New York Dreams

In all of my life I have not really suffered from recurring dreams as much as some.

Before I had Caitlin she was a visitor in many dreams, but always in different ways. As a child I had a dream about a place somewhere in the wilderness, where I would meet up with friends and family. It was such a clear dream that I used to wake up thinking it couldn't be just a dream. It felt like a memory. I can't remember many of the details, just the overwhelming feeling of love, adventure and belonging and the idea that it was a real place.

Coming back to South Africa after my year in the USA I kept returning to New York in my dreams.

I can't remember how many of those dreams I had but all of them had this feeling of "Yay at last I can go back home" and then failure that I couldn't stay.

For the last couple of years I haven't been remembering a lot of dreams so it was quite strange for me to return to New York again in a dream this week.

I don't really spend a lot of time trying to figure out meaning in my dreams. I just think about the feelings I experienced and then usually in my day to day life the emotions will pop up, which will explain to me the why of the dream.

This one was strange though, and real life keeps reminding me of the dream without giving me any answers to the why.

I dreamed I went back to New York and I was constantly telling myself Third time Lucky ( I have only been there once in reality) I also landed up in High school. Everyone was friendly and welcoming. I realised it was summer in NY and I only packed winter clothes, but someone was so kind to give me a warm Jacket. See it doesn't make sense. Warm Jacket in summer. LOL

In any case what the dream did recreate the longing I hadn't been feeling for ages. Missing New York. the city had, to me, a very specific energy. This was probably just my perception of it and has nothing to do with how people experience it every day.

To me it had this old energy of possibility, expectation, and unrelenting power. The City felt like the way it had been portrayed in many movies, as a character itself. Alive and conscious.

I love Cape Town, I'm happy where I am now, but I do still hear the calling back. I don't see myself returning in any physical form in the near future, but who knows what life has in store.

Finding a Place of "Just being"

As we explore ourselves, searching for our own truth. Delving into our own motivations and looking for answers, be it spiritual psychological or religious we can very much start to over think.

I'm a good candidate for that. Over thinking has always been a problem for me, so the only way for me to get past over thinking is to find a position of just being. Not to be passive in my own life, but to be open. To accept lessons and ideas as they come. To experience fully the moment, and to not just get stuck so much in my own head that life passes me by.

I found this Blog post quite resonant.

Being present is being spiritual. Being open and without prejudice will lead you to discovery of this life, yourself and the whole.

I too often find myself unwilling to listen to an opposing Point of view, but I know that each point of view is valid, and I can only grow my own understanding of life, through listening, experiencing, and being. This creates Freedom.

Love

I'm by no means the great romantic of my youth. Even though I am very much an idealist I lately feel more like a cynic or realist.

I have already spent almost 12 years with the man I love so that thrill of initial romance is long gone. The chemical reaction has been replaced by a more deeply felt and, for me, hard to explain kind of love.

Strangely enough when many people talk of love I think they talk of that chemical reaction. Love for me is a much more quiet and intense emotion. I never before realised the degrees of Love as truly and purely as I did in the last week or two.

I'm quite tired of putting disclaimers on things I say so if you don't agree, then don't sweat it. This is what I feel.

First there was my parents siblings and family. I felt a deep love for them. They where all I knew. They both hurt and loved me to varying degrees throughout my life. a Lot of it bad and a lot of it good. Hey we're all human.

Then as I got older I had friends from time to time who I felt more than just companionship with, but a degree of love. Those are usually still in my life to some extent or another.

Every now and again I'd also feel Love towards humanity as a whole, the planet, the universe. I always felt it hard to "love" a god who I didn't really know much about. At times I did really "feel " it though.

Now I think that "God" as such is much more abstract to me, and in a lot of ways really IS Love, and not even closely the guy sitting on his thrown in heaven as I was taught.

Then I met and Married my soul mate. We had more of companionship and camaraderie. I still feel very inseparable from him, but much less than at first.

It's easy to forget that for about the first 5 years we where together we'd do EVERYTHING together. I just felt like half a person without him. How healthy that is I don't know. Probably not very.

When Caitlin was born there started the biggest love affair of my life. There is no other person on this planet who I love more. my husband looses there. "Sorry love"

I'm still trying to figure out how much of that is Biological imperative, instinct, co-dependence, spiritual connection or just my inability to detach.

I need to realise, accept and fully understand and live that she is a spiritual being in her own right. That she has come here to make choices of her own, learn lessons of her own and become her own person. The last thing she needs is an over bearing over protective mother who projects her own emotions onto her.

