A Tiny Pink Heart; a birthmark
[Cross-posted to sacred12novices]
The Caring of PinkPlease read Chapter Two.
[Disclaimer: In the favor and fashion of the fact I've done at least 98% of these questions and activities before, many of these questions and activities posts may meander more into related thoughts. ]
1. As you have read in this chapter, Little Bird was given the task to find her three greatest heart wounds and begin to heal them. Before we discuss your three greatest heart wounds, let’s talk of Pink. How do you feel about Pink, and what does this color mean to you?I wrote about how soft I always found pink to be, how I was both drawn to loving and feeling repulsed by the color, and yet how drawn I was to Lady Pink last time. I was drawn to it, like a moth to a flame and yet. I know now, I know why I all but dedicated and yet found myself not at her altar.
Not for the same reason I didn't own up to Silver, when I knew at the end of Silver I would (and could and did). I think, especially now that I've walked at her side again for a month, what i needed most in my first walk was to discover White first. The basis of so much of who I am of what I do. If Pink is often who I am and what I'm doing on a surface level with love in my daily, weekly, monthly life.
But White. Oh. Oh, White. White was the very soul of looking up one very, incredibly unexpected day, and recognizing myself on the page, in their eyes. Lady Pink and I walk, with our fingers intertwined. As she and White do. Have to. Blurring the edges.
I come to terms with her color slower than her bearing, and I feel my heart sway to her with each step. She is my tandem. My softer brush of fate and action, and I wonder in my deepest core how I could not have been hers last year. I said she and Green were the ones at the edge of who I was. Almost. Almost there. The edges of my White.
And yet this altar has grown on me so much. This color. At first it was omg that is so pink the way a day-glow light blinds you. And now, it's soft, sweet, like the brush of a rose petal against my skin. I feel luxurious with this light color, my shawl, my candles. Reluctant to part with this altar I've grown to love, to know, to need, to feel my heart relax into the hands of, knowing I never can or will really.
This is how I begin to feel about her, too.
Another shade of the beat in my heart.
Another color who I will forever call My Lady.
2. Pink is the color of compassion. Do you consider yourself to be a kind and compassionate person? Why or why not?Yes, quite. It's one of the four-five words first to my lips of anything in my life. In the signature for my e-mail. The name of my journal. Unconditional Love, Wherein Forgiveness is Inherent & Compassion Infinite.
Compassion Infinite. Compassion without end.One of the first, main tenants of unconditional love My Girl (sageness) named this quote of me and how I lived my life over half a decade ago. The world is indeed of compassion, for all things, at all times, regardless of what they've done or chosen or been through. Compassion and a willingness to understand I embrace in all situations.
This.
Oh, this is part of breathing.
I don't know to act toward people without it.
3. If you were in similar situations as Little Bird, how would your response be different or the same?I still feel my first answer to this was an apt one. Some of my reactions would be the same and some of them would be different. Highest above them is that I do not run away when I am scared. My fight or flight screams flight, to the extreme of diving off cliffs and battering ram-ming myself into things if I think they scare me. I dive in, not turn away.
I would have met Gawen that first night. Which is not the same as saying I would have been accepting or welcoming. But I would not have turned away. I would have acted very much the way she did about finding out about a sister/sibling though. It turns the world upside down. I would want my family to know, I would need to go find them.
I think that need would have torn me apart in my second month. I would feel the need to leave and find my sister, but that is where Little Bird and I differ too -- she'd never had a sister before and could be patient, could wait to see how the dice would fall out, and I had a little sister, an angel, who was mine and who I lost, enough to never want to lose a single minute in a chance again for a sibling.
4. Do you feel you have treated yourself with gentle compassion throughout your life?No, I haven't. Forget 'feel,' I simply hadn't.
There was a very large part of my life where I was willing to sacrifice all of who I was, and what I wanted, for everyone else. For how much I loved them and was willing to give to help them heal, help them go forward. And I gave up large sections of who I was and might have been for that. For a very long time.
And if I was always loving, compassionated, forgiving to them, I was dictator to myself in a lot of ways. So much harder on myself for my humanity and imperfections.
But I am very different person now. A good near decade past the person I was then though, and as the person I am now, I would consider myself much more compassionate toward myself. This house, this world I live in. The craft of its touches and the bearing of living with Earl. The jobs, the communities, the books, poetry, people.
I surround myself with softer, beautiful things. Things which cause my heart to grow lush and swell as though a flower in the most supportive of conditions. I can be more judgmental still. I slip all the time and I can be truly cruel to myself in my worst moods. But I am much, much better than I was once upon a time. Because I lived through my once upon time. Because I healed from my once upon a time.
