“Trust,” the prayer/meditation flag has been pieced together for over a week now. It sits, pinned together. Ready. It waits for me to begin sewing. Yet it sits.
This is painful. This waiting. For I cannot begin working again on the piece while so mired in my own ego. Don’t misunderstand that I think the ego a bad thing. It’s necessary to living in this world. However, the process of creating these flags doesn’t work with my ego too much front and center, or even a little off-center. So, until I can lay my feelings and thoughts about Trust (the flag and the concept) aside, the sewing machine remains silent.
Two months ago, I resumed trauma therapy to treat and cleanse what I thought was the fall-out from my Beloved’s choice to leave this world. The layers being peeled back are many and, I am finding, adhesive. The surprise though is that they have roots that go deeper than I had imagined.
If all my life has brought me to this place I am now, then all my life up until and including my husband’s death had been lived leading me to that point as well. Trauma isn’t isolated. It lives in context of one’s life. And I’d venture to say, much of what makes an event traumatic is that it connects in us/me to something else or many somethings from the past.
Trust is immense. It may be IT. THE thing. The key that opens up the path. My path anyway. First though, I’ve been spending a bit of time clearing away undergrowth and roots that have tripped me up for a very long time. That too though is about Trusting isn’t it?
Yesterday was a significant session of EMDR (I can’t recommend this treatment enough. I think it is the piece that has been missing from talk therapy) that reached back 54 years and healed a trauma that reached through multiple facets my family’s and my own treatment of me for years. Finally, finally, the memory was healed; and it’s a strange feeling but there is a sense that my neural networks are running through other events that stemmed from that one defining trauma and healing energy is firing through connections, rewiring years of related memories as well.
As I write that, I realize I am being stitched together, or re-stitched perhaps. I am the collage being moved about on the sewing machine. The colors, the energy, the connections, the details are all at work within me. In a new way this helps me see Mike’s death and even that trauma when I was 2, and multiple other events, that before were jumbled purple bruises in memory to be separate from who I am. Connected to me by love and compassion, empathy, sorrow, loss, but they no longer define the color of the network of my memories; and they no longer define me.
Trust in this moment. I am a point in time. Now. Born of yesterday. Bearing today and tomorrow. A point. A beginning.
Time to head up to the studio.