One of those days...

We all have them -- those days when, even if it's sunny, it feels like there's a black cloud over your head; when you feel (and look) like you've been through a wringer.

Well, today was just one of those days; a time for getting in touch with the dark side of the soul, with the longings and the losses and the fears that lurk in all of us beneath the determined attempts to look on the bright side, make the best of things, develop "an attitude of gratitude."

I can't say I welcomed it, though I'm pretty sure that at some level I invited it: something about that brown thing I wrote about in the last post, that sense that I was walking around trying to make lemonade out of some lemons that were really jackfruit -- you know, the stinky stuff?

You see, I kept looking at the mask I'd made. And, lovely though I suppose you could say it is, today those wide strips of bark looked like they were hiding more than they revealed. I felt like what it was REALLY saying was not that brown can be beautiful (although, of course, it can) but that I felt trapped, wrapped in duct tape, unable to express either my voice or my vision.

So I decided to sit with that, and the tears began to flow. Hey, I'm a woman: sometimes that just needs to happen; a necessary release, a bending back of the bars so the inner crow can fly. And I'm lucky: I have a family that knows my tears rarely come with anger or blame attached. They tiptoe, offer hugs, and accept, knowing it's a storm, not a climate change -- something it can be hard for me to remember when I'm still in the midst of the cloudburst.

I picked up this doll at a roadside sale in Vermont. It was a beautiful sunny day, a location we had visited many times before, and she just called to me. Maybe she's that wounded soul that lives inside us all, or maybe she's just a doll, a dim reminder of the Connie I used to play with all those years ago. But in the tradition of tonglen, I breathe her in, make her pain, abuse, or betrayal my own, and breathe out the blue skies and sunshine for all the other souls who currently live in that dark cage I visited today.