False Start Number Three

The Montague Bookmill's motto is, "Books you don't need, in a place you can't find."

I found the place, and, in contradiction of their motto, I found the books I needed.  Roaming through its two stories I found books that seemed like a variation on a familiar theme. 

After finding these books I came home and pulled off the shelf Women Who Run with Wolves. This book seemed to track me over the years and jump off the shelf to lay in my hands.  I finally bought it once and opened it momentarily, to only give it away.  Once again it found me--this time in a pile of free books.

I opened then with good intent.  It was 2010.  About the same time I purchased Christine Northrup's Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, another book that seemed to be following me. 

There was a plan.  I was going to read these two books together.  Why?  Besides the feeling that these two books had something to tell me I opened the book and began to read:

While women's loss of innocence is often ignored, in the underground forest a woman who has lived through the demise of her innocence is seen as someone special, in part because she has been hurt, but much more so because she has gone on, because she is working hard to understand, to peel back the layers of her perceptions and her defenses to see what lies underneath.  In that world, her loss of innocence is treated as a rite of passage.  That she can now see more clearly is applauded.  that she has endured and continues to learn give her both status and honor.  (396)

I continued reading:

This psychic ability is often called processing.  When we process, we sort through all the raw material in the psyche, all the things we've learned, heard, longed for, and felt during a period of time.  We break these down into parts, asking, "How shall I use this best?"  We use these processed ideas and energies to implement out most soulful tasks and to fund our various creative endeavors.  In this way a woman remains both sturdy and lively. (396) 

 This is why the book had found me.  I was entering my tenth year of divorce.  I was a single mother to four children.  I had been involved in a non-profit group for the last few years as a volunteer that moved in a direction of recognition of motherhood and womanhood.  Believing more in my voice than I could remember for a long time I applied to graduate school. In November of 2009 I began a Master of Fine Arts program in Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.  Then things went off track again:

Whether they are being too cool or too well-behaved, in neither state are they responsive to what goes on deep inside, and a sleep gradually cover over the bright-eyed, responsive nature....When a woman surrenders her instincts that tell her the right time to say yes and when to say no, when she gives up her insight, intuition, and other wildish traits, then she finds herself in situations that promised gold but ultimately give grief.  Some women relinquish their art for a grotesque financial marriage, or give up their life's dream in order to be a good wife, daughter, or girl, or surrender their true calling in order to lead what they hope will be a more acceptable, fulfilling, and more sanitary life.

 As I read back over these underlined paragraphs, marginal notes and place them in the timeline of my life, my heart breaks.  When life became challenging again due to, well, life, I turned to some people for assistance who directed me to another, more reasonable, path. 

By her sweetness, her warm and welcoming voice, her lovely manner, she not only attracted those who took away an ember from her, but so large a crowd gathered before her soulful fire that they blocked her from receiving any of its warmth herself.

The poor bargain she had made was to never say no in order to be consistently loved.  The predator of her own psyche offered her the gold of being loved if she would give up her instincts that said "Enough is enough." (398)

Right at the time I seem to have stumbled on the guidance and answers I needed to "find my voice" I sacrificed it.  In 2010 I made the marginal note, "HOPE!  Teaching is a means to the end-it is not the end after reading the following:

Over the long term there will be even better news yet.  That which has been given away can be reclaimed.  It can be restored to its proper place in the psyche.  You will see. (401)

 And then, I put the book away.  I stopped writing in my journals.  I went back to school for teaching certification the next semester as "instructed."  Much has happened since then.  Much happened before then.  Much  more is to come.  I am not sure what.

I do know that I came out the other side and am finally saying, "Enough is enough.  I am going to sit right down here--by my fire--and process."