A psychic cabin

There is a psychic place I hold in my mind - a cabin where I can retreat when I need to.  It is not a physical place, at least not yet, but a mental picture I can regularly access.  The following is an excerpt from my journal about this cabin in my mind, followed by beautiful photos of cabins that help me visualize this psychic place.  All photos are from Cabin Porn, whom I highly suggest you follow on Tumblr or Instagram.

From my journal, 3 January 2016:

"A scene comes into my mind almost daily of a wooden cabin tucked away in a forest and near a stream.  For me, it symbolizes living for myself rather than striving for the world, shutting away in a place suitable for soul growth, and having a small, but deep life with a strong light shining from within.  Maybe a few can see that light, but it is not for the world."

The Pests

The shoulds and the not-enoughs creep into my life and start building nests in my home when I don’t even realize it.  I thought I had fumigated and taken enough preventative measures for those bitches to stay away.  Sure, maybe one or two would come back to scurry across my day now and then, but I never realized they had actually bunkered down for the long haul.

I’ve read enough Brene Brown to drown out perfectionism and people-pleasing for good, so I thought.  Quotes from her books, her TED Talks, her podcasts, her blog are strewn throughout my journal – my attempt at should and not-enough control.  I also have 3 reminders on my phone to ding at my daily, asking me who I am trying to please, if I have a should scurrying around in my mind, or a not-enough scratching at my brain.  But these guys are durable.  It’s like they’ve trans-mutated into Ultrashoulds and Never-Enoughs.  They have crept into my life so slowly, I didn’t even realize they were there, despite all my preventative measures.  And they’ve stayed quiet, slowly growing into big scary monsters just waiting to make their debut and take me down.  One-by-one, they nestled into my life, staying until the landscape changed around their presence and they blended in perfectly unnoticed. 

But now I see they are here.  And they stare at me, daring me to take them on.

The questions in my head

Here's a peek into what is rattling around in my head lately:

Most spiritual teachers are men and those women who have broken the mold are celibate, unmarried, or childless.  Where are the teachings by women with children?  And why do I have to look so hard to find them?  If I've learned anything through motherhood so far, it's that I've learned a lot through motherhood!  Mothers have much wisdom to offer the world.  Birth alone is an incredibly powerful spiritual experience, but has, for some reason, been deemed by our society as a taboo topic of conversation.  What accounts for this gap in contributions by women, particularly mothers? And how would the world be different if women and mothers were seen as gurus, priests, spiritual teachers, etc on the same level as men?

Our society clearly values the head much more than the heart.  Thinking rules over feeling.  Thoughts and opinions = strength.  Feelings and emotions = weakness.  This manifests itself in many ways, but becomes clear when we look at the abortion rate of Down Syndrome babies.  We think that if they cannot think at optimum capacity, then it's not even worth living.  But what if our society valued the heart as much as, or more than, the head?  What if we valued feeling as much as thinking?  Would people with Down Syndrome, those known to have an abundance of love and joy for everyone, be considered our revered teachers and sages? 

Is it even possible to love my enemies in the world if I do not love the enemies within myself?  If I hate parts of myself and treat those parts with scorn, how can I love the people in the world with similar characteristics?  Is it true that I cannot truly love others if I do not love myself - and not just the nice parts of myself, but the awful parts, too?

My time: the rituals and margins

Time flies.  When I was 2 weeks overdue with Leo, I sat around twiddling my thumbs all day and badly wanted him to arrive just so I would have something to do.  Now, that's hilarious.  Since he came into our lives, I have a whole new relationship with time, one that is now defined by my personal rituals and the margins of time I have here and there.  Rituals stop the doing and let me simply be in time and the other requires the maximum use of time.  Both are important in their own ways.

Those first few days and weeks of Leo's life completely blurred together and I wouldn't have been able to tell one from another if it weren't for a couple of rituals I've implemented into my life.  Rituals provide us a way to mark time and allow for a special observance of events.  In a way, they give us our time back by simply honoring it. 

Each day, I take one photo and I write just a bit about my day.  Then, before going to bed, I write 3 things I'm grateful for and one thing I love about myself.  These are my rituals.  They have given me a chance to stop and observe what has happened, to appreciate what has passed, and to internalize it all before moving forward with the time that flies.  They put little markers in the timeline of my forward-moving life and give me something to look back upon in appreciation.

And now that I've made an attempt to get back into my previous life, with all its responsibilities and demands, I find myself using the margins of my time more than ever.  I've become an expert at creatively using the tiny slots of time within my day to accomplish something.  Thank God for smart phones.  Suddenly a traffic jam is an opportunity to send an email and waiting for something on the stove to boil is a chance to clean up around the house.

In the midst of it all, I've tried to land on a daily practice for solitude and silence.  Some days, that seems out of the question and other days I snag those moments when Leo is napping or late at night.  I try to remind myself that balance does not mean doing it all and I hold onto the small rituals that give it all meaning.

This I know to be true

Pregnancy is known to draw women deeply within, to open her to all kinds of emotions and consciousness she didn't even know she had.  There was a day last December when I faced a deep and dark side of myself.  I wrote down what I could comprehend, and I just came across that writing in my journal.  I remember feeling so dark and heavy at the time, but now re-reading what I wrote, it seems hopeful and beautiful. I love how the dark and the light dance together.

This was me on December 20, 2014.  This was one point in my journey and in my own process of becoming.

20 December 2014

This I know to be true:
We are all connected.  All of humanity is intertwined with each other.  One cannot stand alone.  It is impossible  Everything we do, every action we take, every thought we have has both been affected by countless others and will affect countless others.

Even someone who has decided to live according to self-interest will soon see that the happiness of others directly affects his/her own happiness.  Our struggles as well as our joys are tied together, the world over.  In the end, my liberation, my joy is tied to that of every other being.  This I know to be true.

I don't know if there is a god or what the spiritual world is made of.  I don't know how much we humans have convinced ourselves of what we wish to believe.  I don't know if there is anything after this life or even if there is any purpose to our individual lives and to our collective existence.

I have questioned it all and I doubt all of the answers I have found.  I have felt the overwhelming darkness that comes with the shattering of all I wish to be true, and I have wanted to escape this world for a peaceful nothingness.

Most Truth eludes me.  I cannot grasp it and I will never know it.  But now, I know that even if our lives have no eternal meaning, even if the soul is a figment of our imagination, and even if purpose is laughable, our happiness is still tied together  Our enjoyment of life and our very humanity is bound as one.  What benefits the other benefits me in the end.

And I believe this binding of all of humanity to one another is the potential vessel of love.  If there is a god, God is this network that binds us.  We are bound either by love and goodness in each and every action and thought, or we are bound by hurt, by harm to each other, to the environment, to ourselves.  That love/goodness and that harm/hurt is what most people think of as God.  It is simply the network, the binds, the connections that tie us all to one another and is a conduit for energy to pass through - and that energy is helpful for harmful, sometimes a strange combination of both, and it flows continuously through this network, touching all things.  Every action affect more than we can imagine and eventually comes back to ourselves.

We are one.  We are connected.  In all ways.  This I know to be true.