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It wasn’t a dream, I was journeying.

It was 5am and I woke up scared.  The feeling was so familiar, at first I didn’t even acknowledge it.  A jittering in my stomach and chest.  My mind beginning to search for something to be afraid of.

Then I remembered.  Jon and I had talked  about  it a few days ago.  I knew for a while why I woke up scared in the night.  But just knowing didn’t seem to matter.  My brain and body overrode the fact that I was no longer in a place that I didn’t feel safe.

The fear I woke up to wasn’t rational, it was from a long time ago, when I was a kid.

My sister and I  were still sharing a room.  My father worked nights and came home from work early in the morning,  2 or 3am.  I don’t remember how often it happened, but sometimes he would often come home angry.

It got to the point where I would hear his car pull into the driveway and lay in bed waiting for him to come in the house.  Not knowing if he’d be angry, if one of us kids would be in trouble for leaving something out of place in the garage or not closing a door.   Anything could set him off.  I’d lay in bed every night waiting.  Waiting for him to throw open my bedroom door and turn on the light and start yelling.

Feeling helpless and terrified, I’d lie still and quiet in bed afraid to move,  trying to make myself small, trying to make myself invisible.

I don’t remember how often this happened or how long it went on.  I only know that, even now, at the age of fifty-four, I still wake up scared in the middle of the night.

But yesterday morning, I decided to do something different.  Instead of reading or trying to distract my mind and calm my body, I decided I’d journey back to myself as that little girl, laying scared in her bed and take her home with me where she would be safe.

This is something I learned to do in therapy.  To go back and reassure or even rescue the “little girl who still lives inside of me.

I closed my eyes and in my mind,  went back to the house I grew up in.

My mother and father were standing in the living room.

I told them I was taking Maria with me.  They didn’t say anything they just stood there.

I was angry and hurt.  And I think this was as much about me being able to make my feeling known as taking “little Maria” back with me.   I told my mother that she hadn’t  protected me.  And I understood if she was afraid of my father too, but she never helped me.  Growing up, I had no one to turn to.

Later I  cried when I thought about how alone I was then.  Not in a self-pitying way, but in finally seeing the truth of the situation and accepting it.  It had always been too painful for me to believe that my mother wasn’t there for me in the way I needed her.

Because of where my parents were standing in the living room,  I had to turn away from them to get “little Maria” from her room.  I found I was afraid to turn my back on my father.  I felt  he would come after me if I wasn’t facing him.  That he would physically try to stop me.  I was still afraid of him.

So I did what I had never been able to do in life, I confronted him. I threatened him with violence if he tried to stop me.   (I’m not going to go into details about what I told him I would do to him.  On waking I could see that it was incredible violent, but in my vision it was the most natural thing in the world to threaten him with) It seemed to give me strength because after that  I found myself growing like a spectral giant, hovering over him, looking down on him.

No longer afraid, I became myself again and went into my old bedroom.

“Little Maria” was sitting on her bed waiting for me. I  told her  that I was going to take her someplace safe.  A place where I would take care of her. It’s in the country I said.   I asked her if she ever met a donkey, there are animals where we’re going and paths through the woods, which are safe to walk in.

I took” little Maria’s” hand and we walked through the living room, past my parents, who were now, somehow less real.   As we went made out way out of the house,  I saw that a leopard was walking beside us.   It was long and low to the ground and it shifted from a real leopard to a shadow leopard, more of a spirit, and back again.

It was a comfort to see my little blue car parked in front of the house.  It meant we were closer to home.      When I opened my car door  I was even more happy to see Fate waiting there for me.  Then the leopard jumped into the back seat with Fate.  Fate ignored the leopard as if this was something that happened everyday.

I watched my car drive over the Whitestone Bridge, and north on the Taconic Parkway.  We stopped to eat breakfast at the cafe in New Lebanon.   “Little Maria” had so much french toast she couldn’t finish it all.

Finally home I told “little Maria”  about Jon and said he wasn’t a scary man, but if she was ever afraid of him she should tell me.

Then I brought her up to the guest room and tucked her into bed.  The leopard jumped onto the bed and curled up next to her.

This morning I looked up the symbolic meaning of the leopard.  In the book, Animal-Speak by Ted Andrews, I found this passage:

“The panther (also known as a leopard)  often signals a time of rebirth after a period of suffering or death on some level.  This implies that an old issue may finally begin to be resolved, or even that old long-standing wounds will finally begin to heal, and with the healing will come a reclaiming of power that was lost at the time of wounding.”

