Through a Veil of Tears & Time

In a moment of remembered abandonment by my mother, tears flow and a piece of music called Elegy begins to play on Spotify.

The memory was of a time when I finally understood my mother was no longer going to live with me and my brother. She had made other choices and being my mother wasn’t one of them.

I’ve been grieving my mother for 34 years. She left emotionally when my father died. It took me a few years to realize she just couldn’t be there for us. This past September, the day before my birthday, she took her final leaving. Though I wish to know it as an ever becoming, my heart feels the leaving.

Listening to the music makes me sad. Anger still comes up, too. I just feel it all and as I do I start to feel for my mother. And maybe that’s the most painful part of all.

Elegy for My Mother

I peer through the veils of time as they blow in the wind.

Catch glimpses of…

You laughing as you push higher and higher. 

The swing set pumping against the earth.

You were a force.

Your heart started my heart.

You pushed me into this world.

And now I look back and see

you always moving.

Time took so much away from you.

It took you away from me.

And yet, I see you still,

smiling as I snapped a picture

while you hung the sheets on the line.

Sails in the wind, veils of time

parted for me

for you…

The Heart Will Have Its Day

Photo by suju on Pixabay

Lately the clouds around my heart have begun to clear. The anger I’ve been feeling regarding my mother and the past has started to subside. I feel more pain, but I also feel more love. There is a tender spot in my heart for her now. I know that we were/are kindred spirits. Her father died when she was 16 and it changed her whole life. I know some of her struggles as a parent stemmed from that experience.

Today is the day of the heart. Living life from the heart takes a willingness to feel the range of emotions we are capable of feeling. There is no holding on to any of them. I don’t want to hold onto anger any longer, but I will let myself feel it when it shows up.

Of course the heart knows no boundaries when we let it be and so the day of the heart must be every day. The true cauldron of healing is the heart itself. It’s where the alchemy takes place. Our lives are containers, too. But the magic of transformation happens within our inner cauldron, our heart.

Today I will take a moment to write my mother a Valentine. Love has already begun to transform our relationship. The past is being stirred into a richer story with every turn of emotion I let myself go through. The sky is clearing and the love that was always there warms my soul.

Rise Above Your Stories into the Song

Photo by Paul Morris on Unsplash

The pattern blocks the view. If I look beyond the patterns of behavior I learned as a child, things are so much clearer. Patterns of worry and of acting as though I’m not worthy become bars on the window of my perception. In the world behind bars, day is night and night is day if that’s the story I want to tell.

I see the pattern, the bars blocking my view and they aren’t real. At any moment I can become aware of them and not let them hold me in or hold me back. But sometimes it feels so real, as though I’m actually cut off from fresh air and light. Locked into a holding pattern with no way out, I circle round and round inside a story that conjures up fear.

Like right now, I’m worried. Every time my husband goes somewhere in the car, I’m back in the pattern of worry that began when my mother was gone every night working. One night she got into an accident just a few months after my father died. It’s when I began to expect the other shoe to drop. And it’s dropped a few times with my husband which has strengthened the pattern of worry.

The center of the pattern, my belief in something other than good, cannot hold as I distance myself from the narrow view, turn toward the horizon, and rise above the crumbled tower to see the larger pattern within a larger pattern still, shadows cast by our stories. Beyond the shadow dance is the song that vibrates our very being. When we close our eyes, we hear the truth and move into its flow.

Knowing this I tend not to stay in the holding pattern as long. I can feel peace now…if I choose to. Not quite there yet. I’m still learning to trust, to feel peace even if he’s not home yet. To relax even in the rubble is to know there is more to the story.

Today there are no ruins, just an old pattern to leave behind. He’s home now. And it was always okay.