November 25, 2014 – The matter of mattering

Listen to this post:

When I was in college, I worked summers setting tile – on kitchen counters, around bathtubs, floors, even the stalls of an office building restroom.  My biggest job was laying heavy 12”x12” pavers on the floors of a home in Paradise Cay in Tiburon.  It took many days to work my way from the family room, down a hallway, into the breakfast room, around a kitchen island and back to the family room.  It wasn’t until I met back up with the tiles I’d set at the start, and found that my layout worked – the grout lines actually lined up in both directions!  I was brave in the undertaking – and lucky! If the grout lines had been off, it would have been a huge problem!  As a tile setter I learned to work with a water-cooled tile saw.  It was fun to run my finger right on the blade, showing off how it wouldn’t cut skin. It was also fun doing something that is done by mostly guys.  Oh, how far I have come!

Though I cannot imagine ever being able to work that physically hard again (the boxes of the pavers I lifted and carried were 75 lbs each!), it is useful to know how to work a tile saw.  Today I used my (contractor) brother Joe’s tile saw to cut a few tiles for our kitchen backsplash where we took out a microwave and put in an exhaust hood. Here they are ready to be grouted tomorrow.  I also cut the broken handles off a whole bunch of mugs that were damaged in the first shipment.  It’s so hard to toss things that could be useful – Mom and I thought they might make good pencil holders to give away. After I was done, I realized that I really, really should have been using ear plugs – the saw has a sharp, grinding sound and my ears were ringing.  At least I did think to put on a pair of sunglasses to protect my eyes!  When I was 19 and 20, I never protected either!

Taking good care of myself – physical and otherwise – has never been natural or come easily to me.  It’s always been a struggle to tend to my own needs – drink enough water, get enough rest, or say “I don’t think so” when I ought to.  My orientation, my focus is always “out there,” before it is “in here.”  It’s automatic for me to get what you are feeling before I know where I am.  What this means is that my feelings can get really big before I notice them. Having the capacity to intuit others’ feelings has served me – it allows me to provide a special kind of attention. But, unless I care for me, it’s not sustainable and eventually, I can get pretty ugly when I go on tilt.

There’s a connection here to the quest I’ve been on for what seems like forever – to grow and understand myself.  I’m looking to either transcend this way of being, or find a way to be at peace with it (most likely a combination of both). In this quest, I’ve come back over and over to my deepest, darkest shadow belief:  “I don’t matter.”  Today, in my current circumstances, I so know I matter.  I matter tremendously – not just to those who love me, but I matter to me.  And yet – that belief persists largely unconsciously.  It is at the root of how hard it is to care for myself.

Lately I’ve been living in the question, “what would it take to live my life, make choices, with the deep belief, “I matter”?  So what actually matters?  I am both a physical being living in a body in the manifest world, and I am non-physical – a spirit, a soul that is eternal, not bound by the start and end of physical life.

This past week, Joe and I had an interaction that led me to an awakening about this idea of my mattering.  In part of our conversation, I operated from what felt like my higher self, able to see beyond the circumstances, able to bring an element of spirit to the present moment.  And in the next moment, I did just the opposite. I operated from my fear that I didn’t matter, that what I wanted was again not going to come to be. It went badly.  The contrast in that conversation woke me up.  I realized where I’d gone, I found my center again and apologized to him.

Right afterwards, on my walk with Bo, it sifted in:  my eternal self is beyond the realm of mattering or not mattering, there’s no not-mattering in the eternal, mattering is implicit.  But, as a human being living an earthly life, I matter – I have very real needs.  And, if I don’t tend to those needs, it’s nearly impossible for me to access my eternal self, to be the source of love in the situations I find myself in.  There’s no more worthwhile way to spend this life than to be love as much as I can.  As I write this, it seems like a “well, duh” kind of thing. Nevertheless, the way it sifted in felt fresh and potent.

I am consciously avoiding the temptation to feel like a “whole new me” about this.  And I deeply believe that the shadow (including my shadow) is an intrinsic element of manifest life.  There’s no ridding ourselves of it. I will have shadow beliefs until “I” am no longer in this body.  The tender hope that I live in today, even as I forget to put in ear plugs when running a loud machine, is that the dawning I had a few days ago continues to resonate, ripple, bubble up in my consciousness progressively more. I so want that, if it’s like a muscle being exercised, it strengthens.

I recently heard the words come out of my mouth in support of someone else, “be gentle with yourself for not being good at taking care of yourself.” I’m directing these words to myself, taking me back to the statement I’ve said in these posts a few weeks running now, “if I could take better care of myself, I would.” You might say that’s a copout. But it’s a present moment thing. It doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity to do better down the path.  We are here to shine the light of presence, of consciousness into the darkness of the shadow – without the separating impact of sitting in judgment.  That includes me to me.  Work in progress.  Human.  Perfectly imperfect.  This is a nice place to rest this week.  To feel my gratitude for all that has been bestowed upon me in this life – light and shadow, as we in the U.S. gather to feast and offer our thanks for our blessings.

I thank you for being who you are to me.

Cara