Nevada is gone.

I can’t even imagine it, but Nevada is gone. We had to let her go—help her across the Rainbow Bridge—two weeks ago yesterday.

The plain details: I found her in the pasture that Wednesday afternoon unable to stand solidly or to walk without wobbling. At first we thought it was a viral thing, but she showed no evidence of illness. She managed to stagger with me all the way to a stall in the barn—the bravest and most trusting little horse ever—and made it through the first night (with LOTS of drugs) standing. We left her about 8:30 that evening, and went back at 3 in the morning and spent an hour with her. She was propped in the corner, miserable but still standing. But by the next morning she was down and never got up again—a progressive paralysis of the legs. She experienced no pain, as far as we could tell, just an increasing fatigue from struggling to stand. By afternoon she was getting more uncomfortable—horses are not designed to stay down for very long—and her breathing was getting labored.

Because she wasn’t sick or feverish, and was behaving normally other than being unable to stand, we and our wonderful vet finally figured that she must have had a bad fall in the mud, or gotten kicked, and injured her spinal cord. That’s the only thing that would account for the entire range of symptoms.

The “good” news about that final day is that she got to eat all the cookies she wanted—she never lost her appetite—and had fresh, hand-picked grass to eat all day long. And she got to be a “lap pony,” which she’s always wanted to do. My partner and I took turns sitting on the floor of the stall with her head on our lap. OMG.

I would love to write more, but I still can’t do it. I’d love to explain how I nearly didn’t go check on her on that afternoon, in the dreadful cold and wind; how I found her completely covered in mud—this horse who almost never rolled in the dirt. I wish I could talk about how she staggered to follow me; about how hungry she was. I don’t think she’d been able to get her head down to eat without falling over. About how she made her way over to the herd when they left for the west pasture, rather than stay alone; how she struggled with me down the lane to the barn and an isolation stall, helped by the promise of hay from a friend in front and strategic shoves from behind by the vet. It took us almost an hour to go those few hundred yards.

I wish I could tell you how the entire herd ran to see her go, and how the mares’ screams could be heard for miles; she was a leader among them. How happy she was to see us come back to her in the dark hours of that next morning; how she rumbled at us each time she heard us, and especially once I started bringing her fresh-cut grass and cookies, all through the last hours of her life.

How my sweet Galahad tried to understand the news of her passing, and how confused he was over what to do with and for me: Shall I bite? Shall I shove? Shall I hover? Shall I hug? Shall I walk with her back to the gate and try to do all these things at once? How I felt Nevada from the other side, running freely, happy and surprised, but wanting her herd and her friends, including my partner and me. (I feel her there now, but she’s distant from me, of course.) How so many friends on Facebook and email sent words of comfort, including one who sent this prayer:

We Remember Them (Jewish Prayer)

In the rising of the sun, and in its going down, we remember them.

In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter, we remember them.

In the opening of buds and in the rebirth of spring, we remember them.

In the blueness of the sky and in the warmth of summer, we remember them.

In the rustling of the leaves and in the beauty of autumn, we remember them.

In the beginning of the year and when it ends, we remember them.

When we are weary and in need of strength, we remember them.

When we are lost and sick at heart, we remember them.

When we have joys we yearn to share, we remember them.

For so long as we live, they, too, shall live, for they are now a part of us, as we remember them.

OMG. How can it be that I will never see her again, never see her soft nose, never feel her breath and her lips on my hand? How can that be?

Wow….

Well, life goes on. It will never be the same, and though I am eternally grateful to feel her presence with me often, what I really want is the warmth of her breath on my hand….

Thank you for spending your brief life with me, my sweet friend. I remember you.

(cross-posted on The Alchemical Horse)

You can’t make this stuff up. Or at least I can’t.

I’ve tried a couple of times to write fiction. Does NOT work. Maybe it’s a lack of imagination, though I like to think it’s just an endearing personality defect: I can’t seem to make things up. I can’t lie; I can’t even equivocate any more. Used to be that if I felt like hiding something, you had to ask me a focused, direct question to be sure you were actually getting the truth from me and not some carefully crafted weasel-words. Now, I can’t even do that. Seriously inconvenient, let me tell you.

