Wee small hours realization - mine is a friggin fabulous life. My timbers are shivered with goose bumps over how, time after time after time, jaw-dropping ZOWIE! things happened, often in response to potentially spirit-splitting events. Or maybe the events were spirit splitting, but in a productive way, like splitting apart a mass of bulbs to increase vitality & start new gardens.
This is the second time in my life that I've set about deconstructing it. My first stab was as a college sophomore, writing the "research" paper for Mike Brown's Psych 101 class - on me. Got to honor my life, which at that point was still seriously in the throes of whacked out family dynamics, see some of the things that had gotten me to that moment in time, did it clearly & dispassionately, bagged an A.
What was triggered by coming across a cache of letters that reached back to the late 1950s has quickly evolved into a appreciation of the astonishing life that has always been mine, one brimful of blessings & wonder. While I am fervent in my request to "Keep 'em coming!", am ablaze with excitement over this incredible opportunity to see all the ab fab aspects of this very American (Bryn Athyn, Lockhart, Lockphy Murphart) life.
Woke up about 15 minutes ago - around 3:15 a.m. - after savoring dreams that I can't remember, but still felt the uplift, the inspiring awe. As I stretched to get up & head down to the loo, felt John's warmth on my right, stroked Max's warm fur where he lay sleeping, between the two of us. As I tossed the covers back (careful not to bury Max) & hove my legs over the bed, it hit me how many times something happened in my life at a time that turned out to be the cusp of a seismic shift in awareness. Getting up * walking across the darkened room to the door, thought about the first major BANG! of my life - Ian's death in 1959, at 11.
As I reached for the bathroom door, it dawned on me that in the late 1950s & early '60s, psychiatric care was still socially unacceptable. Even my forward-thinking mother, who was incredibly open about her mid-1950s mental breakdown, in her mid-40s, wouldn't have found family counseling (which didn't exist yet, anyway) unacceptable, having her children be counseled unthinkable.
Mim, Mike & Peter were 15, 17 & 21; I was 7, a just-right age to benefit from what was perking in counseling, with more & more attention paid to behavior rather than pathology.
By the mid-1950s, Carl Rogers & Abraham Maslow were bringing attention to approaches that centered on the conscious mind, free will & an individual's capacity for self-actualization. 1957 saw Noam Chomsky publish his work on the study of linguistics, which would evolve into the psychology of language. In 1963, President Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Centers Act, mandating construction of community facilities, which carried far less social stigma than the large, regional mental hospitals that fired up more fear than hope. Philip Rieff, who started his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud in the mid-'60s, plotting a new course for counseling, away from Freud & embracing influences, including faith, once considered outside the psychotherapeutic pale.
I was at just the right time, even the right place, to soak it all in. And apparently I did.
Yesterday, my heart was all aflutter realizing how growing older, learning that things have rarely (if ever) been the way I originally thought, gaining perception of my ignorance & an appreciation of the fabulous humanity of all who touch my life. It stunned me to realize that while there were times my sister-in-law confused & exasperated me, I never felt any sense of ill will toward her. Ever. That is, to me, a big deal. I felt anger, but not animosity. That wasn't apparent to my, until doing a deconstruct of our history. I thought that was pretty darn ZOWIE-worthy. Never expected things to evolve to where they did just over an hour ago - into a flat-out, no-holds-barred appreciation of the friggin fabulous life that is mine. It's not easy, not what I expected, not what I hoped for & dreamed about, but it is astonishingly wondrous in ways I'll never fully fathom.
It's 4:55 a.m. - headed back to bed. Not even taking the time to do a spell check, let alone a thorough review. Too filled with how cool it is, knowing that my true north purpose as a life expansionist is to do all I can to help everyone realize the same reality. That's not being cocky, The whole WHY behind our creation, the reason we're on this earth, is so we can each, to the best we can, develop nurture celebrate a friggin fabulous life!
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