A Short Note From Me, With A Bonus Round of Tania

I have about four blogs written that aren’t posted. It hasn’t felt the time to post any of them. Writing blogs for me is a lot like writing sermons. First, it’s a weekly discipline. But also, there’s nothing worse than feeing like your finished sermon is a sermon, but not necessarily the one to preach that week! So, some blogs are set aside for when I discern their time has come. “No wine before it’s time” HA!

This week has been one filled with complex emotions. I was overwhelmed by a the return of some memories that I was longer even trying to recover. My PTSD has kidnapped so much of my life and held it hostage. The thing about memory loss is that sometimes you don’t know it wasn’t there unless you recover it!

These memories that returned were little scenes of my life that held the promise of it—the sense of so much yet to be, so many wonders ahead, my potential to participate and contribute, to be with others with common goals, to laugh and cry together, to build a life with someone special, to have a family someday and give my children good memories of being loved and valued. So many of these little moments long gone, made me feel less present sometimes.

They may not be obviously “great” with meaning to others when they hear them. But they are so for me, like when I lay as a young girl in my grandparents small back field and looked up at the blue sky and asked how much better could life be, or when I sat on the grass at Ontario Place on a summer’s night as a young beautiful woman and listened to Oscar Peterson playing jazz and told myself to remember history is made of times like this, or walking up the steep hill behind my university dorm in the dark and meeting one of my professors who was kind of famous and he recognized me and told me he’d been thinking about something I’d said in class, or when I found the note no one else could find in my alto section and I sang it out so the others could catch it, or reaching out from my hospital bed into the little bin where my new baby son lay crying and taking his little hand and telling him I was right there and how he stopped crying, or that moment when I breastfed my second son on getting home from some errand or another and his joy and hunger met and my milk ran out of his mouth all over in a huge smile, and on and on. But what started it? What started this flood of memories returning?

I was listening to Voces 8. That is the effect they have on me. When they sing they gently and purposefully unbutton my torn self and open me up so I can see all the wonders that are still there. They sing the universe of me has still survived the abuse of the one who said he loved me, who promised to honor me, who vowed to cherish me, who pledge faithfulness to me alone, and then beat me just a little every day with neglect, disdain, lies, and then handed me over to his mother so she could have turn at me, too.

Art and artists have a way of helping us understanding the force that nearly killed us, and the force that will not let us be completely destroyed, after all. So just as I was overcome with my own life coming back to me in the A Cappella music of Voces 8, Licensed Counsellor and University Faculty Member, Tania Rochelle was writing about how the art of a short story led her more deeply into the hard truth of what nearly killed her.

This is our recovery. The painful going deeper into our wound with the necessary and affirming Light another holds for us, so that hard truth is revealed and honored in our lives, and the breathtaking balm of beauty that carries our life back to us just when we have stopped looking for it.

There. I’ve said my piece. And here’s what Tania said https://www.sweetwaterretreats.org/blog/2020/2/14/i-am-haunted-by-a-story

Thank you for sharing this, Tania. And thank you, readers, for your companionship this week.

With you,

Diane.