An article I read recently said that
we can reach great depths of creativity when experiencing extreme emotion. Since having lost my four-legged companion,
I’m feeling more emotional so I’m opening the door to “let the Wolf out” – that
howling creature that won’t leave until it gets what it wants. In this case,
the Wolf I’m letting out is a story about the darker side of creating miracles,
with my apologies to an animal that is normally quite benign around
humans. It is only when they are hungry,
for easier prey than the physical flesh of homo sapiens, that they can become a
vexation to what we THINK is our otherwise controlled existence.
The other night a friend asked me
how I came to use “Merry Miracle Muse” as one of my personal titles. My answer:
after forming a personal mission statement, I determined that my calling
in life was to inspire others. For a
long time I thought that the only way to inspire people was by sharing what we
would commonly call “the good” - those times when everything falls together and
all feels right with the world, almost effortlessly. But who am I to say that
someone can’t be inspired or learn from hearing a story that wasn’t so
merry. Laying my story bare in front of
you may help you or a friend release some long carried burden. For years now, The Wolf has been hungrily
pursuing me to share a story that ultimately leads to beauty, goodness, and
miracles yet it was not “pretty” getting to that place.
The story is filled with Love, yet not without its share of
teeth-baring, grizzly, heart-ripping pain. But stay with me, please, because we
are all given experiences where the hungry Wolf comes knocking and we feel
threatened; times when we are brought to our knees with decisions we find too
hard to make, choices where no one direction seems like the right one to
follow. Places where we fear being
judged or ridiculed for our actions.
Looking back at many of my own crossroads, I see how a Loving God was
trying to interject, to make the way clear, but my ears and eyes, or those of a
loved one were closed.
As highly functioning, often
left-brained, linear thinking creatures we tend to see life as having definable
boundaries, clear cut answers. We create
dogmas and systems to prove our thoughts true; if not the dogmas and systems of
someone else, then we adopt our own. But
the natural world shows us that life is chaotic. There is no fail-safe way to be in the
world. Great storms shift the landscape
into unrecognizable shapes. Water and
ice turn rock into soil. The sun bakes
lush fields into desert. Right and
wrong, truth and justice are not as simple as black and white.
What lead me over the edge
toward opening the fearsome door to sharing a perilous story were not only the
reminder of my personal mission statement but also going into deep reflection
on recent Sunday sermon’s on the topics of right and wrong, good and bad,
judgment and compassion, and the “real” meanings behind Jesus teachings.
And so, the story begins…
Once upon a time, there was a man
and woman who fell in love and were married.
They had a daughter and a son.
The Wolf burst in, huffed and puffed, huffed and puffed and finally blew
the house down. The man, left his sick wife, his 17 year old daughter and three
year old son. “How terrible” you might
be thinking. “How wrong he was. How devastating for his children.” And there were those who thought those very
thoughts. Some shunned the man and
talked behind his back.
Now let’s hear the whole story from
the Wolf’s perspective:
Due to societal customs that said it
was “bad,” to admit to such things, it was kept a secret that when the daughter
was 6, the woman/mother began experiencing a modicum of depression. All that doctors of the time knew to do was
to try numbing her emotional pain with drugs.
The drugs were only a band-aid. Eventually the anguish in her heart and
spirit turned into a lung disease called asthma and later, long bouts with
infection that turned systemic. More
drugs on top of more drugs were administered which altered her once sweet,
kind, peaceful, sensitive, and very loving personality. Through no fault of her own she spiraled down
a ruinous path of addiction and psychotic behaviors. She was in and out of mental wards, psychiatric
hospitals, and many times came very close to death. Consequently she was also
addicted to blaming everything and everyone around her for her state of being,
yet she threatened repeatedly to do harm to herself – again a victim of drug
interactions too numerous to even identify individually.
The man’s heart was breaking,
over and over and over again. He turned
the other cheek 70 times 70 times 70 and laid down his life trying to fix his
broken Beloved. He never anticipated
watching his beautiful wife disappearing into a storm beyond his control. As the timbers of his emotional house shook
and his heart trembled, he tried everything within his grasp, everything within
reach of his linear thinking, and everything his dear, loving heart could
muster to rescue her, to bring her back to him and his daughter. He fed, bathed, clothed, and embraced the
woman and the messiness of the situation.
In the eyes of his daughter, he was quite valiant and romantic in his
attempts to keep love in the home and the youngster was often a co-conspirator
in these grand acts of love. But more often
than not, these most glorious gestures were received by the wife/mother as
though they were conspiring to do her harm, to make her worse. Even the daughter was suspect. Such is the demoralizing existence in the
presence of paranoid, psychotic behavior, whether it be the body’s chemical
imbalance or a drug-induced state.
His great love for her even
produced a son when the daughter was 14.
