Messages from Women Friends

I am lucky enough to have some wonderful women friends. As I have mentioned before, some I see regularly and some of them are scattered to the four corners of the planet and I only see them electronically, if at all.  I am this morning struck by two very different messages I have had from two very different women.  One message urges me to drop struggle and accept and realise my true inner beauty.  The second message acknowledges that as women we are often in a struggle and we are not alone as the struggle is an astral one and will soon change.

Let me, in this morning reflective space, say something about each message.

Yes, I am a light in the world, a flickering candle of incandescent beauty.  I know this very deeply. I have experienced times when I have lived in that light and still do.  One of the reasons I am that woman is that I do continue to search and question the purpose and quality of my life. I know that the external world my body moves through is a temporary environment and that maybe there is another plane, an afterlife, another dimension my spirit will inhabit after embodied life is over.  But, hell, I figure it this way, this is the life I have, the only one I can live with any certainty and I've written before about how difficult I find living with uncertainty.

The quality of my being is right now rooted in this world and this world is not always an easy place.  I know that I cannot 'fix' the world and would never set myself up to fail in that way, but I also know that to sit and polish my inner mirror till it is shiny and sparkling so I can bask in my own reflection is not enough for me.  I am a human being who does in order to be more fully.  All the new age crap about being a human 'being' not a human 'doing' does not resonate with me. It's too trite and feels to me like just another instruction of how I should live.

I believe in my inner beauty.  It's just that there are times when that beauty needs to spill over into the world around me, not by living in my reflected light, but by picking up a shovel and clearing the street outside my house so we can all walk an easier path.

As for the second message about planetary struggle creating struggle now for us, well, again, it's too easy. These messages are useful. Sometimes I do feel justified in running around like an electrocuted banshee and screaming the house down because the planets have aligned themselves in such a way that it really isn't my fault. Hooray! 

What is missing for me is that  there is no sense of real responsibility.  One of the things I took away from the workshop I did with William Bloom last weekend was the concept of responsibility.  This was new for me to think of responsibility with regard to spirituality and connection. It is always my responsibility even though it may not be my fault, whatever 'it' is.  It may not be my fault that I carry the genetic legacy of my ancestors, but my responsibility is clear as to how I choose to live with that genetic inheritance.  It is not my fault that the electric company has seen fit to cut the power to our area three times in the past days, but it is my responsibility to light candles. 

All of us carry the emotional scars of past hurts - the emotional and physical after effects of once-lived trauma and those scars and after effects can bubble up and reappear even when we believe we have  healed every tiny aspect of them. At this time of the year (there I go again, blaming the planetary movements!) I have more time to spend with my thoughts and I think about my son, Ben, who died in 1984.  I don't need to go into the pain that losing a child leaves.  Suffice it to say, it was considerable.  In the many years since Ben's death I have worked through that pain, cried a million tears and faced the sadness and the gap his death left in my heart.  I even convince myself that all the memories of painful times are long over  and what is left is the sweetness of my son's short life. And then, a tiny thing, a tiny pinprick of memory emerges and a wave of sadness will be with me.  It may only last a moment, but it is enough for me to know that there is always the memory of a scar. Our bodies and hearts always carry the hint of the presumed healed past. Maybe as women this is more poignant and more present. Maybe we are still courageous enough to rake over the coals to see if there is still a spark that needs dousing.

There is a difference though, as I get older I do get wiser. I am able to see things in their true proportion.  Those tiny lapping waves of memory that provoke sadness come and go very quickly. I don't get caught up in the 'woe is me' that I once might have. I am much more able to be with all these feelings and not get too identified with them.  I don't have the strong need for the story  or drama I would attach to things. I have so many more choices and I also now choose to use them. In the past I might have seen all these choices, but I would choose the self-destructive ones. I don't really need to do that anymore. What a relief that is.

So both of my friends are right. As women, we reflect something very beautiful and we don't have to push ourselves to have an effect on others. It is also true that our female intuitive natures mean that we empathically involve ourselves with the world and the energy of the planet and that sometimes our tectonic plates shift with the earth and we get shaken.

What all the women I know and cherish have learned to see and more importantly, accept, is that everything changes. Nothing stays the same and even the rough times pass. We can take and give strength to each other simply by our friendships.

Now that I have my snazzy varifocal glasses, it is even fun to be able to sit back and watch.
Everything changes.