“...we may have to face offending malignancies of our life…those aspects of our life that we have…glossed over…or pretended didn’t exist. Sometimes this means  we must suffer the loss of what we think we love the most….The Panther is the promise that whatever is lost will be replaced by that which is greater, stronger and more beneficial.”

I fell asleep after my journey and when I woke up in the morning I was shaken by it and would be wrestling with the experience the rest of the day.

The anger I had felt towards my parents was still with me. But I also felt justified in my anger.  It wasn’t about blaming them, I understand they both grew up in difficult, abusive circumstances.  It was about me being able to be angry for what had happened to me.  For what they had done.

But I also felt strong.  Like I  helped the little girl who was me.  I had done for her what she always wished someone would do. Take her away and make her feel safe and known.

I’ve done this kind of journeying before to help me resolve old issues.

I don’t know if this one will stick.  If it will help me not be afraid when I wake up in night.  I’ve felt this way for so long, it may take me going back to see myself as a little girl more than once, or just take more time to embody this new reality.

However it progresses, I feel like I have a new ally in the leopard who walked besides me in the journey.

I also feel that, as Ted Andrews writes about in the symbolism of the Leopard, that  I glossed over the fact in my life that I felt so alone.   That my mother  really wasn’t there for me and I was never known by my family.    It’s not something I really wanted to believe and feel like it’s the “great loss’ that Andrews writes about.

But now I’m looking to the “Promise of the Panther”.  That accepting the loss creates an opening for something stronger and more beneficial for me.

I’m hoping a part of that will be not waking up scared at night, anymore.

I wasn’t aware of the crack, the breaking of something inside of me.

I wasn’t surprised to hear of one more man sexually abusing a woman or a teenage girl. Like most women, I expect it.  I know it as a truth, as “the way things are“.

It’s such a good thing what’s happening, women (and with some men too)  finally feeling safe enough to speak out.  Finally being heard and for the most part actually believed.

What I didn’t expect was the anger.

My anger. I didn’t even know what it was when it started to bubble up in me last night.  I only knew I was feeling something that I didn’t recognize.  Something I  didn’t know what to do with.

At that point, what came to my mind were the few pairs of white underpants in my dresser drawer.  I never wore them, I don’t like white underwear, but they came in the package with the other colors.  Suddenly I was driven to make those underpants mine.

I sat at the dining room table with a couple of black markers and started drawing on my underpants.

I couldn’t tell you why, but there was nothing else I wanted to do at that moment.

Then I had a dream…

I was in a museum or zoo.  There was an old Chimpanzee and a deer-like animal sitting on a couch together cuddling, as if they were on display.  The Chimpanzee was aggressively massaging the deer and singing a song called “What is Love ?”  I knew, in the wild, the Chimpanzee was the predator and the deer the prey, but the Chimpanzee had no teeth and his nails had been removed.   So at first what looked like a loving relationship between the two animals turned out to really be a predator trying desperately to kill his prey, but unable to.

Maybe I was creating a shield, claiming my body as my own by drawing on my underpants.

In Sue Monk Kidd’s book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, she writes about the myth of the Minotaur.  The Minotaur is a creature, half man and half bull.  He lives in a labyrinth under the palace of King Minos.  The Kings daughter Ariadne, helps Theseus find a way out of the labyrinth after he kills the Minotaur if he promises to marry her and take her away from her father’s kingdom.

Kidd writes:  In the female psyche, the Minotaur represents negative, uncivilized (beastly), masculine power, the part the old King had driven underground.  …the Minotaur is the bullish, bullying, bulldozing force of the patriarchy internalized in the cellar of a woman’s psyche. It is a presence that works invisibly, hampering, limiting, driving, even destroying a woman’s inner and outer life.

When I read this, I immediately thought of Donald Trump.  How with his being elected president, the “old part of the king” (or as in my dream, the true nature of the Chimpanzee) has risen up from the underground, how, now it’s all out in the open.

I’ve been silently cheering each time another woman comes forward and tells her story.

I’ve been allowing myself to feel so good about it, I forgot to let myself feel the pain of it.

And then, last night, the anger.

Slowly seeping through the  widening crack,  till it broke wide open this morning.  It crashed through my body, coming out in curses and tears. A life time of  internalized anger.  My very own underground…surfacing, spewing hot rocks and fire.  “I’m angry”, I yelled through tears, “I’m so fucking angry.”

It came in waves and bursts lasting an hour or so.  I let it come, working its way though me.  I’ve felt anger before, but not like this.  It wasn’t free-flowing, or misdirected.

I knew what the anger is about.

