Creeping Negativity
"...it was then that I noticed this quiet, creeping negativity. More recently, I’ve been catching how loud this internal voice can be, and how much it sounds eerily just like my grandfather."
For our full moon Tell Me Something True, I've invited a guest (surprise!) to share her wisdom. Allow me to introduce Seraphina Capranos. Seraphina and I have danced in the same circles for years but didn’t cross paths until she invited me to be a guest speaker for her program From the Wild Edge (which, I must say, I’m super excited about: it exists at the crossroads of body and soul, the place where true healing happens).
Other news before I let Seraphina take it away:
There’s ONE spot left for the September 12-15 Come to Center Writing Retreat. Grab it if it’s yours!
I’m so excited to be leading an October retreat on Isabella Rossellini’s farm on Long Island, NY. This is a retreat full of magic to inspire your creative soul and my only remaining East Coast retreat in 2024. I hope you’ll join me!
Seraphina Capranos is a clinical herbalist, homeopath, and initiated priestess with a practice spanning over two decades. As well as being a deeply engaging teacher and speaker, she has a clinical practice on an island in the Salish Sea. Her unique blend of gifts straddle the vast worlds of plant medicine, homeopathy, and ritual and ceremonial magic. She is a sought after international teacher who has taught thousands of students since 2008. She is the CEO and founder of The Center for Sacred Arts.
My grandfather was a cynical man. If you had a hope or a dream, he’d usually shoot it down with a negative list of “what if’s”. It wasn’t the anxious yet caring shutdown I’d hear in the tone of my friend's parents, it was a heavy, booming, and shameful why bother, you idiot. For him, the cup was always half-empty so why bother even trying. He survived World War II, and also survived the neglect and horrid abuse of his mother. She was a sensitive and quiet woman who, my grandfather would say with tears in his eyes, sold her food stamps for cigarettes instead of providing her 3 children with food. Remarkably, my grandfather turned his mother-wound into deep compassion and respect for women. I had the good luck of watching him adore my grandmother throughout my life. He loved her, respected her, and admired her intelligence. My grandmother was a curvy, voluptuous woman with a lot of opinions and he adored her beauty despite the overculture’s narrative about “plus-size” women I had shoved down my throat.
A complicated man, he died in 2019 at the age of 90, after coming home from buying my grandmother flowers and her favorite doughnuts. They had brunch, laid down for their afternoon nap, and he didn’t wake up. He died just the way he’d always hoped: in his sleep on a beautiful summer day.
I’m thinking about him a lot this week as I contemplate what I’m releasing at this full moon. which happens to fall on his birthday, April 23. Just like him, I’m a Taurus with a reverence for nature. And, like him, I can suffer from a terrible case of why bother. I’ve been noticing it a lot lately. I first noticed it when I turned 40 several years ago. I mean, it was there before, but I just wasn’t as conscious of it until I entered my 40s. Don’t get me wrong, I loved turning 40, in fact my early 40s were some of the best years of my life. However, it was then that I noticed this quiet, creeping negativity. More recently, I’ve been catching how loud this internal voice can be, and how much it sounds eerily just like my grandfather.
This cynicism has me stop things before I start them. It wraps around my hopes and dreams like an ivy vine, slowly strangling the seedlings of creative endeavours before I can give them legs.
“Don’t bother starting pottery classes, you won’t have enough time to stay committed, and even if you do, you’re too old to start a new craft.”
“Never mind that idea of throwing a dinner party next week, no one will come.”
“You shouldn’t think about going on that vacation, what if there’s a tsunami or car crash on the highway. Just stay home.”
It sometimes feels like a possession, a gremlin on my back that I can’t shake. I wrestle with it, bargain with it, and even try to talk it out of its opinion.
On good days, I can have a wise and grounded distance from it, stand back and philosophically marvel at the power of inter-generational patterns and respect their power and influence. On bad days, I can feel paralyzed by this ancestral burden and all the ways its root system has infiltrated my life.
The voice is so noticeably my grandfather's. The tone, the particular brand of cynicism coupled with shame, and how it wants to keep my life small. Safe. Protected. But also isolated. Alone.
What helps shift the way I relate to it the most is magic. Small, yet intentional acts of mundane magic, that are repeated over and over again.
My coven of 21 years will get together the eve before the full moon.
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