Path to Discovery

It is now that I begin to truly see 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

The dream: 2247 Baily Avenue.

The childhood home — one room where I grew up, and then the other room, once my brother’s, where I stayed with my own children for a time after my divorce.


Two kinds of shame: one as a child, and one as an adult.
The shame of the adult takes an even tighter hold on the constraints of your manhood when it is shared with your own children. That differs from the shame you carry as a child yourself, growing up in the house of pain.

How you deal with the shame you feel depends a great deal on the audience around you.

Note

The trauma: CEN or childhood emotional neglect: CPTSD 

The father: authoritarian narcissistic

The mother: codependent, and lived in fear, but also looked away and did not protect

The ex-wife: also authoritarian with a need for control

In one room, you are the child

And in another room, you have your children who see 

Two rooms in the same bewilderment

The common denominator: me

The activities of a child versus 

The activities of a man

The comparison is poignant

But the shame still stands

I now understand my trauma

Unhealed wounds must be processed through connection

In silence, they fester unseen

So with this testimony, I raise my objection 

One shame is learned

One is self created

The burdens of inequity

When you point the finger at yourself – it’s related

The lessons of accountability

And the politics of shame

It’s extremely hard to point the finger

When the finger is pointed at your name

Oh how we justify

The economy of quid pro quo

Just what do we testify?

Sometimes, I don’t rightly know

Like sitting in your own church

Like sitting in your own pew

Just what will we receive?

Just what will we do? 

In childhood I learned to overthink

In adulthood, I did the same

I now try to integrate emotion 

The man, the boy, and the claim 

Over 50 years with living in silence

The reflection from the polished mirror, I am now me 

Funny how when I start to go blind

It is now that I begin to truly see 

CLG

…

DCG

Three classes shy 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Three Classes Shy


Why do I walk the mesa late at night,
beneath the bell tower’s arch of sun-bleached stone?
Why does the old campus glow so bright
for one who walked away from it alone?
I left my home at seventeen, so young,
and paid my way with every dollar earned.
Who heard the quiet hope upon my tongue
each night I studied while the lamp still burned?
Why is there always one more class to find,
a room I cannot reach, a door that’s locked?
Why does the schedule blur inside my mind
while minutes slip away upon the clock?
Psychology, philosophy, two roads
I traveled far but never saw them end.
Three classes short. Who measures all the loads
a working heart must carry, lift, and tend?
I married, and I worked for forty-one
long years, and gave the best of what I had.
So why, when all those working days are done,
does one unfinished piece still make me sad?
Is this the reason that the dream returns?
Does painful truth play hide-and-seek at night,
and wait behind the library till it learns
I’m strong enough to face it in the light?
And if I face it, what else might I find?
That no diploma measures who I’ve grown?
That every lesson life has left behind
has taught me more than any class I’ve known?
The past is history, so let it be.
The future is a mystery, still unknown.
But now, this very moment, sets me free,
a gift we call the present, all our own.
So if a dream keeps calling you by name,
what hallway, what closed door, waits there for you?
Perhaps it doesn’t come to bring you shame,
but just to walk you home, whole, and new.

…

DCG

“If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you.”

— unknown 

This was the dream. I woke up on the San Diego State University campus, wearing a very plush San Diego State letterman jacket, which I have owned in the past. I was surrounded by people, many of whom were from where I worked. The people I had my career with showed up throughout the dream, even though many of them did not attend San Diego State.
We were sectioned off, almost as if we had been told to serve the campus community for some unknown reason. We were grouped together in square formations, almost like attendance lineups, or even in classrooms. I walked around and saw people from my job. I didn’t know why they were there too, because many of them did not go to the same school I did.

This dream, in some form, keeps coming back: me on the campus of San Diego State University.

Transcription
“Here is the twist. I was three classes shy of getting my degrees at San Diego State University. One in psychology and one in philosophy.”
Annotation: the two degrees would have been a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy.
A Revelation
I left home at 17 and paid my own way through San Diego State University. I studied toward a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy while working full-time.
I always meant to finish. But marriage and work took priority, and I spent 41 years with my employer. I ended up three classes short of both degrees, and not finishing those classes is my biggest regret.
My education has always mattered deeply to me. That may be why the same dreams keep coming back. I think they may be my mind returning to the one important thing I never finished the way I wanted to. This isn’t a failure. It shows how much I still value what I worked so hard for.

