Obedient Daughter

I finally belong to myself.

I am picking up the dog poop in the garage like I have been asked to and then some out in the yard.  I begin to have a dialogue in my head about it.  I have done it because, "I am an obedient daughter".  This resonates inside me to when I was an young Christian woman and further back to the teenage girl living under the watchful eye of my father. 

Then I ask myself, what has all my obedience brought me only to find myself laughing sarcastically for all of my bittersweet rule following.  And so I wrote these words in reflection.

Waking in the morning light
I find myself asleep.
the sun is up and windows drawn
my eyes closed tight like night.
No oarsman came to guide me
No entries ever writ
until my heart in it's own time
did tear me into bits.

When I was a child I couldn't harm a man, woman or child. 
My heart was drawn with guarded sword to love them every kind. 
To stranger ones I was attuned, the outcast, dumped, unkind. 
Inside my heart the loving me could never them deny.

I was always trying to "do the right thing".  It kind of ran my behaviour.  I never wanted to hurt any ones feelings or have a bad reputation.  Why all the care about what other people think of me? I am still only at the beginning of understanding this and doing what ever I feel, not just do what is right because I am an obedient daughter.

My figure was always my balance.  If I had not been born with this beautiful shape to buoy my soul I could not have had the courage to be.  God in his wisdom made my body my anchor because my mind and soul became riddled by the handling of a man as a very young child.  My well proportioned figure gave me confidence I did not have in my heart, to be myself.  My body is my harbor. 

More poetry...

Because I was an obedient daughter I asked permission of my parents to marry a man who had asked for my hand, trusting that there blessing would secure my happiness. 

Because I was an obedient daughter I took on the customs and culture of my husband and blended to be a part of his family.  I had never found myself so how could I have ever stayed an individual.  I was a "good wife".

Because I was an obedient daughter I went to church and worshipped with raised hands and repentant heart.  Diverted my eyes and lips from things unseemly.  As yet I did not know my own soul.

Because I was an wise woman I decided to finally have children.  I didn't want to sacrifice all of my time but knew I might regret it and now I never will.

Because I was an obedient daughter I shut my mouth held my tongue and lost my breath.

Because I could no longer live in obedience I turned and walked away from it and died to it all.  I broke my heart and left.  My heart is broken still. 

Then I left my faith.

Oh broken heart and faith of mine
Oh thee how do I fix?
I lay at night and sup good wine
for thine immortal fix.
Blind eyes and ears in thee I find
no colored summer days.
Where did the light and color go
and when will it return.

R
journal entry 5/14/10

Turning Point

I am reaching some turning point.  I am gaining some stability, having less emotional turmoil compounded by drinking binges.  I have not however recovered any of my former painting style illiciting passionate stories of my experience in 3 years.  This being said I did complete my most successful painting to date last year, a commission called "Dance My Soul".  But mostly since regaining a studio space after seperation 'o6, cancer and divorce '07, I have mostly only drank, wept and ruined alot of work.  Kudos to the angel of a man who is loving me through it anyways.  My anger is subsiding.

Immigrant

My grandma died.  She died just over a week ago at 98 years old. 

I have been looking more into of the concept of energy again. And how to change where I am.  I find I need to also know what I come from.  I was listening to some streams about wealth and about what we believe about ourselves that lies just below the surface that affects our wealth and what we expect and receive.  Even the patterns that dictated our childhood that we can be living out of subconciously and how it affects our energy.  So I have been seeking.  The morning of the funeral a I woke up to a vision that was sent to me of an immigrant sitting on the steps of her yard.  It was surrounded by a chain link fence.  You could tell she was an immigrant by the way she was dressed and with a scarf around her head.  I was struck by vision and layed and meditated on it and wondered who she was.  When she/or I removed her scarf it was my great grandmother Ogot.  My grandmothers mother. I still don't know what she means but I know it was related to my desire to unlock my energy for more success.

After Christmas this year I will change my name to Renee Michele.

Time

It has been nearly 5 years now since I left... at heart that is and now I am beginning to heal.  The pain never seems to be extinguished nor my attachment to Joseph and the tribe we have made.  I love him without explanation; the pain never ends.  But I am better now.  Not angry all the time, everyday on, and on, and on.  Perhaps it is better also for him for how can one find peace with a perpetually distraught wife?!  Even if she were a good wife?!  But I miss him more and more as time passes and the unity of my married life and the devotion of family.  I guess I am right where I belong because that is every moment in life.  You are exactly where you should be.  I don't claim to understand why I have to be here today but I am and so I try and be at peace. 

I LOVE MY CHILDREN LIKE NOTHING I HAVE EVER KNOWN.   

