Late Night Rage
Another Collage Journal Carousel entry. This one's theme is, "Imperfect".
Today felt hard and then i found out a dear friend has a meningioma, a kind of brain tumor. As we were trying to talk folks showed up to fix my picky issue with the cement repair in the basement.
My professional org still hasn't commented on the response to a sexual misconduct incident. Three weeks after telling me it was coming very soon and convincing me to come to the online conference.
Getting CK's lumbar puncture scheduled has been ridiculously hard and involved gaslighting.
I'm not surprised there's late night rage today.
Trigger warnings for sexual abuse, child abuse and neglect.
⚠️⛔️⚠️
Hello, rage about my Mother. I thought you were biweekly in response to therapy, bit as my therapist was sick this week it appears you're just biweekly because there's still so many prickly opportunities for me to recall the ways in which you harmed more.
Rage because it still continues to unfold. Rage that she refused to believe I was sexually assaulted as a child until she casually asked me about it while I watched her eat food at a Wendy's. Rage that she knew all along and instead told child me that my discomfort and UTI was due to poor hygiene.
Rage about the man, my Mother's shady boyfriend, who repeatedly assaulted me at age 6, into age 7. Rage at the hazy glimpses of passion and terror that imply so much more than the horror I already remember.
Rage at all the other sexual misconduct from men, from mere lewdness to a child, to outright assault, physically and emotionally.
Hair curling rage. If she weren't already dead I'd wish for her death.
It's an ugly feeling. I don't like my rage, I'm frightened by anger. However, I'm learning to love it, to acknowledge it as a true, reasonable response from my spirit to the terror I've survived.
Collage Journal Carousel
It's been a while.
Stuff for even harder than our beloved elder dog dying.
Canada placing had reached the point where she completing a worksheet that includes the past ten years of employers. I got a first, ballpark quote from a moving company today. Even with taking barely any furniture is going to cost as much as our sewer repair.
CK needs a lumbar puncture to run a pile of tests on her cerebral spinal fluid. Trying to schedule it has been ridiculously frustrating.
Radiologists are the doctors who don't actually want to talk to you.
All that aside, I've been facilitating a cool art journal swap! Each person handmade a journal that will fit into a catalog envelope. Inside, on the "title page" you put the theme for your journal. Then you sent it off to another participant. When a journal arrives you check the theme, maybe get a few more details from the sign up form, create a full page entry, then send it off to the next person.
I'm going to post one a day, until I catch up.
The first one, Peace & Love journal appears last month.
The second one, picture with this post, is for a "Whimsy Journal"
Comics as Diary
Attended an awesome session online today about using comics as a form of personal diary. Mari Naomi, an artist I've come to appreciate, shared how she uses this approach.
She draws one each morning, taking no more than 10 minutes. She uses something from the previous day as inspiration. She showed us a bunch of things she's drawn and then we all drew together!
Nearly 300 people of all descriptions drawing from the same prompt together! Definitely a win for pandemic technology hacks.
The Believer magazine has been facilitating these, they call it Friday Night Comics. Today's experience is likely to turn me into a subscriber.
Art Break
Today instead of my usual yoga my art group met. Online, as we have been since April.
I played on an idea someone suggested making Day of the Dead altars. As a white woman with no real roots in Mexico I felt uncomfortable with this and pointed out that I felt it was problematic.
While this gave food for thought, it took away a project! So I offered something about the different ways ancestor veneration is part of so many cultures, compared to the USA, which is very death averse. I then talked about personal ancestors, plus the side note that you don't have to honor people who were terrible. Then a meditation, so still some yoga.
People created powerful pieces! I am still moved by it.
I made a comic of myself teaching today.
Highs and Lows
I held a Yoga in Chairs today and 14 people came! The online teaching thing is working! This filled me with energy and gratitude!
By bedtime the weight of the rising infection and death rates rising, set against the backdrop of politicians demanding that we get back to work, siphoned off the morning’s energy and took more on top of that.
I felt exhausted all afternoon. Lunch depleted me. I made the effort to make up a slightly different version of tofu salad and didn’t enjoy it. Food felt hard today.
A student got hit by a fraud attack, falling for a PayPal-themed social engineering after paying me online. People can be so terrible.
I finished making a card for a kid who just had her birthday Monday and was really bummed put that everything got cancelled. That helped as I felt increasingly sad all day, I’ll mail it tomorrow, maybe along with another handmade postcard.
Marking Art Gratitude
Getting my studio space useable again has meant I can create again. At an artist's meet-up I help organize someone presented a project of a collaged light plate switch cover. Since I'd got my desk available, and have continued to improve the space, I was able to finish the project I began the very next day and install it in our practice room.
