Tenderized

For years & years & years, I held being vulnerable as a negative. Loving John prompted my comment that my utterly involuntary love for him left me wide open in every way possible, that it "Makes me vulnerable."

It did & it does. And, much to my suprise, it turns out that is & always has been a good thing.

Being vulnerable is life welcoming. Our skin is vulnerable, letting things out, letting things in. Our cells are vulnerable.

How did I come to see vulnerability as a negative, something to be on guard against?

That's a purely rhetorical - such questions lack anything-close-to-understandable answers.

As I tip tap away, am finding myself thinking about ways to tenderize a tough cut of meat ~ you can slow cook it in some liquid, puncture it all over with deep holes, marinate it for hours. What you typically end up with is a piece of meat that's tender enough to eat AND typically with more flavor than a more naturally tender cut.

Maybe the same is true for all of us - that tough moments can, with a little attention & prep, be our most tender, most filled with the flavors of life & living.

Personally....

I've been cautious about getting too personal on my blog. It's felt as if, having worked so hard to get a sense of detachment from my intimate life issues, sharing even an teensy bit of them in a posting would jeopardize what feels like progress.

And by progress, I mean progressing, moving forward. What I've come to realize over the past few hours is that progress, to me, means letting out whatever wants to be shared. Of my various blogs, Sneezing Chickens means the most appropriate for such shares - everything is just a story, nothing more or less. Whatever I share will be mine.

The reason for being for this blog is to honor all the different energies that helped me achieve whatever sense of balance I enjoy at this moment in time. By focusing on them, it felt like I could sidestep the more potentially troublesome aspects of the personal work I've done over the past 35 years. Who can dispute that this group or that mentor, this book or that article, this audiotape or that movie helped shift my perspective to a better place? But plenty can dispute what impact a human being had on me.

What's occurred to me over the past few hours is that even that disagreement, that taking exception to something I might bring up, is a good thing. In the end, it's all just stories anyhow, so hearing someone else's story can only be good, even if it disputes my own. That's communication, and it always, ultimately serves a purpose, even if it's not one I imagined or can relate to.

Life is a complex jumble of stories masquerading as limited time experiences. Ha! They have no boundaries, no limits. I could sit in a room with Mim & Peter, Mike & Kerry and they could each tell a story that directly contradicts my own. Here's the fascinating thing - if you gave each of us a point in time to describe, one that involved us all, some of us would probably come up with similar accounts but no two stories would be exactly the same. And if you have four out of five of us all share the same experience, even that is no guarantee that the moment actually happened. We are all stories & stories are susceptible to naturally selective memory, personal voice, and even unconscious editing. NO ONE has immunity from this all-too-human experience processing software!

How can I write "wrapped in stories" if there are stories I'm cautious about sharing?

What to do today?

Am working on significantly upgrading my blogging skills. Craving for better content, snazzier pictures, more links to blogs I love typically hits in force after reading the current edition of Artful Blogging. As gorgeous as those samples of excellence in blogging are, I know that it's relatively simple to consistently make improvements to what & how I post.

Very uplifting, to be inspired by excellence instead of disheartened!

Now, what to do today?!

Born & bred in the briar patch!

Realized recently that the focus of my book is on my relationship with relationships.

While it hadn't dawned on me before, my consciousness had certainly been flitting about it. Knew that I wanted to celebrate all the energies, the stories, that helped me gain & maintain my spiritual footing.

A common thread among many of those energies & stories seems to be the importance of identifying challenging situations or troubling problems in order to move past them. Strikes me that a major problem with identifying things is that the process can take so long, it can become a familiar part of our life. We can stay stuck rather than detach, ignoring that it’s time to see the issue for what it is, giving it a tip of the hat, then moving past without trying to best it.

This limiting tendency of rehashing perceived issues rather than letting them go brings to mind an Uncle Remus story about Brer Rabbit & the Tar Baby.

Seems that one day, as he was walking down a dusty country road, as carefree as you please, ol' Brer Rabbit came across a Tar Baby, a glob of tar & turpentine dressed up in clothing & a hat by Brer Fox to trick Brer Rabbit.

Now, Brer Rabbit didn't realize what it was, which was just what Brer Fox had hoped. When the Tar Baby didn't answer Brer Rabbit's greeting, ol' Brer Rabbit reacted to the perceived ill manners by taking a swipe at the offender.

Well, the Tar Baby didn't budge, but Brer Rabbit sure found his hand stuck deep in a glob of tar. Even when he realized the actual situation, Brer Rabbit made things worse & worse for himself, getting more & more completely stuck where he was, totally at the mercy of his arch enemies, Brer Fox & Brer Bear.

Now, ol' Brer Rabbit should have seen the Tar Baby for what it was - a glob of tar with clothes & a hat - and walked on by.

I can't count the number of times I acted like Brer Rabbit. How many times did I try to "resolve" a difficult relationship or problem, only to get sucked in deeper & deeper?

Thank goodness, Brer Rabbit kept his wits about him, finagling Brer Fox into playing to his strengths rather than weaknesses, tossing the trussed up rabbit into the sticky, brambly, thorny briar patch where Brer Fox expected him to perish miserable. Instead, the infuriated fox heard that dang rabbit call out to him - "I was bred and born in the briar patch, Brer Fox! Born and bred in the briar patch!" as he skipped away as merry as a cricket.

Sure do hope that I'm more & more like that clever rabbit, learning life lessons, keeping my wits about me, and when I do get stuck in issues that seem made to suck me in further & further, to look to my core strengths & get back to a place where I can skip away to new freedom, merry as a cricket.

Held hostage

The entire country is worn out after going through 2+ weeks of hell as the United States Congress made our nation's leaders look utterly out of their depth at best, stupidly blind & dangerous at worst. Small wonder the stock market is tanking - which will decimate the little guy investor & make the big guys who bet on a bear market even wealthier.

Stinks.

And has left me wrung out & depressed.

Speaker Boehner said he got 98% of what he wanted (so much for compromise), while Minority Leader McConnell says the GOP learned it pays to hold the nation hostage because it forces us to focus on what they want. Let's see how it plays out.

was off line for over a month

my major computer problem turned out to be minor ~ a malfunctioning mouse that needed replacing.

big life lesson in that.

and that i finally did figure it out without major expense & i was able to make things right all by myself & (drum roll, please) i knew exactly where to locate the installation instructions.

took a while (too hot to be in the unairconditioned computer studio for most of those days), but got it done.

feeling decidedly competent.