Enough so I encourage people to remember to love and spoil and create the world they should be living in.
5. Some people think that because Pink is so gentle, she is not a strong color. Do you think of Pink as strong or weak?
I think I agree very much here again with my words in my journal from last time, and instead I will leave you with one of my favorite Jacqueline Carey quotes, which has been on my journal profile almost as long as I've been on livejournal, in response to this; "Let the warriors clamor after gods of blood and thunder; love is hard, harder than steel and thrice as cruel. It is as inexorable as the tides, and life and death alike follow in its wake."
6. What do you think are your three greatest heart wounds?Give how I chose Question 7 as my update of my first three, I chose to spend this specific month, focusing on the three worst heart wounds of this three months. Which I spent a lot of time thinking about.
Third, the fact I do have a deeply ingrained belief and feeling in and of worthlessness in the eyes of very certain people who love me lately. The kind that words and understanding and touch don't solve or soften. Second, I have been in the possession of a willingly blindness, both of hope and of common sense, separately rather than ever together. I'm, also, far too aware that knowing it, isn't me actually healing it or trying to fix it.
First, is still the same as last time. That is how big it was/is, which blends into --
7. Which of the three you have listed would you say is your greatest heart wound?My greatest heart wound I wrote down last time was 'having given up crying as a child.' Which is greatly in references to several things having to do with my little sister, parents, my following teenage years, etc. But also. Because it is the deepest thing, and the one I've been working on for nearly a decade. Getting back to it. And not talking about it, but slowly actually working on my heart and myself and my head and my eyes.
And given that I nearly cried myself to sleep Sunday night.
Well, it's more than I ever would have ten years ago.
Even if it was only about five or six minutes.
8. What of your other two greatest heart wounds? How would you describe the healing for these to Pink?These I wrote about a great deal in-depth at the time nearly two years ago, one of them was about my mother kicking me out at nineteen and the other was an amalgam case I simply labeled "Brent/Josh/Kris" for short.
The first has been a work in progress this last year, in a really great way. Worked on when I was helping my stepfather through his surgery and connecting with my mother over classes and a new community. Through a whole lot of beautiful steps that are more at an adult level*, without the past attached to it. (* - Though yes, I'm fully aware, I'll always be her little girl.)
The second I'm pretty sure is vastly, massively gone. Gone, like anything under an atom bomb, gone. Especially in the face of the Billy antics I learned about during last summer and the antics of the only other problematic, frequently regaled to me by those around me as monstrous, male connected to my relationship. And given that who I've become (because of the “Brent/Josh/Kris" amalgam) refused to be a carpet to either of these men and their deeply insulting, inexcusable, destructive behavior. I made so many better, healthier, safer choices in the faces of it this time.
9. Let us return to your single greatest heart wound. Write down your plan to heal that heart wound. I offer you a blessing as you begin this healing. Remember Pink is always with you.My write-up still does my first one justice. It's a thing at a time. I've cried more often in the last year than I probably have in the whole last decade. Including the period when my sister died. Which a hard thing to wrap my head around. A very hard thing not to be overly judgmental at certain people about, because crying exists in the freaksmeout box.
But mostly I take a thing at a time. I try to remind myself to let myself cry. And I try not to beat myself up too much on the days when I just fall back into the old habits of walking down the easy, fits like a glove, steps of how to keep myself from crying no matter how bad something is of how much hurts. Because crying makes no sense to me.
But I have faith in My Girl, and several other people, and I'll keep walking this path that I've been walking, learning to cry, for about a decade now. I believe I'll find sometime, someday at the end of it.
10. There is a section of Chapter Six where Pink is speaking to Little Bird about her three heart wounds.…“The power to heal yourself was always in your own heart and hands and mind and vision. It does not lie outside of you. Go home to yourself. Your home is within your own body. Create your dream. Create it of that magical mysterious star stuff inside that makes you, you. Each of us has a voice of truth and life and love and joy that was stolen from us, that we deem impossible to ever reach again. For the earth, the voice of the sky, which it can never touch, but each of us has a way - a way to bring that voice back to stay. For some, it could be baking a cake. For some, it could be building a house or dancing. For some, it could be healing the sick. There is always a way to hear once more the Voice of the Gods.”
Now meditate on this passage, and describe in what way you choose to once again hear the Voice of the Gods, to heal yourself, to better create your dream. Feel free to share this in whatever way you choose - be it a poem, a song, a drawing, or other. There is no right or wrong here, just what comes from your own heart.
