The Windmills and Spirals of a New Beginning

In my continued fascination with spirals, I was looking at one that was spinning.  You know, the kind you see when someone is trying to hypnotize you?   It represents continual change and evolution and the interconnectedness of all things.

As we passed December 21, 2012, which was to be the last day of life as we know it and not necessarily the end of the world, because we are still here, I look to what that new world  might look like.  In terms of rebirth or growth, the spiral symbol can represent the consciousness of nature beginning from the core or center and thus expanding outwardly. Or you can look at it as outward information coming in to the core of your being.  I read this yesterday about this kind of spiral movement:

And when one contemplates such an infinitely regressing movement one begins to appreciate that the words 'first movement' doesn't even begin to express the beginning - that it's all an endless beginning - it's all a one act play - an infinitely recursive and enfolding one act play. Thus the 'first movement' is everywhere you look And soon you'll look up and see the same thing in every thing you look at until your view of reality begins to shift and with it meaning itself will take on a whole new meaning and on and on and on - beginnings enfolding endings which enfold another beginning until there's no more beginnings or endings and you just are. -Robert McCoy

If you look at a spiral in motion, it appears that it is moving from the outside in.  And if you look closely at the center, it appears to get larger as it spins.  Interesting if you think of the spiral as inward reflection.  As more wonderful things move in, your center becomes larger,  I think you can also say that as things move out from the center, it also leaves space to allow your inner most ideas to grow.  The inner core stays the same as the outer grows in size.   Do we actually spiral out of control or just to a place that is new and not understood quite yet?   I like to believe that December 21st was the end of the world as we know it and an opening to something quite new and even grander.   Any way you look at it, growth is always occurring, like it or not!  You can see for yourself here: 

click here

So the same people, places, and things are always new, always beginning again.  From a different perspective.  You get to see them from all sides, angles, directions.  And sometimes, what you have been looking at for years starts looking different. So enjoy your life from all sides and angles this holiday season.

Like a tunnel that you follow

To a tunnel of it's own

Down a hollow to a cavern

Where the sun has never shone

Like a door that keeps revolving

In a half forgotten dream

Or the ripples from a pebble

Someone tosses in a stream.

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping

Past the minutes on it's face

And the world is like an apple

Whirling silently in space

Like the circles that you find

In the windmills of your mind

-Sting

A Song for My Father

Family always comes to mind this time of year.  If you are lucky, it brings wonderful memories to mind.  The holidays can also bring back some forgetable memories as well.  Regardless, those that have passed on come to mind.  So I post this again as it is apropo for me at this time of the year. 12/2013

As we head full on into the holiday season, I wanted to add this story that came to me yesterday after spending the day with my family on Sunday at a tree farm cutting down our Christmas tree. Thank you for indulging me on this one. Happy holidays to everyone! (Dec. 2011)

A Song for My Dad

I saw my dad today. He was driving a tractor in a large field of Christmas trees dressed in a Santa suit. And he was smiling.

He drove by on the first pick up and said there was no room this go around but he would be back shortly. I could have sworn I caught a glimpse of that sparkle in his eyes, the one long lost to pain and dashed dreams. His heart was so big and so open. It was an easy target for the cruelty that life can impose. 

Always quiet, and contemplative, he was a guy who could draw Donald Duck in 8 seconds flat, who drew 1950’s pin up girls with the same ease and beauty as it was for me to create a fresh floral design from a few cut flowers and greens. He could play Claire de Lune by heart on piano or organ, and apparently act in plays, something that was never known to anyone until he reminisced it to me 3 days before he died.

He was a man who was 5’11”, weighed 230 lbs at his skinniest, barely finished high school, was a paper hanger, painter, a natural artist who designed and built both of our family houses. This was a man with hands the size of frying pans who didn’t need gloves to clean the ice and snow off of car windows, whose pranks included using manure to make a small explosive that blew the mailbox off of a neighbor’s house because Dad was miffed about something he couldn’t quite remember; he was a very broad shouldered brute of a guy who could lift a full grown man over his head, which he did, during a party and “accidentally” dropped him and broke the man’s back. Which subsequently ended the party. Dad felt awful about the accident, but remained friends with the guy.

This gentle giant donned a Santa suit every Christmas for my sis and I during our toddler years. His own mother would plop into his lap each season and they both would hoot and holler with laughter for the 8MM camera.  Me and sis would watch those tiny grainy reels over and over in the coming years. I don't know if we knew what we were looking for in those home movies, but whatever it was, it brought joy for those rare moments.  When Grams died, Christmas ended at her house and we never saw Dad's side of the family again. That loss took the  glimmer from his eyes and his goodness was subsequently drowned in the drink.

This was a man who never cried, who only winced and yelled obscenities into the air after driving a 3” nail into his knee while breaking boards in half for firewood.  This man, who in his frustration with his wife and family, chose my cousin over me for his new daughter; he didn’t speak to me for 4 years for a myriad of reasons. He could be cold as ice on the outside, but cried soft tears and hugged me tightly after I told him I was finally pregnant after years of infertility.

