Dear zenstrawberry:

Change of plans: I will go on my walk shortly, after a couple of postings here. I re-read your latest post.

You wrote: “I can remember the fear and extreme cautiousness and sadness from childhood, but reconsidering those emotions as one that I had as a child, undeserving of those feelings, as opposed to ones that I earned or was deserving”- I didn’t understand: are you saying that you now deserve feeling fear and sadness? That you are guilty of …what?

Regarding the painting you gave your ex boyfriend, the sunlight pouring through the branches of a tree and the bird. You wrote before that you shut down during the relationship, during arguments… I wonder if the sunlight shining through the branches is you opening up, what he wanted you to do. I wonder if that was your way of telling him you want to open up to him, you want to open up to love, to the sun light, you were offering that to him… and the sunlight is about you making yourself known to him, letting him see you, figuratively, in full light, visible in the light. You were inviting him to come through the branches and see you…?

He smiled and thanked you but didn’t see you, which is what you invited him to do?

We miss so much. There is so much we are blind to: people trying to tell us and we don’t pay attention. It makes me sad. I wish I listened in my life… to the reaching out-to-me of a child. My own regrets.

There is pain we have to live with because there is so much hurt and so much lost. And there is hope in the sun yet to come through the branches and shine on you, zenstrawberry. This is a painful process, letting the child in you, that scared and sad little girl out of her little jail inside. Unfortunately it has to be painful, but there is no other way. You have to free her and give her her rightful place, not locked inside of you and not shoved to the back of you but place her in the front of you, where she belongs.

anita