But I digress.

So I told you all recently that I’m working on “mother issues,” which I most assuredly have. It’s not been easy to see them, but they’re finally sneaking out into the light, in some very odd ways.

The last few weeks I’ve been trying to focus on the part of my psyche that represents my first year or two of life. That little infant is terrified! And understandably so. I spent a couple of months of my first year in the hospital, for seizures or something that no one was ever able to explain to me. And Mom was depressed during most of my childhood. So it’s no wonder that poor little Baby Kay has issues.

So I’ve been “carrying around” Baby Kay during my daily routine—just holding her, talking to her, trying to make up for some of the mothering she didn’t get. It seems she holds in her tiny fists some of the answers to my painful jaw. What does she want and need? She has no words, and I have zero experience with babies….

Watching the baby, I have realized that the dreadful, crippling anxiety that I experience more often that I’d like to admit is also linked to her.

Any time I try to make a decision, even something insignificant, or any time anything—even the tiniest thing—changes or shifts in my world, or even in my daily schedule, Baby Kay starts to fuss and cry and get panicky. It’s so bad that just trying to figure out what time of day I should go see the horses is a frightening event for that baby.

I’m not kidding.

I don’t know enough about the psychological “why” of this to talk about it at this point. What I do understand is that it’s a really good metaphor for the way I am in the world—that internalized baby is terrified! She is so scared. Any time the mother (my adult self, at this point, or the internalized mother, my image of the mother, the baby’s image of the mother…) tries to do anything at all, any time anything shifts and the baby feels the least bit insecure, then panic sets in. Sometimes actual panic—and a terrible, gripping anxiety in my gut that just freezes me in my tracks.

Well. That explains a lot.

And then there’s this morning’s events. This is the part that you just can’t make up … and it’s the real wonder of working with the imaginal the way that I do. I love being able to feel the connection with ancestral figures and images, and to be able to “see” the dialogue taking shape in outer events.

So on the way home from the Metrolink stop this morning, I recorded some thoughts (thank goodness for the app on my cell phone!). What follows is edited down from the transcription:

I’ve been holding Baby Kay (who is, as always, anxious and fussy) and bouncing her around, talking to her, playing with her a little, getting her to at least look around instead of just squinching up her eyes and screaming. And all the while, I’m aware that my mother is nearby—my actual mom, Mary Ellen, not just my internalized mother. I can sense her with me in the car, and as I drive I’m able to feel at least part of what my mom must have felt when she held me….

Mom, as a teenager and young woman, was vibrant, serious, and determined; she had ambitions for her future, though she never told me what they were. Then she fell in love and married…and, I think, still believed her dreams could come true. But suddenly, holding her first-born in her arms, the realization must have hit home: the realization that nothing else was now possible. All her dreams and ambitions had come to an end. In the fifties, cultural expectations for women did not include motherhood AND a career. Mom and Dad both were conservative and cared very much about living up to the cultural norms.

How ambivalent she must have felt about that baby, my infant self.

I know my mother loved me—loves me still. But it wasn’t an easy, free, happy and joyful thing. A lot of the time, at least, it was mixed in with grief and anger, which moved into depression (which always follows when you can’t do anything about the anger, when there’s no action you can take). So here she’s got this screaming infant—and a sickly one, to boot!—and she’s trapped. There’s no way out…

At this moment in the recording, I’m sitting on the driveway. The car engine shuts down and you can hear the sound of the door handle…which does NOT open.

…and all of her dreams are gone, and … I’m not sure what’s going on here…. What’s my car doing? [Sound of car being turned on and off again, twice….]

“I’ve got to go. My car has locked me in. I’m not sure why my car has locked me in.” [half-jokingly:] “I’m trapped! Oh no!” and the recording ends.

What happened, apparently, was that I had inadvertently hit the “lock all doors” button … and for an instant, I was truly terrified because I couldn’t get out—I was trapped. Wow….

Transcribing this, I found tears very close. Mom, thanks for this graphic demonstration, or reminder. I love you, and I’m grateful for your help as we—yes, WE—work through this….