He wore that red suit a few more years for my one brother, but it never made it to my youngest brother’s Christmases. Some years down the road, we got him to put it on for my young nephew. Sis and I got the job of dressing him and we laughed until we cried as we attempted to stuff him into the too small well-worn suit. I saw that glimmer find its way out of the darkness that night if only for that short moment.

The last time I saw that glimmer, a faint sparkle, the one that I now see in my younger son’s eyes, was after I had the nurse dose him up on morphine.

 “If we give him any more, his heart might stop.”

“He’s dying, for Christ’s sake! And he’s in pain! Give it to him now!"

I was with him at his diagnosis,  drove him home that day and begged him to take one more trip to Greece, the place his heart belonged to and missed.  I was the one who researched stage 4 pancreatic cancer and was told by a trusted friend and surgeon to tell Dad to get a great bottle of bourbon and a good cigar and head to the beach to enjoy the very short time he had left.

“If you want to go, Dad, we’ll make it happen. Someone will travel with you. But you

have to go now. There isn’t time…..”

It was me who said no to the treatments, “What for? He only has a few months to live, let him be happy in his final days.”

He was silent during that initial conversation with the doctor who delivered the fateful diagnosis. He was silent on the way home that day. He was silent during our conversation, my questions of what he was thinking, what did he want to do, did he want to go to Greece.

He did hear me that day, though, and asked the oncologist a few days later if it would be possible to travel. My heart beamed but was quickly silenced when the rest of the family said no, he was to stay and allow the doctors to concoct their chemo cocktails for him.  It was me, who was dismissed as wanting him to die, for saying no to experimental treatments that are only a playground for unrelenting oncologists.

“We can beat this thing, Dad.” was the fear coming from everyone else at that appointment.

And my heart broke as I watched him relent.

So he never went to his beloved Greece again and the only beach he saw was in a painting on the wall of his hospital room those last two days. He seemed lost in that painting his last morning, as if he was already there.

With his pain finally under some semblance of control, I sat with him after the others had gone for coffee.  He told my husband I was crazy after I asked him how he was feeling.  I saw a glimpse of his sparkle as it snuck out from under the thick blanket of morphine. I smiled and knew at that moment that we had made peace with each other, after years of struggles and heartbreaks.  He died the next afternoon.

So it warmed my heart when I saw him today. The gentle giant that was silenced during his lifetime, was driving an old farm tractor, smiling, eyes sparkling, dressed in a Santa suit.

In Transition

I was at a monthly Meetup group this week and of course, we all gave our 30-second elevator speech of who we are, yada yada…  Me:  I am so and so and my business is In Transition.  Ooh!  What’s that? What does your business do?  And sheepishly I say, nothing.  I am IN transition.  Meaning:  I am not working right now.

 

It’s hard to own this.  Why?  Because I have always worked.  Work defined me.  What defines me now?  Why can’t I enthusiastically announce to the world that I am not working and damn it, it’s okay?  At least for the moment.  Why CAN’T I be in transition?   Why can’t I take the time to figure things out?  Why must I have the answer to my life when I just don’t?

That place where nothing is happening is called the liminal stage and damn it, that is where I am right now.  I should call my business The Liminal Stage.  That sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it?  My work right now is to amass information, go over the past 7 years (the number 7 means refinement – okay, so I am busy refining myself.  The number seven symbolizes God's perfection. – okay, this is pretty intense right here!) This is when we take an inventory of our life. It’s a time of spiritual questioning and review of our life purpose.  Isn’t that a full time job in itself?  I think so.  So just lay off me!  Wait, I need to lay off myself, for I am the only one badgering me to get it together already and figure out the next step.

What is this transition and who let it in?  I have spent a lifetime as a serial entrepreneur, always dreaming and working on the next thing for my growth, always overlapping my work, never a break in between.

My business is Liminal Transitions.  That sounds even better.  It sounds business-like, right? Authentic.  What do you do? I sit in the nothingness while all the pieces of me banter and fret and cajole their way into creating the next me.  They will let me know when the work is done.  My business is to not get in the way with worry and negative thoughts.  My job is easy in all this.  I just sit still in the silence, in the quiet, knowing that within that quiet, a ruckus is vamping up and soon enough will make so much noise that I will be forced to engage in something.

The wait is agonizing.  All I do is feed the ideas and wait, like a mother with her newborn.  Eat and sleep.  Eat and sleep.  And grow.  And grow.

I can’t do this much longer.

But I can feel the growth.  There are the growing pains that come with working through the blockages, breaking loose the long held self-defeating voices of long ago.  I AM! I AM, I cry within.  I, who fights everything, must be still while this raging goes on within.  This is excruciating for someone who has never sat still for anything; the person who’s monkey brain has grown to gorilla brain; no, King Kong brain.  How do you keep King Kong quieted?  You can’t, of course.

And so I sit, feeding this silent activity, resting and waiting for that moment when I burst forth, full speed ahead.  Again.  Oh, it will be grand, that is certain.  My biggest thing ever, whatever that is.  I am not done yet.

I am Transition.  A work in progress.  Not yet defined.  But magnificent.