TAKING A TURN TOWARD BLISS

Why Be You When I Can Be Me?

It is not always

But it is many times. Thoughts arrive and compel me to remember them and write them down. But they escape me before I get a paper and pen or sit down at the word processor. Too many times I start to fulfill my list of things to do made the night before and put off the thoughts stirring around inside of me.

The thoughts are about my journey, mostly anchored in my struggling through the blockages rooted from my mother, justice or injustice in the world, my son or loves that have lost out in one way or another.

Sometimes I don’t know if I want to tell someone else my thoughts because it diminishes them by limiting them with words that box them in. Feelings, revelations and inspirational moments are deep, broad and tall. They make me feel alive. And that is the best thing about life. Being alive and feeling the sensation with renewed fullness never gets old. Even though I suppose I am entering the last season of my life, there has been a newness of feeling alive over the last few days. And I have been here before. Life ebbs and flows, that’s just the nature of it, do you agree?

I’m scared to do what I am doing. All those messages that speak to me without solicitation are like orders. And until now, I have carried those messages and voices inside me in the subconscious. The voices don’t want me to follow my bliss. The voices want me to live someone else’s idea of my life. I mentioned that I am scared. I am scared because to follow my bliss means I am not looking to make money, which I am soon going to be debilitatingly short of. But to be fully honest, I have put off my bliss for far too long and I have not used my time as wisely as I could have to get some of my bliss. But how will I ever know if what I have done isn’t just the path I was meant to be on? We don’t know. Nobody knows. Though there are many external voices saying how we should, what we should and when we should do whatever they think. In a way, when someone else says it and we follow whatever it is that they say, we are not thinking for ourselves.

Just in case it is the right thing to do, I am trying to walk a different life. The one that lets me create. Express myself in my writing, compose, sing and play the piano…and touch the rawness of seeing my personal truth and experience with my mother. In a way, I have been growing towards this my whole life. And spurred on by how life has unfolded for me, I have walked into the fire of my personal life consistently. Never being one to duck, cover and deny, getting this far and never feeling taller than I do now is really fine with me.

Raw is something I have always kept for myself. I connect with other people who daringly show their rawness. Do you know raw? Being real? The integrity of being you, putting yourself out there and being vulnerable without the guarded net of pretense? I wasn’t raised to be me. As I have increasingly found out, I was raised to pretend to be happy, fulfill some elusive list of the image required by my mother. And may I be honestly blunt and say that is no way to mother a child. Happiness isn’t something we can know unless we are as close to being our natural glorious selves. We are born to be ourselves. Not some cockemamy image.

I won’t be so honest here as to shortchange my momentary personal reservations, but maybe you don’t want to know too much. In real life, the one where we come face to face with other human beings, so often I find that people don’t want to know about what you really are feeling, thinking or doing. Those times when I sense another put up a shield of “I don’t want to know” or I sense them moving away even though they have taken no step yet to physically move. But I “feel” it, maybe it is in their mind and I have just felt what they are thinking. Maybe this is too much for you?

So much of what we really are experiencing is unknown to even ourselves or we know and are too guarded to let anyone else see or hear us speak what is really going on in our heads and souls.

I think if I wasn’t honest about how I feel about my mother for starters, I would be on antidepressant medication. I am one of those who believes what we emotionally bury is never buried. It will manifest itself in some way. Healthy or not. It is just a demand that the truest and most raw feelings make. We have no choice.

A painting hanging next to me while I type
by a VietNamese artist

I never wanted children. My own childhood gave me an adult who is full of self-doubt, unclear messages of what a good family is and love that had holes made by betrayal and the willingness to sacrifice a child for reasons that came from the parent’s unfulfilled happiness. Confusion has been the result because I was always told that I had a Christian family. A loving and caring family. Parents who have never gotten in touch with their own real selves run the risk of being found out by an adult child such as the likes of me. We are the ones who reach for the truth and are willing to live in it even if it means we have to distance ourselves from a parent.

I never wanted to bring a child into this world. I said it out loud to my mother while in sixth grade. I was eleven. The world didn’t seem a place I wanted to put a child in.

It was a huge responsibility to be the one to guide the child and prepare him or her for their destiny.

Then came a boy.

He was in second grade when I met him. Big part of my life.