While I've not been writing as much, I've been creating pages in an artist's journal I began at the beginning of the year. My depression hits hard around the holidays, with the death anniversaries of all my parents falling within a few weeks of each other. My Mother's death anniversary is the day after Thanksgiving this year and this is the first year I'm coming into them without my studies to distract me. Having the ability to go make something artistic is really a helpful tool for me, especially when my energy feels too low to write.
Having weekly art therapy appointments this past month has helped me see how having this outlet is a big benefit to my healing. Art, as my friend SJ likes to say, helps us express what words cannot. Despite my skill as a writer, there are times when words fail me and the more I learn to turn to creating art during those times, the better I'll be.
Studio Gratitude
I'm grateful for having space for making art. I have a big desk with decent lighting. My desk sits near a sink for clean up and cabinets for storing canvases, old magazines, boxes, and other media I use in my art. It hasn't been really usable space for a while, but the past week I've started to really make it a workspace again.
While I was doing my training and internship in Integrated Movement Therapy I really stepped out of making art. I wasn't doing much at all, having stopped creating when we were dealing with the last years of my Mother's life. Time to create art seems to be the first thing I cut as being a waste of time, not really "practice".
I know this isn't really true, the research demonstrates that making and creating is what helps make us feel whole. Still, it is the activity that seems to be least important. I'm trying to change that. Art not only feeds my creative side, but it is a way to express the things that are too difficult, too elusive to put into words.
Seeing an art therapist keeps things really in mind and is giving me some motivation. I do think I want to create a body of work to show. As part of my clean up and reorganizing I've made it so I can see finished works from my desk, to help keep me inspired and focused.
Calm Abiding
This past Saturday would have been my Mother's 73rd birthday. It made the week feel a little fragmented, but I was upfront with people about it. With CK's encouragement I made it off to the Collage Guild meet-up and worked on a few pieces, including this one that veered off the month's theme project quite a bit and is still in process.
In the evening I went over and saw a friend I've not seen in many years. She's moved many times, in pursuit of her studies in medicine, and because I have a hard time getting out. She had a clothing swap Saturday evening and I arrived with a backup plan to ditch my clothes and leave, but ended up staying 2 hours, enjoying the company, and scored some great new-to-me clothing.
Perhaps it is the returning light and the cherry blossoms, but I feel as though I weathered the "bump" of that birthday milestone without too much difficulty. Yes, some extra encouragement was asked for and given.
It is becoming easier to think of her as really dead. That's been part of the pain caused by how she planned her death, and my exclusion from it, just this surreal sense of not believing she's really gone and I'll never see her again. It is getting easier to hold onto this reality.
Two boxes of her personal property were sent to me by way my Mother's old pastor. I was teaching and asked him to leave them on the porch since I wouldn't be away long, also saving CK from the need to interact with him. I found myself somewhat baffled as to why I was sent many of the things the people going through her belongings chose to send me.
In the meantime, I'm waiting for my right shoulder to heal so I can start digging up the soggy earth of our yard. The plan is to move several rose bushes, at our house and some from a friend's house, from shady locations to the front edge of our front yard. I have a goal of roses, dahlias, and lots of differing spring bulbs forming a natural border between the road and our yard. For the moment I need the rain to let up a little, buy a lawn destruction tool, and get my shoulder improved so I can use it. There's also a plan for a blueberry bed for the 3 plants we currently have in big nursery pots.
All that and I'm four weeks into a training program for new business entrepreneurs. I was accepted to a pilot program that provides training and other resources to people who are starting a new business after being unable to return back to their old job. Leaving my old company ill and unable to sleep, and told by my doctor to not go back, ever, qualifies me for a lot of support.
I'm writing a business plan, working on a marking plan, defining my services and customer personae. It is a whole new world to me, I feel like my to-do list for Samatha Yoga grows every week I'm taking this workshop! It is pretty exciting to be exploring actual business planning protocols to my ideas around teaching yoga.
Those weeks stretching long into the cold, darkness of winter, after I found out my Mother had died, just seem to dull the light inside of me. I don't feel fully restored, still yet healing and grieving in bigger ways too, but I feel more of a sense of equilibrium instead of the flat apathy the news brought.
Just recently the dogs seem to have gone beyond just mild friendship, which is to say that Dora not trying to angrily bite Bertie's face off. Yes, she still bites his lips, only now she does it while wagging her tail with excitement and joy while she does it. We've also seen snuggling happening.