I've been trying not to write this for days, since it got caught up in my head that evening;
She walks back into the hallway, standing like a ghost with her hand at the beginning of the passage. She can see down it, knows it, every inch. The walls lined with mirrored alcoves. Mirrors of flicking images all different, all beautiful, all precious. They are the representations of this life. This life she has fought for, loves so dearly, so truly. Fought for and built and all but died for and protects with every last inch in her.
But she stands, the flickers of their colors and lights catching the floors near them, and then she sits. At the front of the hallway, where she can see them all. Where she returns to them all. But she doesn't go to them. Without it changing -- their beauty, their importance, their preciousness, their belovedness -- they are reduced to the pale imitations of The Truth that shatters them all to shards.
Everything she needs, without a single trace of what she wants.
Her chin on her knees, she sees them, hears them, ignores them, not wanting anything of them. Anything of them at all. She simply sits, quiet, unwilling to touch any of it, remembering. An echo removed now, four solitary statements.
Some days I wish my life lessons were with you.
But I'm not ready.
What are you thinking?
That everything makes sense when you're near.
And I have to figure out what to do with that.
11. OPTIONAL: Write your own prayer to Pink.My prayer from last year, which stands well still.
To my dear, dear, Dear Lady Pink,
Hold me in the palm of your hand
in your heart, in your grace.
Remind me ever to be gentle and
compassionate with myself.
Teach me that being selfless is not
the same as being less deserving.
Show me careful steadfastness toward
my own personal healing and
Guide me as I keep my life dedicated
to the loving of others.
12. A Gift for PinkPink represents love, caring, and compassion. If you’d like to be closer to Pink, spend a month with her, and every day for a month do something kind for someone else. It can be as simple as a kind word or smile.
Write down your daily gifts to Pink.
I did not do the Gift for this month, but I spent a lot of time looking over my notes from last time. Last time, in my journal, I detailed every single day what one or two things I went out of my way to do. From swapping gifts to paying for things, sharing candy corn and buying Pink pants, singing with Earl on Skype and taking care of a child when she was scared,
I didn't do this, but my fingers touch the pages slowly and I have to pay my deep, deep respects to the lessons ingrained on my heart from having done it the first time. I was so deeply moved by the process and I'm so deeply reverent toward the project now. I truly deeply hope others got the same kind of beauty out of doing it.
13. Promise yourself and Pink that you will follow through with your plan to heal your heart wounds.
I do promise to continue working on my First Heart Wound.
And to spend about as much time as normal lately working on the other ones.
The Caring of PinkPlease read Chapter Two.
[Disclaimer: In the favor and fashion of the fact I've done at least 98% of these questions and activities before, many of these questions and activities posts may meander more into related thoughts. ]
1. As you have read in this chapter, Little Bird was given the task to find her three greatest heart wounds and begin to heal them. Before we discuss your three greatest heart wounds, let’s talk of Pink. How do you feel about Pink, and what does this color mean to you?I wrote about how soft I always found pink to be, how I was both drawn to loving and feeling repulsed by the color, and yet how drawn I was to Lady Pink last time. I was drawn to it, like a moth to a flame and yet. I know now, I know why I all but dedicated and yet found myself not at her altar.
Not for the same reason I didn't own up to Silver, when I knew at the end of Silver I would (and could and did). I think, especially now that I've walked at her side again for a month, what i needed most in my first walk was to discover White first. The basis of so much of who I am of what I do. If Pink is often who I am and what I'm doing on a surface level with love in my daily, weekly, monthly life.
But White. Oh. Oh, White. White was the very soul of looking up one very, incredibly unexpected day, and recognizing myself on the page, in their eyes. Lady Pink and I walk, with our fingers intertwined. As she and White do. Have to. Blurring the edges.
I come to terms with her color slower than her bearing, and I feel my heart sway to her with each step. She is my tandem. My softer brush of fate and action, and I wonder in my deepest core how I could not have been hers last year. I said she and Green were the ones at the edge of who I was. Almost. Almost there. The edges of my White.
And yet this altar has grown on me so much. This color. At first it was omg that is so pink the way a day-glow light blinds you. And now, it's soft, sweet, like the brush of a rose petal against my skin. I feel luxurious with this light color, my shawl, my candles. Reluctant to part with this altar I've grown to love, to know, to need, to feel my heart relax into the hands of, knowing I never can or will really.
This is how I begin to feel about her, too.
Another shade of the beat in my heart.
Another color who I will forever call My Lady.
2. Pink is the color of compassion. Do you consider yourself to be a kind and compassionate person? Why or why not?Yes, quite. It's one of the four-five words first to my lips of anything in my life. In the signature for my e-mail. The name of my journal. Unconditional Love, Wherein Forgiveness is Inherent & Compassion Infinite.