I dearly love the man I am with as well and have never been so at peace.

Carnival.

Renee Michele

Sugar and Money

Fathers Day 2010. I love my children. They are the very heart of me. They are like sugar making life sweet.

Anger...

... Is when a person doesn't get what they want and there day gets ruined and spoils the mood and changes the celebration from a gift into a responsibility.

What do I believe?

A few years back I left my marriage to try to make sense of what "I thought" happiness was supposed to be. I woke up very early one Saturday morning to a voice that was as audible as someone speaking out loud, my inner voice speaking loudly to myself. I heard it say "I'm going to leave this guy" and knew it was the truth. My heart started to pound. These were not easy words to hear. As a woman, as a mother and a christian these words shook my world. 24 hours later I began to leave. This was no act of faith on my part. This was an act of will. There was no consolation for getting divorced in the Bible so I lost faith for a while because I couldn't move forward in it. I was frightened, at times terrified at what might befall me having made this choice. I literally I broke my own heart in the life I had invested so I wouldn't lose my mind. During that time I even went so far as to pose an option to myself like you could leave your husband or you could leave Christianity and stay married and maybe that would work but inside I knew it wasn't the answer to peace either. Consequently, I ended up leaving both.

How could I leave someone for my own happiness. For a lot of people this is easy. They just turn and walk away and demolish their past like it's nothing. But it haunts me, it revisits me over and over like waves on a shore. Like a silent movie with no sound I am straining to be at rest with what I have chosen. What is the matter with me? Why can't I let this thing go?! It feels like the most selfish thing I've ever done.

Such a fine wife I made. Why did I leave? I left because I felt alone. I was living inside of myself, functioning inside the relationship. This still small place cramped in the middle of this fantastic family.  I was on the margins, the epitome of goodness. It was my display of devotion, and it was from the heart but it did not include me. I had had difficulty with Christianity from the beginning. I remember early on in the 1st and 2nd year encountering lose of identity in the most devastating way being swept into a cult. Another time giving in to depression caused by the divide in what I was trying to be and who I was on a very organic level, in the matrix of being that I am.  So I counseled twice for those 2 things, counseled again when I found myself falling in love with my former husband and began to gain some insight into the issue.

At another moment time I was going to leave my family because I felt I was going to have a total breakdown. All the hours alone with small babies were so long and late into the night but God in his mercy changed their fathers work schedule that very same dayand I gained some relief. I never thought about divorce. It was not within my principles of faith, never in my conversations for many reasons. We were raising children having a great family life and  divorce was not biblical. As for partnership we were somewhat at odds with each other over my artistic career, homeschooling and all my alternative beliefs that were challenges and him leaving the creative field for financial reasons and unobtained opportunities.

Finally, I chose to stop thinking about all I believed and made an "illegal u turn" in the middle of my life, pushed a grocery cart out into traffic as a distraction and left. Keeping what I knew of God as being an emphatically loving entity I pushed all of my beliefs aside in order to move forward and haven't turned back. It is my belief that He will bring this thing full circle and bring me back into relationship with new understanding. Not saying it has been easy or I never have doubts and wonder if this whole thing is going to fly back in my face like a grenade!? So far it has supported me this wonderful, purposeful, painful reconciliation of me to my own life. In the end I realized I never left God but left the rules and regulations of a Christian life in order to live my life. After all...  it is mine to live.

Periculum

Yesterday I had reached the end of my wits at this job, I feel like I am stuck. I stated, "something has to change, something just has to change".


I had an amazing dream this morning, the stars streaming towards me from the dark, a gigantic fish (carp?) swimming at me through the air, coming below my naked body and making love to me transferring something to me in the form of direction, abundance and great success.  As I am revisiting this astonishing dream I hear and see this word in my mind. It is so unfamiliar I am not even sure how to spell it, I thought it was perniculum, but turned out to be periculum. For some reason I think maybe it is one of those little conductor wands or one of the teacher witches wand from Harry Potter.  This seems to fit what the meaning is I glean from this word although it is not the wand itself. The wave of the wand that relieves me from performing some duty of obligation, the conductor orchestrating the combination of circumstances that make it possible all an act of God.

Next day...I believe it was a guide, my animal guide. 

Pe`ric´u`lum
n. 1. (Rom. & O.Eng. Law) Danger; risk.
2. In a narrower, judicial sense: Accident or casus, as distinguished from dolus and culpa, and hence relieving one from the duty of performing an obligation.

Ca´sus
n. 1. An event; an occurrence; an occasion; a combination of circumstances; a case; an act of God. See the Note under Accident.