On equanimity

What do you find attractive in a mate? What do you look for in a friend? What quality makes you feel most loved and secure?

Most of us don’t really know. Those of us that do have a ‘feeling’. We call that feeling Love. But we are wrong.

Love is important but as some of us know; Sometimes Love isn’t enough.

Love without loyalty won’t last. Love without faithfulness won’t make you feel secure. Love without strength isn’t powerful enough to let you relax.

Who wants to live the mantra ‘I know they love me but…’? Not me.

I need equanimity.

Flakey, shaky, flighty, moody, chameleon, temperamental, two-faced, inconsistent, indecisive, shifty, insincere, egotistical make me nervous, insecure, restless.

I crave equanimity.

All is well in my world when I know that the people around me love me enough to not be moved by my shit. That they will stand up to me in my own best interest. That they will walk through the valley of hell with me. They will love me even when they don’t like me. Then, I’m safe.

The love I receive is faithful, strong, staunch, sure, grounded & true. Or it simply isn’t enough. Fact.

This is the love I give to my son. I will be here, loving you, come hell or high water, forever. This equanimity holds his world together. I am no different.

Equanimity is the glue that holds my pieces together.

The gold is spoiling my grass

I was once told the story of an old man. I have no idea where this story comes from, so if you know let me know so I can attribute it here.

This old man is negative, grumpy, set in his ways. He wants more money; everything is expensive, prices are rising and he longs for the days when he was a boy and prices were reasonable. One morning he wakes to a pile of gold bullion stacked in his front yard. His response ‘Oh gosh darn it! That gold is ruining my grass!’

I realised a moment ago that I am that man! I was reading the honest and inspired blog of Ronna Detrick Renegade Conversations. Ronna wrote the following:

I don’t want to stay dry in my relationships. I want them wild and messy and juicy. By that admission, this means they will be hard, confusing, potentially disappointing, and require much vulnerability and risk. At this point in my life I don’t want safety or surety. I want passion, abandon, fiery integrity, brutal truth, and raw beauty. I want to get wet.

First let me say Wow! Fearless honesty should always be applauded! My relationship is wild, definitely messy and juicy (in the personal growth sense) right now. It is hard, really hard, deep, slow work. And to do the work we have had to face paralysing fears, speak searingly painful truths and embrace a vulnerability I have never known before.

What a powerful re-frame. ‘Wet’ is a magic new paradigm. I am not ‘going through stuff’, ‘in a rough patch’, ‘falling apart’. I am jumping into the depths of my marriage, our love, with both feet. I am getting wet.

Lets talk about … My fine line

There is a fine line, at least in my pretty little head, between submitting to someone else’s will and choosing to find happiness in someone else’s happiness.

You might need to read that one again. It is a really, really, fine line.

This is a really complicated issue. At least for me. The concept of submitting to the will of another is abhorrent to me. It makes my blood run cold and every single cell in my body rebels against it. As a woman especially, I harks back to millennia of women without an avenue to exercise their own will. Similarly though the concept of finding happiness in someone else’s happiness reeks of the feminine mystique, of 1850′s housewives socially trapped into living only for their husband’s and children.

The key here, I guess, is choice. Choice is what we have been fighting for, isn’t it? Somehow some choices still seem to betray myself, my gender. The difference between an enlightened, empowered choice and a choice that flies in the face of my freedoms and rights? Awareness.

Conscious choice makes all the difference. Conscious choice is the only thing that makes the life of a modern wife and stay at home mother different to that of her 1950′s counterpart. I am choosing fulfillment in my role as domestic goddess. They had no other option.

I chose to marry because it was important to my husband. Not out of fear. I chose to remain at home raising my son, because it is honestly the hardest, toughest, most fulfilling thing I have ever undertaken. And I don’t back away from a challenge. What makes my choices, in my mind, revolutionary and rebellious and empowered is that I am aware of every choice I make. I put my life under the microscope and analyse who I am in the face of my freedoms and choices.