Compassion Infinite. Compassion without end.One of the first, main tenants of unconditional love My Girl (sageness) named this quote of me and how I lived my life over half a decade ago. The world is indeed of compassion, for all things, at all times, regardless of what they've done or chosen or been through. Compassion and a willingness to understand I embrace in all situations.
This.
Oh, this is part of breathing.
I don't know to act toward people without it.
3. If you were in similar situations as Little Bird, how would your response be different or the same?I still feel my first answer to this was an apt one. Some of my reactions would be the same and some of them would be different. Highest above them is that I do not run away when I am scared. My fight or flight screams flight, to the extreme of diving off cliffs and battering ram-ming myself into things if I think they scare me. I dive in, not turn away.
I would have met Gawen that first night. Which is not the same as saying I would have been accepting or welcoming. But I would not have turned away. I would have acted very much the way she did about finding out about a sister/sibling though. It turns the world upside down. I would want my family to know, I would need to go find them.
I think that need would have torn me apart in my second month. I would feel the need to leave and find my sister, but that is where Little Bird and I differ too -- she'd never had a sister before and could be patient, could wait to see how the dice would fall out, and I had a little sister, an angel, who was mine and who I lost, enough to never want to lose a single minute in a chance again for a sibling.
4. Do you feel you have treated yourself with gentle compassion throughout your life?No, I haven't. Forget 'feel,' I simply hadn't.
There was a very large part of my life where I was willing to sacrifice all of who I was, and what I wanted, for everyone else. For how much I loved them and was willing to give to help them heal, help them go forward. And I gave up large sections of who I was and might have been for that. For a very long time.
And if I was always loving, compassionated, forgiving to them, I was dictator to myself in a lot of ways. So much harder on myself for my humanity and imperfections.
But I am very different person now. A good near decade past the person I was then though, and as the person I am now, I would consider myself much more compassionate toward myself. This house, this world I live in. The craft of its touches and the bearing of living with Earl. The jobs, the communities, the books, poetry, people.
I surround myself with softer, beautiful things. Things which cause my heart to grow lush and swell as though a flower in the most supportive of conditions. I can be more judgmental still. I slip all the time and I can be truly cruel to myself in my worst moods. But I am much, much better than I was once upon a time. Because I lived through my once upon time. Because I healed from my once upon a time.
Enough so I encourage people to remember to love and spoil and create the world they should be living in.
5. Some people think that because Pink is so gentle, she is not a strong color. Do you think of Pink as strong or weak?
I think I agree very much here again with my words in my journal from last time, and instead I will leave you with one of my favorite Jacqueline Carey quotes, which has been on my journal profile almost as long as I've been on livejournal, in response to this; "Let the warriors clamor after gods of blood and thunder; love is hard, harder than steel and thrice as cruel. It is as inexorable as the tides, and life and death alike follow in its wake."
6. What do you think are your three greatest heart wounds?Give how I chose Question 7 as my update of my first three, I chose to spend this specific month, focusing on the three worst heart wounds of this three months. Which I spent a lot of time thinking about.
Third, the fact I do have a deeply ingrained belief and feeling in and of worthlessness in the eyes of very certain people who love me lately. The kind that words and understanding and touch don't solve or soften. Second, I have been in the possession of a willingly blindness, both of hope and of common sense, separately rather than ever together. I'm, also, far too aware that knowing it, isn't me actually healing it or trying to fix it.
First, is still the same as last time. That is how big it was/is, which blends into --
7. Which of the three you have listed would you say is your greatest heart wound?My greatest heart wound I wrote down last time was 'having given up crying as a child.' Which is greatly in references to several things having to do with my little sister, parents, my following teenage years, etc. But also. Because it is the deepest thing, and the one I've been working on for nearly a decade. Getting back to it. And not talking about it, but slowly actually working on my heart and myself and my head and my eyes.
And given that I nearly cried myself to sleep Sunday night.
Well, it's more than I ever would have ten years ago.
Even if it was only about five or six minutes.
8. What of your other two greatest heart wounds? How would you describe the healing for these to Pink?These I wrote about a great deal in-depth at the time nearly two years ago, one of them was about my mother kicking me out at nineteen and the other was an amalgam case I simply labeled "Brent/Josh/Kris" for short.
The first has been a work in progress this last year, in a really great way. Worked on when I was helping my stepfather through his surgery and connecting with my mother over classes and a new community. Through a whole lot of beautiful steps that are more at an adult level*, without the past attached to it. (* - Though yes, I'm fully aware, I'll always be her little girl.)