Therefore it is Thus

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

I share my life

Getting my past mistakes clear

I give of myself

To those I hold dear

I’ve come to the conclusion

We are here for each other

Not far from that

Of a virtual mother

We trick ourselves thinking

The self should be nourished

When the truth is

This should be discouraged

The muse we must follow

Extends beyond inside us

Puts the other person before

Therefore it is thus

My allegiance my sacrifice

This declaration I make

Your happiness is mine

A mutual sharing for its sake

We are bound together

On this earth we call home

Cast away the falsehoods

That continue to roam

…

DCG

Resolution of Happiness

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crossroads

Can you recall a time in your life that you woke up and decided to fundamentally change a direction in your life in some way?  Was it from a dream, a real experience, or was it after several experiences that so affected you that you finally awakened and told yourself no more!  Did something within you “click”, and you were able to see things from a different perspective, and that maybe you now needed something different or something more than what you were getting?  Was it a friend that gave you some feedback, was it at some social function that created a dissonance between what others thought and what you yourself thought that seeded an idea that there was something you wanted to do differently, thus started you on a journey for looking at things differently and changing your current orientation?  Commonly our observance of others’ ordeals often triggers something within us to make sure that we do not travel down a similar path or conversely they show us a way that we would like to emulate.

I know that many might use examples often found within their own families growing up that might make them think differently with having both positive and negative examples to draw from.  The lifetime built upon someone Else’s dreams can be a hard pill to swallow when they later reflect on their success of a notion that was not theirs in the first place.  I have seen many examples of parents indoctrinating their children with ideas of the direction they should take in their own lives without any consideration as to what the child themselves may wish to aspire to.  I think in contrast it is noble when parents inspire their children by way of example, unlike that of a prescribed directive spoon fed to them day in and day out.  This pontificating can lead to some serious issues as the children grow up with unrealized dreams of their own.  Those who do not break free from its grasp may lead lives fulfilling the dreams of their families, yet failing to meet the potentials originating from within them.

As Robert Frost wrote in The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I– I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. – See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15717#sthash.cfShtprA.dpuf

I do think that this has been misinterpreted as Frost himself has shed some light on his work in letters and correspondence to others.

The last lines “I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference” are often cited as emblematic of America’s individualist spirit of adventure, in a reading that assumes they are to be taken literally. This is doubtful: whatever difference the choice might have made, it was not made by a discerned difference between the two paths that opened up before the traveler. The speaker admits in the second and third stanzas that both paths may be equally worn and equally leaf-covered, and it is only in his future recollection that he will call one of the two roads, the one he took, “less traveled by.”

The “sigh” can be interpreted as one of regret or of self-satisfaction; in either case, the irony lies in the distance between what the speaker has just told us about the roads’ similarity and what his or her later claims will be. Frost might also have intended a personal irony: in a 1925 letter to Crystine Yates of Dickson, Tennessee, asking about the sigh, Frost replied, “It was my rather private jest at the expense of those who might think I would yet live to be sorry for the way I had taken in life.”

When you do not have much of a support group, when others around you pay little attention to you, and you have questions on what would be a good direction for you to pursue, than you must primarily rely on your own resources and experience with the world, thus, trial and error may play a large part in your decision-making.  Your talents and opportunities are predicated on what you have developed, what you have chosen to concentrate on which is also a starting point, but my focus is on those particular areas that you have not quite figured out for yourself, those areas that you do not have much experience in, or that what you once thought of as a sound path, has now been altered by a new perspective.

I can certainly remember times that struck a chord within me to change my aspect.  I think that maybe at times the persuasive forces that refocused my energies to gravitate towards these redefined goals because of my observations, or because of the feedback that others had given me was a metaphorical crossroad materializing before me.  I learned in part by the trial and error experiences in the social realms, an area I still have not even closely mastered to this day.  By that I mean that there are many situations that still elude me, as I continue to meet people who never stop surprising me with their behavior.

The question that keeps coming back to me is the kind of impression that is left upon me?  The deeper the impression of an event in your life, the more attention you give to it.  I like the song by INXS Don’t Change as it reminds me of a fresh start when pursuing new venues.  Our paths we choose are up to us.  The power of choice is within us.  What’s yours?

I’m standing here on the ground
The sky above won’t fall down
See no evil in all direction
Resolution of happiness
Things have been dark
For too long

Don’t change for you
Don’t change a thing for me

I found a love I had lost
It was gone for too long
Hear no evil in all directions
Execution of bitterness
Message received loud and clear

Don’t change for you
Don’t change a thing for me

I’m standing here on the ground
The sky above won’t fall down
See no evil in all directions
Resolution of happiness
Things have been dark for too long

Don’t change for you
Don’t change a thing for me