all I have to do is hose it off. Seems like a small thing to you perhaps, but there was a time I was afraid to even try.
Until next time…
