But it is not you. You are the choices and relationships, and values, and actions that define you and your life. You no longer need the family dinner. It is archaic.
Everything it can teach you you have incorporated already. Now it is holding you back, making you smaller. Because it is fooling you. It tethers you to false beliefs about yourself and your family.
Really, I think ritual may help. A coming to age ritual, like all traditional societies have to help young people come of age, that our society lacks.
Yes.
A ritual remembering, to honor things I cannot name. I will find a menorrha. I like the imagery of lighting the candles and increasing the light. I love the story of rededication ~ of all those things I posted for us here about Hanukka.
This is beautiful imagery, Copa.
I don't have to be all pretentious or even know what it is I am lighting candles to.
I really like this idea.
Thank you.
***
I have written on this thread for hours now. Condemning myself and coming through it and condemning myself again and finally, maybe, a sense of gratitude; of appreciation.
Part of the self condemnation involved the nature of the value system created. The role of Hero; the arrogance of linen and crystal.
Or was that honor.
I will change the imagery to fill the endlessly long table, with abundance upon abundance; with nourishing, freshly prepared food.
I will add a menorrah, to remind myself about sincerity, and about ceremonies of re-dedication.
***
If the family dinner had nothing to do with my family of origin (or my children), if it could be seen as the value system by which I created a path for my life ~ and if the maze, the beautifully living greenery of the mazes, could be seen as the protections erected around your heart, around the core of you...if we could understand that our hearts and moral structures are safe
by our own choices and actions and certainly having nothing whatever to do with our families of origin...that would free us, too.
I had not looked at my imagery of the dinner as imagery of self, Copa. The linen is snowy white; spotless. The crystal rings so beautifully, the wind gentle, the stars ringing too. There is an exquisite balance to a maze; to a beautifully appointed table with candles and flowers and shivering, sparkling crystal.
Could it be that there is a Hero component in that dinner imagery.
It truly is beautiful imagery...and it is equally true that the reality it covers has to do with very ugly things.
I have never seen the imagery that way, Copa. I saw loneliness, and longing and hope.
What would be the imagery of someone who was healthy.
That is the issue for us, I think this is true. We have the imagery ~ the beautiful table, the burgeoning green of the maze...but at the center, we are protected by the imagery. For that family dinner to happen in sincerity and in celebration of the true things, there would be love and open communication and joy, which may be a pseudo (whatever that word is: synonym?)
A pseudo synonym for joy because I mix joy and gratitude up in my thinking, maybe.
And because I am the one who has prepared the dinner...but was this an act of generosity...or hubris.
I am thinking alot about pride, this morning, and about the concept of hubris.
hu·bris
ˈ(h)yo͞obrəs/
noun
noun:
hubris
- excessive pride or self-confidence.
synonyms: arrogance, conceit, haughtiness, hauteur, pride, self-importance, egotism, pomposity, superciliousness, superiority;More
informalbig-headedness, cockiness
"the hubris among economists was shaken"
antonyms: humility
- (in Greek tragedy) excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.
Excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.
***
Copa. A maze. I did not expect to find a maze, in searching for imagery of nemesis.
This is the myth of Nemesis, goddess of retribution and false pride:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(mythology)
At 32, for 7 years, she has lived with her parents. This is a form of abuse, too, if you think about it. Of course in traditional cultures, and here too, it was customary for a child, usually a daughter to stay with the parents to care for them in their old age.
The daughter should have been urged to find her feet, to establish independence and autonomy. Instead she was undermined. M feels that the daughter may have been permanently harmed by this over-protection. He feels it is the needs of the parents that are served.
Maybe the answer here would be whether there is respect for the daughter. Or has she been enslaved to the family dynamic and is she now seen as less than. It goes back to Serenity's research about flexibility and rigidity.
Remember Copa when we discovered that dynamic in my relationship, in my thinking, about my son. I try to remember to watch for it now in my thinking about my daughter and grands, too.
Thank you, Copa.
That was hard to acknowledge.
Hubris.
When I rushed to help my mother, I circumvented the maze and I went directly to the center,
To the living, beating heart.
Is it true Copa that having made that decision you accepted the consequences (automaton). What rotten choices we are presented with. How to say no. How to live, if we say yes.
So we die just a little.
Every day.
Until it becomes automatic to do so.
Sleeping Beauty kiss for us, again; for the sakes of our children, we awaken.
Who is saving who, here.
A Buddhist koan: "Ah! At last, I am awake." And the answer: "So you believe."
I was indifferent to my mother.
Frozen do you think, Copa?
I believe you loved your mother in Nietzsche's sense of love. The love came first, but you learned that you needed to protect it.
Without it Copa, who would we be.
