Brave

The Necessity of a Great Villain

December 9, 2012

“After all, what would the world be like without Captain Hook?” – Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman)

I have a nemesis. I have chosen her carefully. Allow me to explain:

Today ended up being a very quiet day. We started with a late breakfast and ended up – as I hope other people occasionally do – watching ridiculous Sunday television. The Three Musketeers was on: the one with Charlie Sheen sporting a mullet and Keifer Sutherland before he was Jack Bauer. Best of all was Tim Curry’s performance as Cardinal Richelieu. Mark and I often judge a movie’s appeal on the quotableness of its lines – and Tim Curry, with his, “All for one and more for me,” provides ridiculous entertainment.

It did get us talking about the best movie villains. Alan Rickman in the atrocious Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Glenn Close as Cruella in 101 Dalmations, or even Thomas F. Wilson as Biff Tannen in the Back to the Future movies. Fabulous villains in the proper sense of the word, not just bad or evil or scary but properly fun, very quotable and always dastardly and compelling. In Ocean’s Eleven, Basher says, “It will be nice working with proper villains again,” and we secretly agree.

Does every story need a good villain? Does every hero or heroine need a nemesis? Is Sarah Ban Breathnach right when she says that it is “simply not an adventure worth telling if there aren’t any dragons?” Are the hard and scary parts of our lives as vital to our story as the sunny ones?

I myself have a nemesis. It may seem crazy to think of her in this way, but when I do our interactions cease to stress me out. Instead of letting her get to me as she used to, I now look at her with amusement and a certain level of comic detachment. In my head I am looking at her with narrowed eyes, tossing my hair back and getting ready to do battle. I imagine her with her red cape flapping behind her as we circle each other with purpose. She is as silly to me as the best of the fabulous villains. By letting the energy out of our interactions I get to live that moment when Sarah says, “You have no power over me,” to an inappropriately crotch-stuffed David Bowie in Labyrinth. Doing this sounds silly, but it means that I get to decide who the heroes and the villains are in my life.

So just for a moment, try seeing the world around you as characters in your own movie. Try seeing the people who drive you crazy as ridiculous partners to your hero or heroine self. Who is the Vader to your Luke or the Hook to your Pan? Then delight in knowing that they have no power over you.

And know that the heroine of this particular story is going to win.

P.S. My voice is (mostly) healed! There’ll be a new story this week. I’m just recording it now! xo

Brave, collecting emotions, grief

Talking About Grief

October 30, 2012

There are not yet words for what we are swimming through. Things are happening we cannot say or even percieve, because no one admits they are happening. This is where the limitations of human conciousness show up: we need words in order to make things real. If we don’t talk about something, it’s as though it’s not happening. And yet it is happening.” – Christina Baldwin. Storycatcher

No one ever talks about how exhausted the process of bereavement makes you. They talk about how sad they are and the stages of grief and all of that technical stuff. They talk about baggage and processing and funerals and details. You always know how someone died and when they died and when and where they will be ‘put to rest.’ But at a time of loss, it is not the dead that need that rest.

We have had a profound loss in our family. That is why I am not here with the story I had hoped to give. I haven’t had a chance to record it, but more than that, I have simply been too tired. I have fallen asleep in three different chairs today and in the middle of three different conversations. It’s as if the body simply can only take so much emotion and can only go so deep for so long before it decides it has had enough and shuts down.

We have talked for several days now, in that strange gap in your life that death opens. We have used words to remember, to understand, to question, to wonder and to share memories. It’s as if we must get it all out there; get it all said in order to cement it into our minds and our experience. I have heard some stories three or four times already. These tales have already begun to take on the status of family legend. The mythology is being created around me as I sit as witness. It is sacred and strange all at once.

But the fatigue remains, and although proper sleep alludes us, we have begun to sit together more quietly and to turn to distractions to fill the silence of our tired selves. Our minds turn from telling the stories to storing them. New files are created from this unusually massive download in our cells, and we struggle to string a full sentence together.

It is a ritual and a ceremony that is so personal and yet so universal. Birth and death are the things we all truly have in common.

But it is the stories we tell about those things and the time in between them that creates our experience.

Sending love to you and your loved ones tonight. Hold them tight. Tell your stories now while everyone is there to hear them.

Brave, emotions, fear, Sacred Feminine, Wild Woman

Is That REALLY Fear?

January 1, 2012

“Love bravely, live bravely, be courageous, there’s really nothing to lose.”

– Jewel

The powerful shifts of 2012 began this morning before I had even gotten out of my pyjamas.

My cells feel scrambled and the world looks different than it did 20 minutes ago.

I started the day listening to the last Circe’s Tribe call recording. In the opening meditation, Jamie had us visualise something that included a colour and an emotion associated with it. The colour that I saw was pink, and when she said emotion, I thought that I felt panic. I have been feeling that feeling off an on for a few months now and I have been swallowing that feeling down, giving myself heartache in the process.

I almost stopped listening, but then a question came into my head: “Is that actually panic that I am feeling? Is it really fear or could it be another energy? Could it be power? Excitement? Passion? The colour was pink after all?!”

The question stopped me cold. In that moment I realised that I have the same reaction to all of the great big strong emotions. Afraid of their bigness, I call them all the same thing: fear. Being afraid of them meant that I stopped knowing what they really were.

That realisation brought on the most incredible feeling of expansion.

Then anxiousness.

Then excitement.

Big excitement.

And then I wrote this in my journal:

“Q: What do I focus on next?

I commit to meeting my emotions, naming and allowing them; letting them be as big as they need to be and expanding myself so that I am big enough and brave enough to hold them.”

“Q: What do I do next?

I commit to meeting my emotions, naming and allowing them; letting them be as big as they need to be and expanding myself so that I am big enough and brave enough to hold them.”

There’s that feeling again, but I am going to walk over and meet it face-to-face.

yes.

Older Posts

Newer Posts

The Necessity of a Great Villain

“After all, what would the world be like without Captain Hook?” – Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman)

Talking About Grief

Is That REALLY Fear?

“Love bravely, live bravely, be courageous, there’s really nothing to lose.”

– Jewel

Newsletter

New here?

Legal Stuff

My Instagram