I am here...

I feel like I am Rocky, in that moment where he is running up the steps and stretches out his arms into the morning sun. Well not quite that triumphant but bloody well determined anyway.

You probably thought that I fainted and fell off a cliff.

Not anytime soon.

Life happens. I go non-verbal while I process it all. I have been longing to get back to writing, so I am dragging myself over here to begin. I am seeing that when I hesitate, stumble around wordlessly, a bit scared (or even nigh on to petrified) maybe, perhaps, I am closer to saying the true thing, being the strong one. That Marianne Williamson quote about fearing our fabulousness. I swear to God that pisses me off: that any of us should ever doubt - that we are taught to doubt - what is excellent in us because it is outside the norm. Although I get the whole go-along-with-the-community-to-dwell-within-the-safety-of-the-community thing, I also am experienced enough to know that it is our unique gifts that will save the world.

Also I am a parent and see how very easy it is to get caught up in the yearning for status quo and bark at my family to strive for that too. Thus squashing the tender blossoming I am soooo honored to bear witness to.

I was graced yesterday to allow my deep need to fit into whatever personal version of "community synch" I imagined to be true just slide on past, and simply support my child and his demanding, but brilliant, pace of learning. I came home thrilled, or maybe just amazed that I had listened to that same God I just swore by. And I came home with a happy, engaged child. No squished blossoms on anyone's part.

Parenting is the most amazing Gift. Like the Goddess Inanna stripping off her every outer adornment and protection, we are offered an opportunity to leave every last vestage of "normal" and bear witness to Ereshkigal: moan and rock like the flies with the Queen of our Souls:

The kurgarra and galatur [the flies] moan with Ereshkigal, appeasing her anguish by the echo of their concern, affirming her in her suffering. Enki has understood that complaining is one voice of the dark goddess, a way of expressing life -- valid and deep in the feminine soul. Such complaining does not seek alleviation as much as it is to simply state the existence of things as they are felt to a sensitive and vulnerable being. There is no need for a stoic-heroic superego perspective of judging it as foolish and passive whining, but rather it should be viewed as autonomous fact -- “that's the way it is.” Suffering is seen as part of reverencing.

Ereshkigal is so touched by the attention they offer her in her pain that she extends herself and offers gifts of fertility and growth.

We are offered the chance to allow another's reality to be True and Good (straight from God) no matter how late it will make us at the grocery store or how awkward we think it might make us look in front of our friends, and that very stretching to listen (with God) to our unutterably marvelous children is, although absolutely a treasure for our children, also, fantastically, a gift to ourselves as well.

Like Ereshkigal, our children (and our own inner children) (and God) hear our attentive moaning with and extend themselves, offering us Blessings.

I grew up hearing all about how I was supposed to be seen but not heard. (Raise your hands: how many of you heard that too??) And so I thought that that was my job as a parent: to "spend the first two years of their lives teaching my children to walk and talk and the next sixteen years to sit down and shut up". But I now can see that this method just teaches us that we must be pretty enough to be visually pleasing and yet that we have nothing inside of any value to anyone, least of all ourselves. I can see, miraculously, in my children that this is blatently not true.

At every turn my children open doors for me. Through loving them (listening to them, even when their hungers or needs don't fit my schedule or sense of decorum, and even when I am quite sure that I have no strength or talent for doing what they need to have done) I have experienced my own wonderfullness. This happens when I am making way for what they can do, as well as making allowances for what they cannot do.

And then sometimes, often, yesterday, if I stay right with them, mirroring to them what I see, confirming to them by altering my pace to suit theirs that they are infinately loveable, then what they used to not be able to do they can now accomplish.

Oh. My. God.

And so my life has been full lately of this work. Or maybe just reverence.

Anyway, also, I have been painting. I am going to put three of my latest base journal pages here. In gratitude for all of the Gifts and Blessings afore mentioned in this post, and to keep them flowing, I offer them to you, copyright free, to print out and draw on, or cut up and collage with, or whatever strikes your fancy. Of course you are free to tell your friends and blog readers where you got them, and of course I would love to see your blog or Flickr links to what you did, but really, they are free for you to use however you would like.

Eeeps! I am having trouble loading photos... I will post this and try to load the photos in a separate post...

Goddess Bless all of us parents.
Goddess Bless the artists.
Goddess Blessings on and on the children.