Blog (36)
“Sometimes in the darkness of my own shadow I know that I could not see at all were it not for this old injury of love andgrief, this little flickering lamp that I watched beside for allthese years”. (Wendell Berry)
My conscious journey began with the knowledge that I had not learned how to mother in my family of origin. Yet here I was with two extraordinary beings in my care. I felt I had been entrusted with a sacred task about which I knew little and which I had been performing already for some years without giving it much thought beyond the day to day of getting everyone fed and rested and cleaned and all the rest of those consuming early life tasks. Everything else has sprung from that realisation because once I knew that, I had to try and do something about it. And from this came a consuming interest in families and what makes us tick.
I am in an abandoned village and suddenly I round a corner and find a large beautiful brick building with designs on the outside. I am delighted and amazed at this unexpected find.
1 in 3 to 1 in 5 of you will know what depression is (the figures vary) because you live with it, or you have experienced it and found a way through and out the other side. If you have never been depressed then, trust me, you cannot know what it is like. And no, the sufferer cannot just snap out of it.
Someone spoke to me recently of the ‘dark’ emotions: anger, envy, hatred, jealousy. These are the feelings we don’t think we should feel and so we have learned to try and suppress them. We often do not recognise them, let alone dare to name them to ourselves. The one I notice most people avoiding is anger, maybe because they associate the feeling with violence. But anger is just a feeling. And feelings never hurt anyone. Whereas what we do as a response to our feelings may indeed be hurtful or damaging. And not necessarily to others, but to ourselves.
A wise woman once told me that I could have the freedom of responsibility. It took me a while to get my head around that phrase. I didn’t like the sound of it. More stuff for me to do? In what seemed an already overly responsible life? I could not relate the two terms for a while. Freedom and responsibility…how do they go together? But eventually I realised that she was talking about magic: the magic that I secretly relied on, in my deep self, where my knots of anxiety reside. The secret something that would intervene when all else failed. The benign energy that would say: OK, she’s had enough. Give her a break now.
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