I learned about conflict from my parents. My mother used words as weapons; my father used the angered silence. Within the confines of this senseless arrangement they produced nine of us and gave rise to the fear and insecurity that would dominate most of our lives.
My parents are dead now: all that furious, unfocused energy gone – stilled together in the grave. They surely rest in peace. My mother was in need of a concentrated dose of it. But the anger and resentment and the thwarted logic that fund such emotions is apparent from time to time in my siblings and me; such is the legacy we have been left to grapple with.
This is the story of my journey out of a lonely childhood into the dissonant world of the adult. It’s about the mother who cared for me and tried to smooth the way, and the father who couldn’t, who charged on ahead regardless, letting the briars and branches of his discontent crash into me, to cause me to stumble, to defeat me and make me bleed.
It’s about a few good people who loved me and urged me on. It’s about the many who could not love themselves and so held me back, wrecking the pure and present oneness of what I tried to be.
Throughout the journey there was God, bending to fit the cliché of what others said He was. It took a supernatural event in our home in 1970 to confirm for me the existence of this supreme being. It would also trigger in me the need to question the reality of things rather than blindly accept everything ‘as is’. Finding the truth beneath all the limiting belief systems I grew up with then became my quest.
That search is not an easy one. The fearful past strives to keep me bound, while my higher self calls to set me free. I realise, however, that understanding the people and events of those earlier years, rather than blaming them, is what leads to peace and draws me closer to that truth or the divine spark that lies within all of us. Following this path is a life’s work. It involves the continuing education of my heart and soul.