And as I type that, the sun comes out weakly, briefly, from under the clouds. Wow…. You can’t make this stuff up.

This is a rather rambling, stream-of-consciousness post, but that fact just reflects how new this stuff is to me.

I went to get some energy work today to help with the pain (which is better but still problematic this week). So much information is held in the body, and if we’re lucky, this kind of work releases some of it to consciousness.

One major realization from today’s session is just how much I’ve ignored my body over the years. Back in my professional-speaker days, I used to teach a class in avoiding burnout for overworked corporate types. And we all know that we teach what we need to learn, right?

Well, I’m apparently a VERY slow learner, because twenty years later, I’ve finally realized, once and for all, just why it is that you have to put your OWN oxygen mask on first if your plane springs a leak. Yup. Took me that long to actually get the message.

Can we all say, “self-care”?

So a lot of things suddenly make sense: why, for instance, the pain goes away when I dance, or when I’m hanging out in the pasture with my horses, doing “nothing.” Those are about the only times when I’m actually IN MY BODY, working with it, and not in my head. So much for what I thought was going on.

I think that’s maybe what my study group was trying to tell me last Saturday, when they were talking about how the inferior function of an intuitive is the “sensate” part—the information that comes from the body itself. Maybe, with practice, I might re-learn to trust my body, instead of viewing it as a source of fear and vulnerability. Anyway—interesting. Interesting….

The second insight that I had was that I’m dealing with “the mother wound,” or “the Dark Mother.” Yeah, you say. You’ve been saying that already….

I’ve been saying it, but apparently not understanding it.

Two blog posts from friends today turned my attention to it, and the light bulb went on. The first one, by my friend Angela Dunning (“Equine Reflections” on Facebook), references Bethany Webster’s blog  post “Bringing the Dark Mother Into the Light.” Angela says,

I see this in many clients who, at first, can only speak positively of their experiences of their mother and/or speak in platitudes such as: “I know she did her best for me…”

Taking the next very brave step to add: “And yet, this IS how I feel about what happened…” though, is when healing begins.

We all have a dark side, all our mothers had a dark side. The need to suppress it and to be seen as only a good mother is massive in our society. Yet when we take off our rose-tinted glasses and see how we weren’t well-mothered, THEN we can begin to make up these deficits in ourselves by learning to be a good but honest mother to ourselves.

It’s not about blame – it’s about honesty and really healing…

(Bethany’s site, “Womb Of Light: The Power of the Awakened Feminine,” contains much interesting and insightful information and is well worth checking out.)

How interesting! I really had no idea! But apparently that’s pretty typical. You either hate your mom or idolize her. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but I’m definitely one of those women who always said, “I don’t have a problem with my mother,” but then would go on to say how she never told me anything about my body, how I have her pain in my jaw, and so on.

But I’m ready—oh, so ready!—to heal.

Been thinking about how this has played out in my life: My body is and always has been “bad.” Look at all the things that “went wrong” around my sexuality, for instance! And look at how I was always “not good” at physical things, when in fact I’m graceful and connected to an unusually high degree. And there’s likely more, much more.

I wonder if this is part of why I have not become aware of the meaning of my bodily sensations—that “inferior function.” It may not be just the function I’m least conscious of, but in fact, it may have been deliberately discouraged. I wasn’t supposed to have bodily sensations—certainly not lusty, erotic ones—and so I suppressed them even more than might have been expected, given my personality type.

Dunno….

But there’s another thing: I’m very much in touch with my body, but I don’t usually attempt to “make sense” of it—is that what they’re talking about? And I tend to ignore it—like when I’m uncomfortable around someone. I feel it, but I don’t analyze it, and I generally force myself to stay put because it’s polite. That kind of thing? Dunno….

Hmmm…..

And suddenly the weird thing that my dear Aunt Margie (my mom’s sister) and I have always done makes perfect sense: We don’t write, don’t call, for months on end, and then have these long, wonderful, intimate chats when one of us finally breaks down and picks up the phone or the pen.

