Grapes into Vintage Wine

Life has changed since I started this blog. Lots of internal changes. Feeling uneasy about what next. And I sit with myself and God, patiently. How many times have I said I’ll write today? Sitting with the keyboard, seeing what wants to flow out of my fingers? Energy.

I started reading “Breaking The Rules” last night, for the second time, made it a few pages further than the first time. Into the section on Communication Barriers, didn’t see it coming [the poem I posted by Charles C. Finn, “Please Hear What I’m Not Saying.”] Hit me like a load of bricks, my communication barrier.
That’s where I’ve been, wanting to speak and not finding the courage to step up to the keyboard. Well, there were other things going on. Silence is important AND an occasional word from the depths would have been possible, except for the fear. I don’t have it all together yet. I’m gestating or aging. Take your pick, same thing. Didn’t want to expose myself.
And then it’s past time to speak. More like a dam has to break or a mask has to come off. I don’t know - I do, the fear of revealing my true self. Now why would that be so hard? I don’t accept me as I am. I’ve valued others’ opinions more than my own. I’ve been afraid to take the risk and fail or maybe succeed. The mask becomes so big, I’m tired and haven’t put it down. It feels like death and yet I know that when I talk on the phone I can be so free in what I say. Well most of the time. But to put it in writing, to be in public, OMG, yet that’s what I want the freedom to do. To write about the experiences of this woman, living in this time and space. The inner process of the grapes turning into wine, I’m hoping it’s vintage, rather than drying up and turning into raisins.
I feel deeply. Only “they” told me not to show my feelings. I die a little every time I don’t feel and then hate myself. I’ve been sitting with God in the morning, you might call it meditation, it has a different quality for me. And in the far corner, I spotted a blob, like a discarded rag. I could hear it’s despair and knew it as mine. Please love me it wimpered.

Never before have I taken the time for this part of me. Oh I’ve known it was there and I’ve actively moved in it’s direction and then stopped, backed off and then eased forward a bit. I’ve run from it, distracted myself with books, talking, activities, socially acceptable addicitons. All the while ambivalent about whether to forget it or move in for the kill.

With a companion, for courage, last year, I got close enough to sit with it. A piece of shit or bludgeoned liver left to rot. I know its her-story. I thought, at last I can walk away from it, let the story go. And so I did, got rid of the picture and tossed out the story. Only the feeling was still there.

Gradually I’ve learned to love myself, to like me more than I like someone’s opinion of me. I’ve experienced feeling the depth of my despair and loved it and given it empathy. I feel relieved at writing this, taking off a mask

Don’t be fooled by me.
Don’t be fooled by the face I wear
For I wear a mask, a thousand masks,
Masks that I’m afraid to take off
And none of them is me.

Pretending is an art that’s second nature with me,
but don’t be fooled,
for God’s sake don’t be fooled.
I give you the impression that I’m secure,
that all is sunny and unruffled with me,
within as well as without,
that confidence is my name and coolness my game,
that the water’s calm and I’m in command
and that I need no one,
but don’t believe me.

My surface may be smooth but
my surface is my mask,
ever-varying and ever-concealing.
Beneath lies no complacence.
Beneath lies confusion, and fear, and aloneness.
But I hide this. I don’t want anybody to know it.
I panic at the thought of my weakness exposed.
That’s why I frantically create a mask to hide behind,
a nonchalant sophisticated facade,
to help me pretend,
to shield me from the glance that knows.

But such a glance is precisely my salvation,
my only hope, and I know it.
That is, if it is followed by acceptance,
If it is followed by love.
It’s the only thing that can liberate me from myself
from my own self-built prison walls
from the barriers that I so painstakingly erect.
It’s the only thing that will assure me
of what I can’t assure myself,
that I’m really worth something.
But I don’t tell you this. I don’t dare to. I’m afraid to.

I’m afraid you’ll think less of me,
that you’ll laugh, and your laugh would kill me.
I’m afraid that deep-down I’m nothing
and that you will see this and reject me.

So I play my game, my desperate, pretending game
With a façade of assurance without
And a trembling child within.
So begins the glittering but empty parade of Masks,
And my life becomes a front.
I tell you everything that’s really nothing,
and nothing of what’s everything,
of what’s crying within me.
So when I’m going through my routine
do not be fooled by what I’m saying.
Please listen carefully and try to hear what I’m not saying,
what I’d like to be able to say,
what for survival I need to say,
but what I can’t say.

I don’t like hiding.
I don’t like playing superficial phony games.
I want to stop playing them.
I want to be genuine and spontaneous and me
but you’ve got to help me.
You’ve got to hold out your hand
even when that’s the last thing I seem to want.
Only you can wipe away from my eyes
the blank stare of the breathing dead.
Only you can call me into aliveness.
Each time you’re kind, and gentle, and encouraging,
each time you try to understand because you really care,
my heart begins to grow wings –
very small wings,
but wings!

With your power to touch me into feeling
you can breathe life into me.
I want you to know that.
I want you to know how important you are to me,
how you can be a creator–an honest-to-God creator –
of the person that is me
if you choose to.
You alone can break down the wall behind which I tremble,
you alone can remove my mask,
you alone can release me from the shadow-world of panic,
from my lonely prison,
if you choose to.
Please choose to.

Do not pass me by.
It will not be easy for you.
A long conviction of worthlessness builds strong walls.
The nearer you approach me
the blinder I may strike back.
It’s irrational, but despite what the books may say about man
often I am irrational.
I fight against the very thing I cry out for.
But I am told that love is stronger than strong walls
and in this lies my hope.
Please try to beat down those walls
with firm hands but with gentle hands
for a child is very sensitive.

