Wormholes

My life has been scattered with ‘shoulds’. I rail against them when I find them. My ear is sensitive to the word. A red light flashes at the sound of a “You should…”.

When I turned eighty, something happened to me … or rather… I did something. Something diaphanous, driven by some niggling fear of ‘shoulds’ I’ve never known about, lived under all my life unaware. Like mosquitoes in a dark bedroom you can’t see but you know they’re there.

When I turned eighty, I retreated into myself. At least that’s one way to describe it. I set out to uncover and release myself from the dictatorship of ‘shoulds’. It was difficult to distinguish between ones I wanted to keep and ones I’d picked up that have been hitching a ride these seven decades or more. I wound up retreating from many obligations. I let some people down.

I went on a vacation that started at a pagan festival and a hash brownie I thought would be best eaten whole after someone told me, “You should only take a quarter.” Two hours later I was laughing hysterically at how I’d taken on his ‘should’ as a challenge and refused to think he might have been right. And the voice in my head saying, “You should have listened to your mother,” and marvelling at how a ‘should’s’ power to guilt could snake its way out of the past.

I was in that wormhole when it was interrupted by my friends asking if I was OK. I felt surrounded and safe, joyfully stumbling from gathering to meal to ceremony, followed by an entourage of angels picking up after me, glasses, pants, as I sailed deeper into a mystery. Looking back, the best I can say regarding the mystery is that it was perhaps about noticing how hilarious are some of the ways I defend myself and what’s that all about?”.

And so, at home a short time later, I put myself in that same condition and started to dig for worms. Burrow down their holes. See what jewels might be buried. And over the year the wormholes have opened into gardens and a magic castle with mirrors on the walls of the circular stairs where at each landing you could look at yourself and step into another story.

Somewhere along that stairway I realized I had taken myself back in the same way Merlin lived from end to beginning. And once arrived, like stepping from a darkness into the soft light of dawn dancing behind the mist, the Sun revealed to me my story.

Do we all have a story? Mine became clear, the through-thread that connected it all, the… what do they call it? The over-arching conflict. I saw where most of those pesky ‘shoulds’ were holed up, but that was the least of it.

The jewels I uncovered at first were smothered in filth: frustration, guilt, resentment, darkness, betrayal. But during this year of inner journey into the wormholes of time, this chemical journey, spiritual journey, I came to face trauma differently.

Instead of digging it out and throwing it away I took in the old trauma, replaced the broken parts, gave it a fresh face and played out my story on a colourful stage. And I love replaying the juicy chapters. After all, the traumas are mine, and if it isn’t love, it’s fear.

Perhaps all I did was sweep away some of the fear to discover what was hiding. To relax some it, the fear inherited and transmitted down. Perhaps break the cycle by forming a cycle. The fear is ever a yearning, a cry for love, and I will ever return it.