I sometimes feel like, “If you really loved me you’d call me.” Maybe she feels that way, too. I’ve always felt that the communication was largely from me to her, at least in the last decade or two, and I’ve actually resented it…and then felt guilty for resenting it. But that’s how she was raised, that’s how I was raised, that’s how my mom was raised; that’s probably how her mother Hazel was raised, and on back through the generations. It’s all we know. And we do love each other, very much….

All of this is has been mostly unconscious, of course. Add to that the genuine doubt that we are, in fact, loveable…so if the other one doesn’t write, or call, or whatever, then maybe they actually don’t love us. Maybe we actually do not deserve to be loved. That’s how it feels to me, at least.

Well. Onwards and upwards, I guess. Onwards to the next phase of the learning.

Concrete, medically diagnosed illness … is not only a clinical event.  It is also, if not first and foremost, a psychological event whose physical aspects require a psychological examination. … Everything matters to soul and expresses its fantasies, whether ideas in the head or bones in the body…. The components of any illness–affected organ or system, causal agent, style of disease process–all have their significances in the language of pathologizing fantasy as well as that of pathological facts.  – James Hillman

[This is a version of a paper I did fifteen or so years ago for a class at Pacifica. It’s a story amplified by material from James Hillman’s writings (you can check out the bibliography at the end if you want). The story itself is worth reading—I’ve got that in bold italics. You can read just that part, but if you want more of of the background, read the parts in between. Long, but fun to read!]

Archetypal psychology, as James Hillman talks about it, introduces a different way of thinking about our lives and about psyche.  Rather than just looking at an image, an event, or a symbol, Hillman suggests we approach it by means of imagination, and look for the deeper, wider, richer meanings.  Each thing is given an importance beyond what is seen on the surface.  “The archetypal perspective offers the advantage of organizing into clusters or constellations a host of events from different areas of life.” No longer is behavior just behavior, distinct from our style of consciousness; no longer is our consciousness distinct from our images.  Rather, each “category” enriches the others, and we begin to sense, or imagine, the depth of psyche.

It’s a Friday evening, and I’m visiting with an unusually intuitive friend of mine, someone who knows me well and whom I trust.  We’re talking about a job interview I had this afternoon—it looks like within a couple of weeks I’ll have a part-time job that will help pay my school and travel expenses, plus give me much-needed health insurance.  This is an exciting turn of events. 

This particular night, however, I am in tremendous pain from a several-year-old injury to my lingual nerve. It usually affects just my tongue, but tonight the entire side of my face is throbbing.   My friend says, “Interesting that it’s so much worse today.  Could there be a connection with the job thing?” 

The pain is incredible. Oh great, I think to myself, I sure hope there’s no connection—I’ve been looking for this kind of job for months!  But I have too much experience with this kind of synchronicity to discount the possibility. “Well, maybe, but I sure don’t know what it might be.  It hurts too much to think.  Any suggestions?”

My friend is quiet for a minute, tuning in.  Finally she says, “You’re not listening to your body.  Hmmm—this is interesting: I get the sense that somebody in there has some stories to tell.  Wonder what that’s about?” 

 The pain is on the left side; I try to pay attention to the left side of my body, but nothing comes to me at first. Continue reading →

A friend and I have been having a lively discussion about a couple of praying mantises who apparently arrived at her home on some plants she purchased for her new patio garden. It reminded me of this post, which was written last year but had never actually been posted. So here it is, better late than never. Enjoy!

There is something about the particular that’s important. That idea was brought home to me last weekend [Sepember 2015], which I spent at a conference called “Honoring the Altar of the Earth” held at a local retreat center.

Every spare moment I spent outdoors, walking the trails and noticing everything I could, communicating as best I could with my fellow beings. My attention was especially drawn by the world of the tiny—there are great communities of living beings in any given square foot of the natural world.

The retreat center has some forested areas—disturbed, second-growth, weedy—and quite a bit of manicured lawn area with widely spaced trees, perfect for walking meditations. There’s an ephemeral creek running through the property; at this point in the summer, it’s composed mainly of puddles where mosquitoes breed unhindered. I stayed away from that.

