Daily Archives: November 5, 2023

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Ride Forth

I thought I had posted this, but I do not find it.

Ride Forth

My grandmother
Packed all her troubles in her saddlebags
And rode forth singing

My mother
Packed all her troubles in her saddlebags
And rode forth singing

My father
Was the only one
Who ever saw the contents
He tried to drown them

My mother was loved
For her charm

I ride forth
Sometimes I sing
Sometimes I weep

My saddlebags are empty

Prayer flags flutter
Slowly shred
In the wind

I write my troubles
And my joys
On cloth
And thank the Beloved
For each

My horse is white
When I sing
Black
When I cry
A rainbow of colors
In between
The whole spectrum
That the Beloved allows

After I emptied
My saddlebags
I tried to leave them
But the people I meet
Most, most, most
Are frightened

A naked woman
On a naked horse

I had to leave my village
When I learned to ride her
Made friends with her
Beloved
My village does not allow tears
When she turns black
Their saddlebags squirm and fight
The people try to throw them on my horse

In other places
The horses are all black
The white aspect of the Beloved
Frightens them
And they attack

I carry saddlebags
And Beloved is a gentle dapple gray
And the illusion of clothes surrounds me
When we meet new people
Until we know
It is safe to shine
Bright
And dark

I hope that others ride with the Beloved
In full rainbow

I ride forth
Sometimes I sing
Sometimes I weep

Even the color lonely
Is a part of the Beloved

________________________

The photograph is of a watercolor of my sister, Christine Robbins Ottaway, by my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway.

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Welcome dark

This morning I listened to this song and album.

https://thewinetree.bandcamp.com/album/kentucky

I bought the CD over a year ago at the nowhereelse festival in Ohio. I heard The Winetree live and thought it was gorgeous. I bought others for myself but this was for a friend. Today I realize that the entire album, every song, has sorrow and longing.

Which makes it an interesting choice for someone who said, “I am always happy.” The first time he said that, I thought, wow. That is not true. I don’t believe that, so who are you lying to? Himself first, right? Because it seemed so obviously not true.

I never gave him the album because he stopped talking to me.

When someone says an absolute, that is a red flag for me. I wonder if the CD was for the emotions that he is not in contact with and stuffs. I went through a time where I tried to unstuff all the old emotions that I hid in my complex and frightening household growing up. My biggest ones were grief, fear and humiliation. It was not safe to express those: they would be made into a story to entertain people. I started to deal with them two years after my mother died. My sister did too.

This poem, Butterfly Girl Comes to Visit, is about my sister and my unacceptable emotions. Another, Ride Forth, is about stuffing feelings and then bringing them up and letting them go. I’m not saying we are ever done. I don’t know if we are. I thought of it as going to the depths of the ocean. The trunk at the bottom is full of terrifying monsters, but I had to open it anyhow. And at the bottom or somewhere in the trunk, is Hope, just like Pandora’s box. It took a couple of years of work to get to hope. It was so hard in counseling that my days off were more difficult than clinic, and that is saying a lot, because clinic is hard work.

Our culture is so afraid of the dark and of emotions. By doing my difficult work, I could be present and tolerate patients’ often difficult emotions and say, “Well, I can understand why you would feel that way. It is a really difficult situation.”

I do not want to be happy all the time. I think that is silly. What I want is to feel my emotions, in real time, and be honest with myself about them. As Rumi says, grief may be sweeping your house clean for a new joy. How can we love without grieving?

Welcome to the rain and the winter and the dark, and welcome to resting and quiet, and the hope that the sun will return.

And on the other side: My mom loved me.