I intended to post tonight about Portland's looming Mega-Quake, as tonight January 26th 2015 marks 315 years since the last Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake which occurred around 9pm that day in 1700. It is particularly apt for me to write about disaster preparedness since I spent most of today preparing for the Blizzard that is hitting the northeast.
Instead I feel like right now, in my first post back, I want to write about how hard it is for me to accept where I am and what its like to be here.
[Note: Two Months ago I moved from Portland to New York, specifically my Grandfather's house on Long Island]
I want my time here to have meaning for my grandmother. It may or may not. Because she has Alzheimer's/dementia it doesn't seem possible that I would know what it meant to her... if it had any meaning at all. I should be content to know it has some meaning for me, however I feel a bit lost in my journey at the moment, so that meaning is not clear in this moment. I usually find it's hard to tell what something means until after, like weeks or months or even years after... I should summon some patience.
I want my time here to be be meaningful for my grandfather in a very narrowly prescribed way. I want for him to learn to see the world the way I see it, not overall, but in at least one way. I don't gauge that this is likely to occur for him. Is it not enough to bring some company and compassion into his life, to hold space for him, to cook and make life easier in a number of small ways?
It's often difficult for me to accept him for who he is. In those moments I want desperately for him to see it my way, to make suffering go *poof*. I must remind myself that the whole point to coming here was to sit with suffering, not to alleviate it in any gross way. It's hard to sit with suffering, or perhaps reframed its a part of my mind that hasn't been well exercised. I hope I'm giving it a work out.
I want my brother to be more like me than he is like my parents. What does that even mean? I myself am very much like my parents. I am letting this fixation, this attachment to a desire for things to be a certain way get in the way of my being open and real and brotherly with him. I should be grateful to have a loving brother and be able to spend moments together. He's really wonderful.
And my father... I generally am in the habit of reacting. The reaction is "I can't accept this." Why is your father the hardest one to accept? Is it because I love him the most, care about him the most, therefore want him to exhibit some degree of liberation the most? OR is it because I see in him so much of myself that I feel like I have rejected. Have I rejected it? or grown with it? learned from it? loved it to death? denied indulging those seeds? All of the above please
Father is the hardest one to accept. I'm grateful that I can see that the reaction I am having is "I cannot accept", I've made it to step one. Now I see the connection to Deb, so hard to accept father.
Maybe its easier to accept from a distance, it allows you to pretend that things are other than what they are. That doesn't sound like true acceptance though. From far away you can hang onto your fantasies longer because you are presented with less contradictory evidence. Evidence of what? like my father is a criminal? What crime has he committed? He has committed the crime of not exactly matching some wishful idealized avatar of a father-figure I have made up in my mind. Would I be any happier if he had matched this profile, or would I want only for him to be something else entirely?...Tanha
I am grateful for the work my father did that helped me be here now doing this self-study.
All of this speaks to the difficulty of step 2 in my 1 2 3-step theory (Which is mentioned but not well explained in this post). The hard way through, the only way through, step 2... acceptance.
