Rumpled skin of myself

My wolf came out the other day; no, literally she really did. On a 45-miute drive while I was taking a cat nap in the passenger seat – we'd done this same, long stretch three times in the last week-and-a-half – I had a waking dream. The kind that pops up before you know it, signaling that you were on the edge of sleep, but not quite.

Almost before it shifted to another visual, I recognized it as something to note. A yowling wolf, standing straight up, as if half human, emerging from a silken guise that looked like me. I was just shed, split in two and shuffled to the floor like a Disney-princess costume when the bad-guy seems more attractive.

I immediately sensed the wolf represented both power and anger. After journaling, I am aware she also symbolizes not playing by the rules, wildness, a natural state, animalness, beastliness and rawness.

Max and the Wild Things

The power and anger had been suppressed, but now they are out. This coincides with recent night waking as if my body is programmed for fear mode. Fear that I won't get enough done, be a good enough parent, earn enough, basically that there is not enough and I am not enough. On an intellectual and spiritual level, I know this isn't true. But, bodily and deeply imbedded, I don't and I need to learn it in that realm to release it.

A couple of days ago, a Richard Rohr meditation addressed this issue in a manner I had not before articulated:

Moving to the level of "participative knowing: is first of all a cellular experience, a full-body knowing. It is nothing you can prove merely by the mental ego. It is something you know by inner experience – by prayer, by love, and by suffering."

That hits the nail on the head for me.

This week I have been struggling, more like battling, with my almost 13-year-old in organizing her to go back to school. Organization is not in her genes and so her wolf has been calling, growling, to mine. As I explore and begin to address her resistance to organization and preference for chaos, I understand that taps into my current journey. That I have been too conformed to the world's ways that are not in sync with my nature. I have been teaching her some of the structures that constrict me and stuffed this wolf inside. She's challenging that. As a mother, I do need to guide her through the maze of living more easily in the world. Interesting books on fast minds and the hunter gene teach me that my daughter's nature is one of constant scanning and change. That she's not meant to be still and obedient, though she must adapt somewhat to survive this world. That's where I come in.

I can't ignore either of our wolves. Mine is no longer invisible and has shredded the princess facade of niceness. My wolf must channel her anger. Confess, as a wise astrologer suggested six months ago. Not repress or express. She's rebelling against old messages of sucking my stomach in or eating with my mouth closed so I don't appear uncivilized to others.

I ache to embrace this wildness that I see in my child. To own my power and creativity and surrender the old messages, patterns and destructive ways along with the fear and anger. I long to let go of the super structures that are not me. The ones that hold and hem me in. The ones that separate me from Spirit.

I want to flow, dance, be joyful and not restricted. That's all my daughter wants. We're fallible human bodies with big hearts and a spark of Divinity, that of God within. In learning to unstrap my burden of responsibility, perfectionism and attachment and give them to Spirit, perhaps that will guide her as well.

I feel like the opposite of my favorite storybook character, Max, from Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Max dresses up in a wolf suit to become "the king of all the wild things." I've dressed up in a suit that constricts my wildness and closeness to Spirit. Hoping to complete the journey and return while, like Max's homecoming, my dinner is still hot.

• When has my wild thing emerged?
• What triggered it?
• What message did it bring?
• How do I identify with the wildness in others?
• How does that wildness draw me closer to Spirit?


lazily drifting
out of thought
into the warmth
of the sun, the
soft breeze and
gentle hum of
the car

hypnotic

uncontrolled
images carelessly
floating by until
one calls, grabs
my attention

the wolf, my wolf
growls her way
out of my skin

announcing her
visibility and need
to be out

now, what to do
with the rumpled
skin of myself and
the new wildness

Listen to this post:

Strength of a rose[ie]

Lonely heart/pastel & paint on paper

Listen to post:

For days in yoga, I keep hearing a haunting song [see link below] as we’re ending practice and entering shavasana. It’s a real song the teacher spins on the dvd player.

These lines, in particular, echo deep within:

            “And it’s happening to me and you …
 

           … Where we’re bound nobody knows ..."

The subject is our wildness, to me, the terrain of the heart. It’s such a wonderful transition from the activity of poses to the coolness, winding down and turning inward of relaxation. And even though I have heard that song at least a dozen times, it always catches me … in knowing. It helped me remember something I wrote as a pre-teen, about the age of my youngest daughter. I penned these lines:

            “I am bound where no man goes.”

It was a somber piece about living in isolation, then I translated it as the Steppes of Siberia. I am coming to understand it was about my wrestling with growing up, keeping part of myself and letting others go.

A month ago, while deep in pastoral counseling, my shaman asked me to remember/visualize when I first felt less than. The image of a pre-teen girl in a fetal position immediately flashed in my mind. It quickly shifted from me to my youngest daughter and my heart sank. I know she is in the same place. Shunning the physical, psychological and emotional changes stirring. My heart aches for her as it does my inner pre-teen: the one lost, confused and feeling isolated.

This week in my monthly archetypal-astrology group, we discussed the drama of opposites with regard to astrological aspects, the angular relationships between the planets, and from a Jungian perspective. A handout carefully prepared by our teacher, discussed that “ego development requires that we reject even essential parts of what makes us whole; and this is what becomes the shadow … the road to wholeness is rough and bumpy … but we continually seek that which we have unconsciously discarded.”

I wonder what I discarded in that fetal position as a pre-teen and what my daughter intends to shed?

Two nights ago, I had an interesting dream; I haven’t remembered dreaming in months:

My twin sister and I are on a train. I fall asleep and awake in a car with her driving. I feel as if I have been drugged. She acts as if all is normal. We stop and I notice one of my daughters, some female cousins and nieces a half block behind us milling around another car. My sister directs me into a store, where we encounter my mother haggling with a woman about a cabin reservation. My mother insists she bought the cabin across the creek behind the store. The woman says she doesn’t even have a reservation.

When I first looked at this dream, I felt betrayed, as if my family tricked me into this journey. But when I explored it again, it seems as if this line of living women in my family is waiting to cross the creek into the cabin of the ancestral women who have come before. The ones waiting at the car are, well, waiting. My mother has tried and my sister has brought me here. I think it’s my turn, my work. I notice my other sister who has a son is absent as is my youngest. They aren’t part of this yet. I believe that my sleeping on the train is a key to how to get past the gatekeeper/shop owner, cross the creek and get us into the cabin.

To do so, I must traverse the terrain of the heart and retrieve my discarded parts. The song “Strength of a Rose” by Deva and Miten Premal describes that journey. Rose is my maiden name; Rosie is my nickname.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuoQQsHUmZE  

• How have I experienced the terrain of my heart?

• When have I felt isolated?

• What parts of myself have I discarded?

• When have I also felt connected?

• What is my current calling toward wholeness?