Walled off or wide open

I am sitting at the Buffalo Airport, drinking coffee and eating tomato and mozzarella. Fox News blaring behind me, and I look around as people are faced to the television, faces glued, eyes staring with expressions aghast. All I hear is blah-blah-ing – rubbish, stuff and nonsense, hysterical, dramatic, superficial, stereotypical reporting about “terror,” “evil,” “we will not cower in fear.” It feels as if I’m living in a science fiction novel or movie, enveloped in darkness. Empty, ignorant, frightened, and paranoid facial expressions around cause me grief, distress, disgust. I am reminded about one of my most intense biases: ignorance.

Reflecting on the last two days, I am grateful for the past 17 years in Buffalo. I arrived at age 39 as an adolescent. Friendships were developed here. Life-long, heart-felt, caring and loving friendships. In my forties, I completed a college education, and with the skilled observations and guidance of my therapist, I learned to allow into my heart the support and kindness of many people who became my friends: Janna (who moves onto new adventures very soon), Cheryl, Bob and Anya, Alan and Judy, Jeff and Elizabeth, David and Carolyn, Susan, and Marion. My friends became my family, believing in, validating and accepting me for who I am. Thus, filled with their love and the knowledge that they will always be there for me wherever I may roam, I was able to grow into an adult, and move on – with Tom, to Philadelphia, a new life, and profession.

On the train from Baltimore to Philadelphia I complete Geneen Roth’s The Craggy Hole in my Heart and the Cat Who Fixed it: Over the edge and back with my dad, my cat, and me. I don’t know what attracted me about the book when I picked it up at Barnes & Noble in Buffalo the night after Mar-Mar died. There are some quotes from the book that I want to share with you. How strange. They have relevance and it feels as if she is speaking to me personally about my emotional and spiritual life.

Geneen and her mother:

I learned to sense her mood by the way her mouth looked, her eyes narrowed, the timing of her breaths and I adjusted myself accordingly. If I could figure out what I did wrong before she said it, I could do it right. If I made her unhappiness happen I could make it unhappen. If I chirped enough and didn’t get in her way maybe she would be glad to see me. I never stopped spilling myself like cake batter into a thousand different molds to make her smile, make her happy, make her love me, and I never stopped believing it was my fault that she didn’t.

Geneen about her father’s money when he is dying:

It isn’t the money I crave; money is only the transport, the red caboose on which my father’s love hitched a ride. I don’t need a million bucks … I need to know I am worth a million bucks. I need his love to be so grand it illuminates me, fills me with absolute, irrevocable permission to take up space, be alive.

Geneen on the difference between a spiritual teacher and a therapist:

A therapist sees the problem – you had a father who treated you like an object – and tries to help you heal the wound that came from it. A spiritual teacher sees the problem – a father who treated you like an object – and believes the wound is not in what he did, but in what you did to survive the situation. The wound is that you left yourself. The wound is that you forgot who you were/are in the desperate attempt to be loved … with a therapist you learn that you are loved. With a spiritual teacher you learn that you are love itself.

And ... finally, Geneen Roth writes:

It seems my heart has two positions: walled off or wide open

I arrive home.

Comments

[Winston]

Personally relevant? Yes! "The Craggy Hole..." does not sound like the kind of book I would normally pickup, much less buy and read. But this one...I just may have to get it. The snippets you offered tickled my emotions into a quiet frenzy.

[Tamar]

Winston, I had to stop myself from writing out most of the book as quotes!

I love this: "tickled my emotions into a quiet frenzy."

Yes indeed!