MOMENTS OF REAL VERSUS A LIFETIME OF PRETENDING

I choose the moments I have left to be moments without pretending.


When Death Comes

by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

from the book Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime
page 111-112

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I am reading the book The Body Never Lies by Alice Miller. And it is so helping me. It says things I have already learned, but find it so helpful to see in print the words. It validates and gives permission to really believe things that have so rung true in my search for living a life fully, free and unencumbered. I have colored the sentences that just made me pause and drink it in.

If you click on the post title, you will go to Alice Miller's website.

From chapter 10, The Body as Guardian of the Truth
a story of Elizabeth from pages 121 - 123
...But, as always I managed to ignore my own feelings and adjust to her mentality...All I had to do was to listen to my own body, because in all the encounters with my mother I was invariably afflicted with severe physical symptoms as soon as I started repressing my feelings. My body appears to be completely unerring in this respect, and my impression is that it knows my truth very well; better than my conscious self...

It would be nice if I could find someone who would let me be as I am, let me say all the things I would like to say, who would not force-feed me with moralistic homilies. This might help me intregrate my painful memories....I am closer to my own feelings than I have ever been before. I can express them...Since I started doing that, my physical complaints and my depression have more or less disappeared.

...I haven't seen my mother once this year, and I do not feel the need to do so. The memories...protect me from any illusions I might have and also from expectations, that she might have something to give me that I missed out on so much as a child. Even though I still miss it from time to time, I now know exactly where there is absolutely no point in looking for it. ...I feel no hatred in me. I do not need to hate my mother because I am no longer emotionally dependent on her.

...failed to understand that. She wanted to free me of my hatred and did not realize that she was unintentionally thrusting me into that hate, which was an expression of my dependency, a dependency she would have created all over again...Today, I no longer need to suffer from pretending that I have feelings for my mother. I don't. That is why there is no hatred left inside me.

And this part I was really grateful to read:
It does not matter so much whether we have to break off all contact with our parents or not. The process of separation, the path from childhood to adulthood, takes place inside us. Sometimes breaking off all contact is the only way in which we can live up to our own needs.

Form Chapter 11 ~ Can I Say It?
page 127
I can well remember the fears that haunted me when I was writing Thou Shalt Not Be Aware.
...I knew quite definitely that I had chanced on an unwritten law, the devastating exploitation of children for the retaliatory needs of their parents and the taboo placed on that reality by society. We shall not be aware.

Did I not risk incurring the severest of penalties if I insisted on breaking that taboo? But my fear also helped me to understand a lot of things...

p 132 -133
...When their parents lie dying, they desperately hope to feel, at the very last moment, the acceptance and confirmation that they never felt in the presence of their parents throughout their whole lives. Dagnmar writes:
Every time I talk to my mother I feel a poison flowing into my body and forming an ulcer there. I try not to see it like that, because seeing it like that gives me guilt feelings. Then the ulcer starts to suppurate, and every time I lapse into depression. I try to admit my true feelings and tell myself I have the right to feel them, to see the intensity of my anger. When I admit my feelings, although they are not always good feelings, I start to breathe again. I start allowing myself to stay with my true feelings. If I succeed in that, I feel better, more alive, and my depression disappears.

...But, how can I respect myself if I don't take my true feelings seriously? If I don't do that, I don't know who I am, I don't know who I'm supposed to be respecting.

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See the comment section for personal writing

NO HYPOCRITE IN THE MIRROR

This poem I wrote while in college. The time would have been sometime between 1970 through 1972. I had recently left the college that I loved, North Central College in Naperville, Illinois outside of Chicago. I was attending the local college, Huntington College in Huntington, Indiana which is a very fundamentalist Christian college. I had heard that I was being judged on the reputation of another female student that I was considered to be friends with. I don’t remember her name, but she had a reputation by the other students for being a “wild” young woman. I didn’t have that knowledge of her. And I wrote this poem in a response to this.

I share it here, asking anyone who wants to share or copy it to always put my name with it as the author.

