MY HOUSE IS TOO SMALL!

One day many houses ago, while settling into the house I had just finished moving into, I looked  at the items that moved from place to place with me over the years. There were a few very old things and some new acquisitions, but the over all impression was more like rooms added to the previous residence. At that moment I realized that everyone infuses their home, or should with personal characteristics as unique as their face. One's house reflects the inner self as well as the external persona. Even if one owns more than one residence, say a cabin in the mountains or a beach house, it will also seem to be just more rooms in the image of home.

I have many cherished items that are in storage. However, there are levels of storage. I brought the items I thought I would need every day into this little house on Lamento del Coyote in Taos. Now that we don't go to Arizona anymore it is our everyday of the year house. It is well designed but too small for two thirds of our life. I have  cherished plates, glasses and silverware tucked away in the back of cupboards. Many other items are almost out of reach, but I only use them several times a year. The garage holds garden items, tools and some cupboards that need to be installed but I can’t do it by myself, so they wait. I have a nice drawing table that is completely covered by art supplies and tools because there is nowhere else to put them. In addition, there are paintings waiting for their permanent home that fit nowhere else because our walls are already occupied.  Sometimes we switch these around with others on our walls.

Spider Woman Weaving her Web in the Cosmos

We have the furniture and household equipment we had in Cottonwood as well as furniture from PQ’s house on the reservation that was transferred to a storage shed quickly and randomly when we rented out that house. Our hopes were always that we would someday furnish another home in Arizona. Now they wait out of sight and usually out of mind. The thought of sorting and culling all these things is beyond imagining at this time. Our plate is full enough, and yet it would be a terrible legacy to leave for our survivors. But there is more! The old Pueblo house is also patiently holding many items including family photos and books that used to be in the house of my parents. When my mother passed away, my cousin and I had two days to pack her belongings and remove them from her apartment. As you might imagine, we didn’t have time to organize them. They wait in storage, and their content becomes more mysterious with time.

 

This sounds very tedious, doesn’t it? However, when entering it in my private journal, I recognized that this describes the physical symbols of a life pattern. In psychological analysis, dreams about a house usually represent the self and make a symbolic comment on the state of the self. These stored items represent a blockage of flow and decision in my life.  I also live in a psychological house too small for my desired lifestyle or to accommodate my goals. There are stored boxes in my psyche as well.

Two-thirds of my creative life has always existed in a hoped-for future. I’m now old enough that my time to use all things has narrowed significantly. While many people my age are retired from a profession, I find myself still hoping to have one. Yes, its now absurd, but its amazing how quickly I arrived at this impasse.

Outwardly, life is good. I have my office space back and PQ and I now have our house to ourselves, after several family crises even though the garage holds remnants of the previous situation and PQ consequently must paint on the dinner table. I’m learning that life never goes back to where one leaves off. The movement of time is like a kaleidoscope, the pattern changes with each turn. 

The symbols of those soul pieces that we lose along the way must be honored but I’m learning that they must also be buried with respect or repurposed. I’ve heard famous people say they are grateful for their life’s work and would do it all again if they had a chance to relive it. That sounds inspiring, but the opposite also exists, and I’ve always had my doubts about the truth of a life lived without regrets.  I would never willingly repeat my life but now honor it as a chapter in a much larger story. 

Although there have been many times that I wished I had never been born, I’ve derived meaning and satisfaction from the challenge of UN-weaving the spider’s web that I fell into at birth. I understand the importance of Grandmother Spider. She is the frenemy that sets the challenges that stretch us to the limits of our potential before she sucks the juice out of our ego. On the good days I’m satisfied with myself for converting some major challenges into awareness.  Ultimately, I wish to achieve prowess in walking the fence between this life and the next. I believe that wouldn’t be possible without some help from the higher self and its elevated contacts.