Not wanting to trek through the brush where chiggers lie in wait, I knelt down on the path and focused on a small patch of grass, nettles, and pokeweed. Whom might I encounter there?

A hunting spider (or maybe a nursery-web spider) poised on top of a nettle leaf caught my eye—she ducked and ran to the edge of her leaf when I knelt down, but then returned—it was her leaf, clearly—within minutes. Nearby wandered a female of some strange stick-insect species. A true bug crouched and sucked a leaf. Another, almost-invisible spider suddenly came into focus, hanging on a truly invisible line of web stretched over an open space a couple of feet wide. She sat with legs spraddled, but when I blew gently on her, she turned into a long and narrow “racer” who glided swiftly along that invisible track. I couldn’t see how she moved. Amazing. A (relatively) huge daddy-longlegs prowled among the leaves and stems.

I walked on for a while, hoping for a path into a wilder space, but came quickly to the outer edge of the property, and turned back. When I got back to that little patch of weeds and knelt town again, I was oddly thrilled to see my “friend” the spider, still home atop her leaf; and her buddy the harvestman down closer to the ground.

What was it about encountering these fellow creatures again that was so special? Maybe it’s because I had become aware of them as individual beings, more solidly real than just a kind of generic “spider” or insect—they’re not any more ephemeral than I am myself, and they have strings of days and nights made up imperceptibly of each moment, just as I do.

I persuaded my cell phone’s camera to focus on my little friend—not easy to do—and really enjoyed the encounter, and the act of attending to things so very small. The spikes on the nettle leaf, from the spider’s perspective, are large and easy to navigate. The world is so different at this level of awareness, and so beautiful.

When I got home and processed my photos from the trip, I was horrified to discover that the photos of the spider were not there. The pictures I most wanted to see were gone. Wow. But then, I hadn’t asked her permission to take her picture….

That particular spider—that individual creature, with her own awareness and will—that was one of the messages I received from her: her particularity. It was so delightful to find her again the second day on a different leaf, and so disappointing to find her gone, or hidden, the third day. And it was such a shock and a loss to realize that her pictures had also gone—her individuality lived in my memory, but there was nothing visible or tangible left to me. She exists in this plane still, perhaps, but no longer in my part of physical reality. And I felt her loss.

A few days later, I sit next to my waterfall, journaling, and notice a tiny stone here beside me that bears the ossified, crystallized remains of tiny sea creatures, the remains of individuals whose lives in this plane of reality ended eons ago. They and their relatives—by the billions—once had living bodies that in their death have given me the limestone formations underlying the land on which I live now.

In this small stone I can see the remains of three, maybe four, individual creatures. These creatures, this stone, this human now examining it and trying to imagine a watery life, breathing in my food and oxygen in a shallow, dark sea…. I can’t comprehend billions of creatures forming that limestone bluff; but I can see, in my mind’s eye, these four individuals.

And the pair of doves who used to sit and preen on the deck railing after their bath: I haven’t seen them recently—but yesterday I did see a dove startle up from the ground, largely denuded of its feathers by an encounter with a cat. My cat? That individual bird—was it one of the pair who used to come, now damaged and maybe killed by my own cat? This brings things close to home.

Would “civilized” humans kill so carelessly if we looked into the eyes of the animal and saw the soul behind them? Would we thoughtlessly eat that individual animal if it had a name and a face? I doubt it. Easy to eat meat packaged neatly in plastic wrap. Easy to kill—or not. Rather, easy to eat what has been killed, anonymously, by others out of our sight. We have no responsibility for its life or death, right?

Interesting.

And that particular, individual spider chooses to be, once again, invisible to me. I’m reminded that I never asked her permission after all. Rude of me….

A couple of days after I finished this piece, I chanced to check the recycle bin on my computer, looking for something entirely unrelated. Lo and behold, the “lost” photos of my friend the spider were there after all. Gotta love it. But she sure did provoke a lot of thought, which is a very good thing indeed. And I’m glad to have her back!

(This is a slightly edited excerpt from my dissertation; it’s part of a longer discussion of women’s voice and agency in a patriarchal culture.)

