A New Clearing

Enjoying the jet lag, combined with my dreams where one can't figure out where one starts and the other one ends. It was interesting for me bringing up a difficult time of the past, and feeling very resolved about it which in turn stimulated a dream of wonder and beauty merging several snippets of my past. I am writing this while my partner sleeps besides me, a gentle symbol of his relaxation that everything will be O.K. with our upcoming marriage and his new life, soon in USA.

Many years ago, I worked in advertising and our group formed a company within a company. I worked hard and long hours and was paid pretty well. It was kind of exciting if you could find a client let us do what we were good at, high concept smart and fun packaging and collateral. My mentor was an interesting man only 10 years my senior, and I thought we bonded. So, I put in a lot of hours, and weekends while having a partner at the time, who was aware of what was happening and said they are just using you up. It wasn't self-serving, but I just didn't listen deeply because we had other problems unrelated.   Since I was doing so well, I decided now was the time to buy a house. I had a small down from my father's early death the year before, and knowing that my job was never permanent I had better get in while I can. This is was a motivation to working so hard.  I looked near and far for the best for my money, adding a commute that was longer than my apt. Once I got my first place I needed more time to spend on fixing it up, since it was kind of raw. I began to leave work at what would be my normal quit time, and not work late nights all the time.

Earlier in the year at work we had a meeting about our little company, and was told we have retirement accruing separate from the main company. That was dangled over me to spur me to work long days and weekends. Well, you can pretty much guess that at about the time I took initiative to work more normal days, we lost a client and I got pulled in to be the sacrificial cow. It lost my job at a weak point when the economy was still struggling after an earthquake and normal malaise, which seems to follow most of my life. There was no retirement I found out, nor bonus for all the hard work, which added to the shock. Here I am struggling to pay a new mortgage, and slim jobs. There is much more to this story, but I will leave them out because it is not part of this signifiant release in my dreams.

Fast forward trying to recover from brain injury with speech being nearly non-existent and motor skills heavily compromised, I had a meeting with my ex-boss from that advertising job and he gave a few small gifts. I was still a bit pathetic, so I would see some interesting reactions. It was early on in my healing process and I was still steeped in anger as to "why me?" Plus, having lost my partner during this time I was raw and trying to find some of my old power. I wrote a letter to that old boss saying these little gifts are a far cry from the retirement promised to me. I wanted someone to blame and share my misery with and he just happened to be in the right place and right time.

I took off with an older female workmate to Mexico, to relax and heal after I wrote this letter. One evening on the beach, I broke down about what I was left with brain wise. A really good wailing cry with someone I felt I could trust. Looking back these were all things I had to experience to get them out of the way. Anger and despair need to be eliminated so that one could then settle on what you have at the present moment and cement that the past is totally gone. She had understood what were the issues that caused my break-up, and it was done to spare my partner my misery my first year back. It was never understood by him, because it removed him from a role he is used to of taking care of disabled adults. I just wasn’t going to give all my power up in a time of weakness. Some real purging that trip, and came back fresh and ready to get busy with speech. Upon returning, I was driving her car for the first time when I realized that I had so many deficits with my paralysis that left me unable to see to the right. So, I had her drive and we talked about a letter I received from my ex-boss because she worked with him at one time. I was so upset that he said in the letter, "I am not your father!" and didn’t quite understand how much my father factored in to so much of my misery. Also in his letter was a long-winded explanation about the supposed retirement. He had moved on but obviously I hadn’t.

I tore that letter up and threw it over the bridge we were driving over that day with my friend, but it stayed with me until last nights dream when it was all released.  I can’t do justice to how good this felt, but it spurred the next dream woven of past memories.

I went to the corner of a room to drink out of a water fountain. This was from when I was 17 working in an art gallery, which taught art classes in back and had this old water fountain with the handle coated in various colored paints from over the years. This alluded to all the artists in the gallery and were also the teaching staff. I am sure you know the kind of fountain that are square and about 3 ft tall with a stainless steel drain on top and a flip handle in the corner. Near a door opening which opened on to the galley. I saw a wide pictorial view like a wall had been blow out of the gallery that left the walls left and right. There were several artists trying to figure out an inventive way to close it up,  but because it was a beautiful beach, ocean, cloud view they did not want to totally close it up. The view was more or less from my recent trip to Sri Lanka(I’ll include a few in this post). The team had worked into the gallery wall a horizontal window strip top and bottom, so it looked like you could walk on water while seeing clouds above. No readers, I don't have Jesus complex. Then while taking a sip of water from that fountain and talking to the team, who had come up with a way to paint the wall using the same colors in my photograph, and their hands dipped in paint, cotton and sand to give the wall tactile mystery. I am sadly leaving out much more of the dream, but you know how detailed dreams ...seem to be. That is enough to know that what I held on for so many years about my father has been finally dusted in a dream of creativity through a clearing of my held-on traumas. This was the tail end of the fingers woven into my life.

My main point in telling you some of my past is to help others understand there is a natural process when anything really significant happens in your life. I had lost my brain, my house, my job and someone I still love all in the period of a couple of short years. One has to go through disbelief, anger, depression(although not a fan of basking in it), before you can get to acceptance and access your full healing potential. I would often have denial of the pain caused by others rejecting me when I spoke, only using it to spur on more personal work. My recent foray into M.B.L. helped to release any leftover traumas held in my body and helped to facilitate this latest release. This leaves me with less desire to escape by “doing something” to occupy the busy mind.