Lifelong Healing

A Certain Refusal, Other People's Lives, and Wasps

In my daily work world I was assaulted twice in the last three years --physically by a favorite older student and emotionally by a trusted colleague. Now a certain, very specific refusal to work has arisen within me.

It is not laziness. It is not fear. It is not willful or intentional. It is almost paralyzing.

I simply cannot even imagine a job site without seeing danger everywhere and becoming unable to summon the old perfectionist, hyper-vigilant, appeasing energies that fueled my out-in-the-world work for decades. I look at my resume and wonder who that person is, who has those skills and talents, who held those jobs for decades.  I want to believe the refusal has purpose, allows a slow dissolving of false selves -- the secretary, the teacher, the tutor, even the writer. What will be left of me then? Will my work personas never rise again?

I don't know.

So, I fill up with other people's lives.  A critic of television and a mother, who years ago only allowed my daughters two hours of watching a week, I am now a detective mystery television show addict. I log many hours on Netflix with Luther, Rosemary, Lewis, Endeavor, Frost, Jane, Morse, Poirot, Columbo, and others.

There is one reprieve I have received that relieves the paralysis:  the old love of the inner world that Nancy Drew activated in my early years retains its power. Personal versions of these televised lives have begun to inhabit my dreams, and through them I can see what parts of myself have been cut off, separated, made vile and need re-integration. Each day I enter that dreamworld and speak with my fractured selves. There is much inner work to be done, to dispel the constructed selves, the destructive energies, break up the vibrational pathways set down by that early abuse and re-activated by workplace assaults.

Occasionally, I break away from both the inner dreamworld and the television world. I set a simple task in the outer world and eventually finish it. It may take months of looking at the same unfinished work before I can act -- like the bullet-shaped bird feeder that hangs from its metal staff by the Bradford pear tree that I see many times a day from my kitchen windows.

The feeder drew a wasp in the spring that built its nest inside. Once, in summer, I tried to oust her with blasts of water from the garden hose, my own serpent in her garden, but she returned. Remembering the bees, I left her to her work and watched from a safe distance as the weeks passed. The nest grew. Newborn, the wasps emerged.

Mid-January now. Cold. The water in the birds' dish freezes nightly. The feeder, glazed green with mold, is empty. No birds come.  Today I bring the feeder inside. Hot water and dish detergent, simple non-anti-bacterial natural dish soap, fill my kitchen sink where the bullet feeder lies submerged for hours. Gloved, I scrub it, remembering the wasps. Dry it.

Why did it take me so long to wash this feeder for its return to the birds, not the wasps? I suspect the wasps, some of whom arose from sleep during our last unseasonably warm spell, will swarm again in springtime around this remembered womb.  No matter how hot the water, nor strong the soap, I cannot dispel the vibrations that will draw those wasps again.

I do not know how.

But the birds, if they come, will know. I spill some seeds as I fill the feeder, leave them where they fall upon the ground -- a simple flirtation with fate, perhaps, a momentary conjunction of chance and will.