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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 659221" data-attributes="member: 17461">Okay.  So here is a potential insight.  Where we hold heartspace for our mothers (my mother/myself) and for our sisters (my sister/myself), for our fathers and brothers and grandmothers and grand children ~ for everyone in our lives, those parts are not really them.  They are parts of us where we keep our remembrances of them.  Mostly, for most of us, we keep our remembrances unsullied. We remember the child in the sunshine, absolutely delighted as we come into the room.  We remember our own response, and how it took us by surprise.  We do not keep in the forefront of our remembrances the time we came in and the room smelled awful and the baby had painted the walls of her crib with her own excrement.  That memory is in there too, where our children as babies remembrances live, but it isn't an important one.  It does not hold a candle to the sunshine remembrance.  In doing what we are doing with our moms and our sisters and brothers, in undoing what we stubbornly insisted was who they were really, however rotten what they actually did was ~ we are letting go of the very things that enabled us to make sense of our childhoods, and of our people, somehow.  In stepping out of denial regarding our FOO, we are destroying, challenging, cheapening the very remembrances that made it possible for us to hold faith with our deep and unshakable certainty that they didn't know or that they didn't intend.  It is such a hard thing, to let that go.They did know.They knew what they were doing, they knew how they were thinking.  They had the same option to choose to cherish, to keep their remembrances of us unsullied, but they didn't choose that.  In their secret hearts, in their heartspaces, they really do not think well of us.  They despise us.I am so surprised, and so hurt.  I don't really believe it could be so.And they told us and told us that they found us foolish and so easily disregarded a thousand times over, and we refused to hear it.  We think everyone is like us.  Everyone is not like us.  They do not think like us.  They are not hurt by the same things we are.  They do not see the same things we see.  Or if they do, they disregard the very things we find to be the only valuable thing.That is the sense of bereft; that is the desert I walk through, everything dessicated and blown away.I don't know what to do about this part, either.  I think it is a fairly accurate representation of what is happening as we rebalance our psyches, though.It isn't that I don't want to be in the desert.  It is that I am so sad to be there where I need to be, where I have intentionally placed myself, that I do not see the miracle of tears as relevant.  It is what it is.We don't get to cheat.This is day two or three.  It will be another day or two, at least.CedarWell, how does this sound.  What I am doing, as I examine the truth in the changed parameters of what I have always believed, is sort of taking a walking tour of my feelings.  Each of the tumbleweeds, the horror, that shocked feeling response to each of the wizened and dessicated bodies, all of the places where water once ran and then, stopped, the sky that high, dry, cloudless blue that means no rain ~ those things were things I believed alilve; things I believed real life into.  And now I don't.  And without my belief in them, they mean nothing.  In a way, this is creating space for whatever it is that comes next.  I don't exactly feel foolish for having chosen to believe...but I hear my mother's voice, I see the sneering certainty:  Cedar is the romantic of the family.  Just not right in the head or the heart; a thinking problem and this has always been so.  That is just how Cedar is.Just don't think, Cedar.Don't you dare.So I'm having a look at that, too.My mother/myself.Where is my sister.  Where is my sister/myself.  Emotionally united with the mother, the sense of contempt rolling off both so intensely it would be easy to miss that smaller sister that is my sister/myself beneath the glittering glare of my mother/myself striding through the desert.I am still afraid of my mother/myself.She is so powerful, still.Both of them visiting my true feelings about what has happened, about what I insist on knowing.  That same feeling of contempt; a desperate sense of if Cedar does not have it then it will be mine and Cedar will mean nothing.Even from my mother/myself.Something too about that tapestry I am always posting about.  The colors are very vibrantly alive.***There is the scent of rain in the wind.  Far in the distance, roiling thunderheads.But for now, I am in a desert that stretches to infinity.</blockquote>

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