When I was in mid-Oregon recently, in the high desert, I discovered some of the plants there have such deep roots. When it goes over a hundred days without rain and is above 100F degrees, that makes sense. I was weeding an area there at my daughter’s family’s home when I decided to take out this ragweed type plant, that was covering a gorgeous volcanic rock. I tried to pull it up with my hands. Yeah, right! So I went and got a shovel. I dug and dug, all around it. Five minutes later, I got it out. The root turned out to be over a foot and a half long, very thick at the top.
Then I noticed all the sagebrush blown everywhere. No way was the wind going to get this ragweed up either.
How far? A few miles? Another state? Another continent?
Fascinating as we review our choices, isn’t it? When and where were we rooted deeply, then again, when and where were our roots slim and ready for transplanting? For me, there were times I did not understand what was going on around me, why people were doing what they were doing. Which way the winds were blowing.
Right now, I am firmly rooted, yet not deeply. Where will I be in five years? I don’t know. Yet I don’t lose any sleep over it. Learning to sense when my roots are deeply implanted and when they are not has helped me a great deal in the last few years. When to let go and move on has taken me a long time to understand and then give myself permission to do so.
My, oh my.
Thanks for reading. Merci beaucoup. Let me know about your roots~
Yup, my book, When I Was a Rock Star is on Amazon in paperback and ebook.
Redemption. We’ve talked about this before, yeah? You and I, you and your spouse, with your daughter, your boss, your neighbor, your therapist, your lover, probably even your cat.
What is redemption anyway? The act of saving or being saved from error or evil; the action of regaining possession of something in exchange for payment; clearing a debt; release from the consequences of an offense for the person who committed the offense.
Okay then, what is forgiveness? A conscious decision to release feelings of resentment toward a person(s) who has harmed you.
Interesting. In the program, we used to talk about forgiveness is not forgetting, it is not condoning, it is releasing. Lewis Smedes noted “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”
Really?
Last year, in one of my sojourns to work with the kids in Juvenile Justice, I told the Haitian story from Diane Wolkstein, “One My Darling, Come to Mama.” It goes like this: A mother has four daughters, she loves and dotes on the first three and despises the fourth daughter, Philamandre. Every night when the mother comes homes, she sings as she is coming up to the house door, “One my darling, come to Mama. Two my darling, come to Mama. Three my darling, come to Mama. Stay Philamandre, stay. Stay where you are.”
The three daughters would let their mother in, they’d eat dinner together. If there were any scraps left from dinner, then Philamandre could eat.
One day, the three daughters were kidnapped. When the mother came home, she sang. No answer. She sang again. No answer. She opened the door, saw the daughters were gone, and ran away like a madwoman, singing the song frantically. Philamandre realized she was on her own, went to the town and found work. Eventually she came to work in the palace of the king, and over time, the prince and she fell in love and were married.
Years passed. One day, she heard the maids talking about a crazy woman singing a song out in the street. Philamandre, now queen, went to the window to look out. Yes, it was her mother. Her clothes were rags, her hair was wild – filled with sticks and bird droppings.
The queen went outside, brought the her mother in. She bathed her, gave her new clothes, and trimmed her hair. “Mama, the others are no more. I am here. You did not take care of me. Yet now I will take care of you.”
I said nothing more for a minute or so, looked at the five young women sitting in a semi-circle in front of me, dressed in the standard-issue orange trousers and blocky shirt, and then said, “I’ve never understood that story. How someone mistreated could then turn around and take care of the one who mistreated them?”
One of the girls looked me in the eye, “Maybe she didn’t want to be like her mother.”
I’m three times as old as this seventeen year old, yet she has wisdom like that?
Honeysuckle in the rain 5-31-2020
I have often pondered how abused children, when adults, re-establish relationships with their abusive parents and often take care of them, specifically with a couple people I know.
I have been thrown under the bus, as they say, for things I did not do yet got the consequences as the person who did the action would not take responsibility for it. I have been lied to, stolen from, betrayed, mislead, as we all have, sometimes by my own family members. I was bitter. It wasn’t right, where was justice? I was resentful.
In looking up Lewis Smedes, he was a professor of theology and ethics, and author of fifteen books. “Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.”
That young woman who responded to me may have been in custody for an illegal act, yet she had certainly learned a few things along the way. Indeed, there is hope for the future.
