The Elephant and The Dove

 

 

 

 “I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth,”, Frida wrote in a love letter to Diego

I had to really look at my own relationships once I knew Frida and Diego’s stories.  I chose the wrong kind of men, but chose them from me being in the wrong kind of space.  I made abrupt decisions and each decision fulfilled its promise.  I spent years of entanglement and my relationships went from a ‘19 year and seven children’ volatile relationship to a few years and then spaces of aloneness and then to loss of the one great decision I made, and then, finally, to a decision for simple comfort and companionship.  All of us have reasons and all of our reasons have a deep-seated complex reason for being.  Frida and Diego had a volatile relationship that helps to understand why some women make some of the decisions they make.  Frida met Diego when she was a child of 15 and he was a 37-year-old older man that she immediately had a crush on.  She was tiny.  He was huge.  Her parents called them “The Dove and the Elephant”.  The metaphors are not lost on those who seek to understand the intensity of their relationship:  His part in the relationship was that of a bull elephant in a china shop and hers a flitting dove seeking peace and comfort and relief but chose a man who would wreak havoc in her life to give her the stimuli  for the intense kind of art she would do throughout her life.  Their comings and goings, the resentment, the passionate adoration, the enmeshment, the abandonments, the real-life metaphor for a woman choosing someone who would help her actualize the symbols of her pain.  And, that is the crux of why we sometimes choose the worst (or ‘the best’) for actualizing our own woundedness or needs or wants that we never received earlier in our life.  

Why we choose/chose partners for ourselves, or let them choose us, is totally personal and unique, each int heir own ways.  I had a friend who choose five marriages for status, each higher than the other in some way, and she laughingly said, “I got a diamond and fur coat from each divorce.”  Another friend chose passion in her relationships and each ended in abandonment of some kind that came from her woundedness and each fulfilled her unconscious wounded desire to keep that original abandonment alive in her present.  Other friends chose needy men (hello, here I am posted on their/my forehead), “I will nurture and care for you and let you make me sick too”.  Others chose men who fulfilled their sense of “not enough” and were unobtainable, again, fulfilling their sense of being “not enough”. 

Throughout time, women have sought someone stronger, someone protective, someone who they unconsciously felt would fulfill what the women felt, deeply and, sometimes, unconsciously, drew to them.  Frida and Diego’s relationship drove them to deep and meaningful art to become some of the greatest artists of the 20^th century.  Each unique identity in their bodies of work would cause shivers up the spine of women who see their work and identify with it.  Some of it is horrible.  I went to the museum gathering of their work in St. Petersburg, Florida.  I walked in expectant, came out bearing the broken child of my own relationships.  Provocative work that lead me to knowing how my choices progressed as I became more ‘awake’ in understanding self.  Life would then throw me a huge curve ball and I was left holding a broken bat of a heart. I felt so betrayed and yet… and yet… life fulfilled my inner themes of abandonment, albeit his was through his death.  A long only walk of aloneness led me to make my final decision in a partner who would provide comfort and peace and companionship.  It was, perhaps, what I needed all along.

©Carol Desjarlais 30.11.20

**In this painting I chose, as you see, to have her big and him little, expressing my own sense of how big her want was.

 

 

 

Once Upon A Never

 

 

Never has the global humanity of these living generations had to live with such vulnerability.  We do not know what is going to happen next and anxiety is rampant in all our lives whether we deny it or not.  We tend to draw on childhood reactions to things, I have found.  We are more sensitive and needy and fearful and simply reacting like vulnerable beings.  Anger tends to be the easiest emotion to show and all of us, in our own uniquely personal ways, are reacting.  We are sharply aware of negative responses from our outer world and, in many ways, this is showing up in our own lives. Like most fearful things, we flee or fight, we resist or resent, we slump into isolationist’s numbness and sink into a fury of fitfulness.

When this goes on, and on, and on, and we are living in ebb and flow of mandates and regulations like we have never experienced before, we are shut in and tend to start to withdraw to our own “within world| of preoccupation with body emotions, mind emotions, heart emotions, and spiritual emotions.  We are caretakers and we have no idea how to do that in such a world we now lie in.  It can be so very overwhelming.  There is no running away from this.  We are in to a long-lasting different way of being. 