There was and is Something Special here. It has been deeply painful and difficult. But life handed me Jonathan. And I accepted and received him into my life forever. But with the pain and difficulty there is also the underlying spirit connection that my now son and I have. I don’t know if he feels it. He has never told me. But on some level I believe he does feel it. We are kindred spirits. This is one of those parts of my life that has appeared without my planning, but become such an important part of this time on earth. Life unfolds and if we can look back on it and see the path of the journey, it is like someone has authored your life for you.

I can’t remember the two or three thoughts that compelled me to sit down today and write. And it felt so profound and compelling at the time. But this is what came out in its place.

I am currently doing something that I have always wanted to do. But it is the one thing that has been such a challenge because my body responds in such a way that I can’t breathe when I do it in public. I can speak in public about Darfur to hundreds of people. And I have many times. I have had lobby meetings with U.S. Senators Chafee, Reed and Whitehouse and Representative Kennedy. I have directed, composed for and produced musical presentations with hundreds of children, organized rallies, acted in college and community theatre. I drew the house plans and designed the landscaping for my current home. I won honorable mention in the very first art show that I entered a few years ago. I have traveled alone to Europe and to the southwest. Almost everything I have ever tired has been successful. I have even done this one thing as a lead in a musical years ago. But now I am daring to take this step and I have already failed in my opinion last week. And next Sunday, I am risking it again. It is singing solo in public. It doesn’t matter how much I practice or how many positive thoughts I come up with – put me in front of an audience and breathing seems impossible. I don’t know maybe, it is rooted in my childhood. Not good enough, not encouraged, seeing feelings of inferiority as a core value. They are just people looking at me, but they scare the living daylights out of me. It is not something I can pretend to overcome. Breathing and relaxing the throat muscles is my mountain to overcome. Wouldn’t it be great to actually overcome this and feel the freedom from the fear? If that day ever happens, I’ll get back to you. I would relish that I did this.

You don’t know if you don’t try.

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“Touching is wonder.
We think of it as reaching out
to know
to grow
to explore
to love
to believe.
But there is also reaching within . . .
An inside touching that comes first.

‘Satori’ is the Zen way
of acquiring a new point of view
for living
and looking.
not creating something new –
but seeing
and touching
in a different way.
it approaches religion
from the inside
letting it emerge
from man
rather than being imposed.
It finds
a revelation of the divine
within human experience,
within life itself.”

Please Touch by Edwin M. McMahon and Peter A. Campbell


“The Glory of God is Man Fully Alive” – St. Irenaeus of Lyons

“to believe in God is to know that thing you are
shall make you live
and it will never
make you do anything
less.” To Believe in God by Joseph Pintauro

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Genocide Ends When Enough of Us Stand Up Against It
JOIN US
1-800-GENOCIDE
www.savedarfur.org
www.genocideintervention.net
www.standnow.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One of my personal recent finds ~ I checked it out at the library . . .
Dear Frankie

A movie that is special in presentation, spirit of living and being real.

It speaks to us of a mother, father and a child.

If you see it, check out the director's commentary,
as well as deleted scenes.

BOYFRIENDS AND LIFE

"...Our loves are only symbols of an unknown immortality...and what is supposed to be gone and past is often more real than ever..." Cedric Wright

For the most part I find it pleasant thinking about my life. I have taken the road less traveled in terms of the family I came from. Even though my most impressionable years were in the 60's and 70's, I never inhaled. Meaning I never did any drugs of any sort. I never have been the daughter my mother wanted me to be. But it's not clear to me what it is she wants.

One of my unlived dreams is to sing in public. I have been practicing to try to overcome this. And I know my biggest obstacle is the fear that I have. Tonight just before sitting down to feed my need to write, I was playing the piano and singing and thinking about my dad. My father passed away May 10. 2007. But he always came in and sat down to listen to me sing and play the piano. Then when my mother put him in an institution the last couple years of his life, I would sing and sing for him in his room. The last thing I did was sing to him on the phone and he took his last breath at the end of that phone call. He lived in Indiana and I, in Rhode Island. So it felt like dad was there tonight enjoying the music.

In my early twenties, I moved from northern Indiana to Sturbridge, Massachusetts for my first year of teaching. My next two moves were chosen by taking out the map and finding towns along the New England coast. Leaving that one year of teaching behind and going through one personal time of transition, I connected with an old boyfriend.

Old boyfriends are fun to think about. Having kept a lot of the memorabilia, once in awhile I immerse myself in reading through old journals and letters. Nothing wrong with retouching the lessons and feelings of the past.