It’s about my personal experience of growing up in a family where my sister and I weren’t seen as  equals to my brother,  and  my mother  was  subservient  to my father.    Where I was told that if  I walked past a group of men, instead of crossing the street, it was my fault when they made lewd remarks about me.  And how that dynamic lead me into an early marriage, that I thought was an escape, but turned out to be  another relationship where my feeling and thoughts were dismissed and ignored.

It’s the anger that comes from with living in a society that accepts sexism as if it’s normal.  That in so many institutionalized ways tells women and girls that they are subordinate to men.  A society whose culture is to silence women through intimidation and fear.

It’s the anger I tucked away, replacing it with fear, shame and confusion.  Blaming myself for men’s inappropriate sexual behavior and at the same time wanting a man’s approval at almost any price.    And the frustration of not being able to understand or articulate it all.

It’s not one thing, not one incident in my life, but a million little things.  Words, images, touches, gestures that over a lifetime have made me feel inferior to men.  And I sometimes wonder what my life could have been like if I hadn’t believed that lie for so long.

The anger has subsided now.  Maybe I released it all.  Although I have a feeling there’s more inside of me.  I do feel like there’s some healing going on.  And somehow, drawing on my underpants, telling my story that way, is a part of it.

Two planes and seven hours later, we arrived in Udiapur.  This is where I’ll spend the rest of my trip.

It was and still is an adjustment being here.  It’s a beautiful city surrounded by lakes and one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world.

Driving through the narrow market streets and arriving at our hotel,  was like being transported to another world.  It’s not just the clean air, green vegetation, warm breezes, natural and man-made beauty.   It’s the other end of what we were doing in Kolkata.

I left my room and headed towards the familiar voices.  Nadine, Kelly and Kiera were sitting on one of the many landings of the hotel which overlook the lake and mountains.   The hotel is  a labyrinth of stairs and doorways, hallways and balconies and rooftops.

I started to cry before I even got to them.  In the past I would have hidden in my room and cried alone.  But one of the important things I’ve learned on this trip is to really be myself.  Even when I’m feeling like I don’t belong, instead of withdrawing I speak my truth, no matter how mundane it may seem to me or  how vulnerable it makes me feel.

I need your help I said to them.  This is all so beautiful, even decadent, I said I need you to help me understand why we’re here.

Our days in Kolkata were so filled they gave little time for me to  absorb all that I was seeing and experiencing and feeling.  Even though I wrote about it everyday, which helped me be thoughtful and understand my feelings, I was still living in a haze of busyness.

And now it was over.  We weren’t going back to Kolkata, we weren’t visiting anymore organizations.  The itinerary in Udiapur is for us to do what we want, to rest and journal and enjoy ourselves.

How do I go from the intensity and emotion, the purpose and meaning, to this kind of luxury.

Nadine took  my hand.  This place isn’t  that nice she joked,  you should see some of the really expensive  hotels around here.

Then she and Kelly went on to explain the importance of this transition time.

Helping others is not about making ourselves suffer.  If all we did was go to Kolkata and not see the other parts of India, the beautiful and hopeful parts, most of us wouldn’t want to come back.

And just seeing the horrors of a country is not an accurate picture.  It would be like just going to the South Bronx and thinking that is what all of America is like, Nadine said.

I don’t want to be going back to the Untied States and believing Kolkata is India, not just a part of it.

They convinced me that this is an important time to embody all that I had experienced.  To try and make sense of it and incorporate it into my life.  It’s been a week of new intense and emotional experiences  and that needs to be balanced.

This all made sense to me.  And a part of me knew it was what they would say.  It’s why I went to them.

And I can see it’s true.  Since I got here I find myself crying for seemingly no reason. I know it’s cleansing, it’s my body,  my mind and heart processing the past week.

And I can see that what I need to do now is allow myself to relax.  To enjoy this other part of India and take care of myself. I want to come out of this experience enriched and whole, not broken.

Because I do know that I can’t help anyone,  if I can’t help myself.

Last night, Dahn, Hannah, Kiera and I went to a Taylor to have sari’s made. (It costs $23 to have a shirt and skirt made.  I got the fabric in the fair trade market in Bolpur for half that).    It’s a tradition of the group to spend the last night having a sari party.

The sun is just just coming up here and I’m not sure what I’ll do today yet.

Writing this has already helped me understand and feel better. I’m going to try to take this day as it comes.  To do what I feel like when I feel like.

I’ll be sure to take some pictures and  let you know what happens.