I walk a fine line. My priorities and daily tasks are essentially for my family. My self inquiry, my honesty with (and about) what goes on for me in my heart and head in response to this, that is my saving grace. Conscious choice is the difference between oppressed and living breathing empowerment.

I bet I am not the only woman steadily walking this line. What lines do you walk?

(excuse the late post, I am trying a new parenting style today and it is labor intensive.)

Taking stock

9 days into marriage and I feel, well….. nothing. Nothing different, anyway.

All my married friends have told me that marriage changes everything and nothing all at once. This is true for my husband (it still feels weird using that title), but I seem to have only got the ‘nothing’ part. Well, other than my immune system completely crashing, that is. But still, it is early days yet.

A dear friend  (a very wise one at that) reminded me at various stages throughout the reception that a marriage, like any other ritual, is symbolic. That it is powerful and will take time to integrate. Truer words have never been spoken, but I do wonder if you must endorse the ritual or simply participate to truly be changed by it.

I have been thinking a lot since the wedding. About love and marriage, not to mention the events of the weekend itself.  So much took place. So many virtually all those we care about were in the one place at the one time. That alone is a mother-load of quality time to process. Add to that potent mix the vows, speeches, drunken deep and meaningful conversations, poignant one liners, interesting situations (often interesting drunken situations) and you have too many memories to process, to many moments to take into my heart, in 9 short days.

My response so far has been to write – a hell of a lot. I have listened to my old favourite music. I have rearranged the kitchen and my bedroom. Lost my appetite. Done a truckload of laundry and spoken to my girlfriends heaps. There is nothing out of the ordinary in the list other than the laundry. Damn I hate laundry! Oh and the appetite.

As for married life? Is it safe to assume married me will be a thinner washer-woman? I hope not. The jury’s still out on married life.  When I see it I’ll let you know.

Love is…

I was married this past weekend. Did you see my vows? It tells you something about the sensitivity of my husband or perhaps his skills as an orator to say that his vows barely left a dry eye in the house while mine got our teary guests laughing (not only because I had no voice and sounded like a B-grade sex line).

Now I have never believed that love was blind, but my fortnight of hell – the two weeks leading up to the wedding – and the 3 days since has clearly shown me something all together different. Love is stupid.

Love is stupid AND blind. Love is actually borderline insane. Love cannot read the writing on the wall. Even if it wanted to.

Before the wedding my body began a revolt. I got a cold. The glands in my throat began to swell, swallowing became difficult. In the final days when I should have been organizing final details (like my now non-existent guest book) I was curled up in bed trying to convince a snotty toddler than ‘Mummy sleeping’ was a fun game. I trod on a rusty thumbtack. I pulled a chunk of glass from that same foot a few days later. My chin broke out in pimples two days before the wedding and the day before the nuptials, the day my guests arrived, I began to lose my voice.

In addition to this, the recent flooding in Victoria washed away the only thing I had my heart set on – purple hydrangeas. So the décor was changed from mauve to neutral to cover all possibilities. Fantastic thinking too, because we ended up with green flowers. Yes, Green! They looked fantastic though. Bless our outstanding florist. My parents had their breaks fail on the way to the wedding. No I am not kidding. Oh, and the power went off 30 minutes before I was to walk down the aisle – while I was in the middle of getting my hair done. So my hair was finished off in my parents’ converted bus (it was stationary by now, don’t worry). One of our musicians (a dear friend) dislocated his shoulder. Lucky for us he was staunch enough to drive to the mountains and play guitar all with a shoulder that should have been in a sling!

My point? Yes I do have one – other than to whine about all of the tiny things that drove me insane – is this; if so many things were to go wrong in the lead up to any other event I would have reconsidered. I would have pondered the possibility that the universe/god/whoever was trying to tell me something. I would have read the writing on the wall.

But alas, love is blind and stupid. Instead I had a wonderful wedding. And that night suffered from a gastro bug and since then my cold has only gotten worse, my voice hasn’t returned and I have developed a rash, all over my body. In short – I am allergic to marriage.

If love hadn’t blinded me and robbed me of my intelligence, I would read the writing on the wall.