She said

It may well be that in a difficult hour I might be driven to sell your love for peace, or trade the memory of this night for food. It may well be. I do not think I would. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

Abandonment - Faith

Today, I will use two quotes from Anaïs Nin that are perfect.

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." – Anaïs Nin

I have been journaling for most of my adult life. I actually started journaling as a teenager.  I would buy random notebooks and keep copious notes and messages, commenting on the state of my life on a fairly regular basis and evaluating it as well. My mother worked for the Federal Government and they used to have hard bound green ‘Record Books’ which I would get one or two of a year and I often  used those.

I started to journal in formal, decoratively designed books with lined pages in my late teens. My boyfriend bought me my first fancy journal for my birthday when I was 19. I subsequently bought them for myself, or was often given one for my birthday or Christmas. When the pages would run out at a non-gift related time of year, I would buy one for myself.

I kept these journals faithfully until the summer of 1975 when my Mother died. It wasn’t until the spring of 1977, and after I had relocated to the West Coast, that I felt I could even journal again without crying. And I made many of those notes in other places, because it was as if I didn’t want to record any part of what I felt like that year in a ‘formal’ journal. It was many years later before I even felt comfortable to write it down and make it a permanent part of my ‘real’ journal. I had recorded lots of impressions and emotions elsewhere – on legal pads, in spiral-bound notebooks, but not anywhere that I might find it if I was accidentally flipping through pages of my ‘formal’ journal, lest it remind me of the pain.

But once I wrote it in my ‘formal’ journal, I decided I wouldn’t go back and read it. And after a while, just to be safe, I decided that once I recorded anything, I wouldn’t go back and read any of it again. That was my first mistake. And how do we learn from our mistakes without hindsight?

I would write in my journal for days or weeks at a time, but I would not go back and re-read. I felt like writing it down was enough, and that would make whatever it was go away.  Rumpelstiltskin - If you name it, it goes away, right? Wrong. Once you name it, you have called it into existence, and then it is there for you to deal with, come to terms with, work through, and come out the other side of or have it haunt you into eternity. That was the painful yet glorious lesson I only recently realized.

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." — Anaïs Nin

After one traumatic day where I drank myself into a stupor and literally passed out on my bathroom floor, and another day in which I literally sobbed, wailed and cried for hours, I knew it was time. But to do it, I had to go back. Not so far back as to re-live past traumas, only far enough for me to see a pattern. And I found it. I have spent most of my entire adult life claiming lack and limitation. There it was. Abandonment - lack of Love. When my Mother died, emotionally I also lost my Dad and both of my sisters.  That was my initial entry into Lack of Love. But I had rebuilt that support system and I was thriving, things were going well and then, the unthinkable, I had to move away from the system that it had taken me so long to rebuild. Since I hadn’t dealt with the initial abandonment issue, it reared its ugly head again. And that’s when it began to manifest in all of my subsequent experiences. It manifested itself as lack of Money, lack of Support, lack of Job, lack of Self-worth and lack of Faith - all stemming from the original declaration of Abandonment - the lack of Love.

I knew I had issues. I made a list. I wrote how I interpreted each one with their own singular issue of Abandonment. Each one was post-mortem of my Mother and an unresolved event in my life.  I went back.  I re-examined my part and decided that none of the situations had anything to do with me personally.  I did not leave them, they left me. I am alright. I am perfect, whole and complete. I lack for nothing. Then I finally realized…

The Universe is my Source. I know that there is no lack.  There is no abandonment. I know that there is only Peace and only Love. I claim Peace and Love. I know that there is no fear, only Faith and only Joy. I claim Faith and Joy. I know that there is none other than Divine Spirit as the One Source of All. I now claim that I am One with that Source of All. There can only be One.

I now claim Joy, Faith, Peace, Abundance and Love in my life.

Where? Right here.

When? Right now.

And so it is.