Have you reveled in a memory?

 One night, I am lying safely next to my husband breathing into sleep when a vivid memory floods my eyelids.  The sky is bright and the wind a gentle crisp on my four year old checks.  My light blue jacket has drawstrings with plastic caps protecting them from unravel.   I can see my little feet spinning on new fallen leaves and as my eyes gaze to the treetops grasping toward the blue expansiveness of the sky.  I feel abundance’s swelling sunshine in my four-year-old heart, flooding my body, and then shooting like sunbeams out the top my head, my fingers, and toes.

I lay in bed absorbing the delight of this memory, cherishing its innocence and permitting it’s light to seep into the afflicted spaces within me that have weathered with time and life’s lessons.  My wiser mind requests this healing memory to flood and awaken the parts of me that have grown despondent and dispirited.   This experience leaves me with a true “knowing” that I, like all of us, are born with the healing Light of Joy within us.

Chapter One

“I am the Cloud Princess”  -Janet Anderson

I have memories of standing at the end our land near the road watching the clouds roll in from the Northwest.  I pretend that I was their princess and I could announce for the clouds and the winds to swell in strength and rush across the cornfields, push against the strong oaks, and rustle their leaves.  I could also lull them to sleep for a moment before requesting their rise and gush again.  This imaginative play was best on blustery fall days.  For it was during those times I truly became the cloud princess and the master of my 8-year-old world.

I grew up on a hobby farm in the country on the outskirts of a small town in central Minnesota.  I was surrounded with the joys of new life and the heartache of life's endings.   I found great connection with the animals that flourished around me.  They were my friends and I was theirs.  It was the circle of life’s abundance; real and raw.

My mother was kind to my open heart she taught me to feel, to not doubt my existence, and she raised me to have faith in what I felt not what my eyes see.  I grew up using my muscles, my intellect, and my wit.  I played endlessly in nature and with imagination.  I was the princes, the warrior, the sleeping beauty, the merchant, the consumer, the creator, the savior, the cop, and the robber.  The world was full of endless possibilities.

This independent play was balanced with social play between my older sister, younger brothers, and cousins.  Together we played school, carnival, baseball, and kick-ball.  We walked through the woods on adventures.   In the winter we went sledding and skating.  Nature was our backyard and our schoolyard.  Our house was small, but the outside world was huge and filled with opportunities.  Our minds blasted forth with new ideas and games.  We were happy.  I was happy.   I have memories of pretending to be Cinderella.  I enjoyed singing to the animals.  I threw corn to the chickens in the morning.  Life was magical.  Love and the power of joy were alive in my heart.

Despite my childhood, cheerful disposition the world around me had many pains.  I am a product of the Women Infant Children program (WIC) and have memories of blocks of yellow cheese, bags of rice, and powdered milk.  I remember chipmunks running across our kitchen floor, hauling firewood in my sled, Christmas with the real threat of no presents.  My closet was full of “new to me” clothes.  The focus was on family and what was needed not on what was wanted.

Similar to many family situations that one may grow up in you don’t know any different than “what is”.  I did not know of houses with two bathrooms, bedrooms not shared with siblings, and laundry machines that didn’t involve rigging up hoses from the sink to fill with the wash water.  Now that I am a mother of three beautiful boys I have much respect and appreciation for the daily tasks and the love my mother poured selflessly over our family.

As a therapist I see this often in my office where a childhood with times of struggle can result in a building of fortitude, confidence, and perseverance.  However, more often I see childhood struggles break children either response results in unconscious patterning that carries forward in their life.

I have a clear memory of being little and my mother primping me to take a photograph with a single wild flower.  She brushed and curled my long brown hair.   She had me sit on an abandoned stone well behind my grandfather’s hand built house that we called home.   As I have grown older with age I have acquired respect on how photographs and art are time capsules.  They time warp you back to a single moment capturing its energy.  I believe an artist is gifted with the ability to capture the world in the way that God intended for it to be seen.  This photograph of a smiling young girl captures the energy of my childhood.

It was shortly after this photograph that my family as a whole experienced harder times.  Living in the country and off the land meant that we participated in the cycle of cutting trees, drying trees, splitting wood, hauling wood, stacking wood, and eventually burning wood for heat.  The spring and summer were for marking trees that did not make it through the winter and the late summer and fall for cutting and harvesting.  In the fall, following the photograph above my father was cutting trees when an accident occurred and the falling tree struck him.  This accident injured his back and led him and our family down a road of recovery.

When faced with our own mortality it conjures up pains of the past.  Our family weathered these events and eventually time moved us forward, with its unconscious whispering.