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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 665097" data-attributes="member: 17461">Just after we moved South, I was afraid to drive there.  I beat myself up for that...but I still did not learn to drive, there.  I created a circle whose purpose was to hate myself for some shortcoming I could identify.Something concrete, to externalize and justify and name, something already happening inside me that I could not name.This is true, Copa.And cannot be changed.So is/was mine.  Except that she wasn't.  I had to work very hard to see that my mom was not as I had believed myself into believing she was.I discovered that I believed those beautiful things about my mom because what she was really doing, the things she was really saying, the person she really was, was unacceptable.  And the reason I did all that imagining of my mom as so much better than she was?Is because I was too scared to do anything else.But that may not be true for you, Copa.  My mom has done some of the most amazingly rotten things.  I excused every one of them.  Most?  I did not see.  I did not realize that whenever I was with my mother, I was in high anxiety, in emotional flashback past and present and fear for the now and for the future and I covered it all in a thick coat of denial and called it good.Because I needed my mother to be my mother.And that was the cost of it.So, I paid it.I think you are doing important work.  You are up and out when you need to be.  Whatever it represents Copa, it matters very much.I can understand wanting to move on, though.One can only experience so much, from one's bedroom.Perhaps there is no way out, Copa.  The truth of it is just as we've said.  They did love us.  I don't know how it could be that they loved us and did what they did, either.I think we will never know.But we do know they did love us.That matters.Pema Chodron writes about this state of affairs.  She names it true enlightenment.  Truth without filters.The trick is accepting it.And that takes real courage, because we are creatures who seek meaning.  We make patterns out of everything and name the meaning in the thing we've created.  It is a hard thing to understand that we are the meaning.We are the observer-effect.  (I got that from Frank Herbert.)That is what we do.  Observe.Those very fortunate, blessed things; the animals we love, those are our blessings too.  I read somewhere once that like all of us here, animals are on their "Missions of Love".That is why they are made so they do not speak in words.It is only visible once we see it.So, we become more silent, too.  Words can be distracting things, but they are all we have.***So, now?  After having such deep discussions on purpose and form...I will be out in the yard, chipping cement and replacing drain tile and digging trenches.Huh.I am practicing that Buddhist practice:  When chopping onions, just chop onions.So, I am enjoying these messy, dirty, impossible things that I don't really know how to do.  We chipped away at a piece of cement sidewalk until it is just heavy enough that we can lift it so we can insert a drain tile.  Beneath the cement, when we finally got it tilted up and out of the way?Is a drain tile.Under standing water.Why is it not draining, then?We don't know.That is where I will be, this afternoon.Practicing Buddhist landscaping.:O)Cedar</blockquote>

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