I have been busy, so its been a minute.. I haven’t much to say, too, and I am loathe to write just because. In the last few years I have gone back to my studio discipline after teaching for a number of years. Most of my writing has been while I taught, which was itself a side track experience that has helped me be better in my studio practice.

I am back to the studio since late 2017, where I designed entirely new lines of work for a business that would have a strong online presence. The demands of a business are always significant, more a lifestyle than something that you punch in and out of each day. There continues to be new work, new efforts in new directions with the studio even after my return in 2017 where I spent two years simply designing new work with no focus on selling (this was my own self-imposed creative retreat and it was wonderful). I could say how I doubled numbers over last year with an emerging event, certainly something nice, but that too is itself, when put into context, rings hollow to me. This is what happens when your world and your purposes are shifted so dramatically by this light bulb experience called awakening. When you have been to the mountain, there is this feeling of “meh” sometimes….something that by rights ought not happen to a person who is able to accept what-is, but I am after all human just like everyone else. I can say though that while parts of the studio process leave me unimpressed, the core fire of the creative where opposites merge is most of what keeps me above ground. It’s possible that it a problem with my personality who, upon being one with the Supreme Consciousness, has trouble staying on the farm after that. I suppose I should be more flexible, more humble, and more accepting. Like St Theresa of Avilla, I am left pensive for that time when I can leave here and be in spirit and be with that perfectly beautiful presence again. It’s enough to make anyone pull away from the worldly things. And yet, there is a path through and back to the inspired state, too, which I find in creativity. Bliss, I find, drives creativity and creativity drives bliss. But lot of bliss can kind of bleach you out it seems. When you have been “to the mountain” what do you do after that? I think you really have to look carefully to see the sublime in everything. I think bliss can also alter your physiology, which is itself a bit of a challenge many may not recognize right off. I remind myself that every moment in this system of reality is an amazing creative miracle where energy turns itself inside out to appear as matter to us and that the whole shebang is being recreated nano-second by nano-second. Its pretty amazing. That is what I have to hold onto to, which sounds a little crazy (I admit).

What can I tell you that will feed your soul? What can I tell you that will help sharpen your awareness in just the right way? Maybe only you can do that, and maybe all I can ever hope to do is to inspire you to that place.

The paperwhites, which are in full bloom now in the front window of the gallery lean to the light and fill the air with this super sweet reminder of how precious nature finds recreating itself to be: it creates a scent so sweet and strong that it is hard for pollinators to resist. The creation will put on its best so it can continue, and here we are spinning through space, a part of this dance of creation.

It’s interesting how, at a time when I am attending to the inner work the least, issues of karma have resolved themselves. I had always wondered about the power of time on karmic glitches…I think people think how they are so permanent, and I think they are only insofar as we are tied to what those karmas represent. Some of them I think just age out, that is, their once-strong impression is now rendered like nothing after inactivity and shifting awareness from that place within where it lies. No longer being given sustenance, like leaves they fall and die, but remain all about us because conscious recognition hasn’t touched them, and it has always seemed that once the conscious or outer self acknowledges them, those karmic threads are fully transmuted and we are freed from their governing effects (see ‘triggers’).

What happened for fifteen years was a near-constant attending to this process as a result of a kundalini awakening. Its important, certainly, but a few years ago I noticed how so much of the energetic entanglements that I had in my field were resolving themselves one way or another. Some of it, though, seems to have happened in a more background fashion, made possible by simply not “gnawing” on it.

Recently, my ex wife showed up in order to express how she was sorry for how she had treated me over the years after our divorce (and during it). True, her bad treatment of me had spanned years, and true it had been persistent and it had been harrowing for me because of how manipulative the behavior was and how it included my children as emotional pawns in the process (something I was powerless to do anything about, to change, or to help my children with besides grinning and bearing it). The process was one of emotional abuse on her part, seeking to hurt me because I dared stand up for what was right at one point in our divorce process, while my children were used as a way to get at me by trying to alienate them.

This experience was like living in a hall of mirrors where everything that was her fault was put onto me, a very strange form of misdirection and projection all at once. This person sought to try and destroy or spoil my relationship with not just my children but also with family members. In a strange way, people in my family had connections to either my ex or her new husband in odd entirely coincidental ways (a sister of mine employed her future husband before we ever divorced for instance).

I had been made into this monster who could not be treated like a normal human…not allowed to approach the house because clearly I was a danger. Park on the street, stuff like this, and stay away from the house (my house). I was never threatening, I never gave her a reason to treat me in this way. Turns out though that this is often how people are treated when targeted with parental alienation. The real person who was the danger was her, but when I tried to turn the tables on her at once point when she was tearing up my yard trying to turn around in my driveway, she pointed out how unsafe that would be, making my daughter cross the street to get to the car, which was something that I was made to do for years. So much of this was small and petty, but it was persistent and wearing. My children were told I didn’t love them, care about them, and wouldn’t be there for them. How do you explain to people how what someone who is saying with utter confidence and certainty (it seems) is utter and complete BS? I was completely outmatched by this person who grabbed the microphone and said whatever she wanted to that she thought would bring me down. Years later a psychic friend said it was like street fighting. It was horrible, that is true. I mostly just bore it without saying anything. To protest would be like throwing gas on the fire. The point was never about being right but about her maintaining a position and behavior toward me that was persistently denigrating.

It began in earnest when awakening came and instead of giving something away in my divorce that belonged to me (an inherited piece of property), I realized if the shoe had been on the other foot I would have never thought to ask. Because of this, I was rendered persona non grata where my family was concerned. A propaganda campaign began and continued for twelve years. Many family members saw through it, but for those who were not in the know, they were swayed by it. My relationships suffered. Parental alienation is what this is called and it has now been entered in the DMSV of psychological disorders acknowledged by the psychiatric community. What underpins its effectiveness is the bias of “S/he wouldn’t be saying all of this crazy stuff if there wasn’t anything to it!” The Nazi propagandist Goebbels said that the bigger the lie, the less likely a person was to disbelieve it. A firm assertion by a trusted parent saying that the father in truth didn’t love the child nor anyone in the family and was just off doing his own thing without a care for the family is hard for a child to shrug off in some cases. For a child vulnerable enough emotionally to consider this a possibility, the results are devastating.

Further, children of this form of abuse who internalize the brain washing, do not remember the parent taking part in the alienation, instead, once the narratives have been internalized, the child actually believes that s/he came up with the opinion all on their own. Try convincing a child that they had been fed this negativity once their ego’s think they came up with it on their own. No matter what I said or did, that child could not be dissuaded from their opinion of me. It was a nightmare. The majority of children so treated and affected do not see the deception nor do they reunite with the alienated parent.

Many parents describe the behavior as being like their children joined a cult. That was exactly how I felt when I began reading about this type of behavior. For years I thought that somehow I was at fault. Waking up I realized that no, the fault was not with me, at least with many of the things that my soon to be ex tried to throw at me and my children. It was in many ways like a death, one in which I was shoved underwater and allowed to drown. By not being able to see my children, by having game after game played on me about visitation with my children, it was like having the life being wrung out of me. In the literature it is stated that the parent most often the target of this behavior is the more sensitive one, the more loving one. It is hard I think to quantify love this way, but in this case being able to not manipulate your children emotionally to have the other parent alienated and to not turn them against half of their extended family members I would say yes, that is a more loving approach for a parent.

End part 1

Advertisement