Taking Flight
In February I registered my business, Samatha Yoga, which I hope to begin growing this year as a mobile yoga teaching practice, bringing classes to offices, conferences, wedding showers, and more. I've been communicating with one local company already after having counter-pitched an inquiry from a technical recruiter; saying that I wasn't in the tech business anymore but wouldn't they love to improve the Health and Wellness options at the office by having me come teach yoga.
I've also been teaching two mornings a week at a gym in Happy Valley. It really is growing the ideas I come up with without any props aside from the yoga mats the students bring themselves. However, if my resolve to eventually only teach classes or private sessions were props are abundantly available wasn't already made, this experience only strengthens it!
I also spent part of a week attending workshops at Art and Soul last month, which was exhausting and exhilarating in equal measures. I took two workshops, which I'll be writing about soon on the ZenZada blog soon.
I've recently done some immersions where yoga, meditation, and/or energy work and journaling is used an approach to work with anxiety. These aren't teacher training, but as a teacher I'm finding them very valuable as I gather information to make the best decision for my training to become a certified yoga therapist.
At the beginning of March I sold my old house in North Portland. The sales cleared all the debt associated with the property as well as some remaining personal debt, including the very last of my student loans. As embark upon this exciting new experience of running my own business it is an enormous relief to have the liability of the house hanging over me now that I no longer receive a lucrative tech income.
So in many ways my new life seems to be taking off! Which is as exciting as it is tiring.
Fly away, Scrub Jay!
This month also sees my unemployment benefits expire. I am feeling anxious and guilty about this date sneaking up on me. I have been refining, tweaking, researching, refining, etc. on my application to the Self Employment Assistance Program that I'm afraid I may have missed the deadline to apply. There's another federal program I should still be able to apply for, I hope.
I'm feeling mad and frustrated with myself and the days where I feel like I've been zapped by a Cone of Demotivation (+4) that leaves it hard to even keep up with things around the house, make art, improve my business materials. I've been hit by another round of headaches; seems muscle tension is impeding the circulation of lymphatic fluid and blood in my head and neck.
In my meditation practice I've returned back to something my old Zen teacher used to say, "I am whole, complete, lacking nothing." It helps keep firm the reframing of seeing myself as wounded, not broken. I'm working on a bright book of affirmations for the year and am including this mantra, of sorts in it.
In February I also played around with using one of the heavy paper cranes I'd made for our first wedding as the basis for collage, becoming a kind of paper sculpture. One of these large cranes had been delivered to my Mother in the hospital on that day. When packing up her things for the last time I chose to keep it. However, seeing it was rather bittersweet for me. I added more layers of paint to it, a quote from Mary Oliver on one side, "Leave some room in your heart for the unimaginable." and that mantra on the other. In February it was sent, along with 60 beautiful cranes folded from chiyogami paper and two hats, knitted by my friend LG, with a paper crane pattern worked into it. It made it in time to Lansing, Michigan, to bring one of the last smiles smiled by my second college friend to lose their battle with cancer. Yesterday, very early, she peacefully passed onto the next journey.
Spring starts as rather a mixed bag. Sadness, excitement, joy, anxiety (always), hope.
Cranes4CJ Paper Sculpture
August Art Break
This week CK is in London. My big goal is to try and do some good photography of the artwork I began working on this past winter. I feel like it has been a whole new expression for me. At times it is almost as if the lack of creative output during those last 18 months or so dealing with my Mother and my job just condensed into a more complete expression if that makes any sense.
Last month at the World Domination Summit (WDS) I ended up sharing my newer work with quite a few people. I was pretty blown away by the positive response and the interest to purchase pieces. I'm going to be exploring the wonders of setting up an Etsy shop in the next week or two and start selling artwork. I've also started to post about art projects, technique, etc. on our new blog, ZenZada; there's even a post up about a co-creative project I've started because of a workshop I took during WDS. I'll continue to explore what art means to me, and how it is part of my healing, here.
Last week had a tough therapy session. After nearly a month of nightmares with a pretty consistent thing, we looked into what was coming up around it. I was disappointed that it is one of those Big Trauma incidents from when I was 9, which was a year really filled with upset all around, but one thing in particular really haunts me. I always hope each time it comes up that I'll be done with it and moving on. Apparently not yet. My therapist says she thinks I need to work on forgiving my 9-year-old self.
All that and CK in London, plus my planned Saturday beach trip has been canceled due to illness. Just enough to make me sigh and feel a little blue. On the positive side, the creatures are happy to spend quiet time with me, I'm seeing a concert tomorrow evening, and this summer has had us listening to frogs singing, which suits our treehouse-feeling home perfectly.
Balloons - Portland, Oregon - July 13, 2014
Summer Haiku
Frog song in the night.
Wind whispering the bamboo.
Waxing moon arises.