Samuel Beckett: “Not to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and to never stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.”

It has been frightening to be so far away from myself–and here I am ready to write again, to nourish my soul by responding to its desire for reflection, contemplation and expression by sharing with you.

Shortly after making the commitment to this website/blog, I realized doing so would be more daunting than I had expected. As a child, I learned that to speak what I experience and believe is dangerous.   No matter how much I wanted to live differently, my lifetime modus operandi has been to start speaking and then to hold back on going deeper to the nub of my belief. The childhood experience of observing the devastating outcome of speaking the truth continued to echo, thwarting my desire to speak my truth fully and completely.

Over these past two months I have continued to struggle with staying focused on this desire. I have consulted with a psychiatrist who is working with menopausal women who have lost their focus and ability to attend to a task, instead going from one activity to another mindlessly. Last week I agreed to take Vyvanse (Google study at Penn re women and menopause focus and attention issues) on a trial basis to see if this would help me maintain my focus and attention on my desired task.

On the exact same day, I worked on a dream with my Jungian dream analyst. In no uncertain terms, the dream said I needed to tap into the spontaneity that I had as a child–the energy that was drained out of me by my mother’s confrontation with her father which led to her being disinherited and her subsequent decision to fight this change to his will all the way to the State Supreme Court. (I plan to eventually include this story “Living beyond Evil.” under the Living into Our Dying website tab.) Although we lived in my grandfather’s house, I have no conscious memory of this fighting, nor my mother’s determination which turned to devastation when she lost the case.  However, it has lived on in my unconscious; my inheritance has been to be terrified to do fully what she had dared to do–to go to the outer limits to fight injustice.

Now I am consciously defying that silencing voice, even by telling you the bare bones of this story. Over the past 14 years since my late husband’s death, I have written 56,000 words of a memoir about his dying, our relationship, and shifts in our spirituality. Now I realize instead of struggling to construct a literary memoir, I want to begin by publishing pieces on this website. I am discovering that to let unfold what wants to unfold is one function of my doing this website and blog. The dream also made clear that I had to mark out the time from 9-12 every day possible (I usually work on Monday and Tuesday morning) so that I can stay faithful to my desire/my calling at this time in my life.

My two major topics and tabs on my website are DARING Faith and Living Well into Our Dying. In my blog I began by focusing on the former since I was attending The Parliament of World Religions. Then I hit a roadblock. Everything in my conscious mind stopped wanting to write, even remembering to write. Now forces conscious and unconscious have combined to say, “If not now, when?” And my attention has shifted for the time being to Living into Our Dying.

Thank you for bearing with me through this hiatus.