The cracking open/releasing from the bodywork continues–mirrored by my sorting undigested bits out of my compost pile
–leaving me feeling irritated with/disconnected from close friends, needing to withdraw.
Orange blossom petals fall in drifts of fragrant “snow” as the flowering season peaks and completes itself. Tiny little green infant oranges are left behind. Still the scent of orange is everywhere, though growing less strong.
I spend some days of my “silence and solitude” week this past month doing spring clean up and feeding in my little gardens. Cutting back flowering stalks on the kale, bok choy and collard greens in the hopes of prolonging the harvest of their leaves into summer. Pulling out the scraggly arrugula that’s gone by. Loosening the soil around everything left in the vegetable patch. In the flower gardens, trimming back sages, night blooming jasmine and geraniums that are sprawling into the paths. Hoping, in that process, to encourage them to grow less leggy, more full.
It takes thirty 2-gallon buckets of diluted fish emulsion to feed all that grows around the cottage. Once a month, from March through October, I fill and carry these buckets to tend my “green family.”
This month, I also add and turn in the first big load of compost that I’ve shoveled out of the small bin in my back yard. I think it’s been almost 4 or 5 years now that I’ve had a separate bin of my own. Before that, I shared one with my occasionally visiting landlords. Kitchen food scraps, the smaller bits of pruning from the gardens, some of my fire-stove ashes and some of the walnut and sycamore leaves from around my cottage are what I’ve been feeding my little bin all these years. Marveling, each time I add something, at how the heaped up pile keeps compressing and settling enough for me to be endlessly adding to it.
Last year (I think it was) I shoveled out a small bit of the newly made earth that was spilling from the bulging hatches at the bottom of the bin. Just enough that time to allow the hatches to close properly. This time I spread an old plastic shower curtain and begin shoveling in earnest, bringing out what I guessed to be some 3 cubic feet of soil. What a wondrous, miraculous thing it is to see fresh, rich earth that’s been born out of such an odd assortment of what we ordinarily think of as garbage or waste!
I sit for some time on the shower curtain in the shade, hand sifting and sorting through each batch of earth I’ve shoveled out of the bin. I pick out an assortment of small pebbles (no idea how they’ve gotten into the mix!) and other completely undigested stuff. Avocado pits, mango pits, endless apricot, peach and plum stones from summers gone by. Some tea bag labels and “organic” labels I’ve neglected to remove before tossing used tea bags and fruit/vegetable peelings into the kitchen compost bucket that I empty into the bin each morning.
I toss a bucketful of fruit and avocado stones onto the pile of “sheet composting” out in one of the drive rows in the grove. There the tougher, more fibrous garden trimmings get piled with tree trimmings for their slower process of breaking down. Two or three times a year a tractor pulls a wide “mower” through the pile to shred these tougher bits into smaller fragments that will more easily continue the process of turning back into soil. I trust that the shredding will open and break down the fruit stones, helping them to transform as well.
It’s a totally absorbing, meditative process, this sifting and picking out of the undigested (indigestible) bits. Just as the bucket carrying and trimming processes have been. My mind is empty of all thought as I work my way slowly through two long days in the gardens.
Afterward, when I’m wandering on my walks, I slip into reverie about the process that has utterly absorbed me during my days. This sorting-through-the-compost that has so engaged me seems such a clear parallel to the intense body-healing/releasing work I’ve been in the middle of, especially since my two falls over a month ago.
Like the kitchen waste and garden trimmings, much of the painful, sometimes overwhelming and devastating detritus of my earlier life has slowly been broken down and gradually been transformed. Like the newly formed earth that now feeds my garden, these transformed woundings have become the rich, fertile soil in which all the who’s that I’ve become have grown, been nourished and flourished.
And then, there’ve been the hard bits–like the fruit stones–lodged, completely undigested, in my physical body. These bits that have not yet broken down and been elementally transformed. As I continue to do the body-releasing work with Marty (my Feldenkrais/healing practitioner), these hard bits actually do seem to be getting cracked open. More gently under his hands but, still, very much like the fruit stones will be when the mower comes through the grove.
The releasing that comes with the breaking open of these encapsulated hard bits continues to be a very intense, sometimes stormy and often exhausting emotional process. Last month lots of intense, raw rage, hate, grief was rising up from this body-releasing. Most of it swirled around the woundedness that was the legacy of being emotionally tormented by my very damaged mother.
