Choosing

Yesterday started out badly.  One of the cats decided he needed to be up, bouncing off things in the bedroom and yodeling, at 5:30 am.  This, of course, jolted me awake and I couldn’t go back to sleep.  I do NOT get up at 5:30 am. 

I decided to kill some time by checking out Facebook.  It was TBT—Throwback Thursday.  This is when various friends publish old photos they’ve dug out and dusted off and scanned onto the internet.  For some reason, a memory of a particularly ugly scene, starring my mother and me and a box of old family photographs at my sister’s house, shot into my brain.  It came upon me so suddenly it was physically painful.  I burst into tears.

It doesn’t take much these days to kill whatever small buzz of happiness or contentment I can muster.  I’m out of sorts, mildly depressed and fussy.  My life is not in a great or rewarding place, and I don’t know how to get out of the rut I’m in.  This was NOT a great time for a painful memory to raise its ugly head.  I was very nearly undone. 

I determined that I had very definitely "lost my peace."  I needed to take some sage, go out to my "coffee and prayer" deck and perform a self-smudging ritual, try to re-center and re-establish that peace.  I needed help cleansing away these ugly thoughts.  The Universe would help me.

When I finally got outside and started my ceremony, there were still tears in my eyes.  I couldn’t get rid of the picture of my mother looking at me as if I were a stranger, asking my sister, “Where is SHE going with MY pictures?”  I couldn’t seem to latch on to the fact that by that time, Mom was half-senile and not altogether right in the head.  I was wounded beyond endurance.  My own mother thought of me as “other.”  “She.”   The pain caused by this ten-year-old memory was almost as sharp as when it was fresh. 

I was desperate for cleansing, for forgetfulness.  I set a match to the sage, but it kept going out.  What did that mean?  Did it mean that even the Universe had abandoned me?  That I was going to be left alone to writhe in my misery?  I began to stumble down a steep path into a true depression that would probably last at least the whole day, if not longer.  I was no good to anyone or anything, so I might as well BE no good to anyone or anything.  What did it matter?

And then a thought sprang into my head.  A completely calm and coherent thought.  “You can choose to wallow…”  It was as if a rope had been thrown around me and jerked me back, away from that steep slope. 

“You’re right.  I am choosing to wallow.  How else does an ancient memory of a long-dead conflict threaten to undo your life ten years later?  Not gonna do that…”

So I didn’t.  I went out and pulled some bushes out of the ground instead. 

I felt much better this morning.