Hole

Sleep is a healer.  Monday arrives mildly when I’ve gone to bed early on Sunday.  It is a lesson learned with great pain over the years – training somewhat like a dog’s shock collar.  The sting of stepping out of necessary sleep forces me at some point to cringe in agony and remember the protective boundaries of restedness.  Lack of sleep is often a factor when I find myself in a mental hole, the dark place where one might retreat when worn, worried, wiped out.  It is not a happy place nor is it compelling for long-term habitation.  A hole opens for many people from things like illness, heartbreak, addiction, abuse, exhaustion, confusion, stress, loneliness, delusion. I see connection between hole and a potential synonym, depression.

 

The noun hole is defined at dictionary.com.
1.  an opening through something; gap
2.  a hollow place in a solid body or mass; a cavity
3.  the excavated habitation of an animal; burrow
4.  a small, dingy or shabby place
5.  a place of solitary confinement; dungeon
6.  an embarrassing position or predicament
7.  a cover or small harbor
8.  a fault or flaw
9.  a deep, still place in a stream

 

An important thing about the hole is to know when I am in it.  That I can get out.  I may need help.  And I most likely have fallen prey to unhelpful habits.  It’s a habit, crawling into the hollow place where we have forgotten our connection to our Source.  The bad habit of believing that we are not enough is fortified as we humans live hearing society’s mistaken stories of how things “should be” and how we have fallen short.

As life’s sticks and stones find their way to our hearts they bring weight, heaviness that drops us to our knees.  Curled up in a small, shabby mental space we might feel safer in darkness even though it hurts there in a constant, predictable way.  Maybe the hole happens because only in total darkness can I see clearly the path toward light?  As such, the hole might be a teacher.

Animals often go into a burrow or seek darkness to have babies.  Only from a grave can someone rise from the dead.  Life comes out of darkness all the time – every birth, every spring, every lighting of a candle.  The deal is not to stay in the dungeon.  We suffer there when we are hiding and it doesn’t end until we reconcile.  A little wallowing might be necessary sometimes just as a seed goes deep in the dirt to find its purpose (which is, of course, to grow toward the light).  Creeping into the hole is not necessarily a bad thing - choosing never to come out is. 

In self-watching, we learn what revitalizes us – sleep, exercise, meditation, support groups, therapy, friends, prayer, yoga.  It generally involves time and practice and patience.     

I can recognize when I find myself in a hole, accept what is, and find the desire to rise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perspective

My daughter’s school hosts VIP day, previously Grandparents’ Day renamed to include a wider range of Very Important People.  No previous generation folk of our clan were available, so my daughter invited me.  Upon arrival I received a card she wrote.  It stated she was glad I attended and, “Now we can finally spend some time together.”  This sentence took me by surprise because, as far as I can tell, we spend A LOT of time together.  Being that she is only in 2^nd grade and I have spent the last thirteen years primarily in the occupation of homemaking and child rearing I thought I was around pretty much most all the time.  I was immediately struck by the pertinence of her perspective.

Three entries from dictionary.com define perspective for my thoughts today.  I am not writing about art or dimensional drawing.
1.  the state of one’s ideas, the facts known to one, etc. in having a meaningful interrelationship
2.  the faculty of seeing all the relevant data in a meaningful relationship
3.  a mental view of prospect

Perspective is how things look from one’s point of seeing.  My young daughter perhaps sees that her time with me is often shared because she is the third child and we regularly travel as a pack.  I see that the majority of my time is spent with kids in general.  I see that including her in cooking and baking or grocery shopping helps us find time together and get essential tasks done.  She might see that as work, not quality time.  What the deal is with our different perspective regarding reading together at bedtime or watching a movie, just the two of us, I don’t know.

That’s really what is on my mind right now.  I don’t, can’t, will never really know her perspective because I am not her.  She is not me.  We are not each other.  People can certainly endeavor to be respectful of other’s mental view of things and to try to see our own perspective as one of the options, but we all walk in our own shoes. 

Perspective was on my mind this morning as I chaperoned a school trip to see a play about Harriet Tubman and The Underground Railroad.  Beautiful seven-year-old faces stared toward the stage, some white and some brown, some rapt and some dozy.  I chatted with a few kids on the bus ride before the show.  Two were incredulous people had ever been slaves, as if it was news to them.  That made me smile, not because I think they should be ignorant of history, but because they thought the whole idea stupid.  One girl remarked, “Those people must have been crazy because everybody should treat everybody the same nice way.”  Blue, brown, green, and in-between eyes all watched together the staged story woven of injustice and bravery.  I wondered how it looked through each set of eyes.        

I welcome differing perspective so that I learn many ways of seeing.