I really do Love her though. I can not imagine my life without her. I'd hate to sound like a drama queen but I can't imagine life at all, without her.

To me we have spent many lives together, and for the first time in my life I started feeling less alone when she was born.

So I am starting to explore why it is I have this incredible need to not be alone. I spent the first 23 years of my life very much alone. Very much not in touch or truly connected to any other being. There where some connections but none strong enough to really make a permanent impact.

Now I sit with this ridiculous fear of not having my companions. I don't want to be on this earth without them.

Slap in the face from the Universe

It’s funny how the day after I came to talk about, assimilate and recognise This the universe decided to re-affirm this lesson and pull the rug out from under me in no uncertain terms.

I will write about what happened and my feelings around the actual event, and then probably discuss the realisations and thoughts I’ve had since then in separate posts.

On Friday 4 June 2010 I took my daughter Caitlin to the paediatrician in order to find out what the cause was for her continued and constant cough. Since she’d been sick in April the cough just never went away. I realised last week that it could not be healthy to keep her on cough medicines, especially as they where not working.

As both her dad and I had asthma as children this was also a possibility, so obviously the safer course was to have it checked out by a professional.

The paediatrician was truly great. He was able to safely say that she does not have asthma but the continued infections had more to do with her enlarged tonsils and adenoids. His recommendation was to have them taken out, but preferably wait till summer for that.

While I was there I also mentioned the fact that at almost 4 years old she was not potty trained yet. He asked me some questions and then examined her stomach after which he told me she most probably has some intestinal blockages which have, over time, made it nearly impossible for her to have any kind of predictive sensation in going to the bathroom. Hopefully this will clear up as soon as we give her something to clean that out.

As a final thought I asked him to have a look at a black mark she’d had under her foot for at least 2 years.

I asked the GP about it in April, but she wasn’t sure of what it was, and said it was most probably a mole. Well it turns out to be the one very serious thing.

It is a melanoma, it has a high risk of being or turning cancerous, and it needs to be removed as soon as possible. We got confirmation of this from the Plastic Surgeon yesterday.

As you can imagine the last thing any parent ever prepares themselves for is hearing the word Cancer when referring to their child. Just the mere possibility of it completely sent me on a reeling trip through worse case scenario’s and with vengeance hooked into every big fear I ever had.

The rest of Friday was spent in a daze and moving between near hysteria and shock, to utter numbness and denial.

On Saturday morning I woke up, and the memory hit me like a ton of bricks. I spent the next 2 hours, while Caitlin was still sleeping, crying my heart out, absolutely sobbing at this overwhelming feeling of helplessness, and fear. I allowed myself to experience this pain fully, while she couldn’t witness it.

Then I put my big girl panties on and started to just deal with the facts.

Since then and from there, I have had to deal with some depression and a ton of conflicting emotions, but right now I feel like I have achieved emotional balance again. Better able to just get through whatever is coming. There is a bit of denial still in there, but Hey if it helps me cope.

What has been going on in my head will probably still have a ripple effect into my life for a long time, and so I will discuss some of that in later posts.

Living Life with a Vengeance

Sometimes in the past I have complained about the unstable nature of life. How at one moment something is good, life is good. Everything seems easy and peaceful, and then the next moment all is chaos and desperation.

I've come to the realisation that that is part of the basic nature of our reality. As the day renews itself each 24 hours, as the seasons renew themselves each year. As we renew our lives in this reality ( if you believe in Karma) or if you don't, as we renew our lives by having offspring. This is it. it's circular instead of linear. We never move from point A to Point B. We move from Point A right through BC to X and then back to A.

So no wonder that each lesson learned will often have to be renewed, each challenged overcome would need to be revisited. Each relationship issue resolved could very well come up again. We do get better at handling these things. I think we do grow, but even our growth is perpetual, and not a linear thing.

So the challenge is to hold on to that which we find Valid and resonating, remind ourselves of the truths we know at one point and need to re-experience at another, and then Keep on keeping on. That's a trick isn't it. How tempting to give up, and then we just don't move forward at all, or do we? Isn't giving up it's own lesson.

Sorry if I sound obscure in any way, but these are gigantic ideas, that now confront me and allow me to for the first time attempt my big ideas, because every time I have given up in the past I've set my life up to bring me back to that which I gave up on. For me it's time to Just Do It!