My Stuff

More Foolsgold.

In chapter 21 Susan leads us into the language of colors and I think of my relationship with colors over the years. When I was a young girl my favorite color was blue. My five year old granddaughter called me from Colorado on my birthday and asked, "What's your favorite color gramma Adrienne?" and I told her blue. Her favorite is purple. I remember a time when if you looked into my closet purple was the predominant color you would see. Then it was green. Now I mostly enjoy wearing brown, black, gray, army green, off white. And I like to highlight black with red and white. I still like to wear blue too, and green. I like the blue with my eyes.

Go here to read a color therapy chart and scroll to the bottom of the page and take the color test. It will only take you a minute and it's a very interesting experience.

In chapter 22 Susan offers up Rainer Maria Rilke

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

I hold on to, and go after things tenaciously. I think it would do me well to practice just as tenaciously, the art of releasing.

Susan works diligently to dig up an artemesia plant. She's making space for something new. She asks,

"Where do you need to let go in your life to make space for something new?"

As I contemplate this letting go, a sadness arises. I'm letting go of my mother, there's not much of a grounding with her anymore. She's 84 with Alzheimer's and although she could likely be around for many more years, I can't depend on things staying the same with her. I'm getting that the only way I'm going to be comfortable in my relationship with her is to go with the uncertainty, to just let her be and love her the best I can. Each and everyday my relationship with her offers me a new opportunity to let go and be with what is. The love is there. It's always there.

I'm letting go of wanting others to want what I want. I find that especially difficult when there has been a bonding in the past, a shared excitement and wanting of the same thing, a melding of minds and hearts and souls. Sometimes I think I just choose to be blind, trying to keep people in a box of the past, striving to keep the shared connection going when they have already moved on. When I realize they are no longer in that sweet space, I think they are rejecting me personally and I get my feelings hurt. I get so sad sometimes. Attachment is fun when I get what I want but it's heartbreaking when I don't.

Susan says, "What do you resist releasing...A habit, a fear, an idea, a belief...a person, a relationship."

god's mini-storage

This is the title of chapter 23 and I learn from Susan that the word God is abbreviated G-d in Jewish holy texts because it's considered sacrilege to write or say it. I always wonder where these type of injunctions come from, what the original intent was. As Susan talks about God's mini-storage, "Where things begin to coalesce. A vast, mysterious shelter for everything." I'm reminded of my move from hell, April before last. Jerry and I lived in our previous home for ten years and we were moving. We had rented one of those huge 10' by 20' dumpsters and had filled it to over flowing just seven months earlier. A lot of it was just trash, old appliances that hadn't been hauled off, along with lots of yard debris, but a good portion of it was STUFF.
Lots and lots of belongings that over the years, had filled our garage, closets and every corner of the physical space we had appropriated for ourselves. Now we were moving out and I was once again hauling things to the trash, filling boxes upon boxes to give away, along with more and more boxes that a friend came and picked up for a yard sale. Where does this STUFF come from? I was cleaning out and paring down. But my new home didn't have the available storage capacity that the old place had and I just couldn't let go of enough of this STUFF to not be obliged to rent a storage unit.

I'm not kidding when I say this was the move from hell. I descended into purgatory. I was definitely in God's grace but imperfectly purified and before I was going to be allowed into my new home I was going to be scrubbed! As I've written about before, I have a tendency to understand things through symbolism. I make a lot of meaning from the specific circumstances of my life. This move was a huge letting go of the past and moving on into my future, similar, on a much milder scale of course, to what I figure my death will be like some day. I realized that my storage unit was like being trapped in purgatory and I was going to have to sort through every last "box" before I would be able to move on from this life into the next. Death will be all the more difficult if I haven't practiced letting go and expertly honed my skill at non-attachment. All the unprocessed STUFF, of my life will be there waiting for me to sift and sort through. All my material possessions, the "to do" lists and important papers to organize, basket of clothes to mend, relationship issues to be tended to, lies to expose, truths to tell, all of it. I know very well what I need to take care of, what to put in its rightful place and what to let go of. I know. What I don't deal with now I will deal with when I die. I want to die peacefully so I know what I need to do. I know.

This was my own God's mini-storage experience and it was very, very intense. I got a preview to the coming attractions of my death. This is were all the STUFF of my life will coalesce when I die. I know it will be intense, like birth. But I think it doesn't have to be painful. The trailer (which was more like a virtual reality) was a showing of just one possible option. It woke me up and offered me some awareness about attachment, about taking care of business. It's my choice. I know. I'm going to do my work now, or later. It's going to get done. I know.

And my mom is teaching me lots about this right now. Lots. Thank you mom. It's a bittersweet pill but I acknowledge the gift.

Susan asks, "Is there anything is your life that needs to fall apart?" She says, "The mystical rabbis (including Jesus) teach that one has to be alone to contemplate and honor and enter Ein Sof, the infinite." She talks about being, "Alone and falling. Alone and shattered. When shattered...we can begin to mend, tikkun, hebrew for "repair". We can experience rebirth, begin to take in the infinite, through cracks that let in the light."

My love relationships, everyone of them are leaving me alone and falling, alone and shattered right now. My mother, Jerry, others...I'm just feeling a lot. I don't mean that things are bad or that my relationships are falling apart (Jerry is still my rock). Maybe they are just being rearranged, like furniture. I don't know how to use words to describe what I'm going through. I feel myself falling, shattering, and repairing all at once. It's intense for me right now. I have big cracks in me and I'm absorbing lots of healing light.

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole
And casting out my self, become a soul.
--Richard Wilbur