Wednesday Morning Musings

I've always felt like a fish out of water, flopping around in unfamiliar territory trying to find my way back to what I knew and what was familiar. I guess that's the price of being a wanderer. You get hooked on something - a shiny object or tasty morsel of some sort - and the next thing you know you've been yanked out of the known and into the unknown. That's the time to grow feet and lungs. Develop new ways to BE in a new environment. It's called adaptation. Adapt or die. Well, maybe not that drastic but true enough in the end.

I've always felt like a fly on the wall of life: watching from a distance. It feels safe there on the wall, unless someone notices me and comes at me with a fly swatter. I have definite issues with visibility!

Once I dressed the part of the fly on the wall by donning black tights and a leotard and tying a pair of wings on my back as an assignment for a college class designed to teach students to move through fear. It turned out to be a life altering experience. It was the mid-eighties and I was considering a mid-life career change which entailed going back to college after many years and I was scared. It seemed an appropriate class to take.

Besides my fly on the wall persona I met my inner wolf. Fierce and protective, she came out the day the instructor forgot my name. It was an understandably human mistake but there were only eight women in the class and I had an unusual name. It jangled me for some reason. I was polite. She was apologetic. We joked and laughed. But inside me there was a different reality going on. I had the distinct feeling of being thrown against the wall. As I hit then slid down the wall to the floor I changed into a huge wolf and went for her throat! That wolf was no Patsy, the name I had been known by all my life. She frightened me at first but I have grown to love her. It took another fifteen years to find a more suitable name for myself.

I learned something else in that class but I have never shared it. Are you intrigued? Have I got your attention? I'm using humor to cover my nervousness. Can you tell? It's about the Sacred Prostitute archtype. I'm studying it again now, nearly 25 years later. It's safer now but still feels dangerous. I couldn't understand it then. I didn't know what to make of what I learned then and I was not at all comfortable with it. Even now it makes me nervous but I feel I must speak.

Here's what happened. The instructor, a clinical psychologist, asked us to cover our eyes so we couldn't see each other and then raise our hand if we had ever fantasized about being a prostitute, not a sacred prostitue, just a prostitute. My shy little hand shot up in the air before I could stop it. I was horrified! I was approaching my fortieth birthday, my seventeen year old marriage was falling apart and I had two budding teenagers at home. I had been raised strictly Catholic. My husband was well enough known in our small community that I was uncomfortable. What was I thinking? I was grateful we had covered our eyes. I hoped no one peeked.

That experience is scorched into my memory though I never really understood it. I was so shocked and embarrassed I don't remember any of the discussion afterward and was glad when we moved on to other things.

Now as new discussions trigger old memories I examine them with fresh eyes, eyes which have seen the damage done to the bodies and psyches of women by ages of patriarchal culture, myself included. I am remembering sexual fantasies I had as a young girl before I was told they were wrong and I would go straight to hell if I let them continue. I figured I was already lost but I tried really hard to turn those fantasies off. I'm a strong determined person who is dedicated to spiritual growth. I did an expertly crafted job of dismantling my sexuality and all that goes with it to shut myself down. It can be done.

I've put two therapists children through college recapturing all the different parts of myself I whacked off through the years thinking it would make me a better person in God's eyes. It turns out it was just some person's warped version of what God's eyes wanted to see.

Life got better for me when I had a talk with God, an angry talk in which I told him (I still thought God as a him. I don't any longer. I refuse to capitalize a limiting pronoun I don't feel even applies to such a being as God but I still feel the scratch of the grain against which I rub.) I would only communicate with him by direct line, no middlemen. That meant no priests. None whatsoever.

Life is good.