Yesterday I was encouraged to look a bit deeper when a peacock appeared randomly sitting on a headstone in Cave Hill Cemetery and then much later I happened across a headstone with the name Mary Peacock. OUCH! Spirit doesn't get more direct than that. So, today, I'm trying to tease out what that might have meant without getting all airy fairy and over interpreting what might have been a coincidence. But wasn't. (I mean how many times do you see a peacock anywhere outside the zoo? How many people do you know named peacock outside the game of Clue?)
I am the least peacock-y person I know. I don't care about my clothes as long as they are clean and fit reasonably well. I hate them when they are tight or reveal too much or they are made out of strange fancy fabrics that wrinkle and require special care. I don't really dig wearing make-up. I don't think I look any better for all the tricks and artifice. Nor do I feel better wearing it. I feel completely fake, like an overly waxed and shiny used car with a bad oil leak. I don't fuss with my hair and am pretty much a wash-n-go kinda girl. What you see is what you get. Perhaps there's been a little slide in this area of my life. Not a big one mind you. Certainly not big enough for peacocks in cemeteries.
The peacock on the headstone sat there in the rain, bedraggled and missing quite a few of his tail feathers. The word that came to mind was beaten down. THAT feels like me these days. Beaten down by a job I don't love anymore. Hell some days I hate it. Beaten down by caring for an aging parent with Alzheimer's and the ever smaller loop of her thinking. Surrounded by crazy drama and irrationality on all sides, I am sinking. Bedraggled just like that damn peacock.
But still, the peacock had the energy to jump up onto the headstone rather than sit in the mud. And when I sit with him, I feel like he is a message to my inner peacock to not give up. The sun will come out again soon. I definitely have an inner peacock. The energy that helps me know that I am beautiful from the inside out, most beautiful when I am just being me. The inner peacock making the outer show unnecessary. My inner peacock could definitely use some shoring up. I am not being me, my tank is so low that I am constantly tired and irritable, lashing out, and having problems with my boundaries. BAD problems with my boundaries.
I have talked about the boundary thing and why they were lacking in my life in other posts, so I won't rehash it here. Boundaries are a very recent acquisition for me - recent as in sometime in my 40's. Before that, they did not exist. Not at all. I did everything that was asked of me and spent my entire life trying to origami myself into shapes pleasing to those around me. Shapes I instinctively hated. I was never angry at myself for throwing everything aside to become this other thing. My life hinged on maintaining the fakery. No, I lashed out instead at the person who seemed to make the demand that I be, do, say, think certain things. Relationships failed. Friends moved on. Even family became tarnished.
I don't know how or when those things changed. There was no a-ha, born again moment I can point my finger at. It was more a gradual thing, with soft edges and low tidal changes. I shed those personas and people either adapted to those changes or moved on. I got OK with that too. I knew that when I was Velveteen rabbit real, those around me would be too.
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| When I hit the goggles looking for images of peacock or bear for the post, I never expected to find something like this. Isn't it absolutely charming? More here http://bearsofbath.blogspot.com |
So what about the bears?
I did a journey the other night asking for help. A certain hawt-as-hell Viking vamp called me over to him, pointed at something tiny and black just lying on the ground unmoving. "I can't pick it up. It belongs to you" was all he said. I scooped the small form up. It was neither limp nor rigid. It was alive but barely. The outer covering felt like the cheap velvety felt that covered a bank I had had as a child. I turned it over to see if it might be the bank and found it was the tiniest of black bears, barely the size of my palm. I was instructed to carry it with me from now on, which I did, I do. It has grown much over the past few days. The coat is more true velvet and less the slubbed velvet it was when I picked it up. It scratches at my liver. One day it will scratch through and insert itself back inside me where it belongs. Until then, I will continue to nurture this little piece of myself.
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