Thursday 6 March 2014

Ash Wednesday

I mentioned to a friend recently, when she invited me to dinner, that I planned to do a 40 day juice cleanse for Lent.  Her reaction was as strong that I was honouring lent as it was that I would juice again and for this long.  I completed a 42 day juice cleanse at the start of the new year.  I have never felt better.  I am losing weight, gaining energy, and my thoughts are clear and unfoggy.  My decision to juice again for Lent is both to continue this journey toward health and heal some spiritual wounds that are lingering from a searing encounter with a traumatizing narcissist.

I read the other day that spirit is masculine and soul is feminine.  The mind is masculine and the body is feminine.  This is of course not to be confused with male and female.  Regardless of gender or biological equipment, we as human beings carry both the energy of the masculine and the feminine.  While the dominant culture carries more than its share of the masculine, the feminine waits in the shadows.  As Jungian psychology and other psychological and spiritual traditions remind us, one sidedness is a deformity of either pole.  Too much spirit leaves the soul longing.  Too much soul and the fire of spirit is doused.  Balance is key.  I see now, with the perspective of a full two years, that I was pathologically out of balance.  My spirit was well honed.  My soul neglected.  My mind well schooled.  My body ignored.  I have lived a life in service to the masculine and silently and secretly, hid the wounds to the feminine.  My body, my soul, the ground of my being has been waiting in the shadows.  So, into the pathological unbalanced darkness psyche led me.  In extreme! 

Moses and his people spent 40 years in the desert.  Jesus spent 40 days in the desert.  Jung documents his desert experience in his Red Book.  My desert has been my move to the North.  Two years later, I am coming home.  No leaving or the selling off this strange and new life.  Rather, coming home to mySelf.  As I have said elsewhere, the reasons that called us here will not be the reasons that keep us here.  As painful as it has been, I could not have asked for a better teacher or a more customized curriculum.  It has been a hard life lesson, but I do believe I have earned the title of scholar, not in the way it has been applied in the various schools I have attended, but in the fuller sense of the word. 

scholar (n.)
Old English scolere "student," from Medieval Latin scholaris, noun use of Late Latin scholaris "of a school," from Latin schola (see school (n.1)). Greek scholastes meant "one who lives at ease." The Medieval Latin word was widely borrowed, e.g. Old French escoler, French écolier, Old High German scuolari, German Schüler. The modern English word might be a Middle English reborrowing from French. Fowler points out that in British English it typically has been restricted to those who attend a school on a scholarship

I harken back to the Greek, scholastes, “one who lives at ease”.  I am living at ease these days.  In my body, in my home, on this Lane, in the North.  The hole in my psyche that led me to the experiences of these past couple of years is finally known.  It is a hole the approximate size of a soul.  My own narcissistic wound has been made more conscious and I am less naive, less vulnerable, less unconscious to the whiles of gurus, teachers, analysts, leaders, promises, or programs outside of myself.  I am a scholar of life, one who marries spirit and soul and dances with the quieter energies of balance.

Truly and honestly with gratitude, I name my narcissistic teachers in my prayers.  I thank them for showing me in the outer world what I would not, could not see in my inner world.  I bless them for wounding me in the deepest place possible.  I lay alms at their feet.  I rise from the sackcloth and ashes of my dominant attitudes.  I walk into a desert blooming with soul seared insight.   

What does this look like?  Today, this looks like a walk in the woods with the dogs, a green juice for lunch, carting in a load of fireplace wood, a hot cup of ginger and lemon tea with a wee bit of writing, a load of laundry, a few analytical hours, a couple of phone calls, and a private ceremony of ashes and oil on my forehead.  

There have been and will be many deserts.  There have and will be many teachers.  There will be ashes.  Tears.  Triumphs.  There will be Ash Wednesdays and Good Fridays and Holy Saturdays.  Pray, that this year, the sun that rises over Blueberry Mountain on Easter Sunday morn, will kiss all our cheeks with the warmth of Springtime returning.            
   

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