It Begins with a Call - Part 8

My SoulCollage® Fire Element Card

More fire?

There are little fire gremlins in my stomach now.  I have no idea what they want or how to get them to leave.  Weeks go by, and I am nauseated.  I have literally visited over twenty practitioners, both allopathic and alternative, in the last six or seven years.

The story shifts again.  The story is, I see now, about fear.  I am beginning to realize that my fear is what damaged the hub of the wheel.  Yes, I can try to connect to Spirit, but until I find a way to live with or accept or deal with or get rid of or I-don’t-know-what about the fear, I will continue to break or damage or crush or ignore the hub repeatedly.  All my repair work will be for naught, because, for the last number of years, with all of my little unpleasant and undiagnosed (and often seemingly undiagnosable) illnesses, with all of my mortality, deer-in-the-headlights’ reactions, the common denominator is fear. 

My acupuncturist and friend tells me that the moving symptoms are called wind in the Chinese system.  Moving around, now here, now there, because every time I realize this set of symptoms is not deadly serious, another one pops up.  Back to Oya, goddess of wind, lightning, storms.  But why?  Perhaps to inaugurate new fearful scenarios and more opportunities to handle my core issue?  If so, up till now I have failed dismally.  I am only beginning to get this.  It’s been pointed out to me, and yet I didn’t get it.

How interesting that my state right now (it is January 26, 2017), when fear permeates the country, and Donald Trump is, in short order, instituting all of the things he ranted about in his campaign, is a perfect reflection of the collective.  I can hardly figure out what to be afraid of first or more. But the nausea and the gremlins demand my attention.

Finally, a diagnosis!  Here is the question – is it possible for me to come to terms with any of this?  I am now in a waiting game to find the cause of and the cure for an enlarged pancreatic bile duct and my 7 weeks of nausea and distress.  It could be an easy healing, or it could be my death, or anything in between.  Assuming I survive, will I then, Chinese-wind style, be off into the next fear-provoking episode?

Right now, the waiting feels somewhat like doldrums, but worse.  Maybe I’ve gone deeper down.  No one has to tell me to go down now.  I’m down.

I didn’t intend to write this part.  I certainly don’t want anyone to read this epistle of self-pity.  I think, “Well, I can edit it out later.”  Whatever.  Right now I need to write.  I need to write because it is how I process.  I need to write to fill the time.  I need to write to be truthful.  I need to write so that it shows up somewhere that I am facing this darkness, that I don’t know what the fuck to do, that I am pretty much a wreck.  I wanted to say that I’m “at my wits’ end,” but I stopped myself.  Why?  Is there further down to go?

I had the thought this morning that this facing up to my fear is what the brilliant Caroline Casey calls my “beautiful, dangerous assignment.”  I may never know why this is so.  It is a useful reframe, though.

The box is open.

How did I get so fear-based?  A few years ago while getting a cranial-sacral treatment, a story about my paternal grandmother surfaced, out of the blue.  She lost both her husband and her oldest son the year before I was born and moved in with my parents.  Grief-stricken, she cried for several years, apparently endlessly, according to my mother, her daughter-in-law, who, at her own wits’ end, took my grandmother to the doctor.  He prescribed shock therapy.  My mother then had to take my grandmother across town on the bus (in the days before we owned a car) for treatments, and my grandmother begged her repeatedly to stop.  My mother replied that when my grandmother got a grip on herself, she could be released from the therapy.

So, my insightful practitioner asked, “Where were you when this was going on?”

I’d never thought about it.  I must have been on that bus, too, and observing this whole drama.  No wonder I got scared.  Maybe if I didn’t behave, my mother would take me for some terrible treatment, too.