In Risking
By Sandra Hammel

Accept me as I am
Don’t require me to be
anything I’m not

Don’t ask of me to measure up
to your standards
or to live by any code that is pre-anything,
preconceived, pre-generation, pre-set.
I’d rather take the probable consequences
and possible discrimination,
if necessary, for me to be myself.
If I’d be any other way
I would have to face a hypocrite
in my mind’s constant mirror.

There is no alternative.
I am me.
My ideals are not borrowed
or second generation,
they are just mine…
fused conglomeration.

I try to love others
for what they are,
not for what I can make them up to be.

My hope is that
you can accept me
as I alone am.
If you cannot,
then words be silent
and we will part
going our separate ways.
Peace.

For those of us who can meet
the beautiful of earth is ours in infinity.
We will stop no where
all in us is open
and all is open to us.

We dare to step out into this world of infinity
aware of the possible hurt,
but knowing we must become so vulnerable.
We have no other way to be.
The arms of our souls are long,
the depth of our warmth penetrates beyond physical imagination.

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Eva Cassidy sings True Colors

The following is an excerpt from Margery Williams' The Velveteen Rabbit

THERE was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen. On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy's stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws, the effect was charming.

There were other things in the stocking, nuts and oranges and a toy engine, and chocolate almonds and a clockwork mouse, but the Rabbit was quite the best of all. For at least two hours the Boy loved him, and then Aunts and Uncles came to dinner, and there was a great rustling of tissue paper and unwrapping of parcels, and in the excitement of looking at all the new presents the Velveteen Rabbit was forgotten.

For a long time he lived in the toy cupboard or on the nursery floor, and no one thought very much about him. He was naturally shy, and being only made of velveteen, some of the more expensive toys quite snubbed him. The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real. The model boat, who had lived through two seasons and lost most of his paint, caught the tone from them and never missed an opportunity of referring to his rigging in technical terms. The Rabbit could not claim to be a model of anything, for he didn't know that real rabbits existed; he thought they were all stuffed with sawdust like himself, and he understood that sawdust was quite out-of-date and should never be mentioned in modern circles. Even Timothy, the jointed wooden lion, who was made by the disabled soldiers, and should have had broader views, put on airs and pretended he was connected with Government. Between them all the poor little Rabbit was made to feel himself very insignificant and commonplace, and the only person who was kind to him at all was the Skin Horse.

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

For the entire story The Velveteen Rabbit

USA Voters

Choosing our Presidents
hasn't shown voters' thoughtful,
informed voting selections

Leaders with traits of

Authenticity
Consciousmess
Perceptive judgments

versus

Inauthentic
Searching for personal satisfaction
Missing genuine issues

Voting on whims

Led by pundits

Mindless chatter

Ignoring what matters

How can WE be at war

and it is not the most important issue?

SOMETHING IN THE WAY IT FEELS ~ LOVE FOR LIFE

No Matter What
You Were The One

I love this movie ~ The Notebook, from the writing of Nicholas Sparks. This is about the kind of love I would have wanted for myself. And anybody else. If you haven't seen it, I hope that you will. This is a montage of scenes.
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The Notebook ~ Feels Like Home song by Chantal Kreviazuk.
From: Monique1203

Directed by Nick Cassavetes

Ryan Gosling

...

Noah Calhoun

Rachel McAdams

...

Allie Hamilton

James Garner

...

Duke

Gena Rowlands

...

Allie Calhoun

Joan Allen

...

Anne Hamilton

David Thornton

...

John Hamilton

James Marsden

...

Lon Hammond Jr.

Kevin Connolly

...

Fin

Jamie Anne Allman

...

Martha Shaw

Starletta DuPois

...

Nurse Esther

I always have found it impossible to choose just one video clip to include, so here is a scene taken directly from the movie.
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Why Didn't You Write Me?

From: SgtFluffyMcFay

Another scence taken directly from The Notebook:
Now, say I'm a bird...

Clips taken from "The Notebook" set to the music Fix You by Coldplay.

Allie finally reads one of Noah's letters

See what I mean?