But the responsibility of motherhood had already been overwhelming and
nearly non-existent for the previous 8 years and adding an infant to the mix
was not enough to call her out of the noxious trance.
The man was losing
ground. He himself began to spiral down
in the destructive dance and the daughter began suffering a silent
depression. When the daughter was 17 and
the son was 3, both father and daughter were in an enormous state of
despair. He had taken up habits to numb
his own pain and left his beloved position as a minister, no longer able to
give what the demands of a congregation required. The daughter became shy and introverted, not
knowing where to turn for guidance. He worked in a grocery store, barely
surviving each emotionally charged day.
Both came to a point where the Wolf was howling so loud and blowing so
hard, the debris of their house recklessly flying in every direction. “Something” told the father that if he didn’t
get out it would be the end of him...maybe the end of them all.
This was, of course, the
ultimate difficulty for the daughter, to be left with a very ill mother and a
young brother who still needed a lot of care, while she herself was
suffering. For awhile she didn’t
understand and was angry at her father for leaving. The father didn’t give up on her, encouraging
her to get a job and increase social activities to keep her from being
swallowed up by the strong vortex of the downward spiral. He took her for counseling and made sure her
brother had additional adult care. Her anger was really sadness for a seemingly
impossible situation and she knew deep down that her father did love her. He loved her brother and her mother too, in
spite of outward appearances.
Two years later the man could
see that his 19 year old daughter was indeed in danger of falling down the
rabbit hole of her mother’s illness. He
urged her to get her own apartment. The
inner struggle that ensued within her was not unlike the one her father faced
two years prior, and she was filled with guilt, shame, and a sense of
hopelessness. How could he have left a
sick wife and two children? How could
SHE leave a helpless mother and her five year old brother? What would become of them? Hadn’t she been taught the lessons of Jesus,
through the eyes of the Christian church, to be a “Good Samaritan” and stick
things out through thick and thin, to lay down her personal well-being for
another, even her life if need be?
She made several desperate
pleas to her mother to get well, to stop the twister of pain they were all
caught in before the roof caved in.
Wouldn’t she please become the adult, the mother? Wouldn’t she wake up and hug her, and make
this terrible nightmare end? But the drugs, her mother’s “dis-ease” had
control. The Wolf was raging at the door
and the wind was picking up. The
daughter nearly drowned in the trail of tears that fell as she packed up her
bedroom amid rants from her mother about what a “bad” daughter she was…just
like her father.
“Before the roof caved
in…” A striking image! But what REALLY happened?
The Wolf stayed where he was needed, snarling and seething at the heels
of the mother/wife/woman. At least that
was how the woman viewed it at the time.
She was blind to the Love swirling about the house. The Wolf was finally freed to help the one
who needed it most. Help? What kind of help can a Wolf offer? Everyone that the woman was dependent on was
gone – not only dependent on for food and shelter, but dependent on in an
unhealthy way that kept her from healing.
There was no one left to blame.
She was finally alone with the Wolf, his howls growing louder by the
minute and the woman’s groans shaking the rafters. One can only imagine what it was like. And in that skirmish, a miracle was born…
My mother went into the
hospital for the last time 6 months after I left to take refuge in my own apartment.
She got off the drugs. She began
caring for herself, got dressed in the morning, made the bed, and kept the
house clean for the first time in years.
She found community in the church that meant so much to her in her
youth. She made contributions of her
gifts and started to sing and paint and cook again. She started taking care of her son and
participating in his life in ways she had not been able to do for me as a
child. She made amends and created a new
relationship with me, but only after a six month silence between us. Without a word about her terrible past, she
went straight to the work of making up for lost time. She got a job, her own apartment, and a
boyfriend she later married. Much of
this occurred within a short six months of “the roof caving in.” She had a few relapses but finally, after 15
years of an emotional hurricane my mother was truly on the road to
recovery.
When I was 21, my Dad found the courage to share what life had been like for him during those years. He told me that I didn't "come from bad seed" and that I could turn my life into something beautiful. At that very intimate meeting he said, "Robin, we survived the war." He found a woman to love, who
received his love for the rest of his days, although he assured me repeatedly
that he never stopped loving his “Dot,” my mom.
He went back to his ministry and once again resumed a more healthful,
peaceful lifestyle in the quiet setting of small country villages where his
parishioners could further receive the gifts he brought to this world.
I was blessed to have my
mother acting as a fairly healthy mom during the formative years of my life,
from birth to age 6. Years after the
storm ended I took up a long journey to heal the aftermath of the storm. My mother is long since gone away from this
mortal plane, but leaves me with the story of her miracle…her heart and spirit
that were finally able to hear the Wolf calling her back to her own joy and
happiness. She left me with my own
miracle - the gumption to rise from the ashes and to live out my days in the
joy of creating the healthiest possible life for myself and sharing it with
others in whatever ways I can. On this
journey I learned that no one in my story was “bad” or “wrong.” I learned that my father and I did the only
things we could feel our way to doing at the time and in so doing, a miracle
was allowed to unfold and my mother’s spirit found its way back to the land of
the living.