( After being shown to our rooms, I tried to get back to the front desk to get the wifi password and I got lost.   So I wandered around the maze of stairs and hallways and rooftops till I found my way.  The video ends abruptly because Jon called me just as I got to my door and the video shut off.  But I think it gives an idea of the wonder of the place.)

“Dorothy Parker once wrote that misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.”

Last night Jon quoted Dorothy Parker in his blog and  wrote about getting irritated with himself over his publishing career.  And this morning I too got irritated with myself too.

For me it was my lament about not being worthy.

For the past week or so, since I decided to go to India and began receiving support in the form of money and encouraging words for my trip, I’ve been doubting my worth and ability.

One day, Jon and I sat in the livingroom and he opened the mail address to Maria/India Trip that came in our PO box.  He read each letter and we kissed some of the cards and thanked others.  We both cried on and off.   Me, mostly on.   I think that was the first step for me in acceptance and receiving.

It’s been a whirlwind, all of this coming on so fast.  But my trip to India to teach women who have been victims of sex trafficking, is also very organic.   As my friend Athena said, I don’t have to do anything but be Maria.

I know how to make potholders and I know I can teach someone else to make them too.  I’ve done it before.   And I believe in my potholders.  In their accessibility and simple power.  They helped me start and grow my business.  And they’re still doing it, evolving every day.  I know I can pass my experience on to others.

This morning I work up annoyed with myself.  Who, I thought, wants to support someone who keeps whining that they’re  not worthy. And what am I really looking for?  I’ve heard so many times already, through the letters I’ve received, in my email and on facebook how people believe in what I’m doing.  How people believe in me.

It’s like I’m standing there saying “Please tell me again who worthy I am”.  Uck! I don’t want to be that person.

I have a choice, I can feel bad that people are being so supportive and get anxious and whiny  and come across as ungrateful….

….or I can see the truth.  That I’m going to Kolkata, India to do some good work.  That I am worthy of it  and I’m capable of doing it.

And so I am determined to graciously receive all the good coming my way. And to do my very best for the women of Kolkata that I’ll be working with.

Jon came back from the post office this morning with three more letters for me.  I took them from him and said thank you,  to him and the people who sent them.  If felt my heart soften and my spine straighten and a smile spread across my face.

I am going to do such good thing with this money I thought.  And  I am going to savor each kind word and let them take up space in my body.  And I’m going to do really good work, for the people I encounter and for myself and watch it spread, potholder by potholder.

You can see you my Indigogo here.

Jon likes to joke that he’s getting special treatment when it comes to his portrait show at the Round House Cafe, because he’s sleeping with the curator.  And since I’m the curator,  maybe there’s some truth to that.  But it’s hard to tell because I love Jon’s photos for the show so much.  So even if we weren’t sleeping together, I’d want to help him get his photos up on the wall of the cafe.

I used to work at a museum and have done a lot of art handling over the years.  And I worked in a frame shop for about seven years.  Being an artist along with all of this, I know a lot about many sides of the art world.

Hanging an exhibit in a public space, like a cafe is almost always fun.  It doesn’t have the attitude that can come with some galleries and museums.  Also, the art is accessible to more people who aren’t  necessarily used to seeing art.

I’ve been planning Jon’s show since he decided to do it a couple of months ago.  Our friend, the photographer,  George Forss is printing up the last few photos.  On Monday I picked up the 25 readymade frames we got on sale at JoAnn Fabric and yesterday the mattes were delivered.

So, now comes the really fun part, I get to put it all together.    I know we have too many photos so we’ll have to do more editing.   I’m planning on laying them all out on the dining room table to get a sense of what we have and what will work best together.  Editing is about choosing the best photos but when they’re all so good it, it also becomes about which ones will work best together in the exhibit.

The exhibit will the first week of September and will be at the Round House Cafe during  the Bedlam Farm Open House Columbus Day weekend, October 7th-8th.  So if you’re planning on coming to the Open House, you can see them all in person.  If not, I’ll be taking some videos of the exhibit so you can see them on my blog.

For the most part I  enjoyed framing pictures when I did it for a living.  But framing  art that I have a personal connection to is like taking good care of something precious.

I’m so excited to see all of Jon’s portraits framed and together.  They each stand on their own, but seeing them in context with each other, I know,will be a powerful experience.   And I’m not just saying that because I’m sleeping with the artist.

“It seems that you didn’t get a dog for yourself after all. Fate is obviously Jon’s dog. Perhaps a Border Collie is not a breed that fits with you. I know that you were considering a Golden Retriever; can you still see one as your personal dog? You deserve a dog that’s yours and yours alone.”