Years ago, one of my siblings did some egregious things. I believe I have forgiven them yet want no contact with them. One of my cousins chided me for that, saying, “But they’re family.” In my head, I am going, “Yeah, but…” Recently I came across another wisdom of Professor Smedes:
“You can forgive someone almost anything. But you cannot tolerate everything… We don’t have to tolerate what people do just because we forgive them for doing it. Forgiving heals us personally. To tolerate everything only hurts us all in the long run.”
Oh my.
So tolerate is now in the mix. Forgive. Permission to not tolerate. Redemption. Significant issues for me in my life, as many changes are being presented. Some of them being who am I now in my life, who do I strive to be, who do I wish to be with? How do I do this? Where shall I live? How do I pursue what gives me meaning?
“Hi! Hi! Hi!” She waved her small hand between each greeting. Her eyes captured my attention. Bright, alive, mischievous – insistent that I see her.
I smiled and waved back at her, “Hi.”
About three years old, with short dark brown curly hair and vivacious brown eyes, the little girl wore a flowered dress with a red background. Sitting kitty-corner across the subway aisle from me, she perched on her seat, while her mother sat on the seat behind her. The subway rattled and rocked us as it rushed to McGill Station, the next stop on Montreal’s green line.
She pushed off the plastic seat and hopped the three steps over to me. As she reached up toward my oval-shaped earring dangling from my left ear, I was instantly wary – I leaned slightly back. In my moment’s hesitation, she gently rubbed her thumb and forefinger on the length of the earring, smiling slightly as her bright eyes watched me, and then fingered the right earring without the slightest tug on my ear.
Her mother called her back to sit down. We waved at each other the rest of the four minute ride. The panel doors split open, she turned and waved, “Bye.”
I waved back, “Bye.” “Bye!”
I smiled, perhaps as big as her smile, “Bye!”
“Bye!”
“Bye!” Holding her small hand, her mother and she merged into the melee of people going up the tall flight of stone stairs, leading to the underground plaza to either change trains or head up the two-story escalator to the street.
Streetlight in front of Notre-Dame Basilica Montreal. Photo by MDessein
I turned the corner, found the correct direction to Boulevard Maisonneuve, and who is in right in front of me as I step onto the escalator? The bright-eyed little girl. She could have covered the rest of her face, and I would have known from the sparkle in her eyes of her joie de vivre. She recognized me immediately, “Hi! Hi! Hi!” and put her hand up.
My heart warmed instantly. I put my hand up to give her a ‘high five.’
She opened her fingers, put them between my fingers, and closed her hand around mine, looking me in the eye, as if she knew a happy secret.
She held my hand the entire way up the escalator, we looked at each other; she seemed to know clearly what was going on, while I held her hand in wonder.
This child’s intuition, spontaneous action, seemed so clear and sincere. No hesitation, simply clarity in action. Her small hand warm in mine, my eyes moist and my heart entranced with her being.
Countless times in decades past, I missed these opportunities of genuine engagement. I smiled and kept going. I would have said “Hi,” in return and gone back to reading or whatever important, adult thing I was doing at the time.
I now realize those wondrous moments of true connection, spontaneous positive interaction are more important, more life-giving than anything I might have been reading, planning for, or worrying about.
In submitting a grant application recently, the grant requirements helped me articulate a vital nugget my intuition has known for years: I write to help people see their humanity in others, to see their own stories in the stories of others. Our human connection.
Oh! I write to find my own humanity and connection to others. I tell folktales and ancient legends to connect with humanity, decades and centuries past. We are all stories.
“The Black Prince,” a millenia-old Egyptian folktale has followed me for years trying to teach me that. On some level, I knew it as I told the tale when teaching life skills, including telling it to my son when he was searching for himself. Then the Black Prince showed up again in my dreams and my writing a couple years ago until I completed the CD telling his story. The story of his search, my own unaware search, and the search of countless other people.
Then this little girl, filled with joy and trust, held my hand the entire way up the escalator. And I held hers.
Sheep Rock, OR. photo by Mary Dessein Most people would throw it away.
I take the seemingly empty toothpaste tube, cut it open, and get every bit of toothpaste out of it, easily five more uses before I throw the absolutely 100% empty tube away. The stick of deodorant is seemingly empty, the container is flat across the top of the stick. No… I scoop out the remainder inside the stick, clearly a couple weeks more deodorant still in there.