***********
In retrospect, I have often said I
wished my Dad had left sooner. I don’t know
for sure but I suspect that my mother’s cyclone of pain would have continued if
Dad or I had stayed with her, “taking care” of her if you will. I have come to understand that his leaving,
however difficult, was my Dad’s greatest act of love for my mother, for myself
and my brother, and for himself.
It is often said that the greatest
potential for human change, lies in chaos and confusion. Sometimes the Wolf comes to chase us out of
our own way. There is a natural flow to
the universe and I believe that the Wolf makes himself known when we place
blocks in the way and dam up the flow with our limited, black and white view of
things. We think we know what will
happen - ”If I do X, Y, or Z, then THAT
will happen” – but we don’t know. We try
to think our way into knowing right, wrong, good, and bad. We try to play it safe, yet in a chaotic
world this is impossible. We don’t know
how the “right action” as determined by our minds, may be the opposite of what
really needs to happen for a divinely “right” outcome.
It is not always as ghastly as this
story happens to be, but it can feel that way.
Yet, we can let go of the struggle if we become quiet and listen to what
the Wolf is trying to say. In our case
he was trying to tell my father and I that there was truly nothing WE could do
of our own volition to help my mom. The
Wolf blew on the house and sent debris flying to evoke Dad’s instinct to save
himself rather than commit suicide and to let him know that a greater life
awaited us all. Somewhere outside of the
chaos, Dad heard the distant call that would ultimately lead to joy…to
happiness for all of us, only attainable by letting go of what he once thought
was the one and only “right thing to do” by staying with my mother through many
torturous years. It was only in his
leaving that he was able to become the father that my brother and I so
desperately needed and the man he came here to be.
We even try to tell ourselves
that our personal well-being is not important. Because two thousand plus years
and heaps of misguided translations lay between us and Jesus, we really don’t
know for sure what he taught. I believe
he was on a path of discovery, seeking joy and happiness as much as any human,
and if he had any success reaching his own heart/soul intelligence, he shared
it. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t
believe he would ask us to live our lives out in agony, ignoring a call to heal
and use our gifts in the world.
The
third Beatitude, usually translated as, “Blessed are the meek, they shall
inherit the earth,” can be translated from Aramaic as, “Ripe are those who
release what is overly rigid, within and without; they shall receive strength
and energy – their natural inheritance – from nature all around them.” As a yogi, I recognize this as a very yogic
teaching. It is clear to me that my Dad
finally was forced to release his rigid belief that there was only one right
way, though he was only able to do it by coming to a place of surrender. This letting go of rigidity allowed further
releases, for God /Nature to take over and do its work in our lives - to give
us all our natural inheritance.
I do not believe in a God that
uses suffering to “teach us lessons.”
Rather, I believe, it is up to us to realize that sometimes really,
really impossible, hard-to-deal-with things occur, like hurricane Sandy. We must allow ourselves to feel our feelings,
release any idea that we can prevent such things, pick up the pieces and move
on. Other times it is possible to
release the suffering that we ourselves create while trying to determine our
path to peace and happiness with our minds, when often the path is clearly
defined. In my experience, it is the
intelligence of our hearts in tandem with the soul that call us to break the
dam and stop listening to the confusion of our tangled thoughts.
When your emotional house is
splitting apart at the seams, let go. I
invite you to risk tuning your ear to the call of happiness, to joy, whatever
that may be for you as determined by your heart/soul. As you follow that
call, trust that you may be opening a door for one person or several to do the
same. Admit that you don’t know what is
truly right or wrong, good or bad; that you don’t have the answers to life’s
biggest dilemmas. Live to become the
fullest expression of you, love with all your heart's compassion in the best way you know how, and be open to
learning new ways to do both.
One of my favorite Rumi poems says
it well and I feel that Jesus, the man, would have agreed. Each time I read it a new awareness is
brought to light:
“Be helpless, dumbfounded,
unable to say yes or no. Then a
stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that
beauty. If we say we can, we’re
lying. If we say “No,” we don’t see it,
that “No” will behead us and shut tight our window onto spirit.
So let us rather not be sure of
anything, beside ourselves, and only that, so Miraculous Beings come running to
help. Crazed, lying in a zero circle,
mute, we shall be saying finally, with tremendous eloquence, “Lead us.”
When we have totally surrendered to
that beauty, we shall be a mighty kindness.”
Many Blessings of Love & Beauty
to you. And if this story helps you in
any way, I hope you will find a way to share your story with me.
xo Robin