Someone left the above comment on my blog post that had a video of me trying to herd sheep with Red and Fate.  I responded to the comment, but then kept thinking about it.  I mentioned it to Jon and  we talked about it, then he responded to the comment, in his own way, on my blog.  Then he wrote about it on his blog. (You can read Jon’s thoughts on it here).

But I wanted to write about it too, because I found the comment both patronizing and thought-provoking.

First,  I was surprised by the tone of the comment.  It suggested that this person knows me, and what kind of dog I should have, better than I do.  It also suggests that I was somehow wronged in the process of me and Jon getting a dog.  And that Jon is somehow at fault.

Now to me,  these ideas are so off base I can easily dismiss them. (Although I have to admit,  it made me feel a little protective of Jon, even though, god knows, he can take care of himself)  But what really bothers me about this idea is that it makes me appear as someone who can’t speak up for herself.     That I’m someone who needs a stranger, or anyone for that matter,  to tell me what I want and deserve.

I hate to think that I’m somehow putting that out there on my blog. That I don’t know what I want and can’t stand up for myself.    But I honestly don’t think I am.  I do know that when I write something and put it out into the world, it can be interpreted in  many different ways depending on who reads it.

And I could immediately sense the misplaced anger in this comment.  I feel the anger really has little to do with me, Jon and Fate.  But the interesting part of it is that the comment actually got me to think about my relationship with Fate in a way I hadn’t consciously done.  So that makes me wish that instead of leaving an angry and accusatory comment this person would have posed the comment in a different way.  Not telling me what I need, but perhaps telling me her thoughts and asking me mine.

So here’s what I was thinking about Fate and me and Jon.  I love Fate.  She’s a great dog.  She comes with me to my studio in the mornings and takes walks with me in the woods. She never runs off and keeps an eye on me, waiting patiently if I stop for a while.  I love to throw the ball for her  and she loves to chase it.  She lays next to me in the living room when I blog and rides in my car with me when I go to town.

She’s my dog.  But she’s also Jon’s dog.

Jon takes her to the sheep and teaches her what she was bred to do.  He lets her sit on his lap and lick his face and plays with her the way another dog might.  Something I don’t have any desire to do with any dog.  In the afternoons, when I’ve had enough puppy for the day, Jon takes Fate into his office and I am grateful.  He takes Fate to the Battenkill Books  and Moses Farmstand and socializes her in ways I would be uncomfortable doing.

The truth is Fate is our dog.  And I don’t need a dog that’s just mine.  When I got Frieda I did.  But I was a different person then with different needs.   Fate is actually perfect for me and Jon together.   We chose her together, train her together, and live with her together.  And now that we have a dog like Fate, I can see  how well it works, her being our dog.

I hadn’t seen the case in over a year, it was tucked away in the back of one of my draws.  But now I saw it in my mind as I was getting a massage.  The case held a deck of Tarot cards and on the front of it a friend had sewn two crows each with an end of the same thread in their beaks.  That’s how crow first came to me that day and I understood  the thread connecting crows as a way of communicating, like a tin can phone.  I didn’t think about crow again until I heard the cawing.  Not sure if it was coming from outside or was a part of the music in the room, after the massage I asked Mandy if she knew.  But she didn’t hear the crow, she said it was probably just for me. As I turned to lie on my stomach and Mandy began massaging my back, I saw my spine sparkling, each vertebra a different colored jewel.  I saw my arms covered in feathers, like those photos I’ve seen of Native Americans dancing in feathered arms and a bird mask.   Then crow started walking on my back.  I knew it was really Mandy’s hands, but all I could picture was a Mandy sized crow walking on my back.  I knew I’d be Googling “crow” when I got home.

This morning it put it all together.  Crow is a messenger often representing annoying habits or the darker side of ourselves.  But also a pathfinder, developing the power of sight and transformation, releasing past beliefs.

This is something I’m continually working on, releasing old beliefs and looking inside myself to find my own truth.  This becomes more of a challenge at different times of the year.   And the holidays are definitely a trigger for my past beliefs to surface.  This week they came in the form of me feeling really bad about myself.  Finding fault in everything I do and not being able to see anything good about myself.  So when I read about the meaning of Crow, it reminded me that I’m in the process of seeking my truth and that sometimes I lose the way and fall back on old ideas and notions of myself.  And that not living in the old reality or sense of myself and finding a new way is not a bad thing to be doing.   It was a reminder of what I already know but often forget.  That the truth rests in my heart and I can’t rely on anyone but myself to understand it and trust it.  And when I  live my life according to it, I’m being the best me I can be.