Who am I, you may wonder?
I am someone you know very well.
For I am every man you meet
and I am every woman you meet.

By Charles C. Finn

I have been silent this year. And I’ve come to appreciate silence. The stillness in which the universe speaks to me, new ideas emerge from the unconscious and the inner peace within myself.

Silent Night, it’s early Christmas Eve. I’m excitedly waiting to read the article on Silence in today’s Albuquerque Journal’s Boomer magazine. I’ve been anything but silent this past week, making changes to my website, www.OnPurposeCoaching.com, learning a little HTML and all that went with this revision.

I hope the Boomer article is good. In mid-November I put up some fliers, titled “Let’s Talk with Silence.” Just before Thanksgiving, I heard from a freelance writer saying she’s was writing an article on Silence, would I be willing to be interviewed. I said YES. Donna and I had a wonderful conversation about silence.

I’ve really been saying YES to Life since I began studying at the Seminary of Spiritual Peacemaking. It’s like getting out in a raft on a very fast river that takes you wherever it’s going. This fall someone suggested that I might let go of the branches along the river’s edge. Yeah I was doing that, trying to slow things down, maintain a little control even though my hands and arms were bloodied and bruised. Take a deep breath and let it happen.

So here I am, looking out into the darkness. What will the day bring?

Now I can be silent and think back over the year. I intended to write regularly in the blog. Life had other intentions: craziness, turning 60, being ordained, processing what that meant, huge lessons about forgiveness, gratitude, and new perspectives. Nothing that made it into the light of day on the blog. What will 2007 bring?

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays to you and please let me hear from you.

Blessings,
Rikki

Put a piece of blank computer page in front of me and I’m frozen. That’s where the days have gone. I make too much of this. No one has commented yet. So I can write for myself.

My head had all kinds of things to say a few minutes ago. Now it’s bashful and quiet.

Aged cheese. That’s what I want to say. Why do we value aged cheese and aged wine and then not value aged people? I want to age, mature, become wiser, grow up.

And I’m having a struggle with that. I don’t know whether it’s just the idea of change - no it’s the growing up. Taking responsibility for my life in a way that I haven’t. Giving up the idea that it is my life and letting LIFE live through me. Letting Spirit lead my life.

Can I do that?

It’s not a doing, it’s an allowing.

Does it really work?

I don’t know, I haven’t given it much of a try, not consciously. There have been times when life seemed to flow with ease and then I come along and mess it up.

There’s a conversation going on in my head. I’m not sure who is who. I know sometimes a part of me watches another part of me. That we have an observer and that when I shift my perspective, life can be very different.

Who am I? Where is the unique part of me that wants to express itself as it was born to do? Can I really write along and hope to see a glimpse of it/that part? I want to live on purpose and what is that purpose? Again who is that I? How do I get out of my way?

I’m tired of being perfect, of trying to be how I’m supposed to be, what my head tells me I “should” be and that’s where the days go. I become afraid of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, being myself/Self. And the days go by and I’m no closer to knowing who I am.

That voice again, well that’s not really true. You just don’t write about it. You keep it all to yourself.

I feel such a yearning to be known, to be seen, to be …. to be my self. To have the chutzpah to be just as I am, no hiding, no caring about what anyone else thinks, being free like I was as a kid.

Get that voice out of my head. Do kids have voices in their heads? A friend’s son talked about being on planets and really wild things like that.

Tears come to my eyes. The yearning is so strong. For what? To be free, to live as I want to, not throw out all society’s rules, free in some way that is me. Where did I loose me?

Trying to please others, to fit in, to hide my heart, to hide all the parts of me that I though weren’t acceptable. Now I want to bring them out of hiding and they are so scared. Will I like them, can I live with myself like that?

Can you? Are you alive? or keeping your aliveness hidden in a closet? buried under a rock since you were a kid? Will you come out and play? I want some real live people, oh yes, aged and I think we’re the better for it.

This thing in my head is running my life. Some would say “my” ego. Right now Rikki wants no identification with it.

This is very difficult to write without using “I.” Who is “I?” Tell me what you think about “I.”

The ego is judgmental. The ego that I have constructed is very judgmental. If this sounds puzzling to you, read Eckhart Tolle’s
book A New World which has the best description of the ego and what it is and isn’t.

Try writing without I or talking without saying I. It’s a challenge. For the time being, “eye” will represent the ego that lives in my head. Which raises the question, what is the part of me that is associated with my.

Let’s move on. In the 80s, eye remember learning to use “I” statements. Before that, eye spoke using you, when I really meant something about me. Remember talking like that? Not that eye don’t slip into it still.

My point is that after that bit of re-education, now there’s a new lesson in speaking accurately. How do I refer to the observer in me, who watches the ego? The EYE - how appropriate.

The observer has been watching more often. It’s aware of there being two parts, the ego “I” and itself. Now to switch my awareness to that of the observer more of the time.

So who is “I?” It’s judgmental and critical, continually tells eye/the observer it’s opinions about anyone and anything, things it’s absolutely right unless its trying to tell eye what an idiot it is. Ego is terrified most of the time. Like the little man mascarading as the wizard in The Wizard of Oz.

Please tell me about your experience with this part of you.

This wears me out being this observant, this conscious.

More later. Help me out here. How do you relate to your ego? How have you tamed it?

Tell me what you think about Tolle’s book.