Field Note — Sunday, Before 10
Before 10 on a Sunday, I sometimes don’t know where the energy comes welling up from.
It’s not like this all the time.
But it happens.
So before it was 10 AM on a Sunday:
A poem made.
Dreams investigated.
Coffee brewed.
Earrings paired.
A seed-bead necklace untangled.
Jewelry rescued from the counter and returned to order.
Bathroom floors swept and mopped.
Corners and edges cleaned.
Old bath rugs finally let go.
Sinks and toilets scrubbed.
Toiletries neatened.
Clothes put away.
Shoes and purses cleared from the back foyer.
Milk bowls emptied of their accumulated little things, each object returned to where it belongs.
Plants watered inside.
Plants watered outside.
All done with gratitude.
Appreciation.
A stretch beneath the open sky.
A few deep breaths.
The wild welcomed back in.
Salvo kitty fed.
Loki kitty released from the bedroom.
Glassware washed.
Things put away.
And then: sitting beneath the fan with the first cinnamon latte of the year.
Listening to resonating music.
No grand reinvention.
Just tending.
Welcoming life.
Welcoming change.
Welcoming the day.
Welcoming the wild.
While keeping it contained to a healthy presence.
Home becoming home again through a hundred small acts.
Washed hands. Essential oil lemon grass. Orange blossom. Cinnamon.
Domestic day. Happy day. Peaceful day.
Loving life.
Welcoming the season.
Enjoying home, home, home.
This morning, in the middle of a peaceful domestic moment, something painful bubbled up. I felt the feelings before I fully understood what was happening. I heard the voice. I saw the face. I remembered the name. I have not forgotten, though sometimes I wish I could. The memory did not arrive alone; it seemed attached to a long chain of other memories and experiences my mind has linked together—moments when I was vulnerable, when I was trying to be good, trying to belong, trying not to cause trouble, trying to make myself easier to love or harder to hurt. And yet I was hurt. There is something strange about remembering pain while feeling peaceful. The two seem as though they should cancel each other out, but they don’t. Aren’t I healed yet? :) Apparently healing is not binary. The experiences can remain entangled: I can be standing inside a life I value and still feel an old injury moving through me; I can be safe in a quiet morning and still hear an old voice that once made me feel unsafe. Maybe that does not mean the past has returned. Maybe it means I can finally handle it now and see it for what it was. I can see how often I believed that if I were good enough, careful enough, useful enough, quiet enough, humble enough, or pleasing enough, I could prevent other people from hurting me. But I was never required to earn ordinary kindness. I was already worthy of it. I was vulnerable because I was human, and that was not a defect. Some people carry their unhappiness in ways that injure other people, and when I look back I can see how often hurt arrived precisely when I was peaceful, happy, or simply enjoying that things were going well. I was sometimes treated as though happiness itself were arrogance, as though enjoying my own life meant I had failed some test of humility. I wasn’t bragging. I was happy. And there is a long chain, from childhood forward, of encounters with people whose unhappiness collided with that happiness—schoolmates, teachers, neighbors, supposed friends, people close enough to disturb what had been peaceful. I have even watched versions of that happen around my children, and it has made the pattern easier to recognize. For me, the chain began early, but today I can hold it and know that it is not the truth of me. These things happened to me. They affected me. I remember them. Sometimes I still feel them. But they are not my identity. This morning the memories appeared inside a peaceful room, and perhaps that matters. There were plants to water, things to put away, animals moving through the house, coffee being made, a life continuing around them. I have built and inhabited a life I was repeatedly made to feel I did not deserve. I can see that now. From childhood on, there were moments when my peacefulness or happiness was interrupted and broken—the favorite doll, the game player, the record, and later other things less tangible but more painful. I get it now. I was peaceful. I was happy. And sometimes other people brought their unhappiness into that space. The memories were there again today: first one person, then another, then another, the chain running backward and forward through time. What happened to me is part of my history. It is a chain of unhappiness, of feeling unsafe and vulnerable, of being hurt when I was simply trying to live. But it is not the truth of me.
The truth of me is that I am a peace-loving, joyful, appreciative person. I am a nurturer. I want to do well with all my heart. I want to help others. Plants. Animals, People. Places. Things. I want to care for what is around me, to make things better, gentler, more beautiful, more alive. Nothing that has been done to me changes that truth. The anger was not the truth of me. The unhappiness was not the truth of me. The anxiety was not the truth of me. Those were responses to what happened to me, over and over, until the experiences linked together and became a chain I did not even realize was being laid across me. Link by link, it was soldered into place, and for a long time I carried its weight without understanding what I was carrying. Now I can see it. I can see the chain, and because I can see it, I no longer have to confuse it with myself. What happened to me shaped my reactions, but it did not create my nature. Beneath all of it, I was still there: peaceful, joyful, appreciative, nurturing, wanting with all my heart to do well. That is the truth of me. It always was.
I am not other people’s unhappiness or anger.
That is not mine.
