monagustafsonaffinito   CONVERSATIONS

“Set your alarm clock a few minutes earlier” and you’ll tap into your creative juices, Jonah Lehrer suggests in Bottom Line Personal, May 15, 2012. “Our minds tend to be drowsy and unfocused just after waking. Drowsy, unfocused minds are prone to wandering, and wandering minds are great at making creative connections between seemingly disparate concepts.” What a neat example of turning a perceived negative into a positive. Being drowsy and unfocused is a good thing.

Personally I need no alarm clock, not like I did when I was young and could sleep until 5:00 p.m. Really. One time when I was home on vacation from college my mother came to my room at 5:00 p.m., to ask if I’d like some dinner before I went to bed. I did, and I did. Right back to sleep, catching up after intense studying for hefty exams in the five courses I was taking – because that was standard.

Anyway, back to this morning. In my drowsy state, pieces dropped into place like some wiggly jigsaw puzzle: Mother’s day, detoxing – as in nutritional program and/or psychotherapy, skin – our outer layer and largest organ, change and fear/resistance to change, internal warfare, Jung’s Collective Unconscious as I understand it, Freud’s struggle to understand the battle between the forces of life and death, even telephones and automobiles and blogging.. Evolution is the right word.

 I wish I were a poet. The best I can do is a kind of bulleted approach, wondering what the ages look like from a God’s eye view, or even to genuine historians who see the context of time. But here goes.

 I was there when my granddaughter was born. So were my deceased mother and my grandmothers, and the women before them that I didn’t know much about. It was impossible to be unaware of the continuity of life that stared into my video camera as that baby was placed on my daughter’s belly. They tell me that she, now twenty-five, looks like me. I’d like to believe it, because she is beautiful. I mean really. But they don’t mean she looks like me. She looks like they imagine I looked at twenty-five. Together we are part of the life and death of cells in the body of humanity.

 I’ve been in a nutritional program for the past several months. First came treatment of the skin, reducing the inhibiting (he calls it blocking) effect of scars. Is it fair to say that’s removing the effects of our external wounds? Hmm, there’s a parallel in psychotherapy.

 Then came detoxing – slowly, because the body becomes accustomed to the bad stuff we carry around and resists parting with it, getting sick in the process of letting go. Many years ago I spent two years in psychotherapy, so painful I described it later as pulling barbed wire out through my pores, one bit at a time. At the end, everything seemed so clear, I wondered why it took me so long to “get” it. Like every cell in my body – every cell in humankind – I was afraid to release what Adlerians would call the irrational ideas that had me in their clutches. Those two years were years of violent internal cellular battle. The years since have not been without their struggles with personal conflict and sadness, as well as mini-depressions watching the world go through the same thing, wondering what my one little cell can do to help detox. But the barbed wire effect is long gone.

Telephones and automobiles? I am in the process of writing a piece about the evolution of telephones, from French phone party lines to bluetooth convenience, producing the effect of general schizophrenia as we walk around apparently talking to ourselves. Automobiles? My parents dated in horse and buggy. ‘Nuff said?

 Blogging. There are separate bundles of humanity coming together as one. Recently I’ve been moved by the rallying of so many in care of one woman blogging about the joy and stress of caring for her brother. We are all one body, rushing to the support of a part of us in need and, in turn, receiving the gift she gives of faith, hope and health.

And so to Jung as I understand him this morning. We are literally all one body, over the generations and right now. I hope this little cell called Mona will have, in some small way, removed some fear and violence toxins from the other cells in the body of which I am only a part. That would be a happy mother’s day theme.

I expect “A View From the Edge” will cite St. Paul from whom, I believe, I’ve stolen the title for this blog.

Happy Mother’s Day! For now and for eternity. Now wouldn’t that please the God’s eye view?