My second college boyfriend was a political science major and was reading Eldridge Cleaver’s book Soul on Ice back then. All people who have touched my life have left their mark. There is a part in the book where Mr. Cleaver, who is in Folsom Prison, and attorney, Beverly Axelrod, exchange letters. Deep letters. But I love deep. The letters began September 5, 1965.

E.C. writes: “I feel impelled to express myself to you extravagantly, and words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs leap in my mind. But I beat them down, refuse to write them, because it all seems so predictable and trite...What right have you to summon my soul from its slumber?......You have tossed me a lifeline. If you only knew how I’d been drowning, how I’d considered that I’d gone down for the third time long ago, how I kept thrashing around in the water simply because I still felt the impulse to fight back and the tug of a distant shore...”

B.A writes back: “...Believe this: I accept you. I know you little and I know you much, but whichever way it goes, I accept you. Your manhood comes through in a thousand ways, rare and wonderful...I have no measuring stick. I accept you...What an awesome thing it is to feel oneself on the verge of the possibility of really knowing another person. Can it ever happen? I’m not sure. I don’t know that any two people can really strip themselves that naked in front of each other. We’re so filled with fears of rejection and pretenses that we scarcely know whether we’re being fraudulent or real ourselves...”

E.C. answers back: “Your letters to me are living pieces – chunks! – of you, and are the most important things in my life...It only happens in books – or...Do you know what shameless thought just bullied its way into my consciousness? That, I deserve you, that I deserve to know you and to communicate with you...I seek a lasting relationship, something permanent in a world of change, in which all is transitory, ephemeral, and full of pain. We humans, we are too frail creatures to handle such titanic emotions and deep magnetic yearnings, strivings and impulses…

…The reason two people are reluctant to really strip themselves naked in front of each other is because in doing so they make themselves vulnerable and give enormous power over themselves one to the other. How awful, how deadly, how catastrophically they can hurt each other, wreck and ruin each other forever!...Better to maintain shallow, superficial affairs; that way the scars are not too deep, no blood is hacked from the soul. You beautifully – O, how beautifully!! – spoke...of ‘What an awesome thing it is to feel oneself on the verge of the possibility of really knowing another person...’ and...I do not believe that a beautiful relationship has to always end in carnage. I do not believe that we have to be fraudulent and pretentious,...I know that sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings. They see themselves as so inadequate that they feel forced to wear a mask in order to continuously impress the other. I do not want to ‘hold you’, I want you to ‘stay’ out of your own need for me. ...It takes time and deeds, and this involves trust, it involves making ourselves vulnerable to each other, to strip ourselves naked, to become sitting ducks for each other...I am vulnerable and defenseless and I make myself a duck for you. ...And it is not a fraud, forced out of desperation...”

Isn’t this beautiful?

Excerpts from love letters taken from the book SOUL ON ICE, by Eldridge Cleaver, 1965.

"What an awesome thing it is to feel oneself on the verge of the possibility of really knowing another person... and...I do not believe that a beautiful relationship has to always end in carnage. I do not believe that we have to be fraudulent and pretentious" ~ I so love this because I, too, believe pretense shortchanges us out of the life we were born to have.

Above picture of me from my first trip to Europe by myself ~ taken on the encouragement of a boyfriend! Six weeks including Luxemburg, France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece and Spain.

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I organized the
Providence, Rhode Island
October 27, 2007 Torch Relay
as a part of the
Dream for Darfur Campaign
to pressure China to act and end the Darfur geonocide.

The culminating Torch Relay is taking place in Washington, D.C.
on International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2007.

Edwin Mutanguha has passed the torch to his brother Edward Mutanguha who is carrying the torch in the picture.

The t-shirts say I CARRY THE TORCH FOR DARFUR on the front
and STOP GENOCIDE on the back.



Left to right: Samantha Brilhante, Frankie Daponte, Sandra Hammel, Edwin Mutanguha

Call 1-800-GENOCIDE
Tell U.S. Senators to support SADA to help end the Darfur Genocide

www.dreamfordarfur.org
www.savedarfur.org
www.genocideintervention.org

Call President Bush and tell him to actually act on his words
regarding the Darfur genocide: NOT ON MY WATCH.
Talk is useless, President Bush.
His number: 202-456-1111