As the releasing has continued, I’ve found myself in a very different flow of feelings this month. As part of a practice/commitment to allowing in more help and support for the intense reorganization that seemed to be going on in my body, I set up some weekly (rather than twice monthly) appointments with my Feldenkrais practitioner. Two days later he called to tell me (albeit uneasily) that, quite unexpectedly, he would have to be out of town for the next few weeks! Suddenly, instead of weekly appointments, I would be waiting a full month to see him again.
I felt upset, angry, bereft, deserted–left to my own devices yet again in my life. Here it was, as always: “there’s no one dependably there when you think about depending on anyone other than yourself!” Yet, at the very same moment, I had not the slightest doubt that Spirit had a hand in it. That there was something important for me happening in the middle of what was feeling like the same old, same old. I cried some, had a tantrum and then let go of the old litany and just “be’d” with this new wrinkle, knowing I’d be fine on my own.
As it turned out, the releasing/reorganizing/healing processes did indeed go on without the support of the sessions. Seemingly it’s for the cracking open that I need the sessions. The processing of what comes up is something I do fine with on my own, just as I always have done.
And then, what came up behind it were some very old feelings. Particularly, there’s been a growing sense of remove from all of my usually close, caring friendships. For parts of me, the connections still hold deep and true. Yet, what moves to foreground these weeks is the part of me that feels really separate from all connection. The part that feels “why bother?” and “what’s the point?” The part that feels wearied by connecting at all–except in my work with clients where Spirit’s presence and the “form” provide me with some simple, comforting boundaries. In the raw, incredibly unshielded, extremely permeable place I find myself in these days, all other connecting seems, very quickly, to become exhausting, to feel pointless or irritating or irrelevant.
It’s been such a long while since I’ve felt this all so strongly and so pervadingly “up” for me. I know that it’s coming both from the cracking open process and the reawakened despair over “depending” on anyone for anything. Still, connecting with my close friends feels odd. It as though everything takes place on a split-screen. Some of me seemingly relating as usual. The rest of me at some significant emotional remove: watching, unaffected, outside of the connectedness. I try my best to honor this very odd space I’m in. To honor my friends by clueing them in about what’s happening for me.
And then there’s the one friend with whom I generally do the deepest inner traveling. Usually we seem, quite regularly and just by being each in our own process, to trigger or stir up each other’s unfinished material. Most of the time, it’s quite challenging and exciting to play together at our edges. Sometimes we have great fun joking about whatever it is we’re going through even as we’re in the middle of it. In the space I’m in this month, everything she does or says evokes some level of irritation, disdain, criticalness, impatience or “eye-rolling” in me. At the same time, I feel as though I am watching her, our interaction and my irritability from some great remove.
It finally clarifies for me that feeling this weird mix of disengaged and irritated is a clear signal that it’s simply not okay for me to be spending time with her just now. Then, too, I’m feeling a strong pull–as I go through this strange recycling of old ways of feeling–to take more time out/away from even the rest of the less complicated connections with the other dear women in my small circle of friends. It’s just too hard to be feeling both present and absent at the same time! And, as permeable as I feel, it seems much safer to be just with my own energies/company for a time.
Sometimes, in the middle of this increasingly intense need to withdraw, there’s the sense that, were I to really go as far away from close connecting as this “why bother? /what’s the point” part of me wants to right now, I might never want to re-engage again. This, too, is similar to an old concern. Though, in other such seasons. I’ve been more concerned that I wouldn’t be able to fit back into connectedness rather than that I might not want to re-enter.
These days, I can see that both versions of the concern have come from my little ones fear of the “consequences” of my taking such an extreme step to care for my selves-of-the-moment. I talk lovingly to her. I remind her that this is a cycle that has always completed itself without calamity in other threshold times in our journey. This helps her to feel safe, to trust in my choice.
As I come up to this month’s week of “silence and solitude,” I am incredibly grateful to the me that has kept the commitment to provide this regularly planned unconnected time for myself each month. I see now that, at this turning time in my healing journey, I may well need to find ways to provide myself with even more unconnected time. Time to deepen into this releasing process with just myself before I take the newly unfolding me back out in the “world.”
It is such an odd time!
Originally published May 2004