The second I'm pretty sure is vastly, massively gone. Gone, like anything under an atom bomb, gone. Especially in the face of the Billy antics I learned about during last summer and the antics of the only other problematic, frequently regaled to me by those around me as monstrous, male connected to my relationship. And given that who I've become (because of the “Brent/Josh/Kris" amalgam) refused to be a carpet to either of these men and their deeply insulting, inexcusable, destructive behavior. I made so many better, healthier, safer choices in the faces of it this time.
9. Let us return to your single greatest heart wound. Write down your plan to heal that heart wound. I offer you a blessing as you begin this healing. Remember Pink is always with you.My write-up still does my first one justice. It's a thing at a time. I've cried more often in the last year than I probably have in the whole last decade. Including the period when my sister died. Which a hard thing to wrap my head around. A very hard thing not to be overly judgmental at certain people about, because crying exists in the freaksmeout box.
But mostly I take a thing at a time. I try to remind myself to let myself cry. And I try not to beat myself up too much on the days when I just fall back into the old habits of walking down the easy, fits like a glove, steps of how to keep myself from crying no matter how bad something is of how much hurts. Because crying makes no sense to me.
But I have faith in My Girl, and several other people, and I'll keep walking this path that I've been walking, learning to cry, for about a decade now. I believe I'll find sometime, someday at the end of it.
10. There is a section of Chapter Six where Pink is speaking to Little Bird about her three heart wounds.…“The power to heal yourself was always in your own heart and hands and mind and vision. It does not lie outside of you. Go home to yourself. Your home is within your own body. Create your dream. Create it of that magical mysterious star stuff inside that makes you, you. Each of us has a voice of truth and life and love and joy that was stolen from us, that we deem impossible to ever reach again. For the earth, the voice of the sky, which it can never touch, but each of us has a way - a way to bring that voice back to stay. For some, it could be baking a cake. For some, it could be building a house or dancing. For some, it could be healing the sick. There is always a way to hear once more the Voice of the Gods.”
Now meditate on this passage, and describe in what way you choose to once again hear the Voice of the Gods, to heal yourself, to better create your dream. Feel free to share this in whatever way you choose - be it a poem, a song, a drawing, or other. There is no right or wrong here, just what comes from your own heart.
I've been trying not to write this for days, since it got caught up in my head that evening;
She walks back into the hallway, standing like a ghost with her hand at the beginning of the passage. She can see down it, knows it, every inch. The walls lined with mirrored alcoves. Mirrors of flicking images all different, all beautiful, all precious. They are the representations of this life. This life she has fought for, loves so dearly, so truly. Fought for and built and all but died for and protects with every last inch in her.
But she stands, the flickers of their colors and lights catching the floors near them, and then she sits. At the front of the hallway, where she can see them all. Where she returns to them all. But she doesn't go to them. Without it changing -- their beauty, their importance, their preciousness, their belovedness -- they are reduced to the pale imitations of The Truth that shatters them all to shards.
Everything she needs, without a single trace of what she wants.
Her chin on her knees, she sees them, hears them, ignores them, not wanting anything of them. Anything of them at all. She simply sits, quiet, unwilling to touch any of it, remembering. An echo removed now, four solitary statements.
Some days I wish my life lessons were with you.
But I'm not ready.
What are you thinking?
That everything makes sense when you're near.
And I have to figure out what to do with that.
11. OPTIONAL: Write your own prayer to Pink.My prayer from last year, which stands well still.
To my dear, dear, Dear Lady Pink,
Hold me in the palm of your hand
in your heart, in your grace.
Remind me ever to be gentle and
compassionate with myself.
Teach me that being selfless is not
the same as being less deserving.
Show me careful steadfastness toward
my own personal healing and
Guide me as I keep my life dedicated
to the loving of others.
12. A Gift for PinkPink represents love, caring, and compassion. If you’d like to be closer to Pink, spend a month with her, and every day for a month do something kind for someone else. It can be as simple as a kind word or smile.
Write down your daily gifts to Pink.
I did not do the Gift for this month, but I spent a lot of time looking over my notes from last time. Last time, in my journal, I detailed every single day what one or two things I went out of my way to do. From swapping gifts to paying for things, sharing candy corn and buying Pink pants, singing with Earl on Skype and taking care of a child when she was scared,
I didn't do this, but my fingers touch the pages slowly and I have to pay my deep, deep respects to the lessons ingrained on my heart from having done it the first time. I was so deeply moved by the process and I'm so deeply reverent toward the project now. I truly deeply hope others got the same kind of beauty out of doing it.
13. Promise yourself and Pink that you will follow through with your plan to heal your heart wounds.
I do promise to continue working on my First Heart Wound.
And to spend about as much time as normal lately working on the other ones.