And the lipstick tube? Why it has a good 1/8th of an inch of usable lipstick in the bottom. I thought these were normal practices, until it was brought to my attention that not everyone does these things.
We won’t go into Christmas bags and bows…
I was born a good twenty-five years after the Great Depression. Yet my parents were raised during those years.
It appears my, shall we say intense, frugality was carried forward from them.
Another belief that I have struggled with since I was a teen is ‘men are authority figures and are to be obeyed.’ The struggle was that the belief was firmly implanted, yet my intuition resisted all the time. Looking back as I recognize this falsehood, I am lucky to be alive as being obedient included backseats of cars, saying yes when all my insides shouted No, getting in a VW bus and driving to Yugoslavia with a stranger from the Venice train station, not asking questions when dicey situations were presented, allowing abusive behavior to go on yet saying nothing.
Here’s one for you: food is solace and comfort for whatever troubles you. Oh my. I have dealt with overweight since I was young. Something that tastes good will make the problem and uneasy feelings go away, right? Related to that, here is another recipe for life-long eating issues: “There are starving children in China – you must eat every morsel on your plate whether you are hungry or not.” These over-rode a child’s natural response. Kids are truth-tellers and instinct-followers: they make candid reports (“You smell funny. You have a big nose. I don’t like that.”) to avoiding people and situations they are uneasy about.
So who’s stories were those? Old stories happening through me? If they are not my stories, what are mine? I have a right to my own stories don’t I?
In thinking about my parents this morning – my mom, Josette, gone three and a half years and my dad, Kenney, gone thirty-three and a half, I wonder what they would tell me now that they’ve had a long distance view.
Then a mental shazaam followed: what would my sister tell me? She died fourteen and a half years ago at the age of forty-nine and four days of “undetermined causes” as there was no clear explanation for why her heart stopped. What would Rosie tell me? Was she living her own story, or someone else’s? I have often wondered since that difficult time, was she looking for her own path, what was her dream? She had drifted along, trying various occupations such as working on fishing boats in Alaska, photography, office work, and was in optician school when she died. Virtuoso pianist in Montreal playing Bohemian Rhapsody
What I am learning about my own story and my own path is that I create it, albeit standing on the shoulders of those before me. I watch the magnificent thousands of geese arching above me and the hummingbirds flitting about my porch at the feeders even as it is snowing. True to one’s self, true to one’s heart really is survival. The ‘shoulds’ are falling away as I recognize them. Byron Katie’s work is reflected here on being with what is.
Being true to myself and true to my heart’s calling is my survival and the path to writing my own story.
Hundreds and hundreds of geese flying overhead in chevrons, lines, and groups which were morphing into other formations, lines, and multi-layered chevrons as I watched. Speechless, I saw the seemingly endless intersections of birds squawking as they flew. The cascade of thousands of honks sounded like a multitudinous chorus of squeaks so far above me. Geese Photo by Mary Dessein
I had initially looked up upon hearing the first few and thought, “It’s early December, late for geese,” as I stood there in the parking lot on that late afternoon, getting near dusk. The black bodies of the geese in flight clearly visible against the soft grey sky. Then I saw the zillions of birds in the distance, wave after wave of them, coming from different but analogous directions to swoop together, then diverge into another chevron while still others melded into the massive movement.
Fluctuating, reforming constantly.
Captivated, I watched for at least fifteen minutes until just a few strands of birds straggled behind the swarm.
The glory of being in the right place at the right time. And taking the time.
A couple weeks later, between Snohomish and Monroe, were again thousands of geese. This time, white snow geese. They were flying, swirling like a magnificent tornado, their wings catching the pink-tinged, golden light of the late afternoon sun. The distant sound of their honking a gentle whisper that I held my breath in order to hear.
Looking for their evening settlement, their safe place. Yes, I know that search. I bet you do, too.
In the last few days of sub-zero weather, I’ve watched the calypte anna hummingbirds zip around the feeder on my porch, then land on the clothes-line, or on the near naked fuchsia branches in the hanging basket. The calypte anna is the species of hummingbird that does not migrate. It seems 12 degree weather does not slow them down any. Interestingly, hummingbirds cannot walk. Their tiny feet are made for perching.
Imagine that: flying at near lightening speed, shining like a jewel in the sun, and not being able to walk. Yet not knowing any of those things, as the hummingbirds are simply being who they are.
Being in the right place at the right time and simply being who you truly are.
My search goes on.