What our society has for so long considered “women’s work”—the daily activities of nurturance and caretaking—is utterly indispensable to human life. For many of us women, care and feeding of a family preclude any thought of realizing whatever other dreams, goals, and aspirations we may have had as girls and young women, at least until the children are grown. We are taught that this is the natural order of things; this is women’s function in the world. And until women gained some control over their own reproductive cycle, it was women’s fate and function.

For millennia, the patriarchal establishment has fostered this idea, and we women, by and large, buy into it. After all, it feels good to be needed, for all of us—men and women alike. But there is a darker side to being needed, which was brought home to me by the following dream. It takes place in the busy emergency room popularized by the long-running television series “E.R.” and features one of the central characters from that drama:

I’m with Dr. Luka Kovač. I’m crying, exhausted from caregiving. Luka says “You’re working too hard; let them take care of themselves.” I cry and lean against him, saying, “I can’t do that. I can’t stop while there’s one person in pain who needs help. Neither could you!” He looks at me and arches one eyebrow. I notice him pulling out a small case of a white powder and scratching it into the skin of his hand with a needle; it’s cocaine.

The dream suggests that the good feelings generated in us women by taking care of others function as a drug. “Helping others” becomes, in effect, a drug that dulls or transforms the pain we might otherwise feel as a result of what has been denied us by the patriarchal culture: our own autonomy and agency in the world. For many women, myself included, our addiction to this “drug” prevents us from caring for ourselves and our own psychic needs.

A second factor is that following the leadings of Soul is a daunting task, and one that requires a stout heart and strong motivation. Even for those of us who do have a sense of vocation that leads beyond the household, following one’s own path is terrifying. Many women, given the culturally sanctioned alternative to what would be a serious cultural and psychic struggle, turn readily to the “opiate” of helping others in order to dull our terror. And so the least call from the child, the spouse, the sick cat, the pile of laundry, and we cannot resist the lure of the drug to which we have become addicted. The call of the domestic wins out.

The more insidious side of this situation is the way in which the patriarchal culture has supplied us with the very drug that keeps women quiet, submissive, and frequently unaware of their own repression.

We are told from girlhood that men value the angel in the house, the “little woman,” the good little girl, and so we should aspire to fulfill these roles as we grow up. The ideal woman is described as, among other things, exquisitely sensitive to the needs of others, and her finest and truest nature and calling, it is said, is service to others. These are the idealized feminine images that girls to this day receive along with mother’s milk. The patriarchy extols the virtues of this ideal of Woman, idolizes her, puts her on a pedestal. And at the same time patriarchal culture devalues everything that has been so clearly defined as woman’s highest purpose. But our senses have become dulled to the pain of our own repression.

Women must overcome this addiction. Caregiving and nurturing activities are heartwarming, soul-nourishing, and utterly vital to human survival. But we women—and men—must become aware of the essential nature of what has been denigrated as “women’s work” and cease to buy into the patriarchal devaluation of these activities.

I am not suggesting that all who do these jobs are women; nor that all women do these jobs; nor yet that all that women do can be encompassed within these jobs. What I am saying is that the tasks typically described as “women’s work,” and those who perform them, have historically been devalued by our culture; and that many or most women have internalized this devaluation and incorporated it into a sense of self that is shrunken and damaged. In her essay “The descent of Inanna: Myth and therapy,”  Sylvia Brinton Perera (1985) suggests that women often have an identity that is based upon “projections hooked onto us” and that we lack a sense of our own truest self:

In the West, women have too often been defined only in relation to the masculine as the good, nurturant mother and wife, the sweet, docile, agreeable daughter, the gently supportive or bright, achieving partner. As many feminist writers have stated through the ages, this collective model (and the behavior it leads to) is inadequate for life; we mutilate, depotentiate, silence, and enrage ourselves trying to compress our souls into it, just as surely as our grandmothers deformed their fully breathing bodies with corsets for the sake of an ideal. (p. 141)

Perera, S. B. (1985). The descent of Inanna: Myth and therapy. In E. Lauter & C. S. Rupprecht (Eds.), Feminist archetypal theory: Interdisciplinary re-visions of Jungian thought (pp. 137-186). Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.