PQ has been watching hunting videos on Netflix. I hate to see the death of beautiful animals, but I soon recognized that these hunters were not hunting for food, nor were they sadists. There was a spiritual component. While it bothers me to see hunters using high power rifles and mechanical bows in addition to various luring devices to bring the animal into shooting range, I was amazed that some of these hunters tracked the same animal for years until it achieved its greatest potential of beauty and power. When a hunter takes down his dream animal he is often overcome with emotion, shaking with such awe and excitement that he can barely speak. Sometimes he trembles while tears of ecstasy run down his and sometimes her cheeks. It is obviously a profound ritual experience. He or she desires to incorporate the power of that animal. When the hunter eats its meat, it is a transfer of primal power and when he hangs the animal’s head in his man-cave which is his temple, it becomes an icon. He can attune with the nature spirit that infuses it. Since most moderns are alienated from their earth roots and often their soul, the animal embodies their common source of power and beauty, even though it is temporary and must be repeated. 

It seems unrelated but a few weeks ago, I began watching dance videos on Netflix. Before long I was addicted. I discovered that I had missed two generations of dancers and had a lot of catching up to do. By the end of the second week I had a new group of favorite dancers. I also began doing some of the old exercises.  At the same time, I was mystified by this sudden renewal of an old interest especially as I was too old to get serious about renewing my ballet ambitions. Nevertheless, there was something very important about this rediscovery.  I couldn’t shake it, even though it seems like several lifetimes between the dancing days and now and hadn’t given dance much thought for decades. Of course, I love to dance in powwows and am fascinated by the traditional dances of all indigenous peoples and their music as well. I was especially proud to be the dance buddy of PQ’s mother Frances. It was our special shared soul candy. There is something powerful in the blending of rhythm, sound and movement, add color and it is complete. 

However, I then lapsed into sadness and lost interest in everyday activities. I went through the gestures but wasn’t present. I grieved for all the things that have timed out and I would never do again and the ambitions that once drove me but had been just beyond reach and were now out of reach forever. There was a list. I would never travel abroad, I would never have the resources to work with a Jungian analyst let alone become one as I had always wanted to do, I would never have a studio with plenty of space and a high enough ceiling for large paintings or several projects at the same time. The list continued with other wishes that came to a dead end. That’s when I realized that even though I came to value the qualities of age, my options are now limited by time as well as income. The stream of life narrows and it's power will be in focus not breadth. Although this was nothing new, the full impact took my breath away like a sucker punch in the stomach. I've struggled to maintain my sense of purpose through mountains, deserts, dead ends and wrong turns and now I wasn’t going to get where I longed to go after a lifetime of struggle. I have nothing to show for it either. I haven’t made the planet better, saved anyone’s life, except several animals and my mother once. I felt invisible and inaudible. Maybe I’m a ghost. In fact, this all began a week ago with a startling image flashing before my inner vision of a shriveled woman with little flesh on her bones. Just flaccid pale skin and deep eye sockets. No wonder I was sad. How can I compensate for neglecting her. She is the result of my mother's teaching: "cook a generous meal but don't eat until everyone else is satisfied, and then do the dishes." There was nothing left by the time the dishes were done.

 

I relate to the hunter’s desire to possess the beauty and power of the wild beast and see the comparison with my own desire to possess beauty, rhythm and the power to inspire. I too have been hunting for a long time. In significant ways physical birth is just the first step in a lifetime’s becoming. I often felt that my birth was never authentic and have spent my life trying to arrive in this 3D world. But perhaps I'm just learning that birth is an ongoing process. I will never forget a cartoon in an old New Yorker magazine in which an exhausted chick newly broken free from its eggshell says, “whew! I’m glad that’s over, and we the observer can see that encasing it is another shell, and another and another, each larger than the last. Birth is never over! I believe in reincarnation but even if I didn’t a life is made of many phases that are amount to mini lifetimes.  

Perhaps I need to mourn lost hopes and bury them instead of saving their remains, but I haven’t quite arrived at that place yet.  I will never be a professional dancer or a Jungian analyst and I may never see the Royal Ballet perform again, travel to Europe or Tajikistan (I have an unexplained attraction to the stans) but I think I am about to embark into a new as yet unknown phase. I feel the faint breeze of a new door opening. It’s just a crack now but my curiosity is stirred. Perhaps it will lead to a new room in a house that was bigger than I realized.