I know darn well I am onto something here but I don't know what it is.
I was afraid of my sister.
I am thinking I am very afraid of my sister, too. In both (in all of ~ I include Serenity here) our standing up and seeing and speaking with and inviting our sisters into our lives instead of blocking them out of our lives as we should have, I believe we were confronting the fear surrounding the things we came to believe during our upbringings and disbelieving all of it and standing up. According to the reading I was doing last week, we would be better served to run.
There is no win, there.
The sisters will have come to very different conclusions about how to deal with family of origin issues.
However beautiful it seems to us, and we do see other families which are beautiful, there is no winning whatever this is that keeps happening in our families of origin.
D H said that, too.
The battle for us then, I think this is what I think, is Neitzsche's love.
Something bitter there, or bittersweet. How to reclaim it?
***
It could be that I am misleading myself about that dinner. That is the embodiment of the dysfunctional Hero role, successfully played out.
That's okay.
I like that I did that.
My role in the family was peripheral. I was marginalized, by choice.
I wonder if this is a version of D H saying: A decision has consequences. Ethics has to do with claiming the decision, whether the consequences are good or bad.
D H seldom says he is sorry.
Maybe he never says it.
It has to do with internal versus external locus of control. Whether my D H is sorry has to do with how he values me (enough to change) or himself (enough to require that I change).
It is a different kind of morality, and very clean.
"
I was marginalized...." Versus: "I found in them nothing of value; nothing to hold me but dependence. I rejected dependence...but, ashamed of my strength, and of the courage to have used it to save myself, I did not want to say so, aloud."
You fell into the seductive trappings of family and hope of belonging though Copa, once you were home. They are seductive in their familiarity, those old rhythms. How does that Shakespeare go:
For this surcease, much thanks; for 'tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.
It's like that.
You were strong enough to survive it in the first place.
So was I.
***
That dinner imagery may be the heart of me, Copa.
My maze.
A certain set of standards and requirements.
That could be. That is why it rises out of the dark water at this level of healing.
Sacrosanct.
So...is the conflict that we did not break. Arrogance. "Don't you dare. Just don't think, Cedar."
And the mother falls in my regard.
She has not met me on terms I am able to understand.
Is that the nature of the crime, here. That I require no witness in these instances. I was no longer a child. I know what I saw. Is that why I cannot forgive myself. I cannot turn this against myself, cannot name myself coward because I could not protect a sibling; cannot in good faith condemn myself. And yet, there is breakage. I wanted to love my mother. I can only love her if I believe she cannot help what she does. We all do the best we know.
Two sides of the same coin.
Nietzsche: When we peer into the abyss the abyss peers into us.
Because I know what it cost me to survive.
Something human.
***
I grew up; came into the power every young woman (and every young man) comes in to, steps into, is drawn into.
The other feelings are the abuser's interpretation of what is perceived as rebellion.
"Don't you dare."
"Just don't think, Cedar."
And I do not see my mother in the same way.
And I protect her from that and condemn myself for needing to protect her but defiantly refuse to accede, to bend the knee to something I no longer believe or believe in.
How many times have I posted that very thing, those very words, about my sister. "
I believe you. I no longer believe in you."
Like that was a condemnation.
Hubris.
***
I read a book whose title I don't remember now Copa, but it is part and parcel of how I see you, and me, too. I am bound through and through with something having to do with the Benedictines, and with my experiences, there.
With the answers I found, there.
This imagery of you has to do with your sister and the luncheon. Here is the attending imagery: A nun retreats into a monastery, into celebration and challenge and spiritual quest and honor and into the mystery of why at the core, having nothing to do with family; they are shades, are the story of how the Sister was come to be in the world. Her life and her nature and everything about her a mystery; a flame.
There are no words to understand or describe fire. The essence of it, which is transformation.
Everything here is on fire; energy conversion.
A death occurs or is coming or some other event that requires the presence, the knowledge and understanding and involvement of the cloistered Sister.
She comes to the barred gate between the monastery and the rest of the world.
There is no sympatico there. No judgment, no change in the beauty of the Sister's regard.
All things, she holds in high regard.
She does nothing.
Listens.
Leaves the bars; returns to the cloistered existence where everything is on fire.
White candles, in an Innocent's mirror
The flame burns brighter, clearer.
It is most beautiful.
I abdicated like King Edward. I believe I was forced to. Either accept our rules or leave. Nobody said it, but I knew the power structure.
Prince Charles is not likely to take the throne, either.
But having met his obligation, he lives openly with the woman of his choice.
But he did not have children with the woman of his choice.
That I had left part of myself there. That needed to be saved.
Yes I like this imagery; this intention.
Cedar