I love mama 'laine

Any one who follows my posts knows that I was raised by jackals. Fortunately, in this world, you are not limited to your family of birth. Just like a baby duck, you CAN imprint on other parents.... just because you were born to jackals doesn't MEAN you need to be a jackal yourself.

*In this case.. jackal is a metaphor. I am sure that the use of the term jackal to describe a low life form of humanity is based on unwarranted prejudices.... I am sure that jackals are very nice animals as far as vicious scavenging beasts go. I apologize to all jackals every where for the disparaging comparison to my birth parents.

So, anyway, I have gone out and found my own family.... and I really lucked out.

Without permission, I am republishing our last communications about this blog and my current unsettled state.

Mama,

I know you are with the Dalai Lama today - but when you get a chance.... and after you've looked at my blog entry.....

Could you explain what the "poof" thing is about?

When Ale and I are IN EACH OTHERS PRESENCE - there is no doubt in my mind that love - or something like it - is there. We are really really happy and really like each others company.

Within a few hours of being apart... it really IS "poof" - like we don't exist at all for each other. Both of us experience this sensation.

Is this entire relationship nothing but biochemistry?

Okay - I know... it is completely pathetic that I sound like a teenaged girl writing to "Dear Abby". What can I say? I am kind of a teenaged girl. I have lived my life in reverse. By the time I am 75, I assume that I will have returned to full infancy.

Dear Shaun,

Friday we spent the whole day with the Dalai Lama. Yesterday in my shower (where I sometimes do have big epiphanies) I received the message that instead of going to spend the 2nd day with the Dalai Lama, it was imperative that Rhoberta and I attend the Workshop on the Transformation of Negative Thought, for this semester's Advanced Meditation Class, something that I had opted us out of so that we could spend the 2 days in the presence of the Dalai Lama.

... I got on the phone to our teacher Sylvia,
who in a delighted voice encouraged us to come ahead.......

As usual, being us, we were a few minutes late to the morning session. We arrived just in time to hear Sylvia speak these words..."If you had a bad taste in your mouth, you would quickly, without thinking about it for a second, spit it out."

She then continued, and I paraphrase: The same thing when you have a negative thought in your mind, and you can identify it as that, just stop it. Just get rid of it like you would something foul tasting in your mouth. It is just that simple. The hard part is to identify what is a negative thought, especially if it has become automatic for you, so that you can no longer easily perceive that it is negative.

It strikes me that the "poof" is as simple as this direction given by Sylvia. The 'poof' is just the 'emptiness' (especially when it feels like it's out of your control) of what is in your relationship when you are not together.

When you are together, and unstressed, and creating harmony, and happiness, that's what fills the space, and that's when you are relaxed and can feel love and loved...stressed people usually can't be that creative about their ability to be there for each other, and interpret not only how they themselves are feeling, but also especially, how anyone else is feeling, too.

When you're apart the 'poof' can represent the 'emptiness' or the empty page on which you could write volumes, good or bad, depending on the taste that you like to have in your mouth, and how being alone and out of control, has occurred in your history (perhaps even a mutual kind of history). I think I know by now that you know by now, that there is nothing that you can do or say that makes another person 'change' until they can identify, whether it matches something that they themselves can 'see' that they want to change too.

You have the choice however, when you're apart, to make up volumes about what their silence, or indecision means. If we could look at what causes your own ambivalence; right off the bat, you know that you're worried that you are going to get hurt, once again. So sometimes when you are in a place where the 'other' is missing too, you fill in the silent spaces (because they are silent) with your own anxiety. Anxiety that you developed, which was fostered usually by the 'quiet' before the 'storm'
that frequently was between you and your parents and turned out to be painful and dangerous. When the lack of contact begins to trouble you, is when your imagination can also run rampant, and all kinds of doubt can enter the picture.

When you are apart, there is an opportunity for you to create nothing during those hours, however. Neither 'good' nor 'bad', nothing to do with that emptiness except to just let it be.

I know, there's the rub, and that's when patience becomes more than an enterprise that's about 'waiting for the other to make up their mind', and becomes one about you and your ability to not tinker with their machinery, and to be mindful of your own machinery and how it hates a void, and the machinations it will provide to fill that void. The soapy soup of our eternal, internal dramas. On blank pages we usually weave yarns.

My advice is to learn to enjoy the silences, and the indecisions they might represent that are not punitive, and fill that time by putting a 'good' taste in your mouth about what can be coming your way that will be pleasurable. Methinks you already are doing that when you write your impassioned, and gorgeous, and searching, and brilliant, and well crafted blogs.

(*ed note: See? I told you my mama'laine is a genius :))

...Love and hugs, Elaine