We, women, have to be feeling disoriented.  There is a wide divide within home, family, friends, associates and this gap is filled with whatever was pertinent to you once upon a ‘never ever thought this could happen’.  I do not know about you, but I sometimes feel like my brain is numbing in ways that would once be blamed on age, but now, I am sure is this new way of being’s fault.  Anxiety peaks in more often.  A low level depression in energy levels and procrastination are showing up. We know what solitary confinement does to the human body, mind, heart and soul.  We are desperately flailing at hope and wishes and dreams and survival.   It is difficult even more so because we do not have any idea how long this all is going to go on.  We are conditioned to thinking about the gold at the end of the rainbow.  This is a storm with no rainbow.

Women have always been worriers.  We have been the doers.  We have been the healers and caretakers of the world, let alone our families and now we are having trouble finding ways to be nurtured back.  I know that I waft between wanting to walk up to those mask-refusers and covid deniers and knocking them on the forehead and asking what kind of world they think they are doing service to.  Suddenly we may be all aware of global care-taking and nurturing that we have never seen the level of before.  I think part of our strengths, as women, is that we are able to feel and express vulnerability better than our masculine counterparts. 

In all our imaginings, and catastrophising, we could never have dreamt this one up.  As we move deeper and longer into this new way of living, perhaps we have time to dream up some new ways of taking up slack time with trying to reconnect tot hoe things that once made up your happy places.  As for me, and my paintbrush, we shall go on journeys we ‘one upon a never’ thought to have to go.  How do you retrieve your sense of your own ‘Happy’ place, within this Once Upon A Never?

©Carol Desjarlais 29.11.20

 

Becoming the New Us In A New Way

 

 

 

We, women, may find, during this time of covid restrictions, that we tend to be doing emotional, spiritual work.  Suddenly, there is time.  Suddenly, there is space to do so.  And, we may be doing more online research and finding new things to try to DIY.  I am grateful for these two little private students who keep my creativity sparked and there is such joy to see their thrill and satisfaction that they are getting for such praise as a private art teacher can give.  But, they add fulfillment, a purpose, for me during this time.  They get to be our ‘Plus Two’. We tend to be more connected with sea, sky, Mother Earth, and the waters that we are missing so much.  We may find we are longing for connectedness and they opportunities to nurture.  There is much more interconnectedness with those on our social media areas.

Sometimes, past things we have not worked on, come floating to the top of our consciousness.  This can make all this covid isolationist stuff even worse for us if this happens.  Now there is time, for some of us, when we cannot outrun our woundedness, Now is the time that even social medias remind us how much we have been negated.  Some of us are raw and real with the evolving groups of those like the “Me Too” movements.  We are more conscious of how power and strength and politics and movements and retribution and anger and hate and division of protest are more important than our feminine gifts of compassion and empathy.  There is a sense of sharp jabs of in justice and ‘rightness’ even in ‘wrongness’. 

We have all seen and heard and met women who have the Cinderella Complex, who have given up their feminine energy and prowess and giftedness and slumped into passivity and/or voiceless women who cannot say “no”, or “stop” and simply live a bland life of ‘just at the edge” of depression with deep and despairing senses of abandonment of their own divinity.  Some have become more masculine in their reactions and actions against inequalities showing up more sharply.  There is a sense of vulnerability that we may have never know the likes of. Our lives are full of chaos and fears that we have not had to experience, perhaps, ever in our lives.  We are sharply aware of our roles in our society, in our cultures, in our social interactions, in our families, in our homes.  Life, itself, is not what it has been and we fear what may lay in wait for us when the crises is over and we try to find a new normal.  These things can weigh heavily on us, as nurturers and healers and caregivers and our unique individual sense of place in the world. 

Think of how you have changed over this year amid the drastic changes in this world we live and love in.  How are you reacting to it all physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually?  How do you exercise your femininity during all of this?  What is your new role in these new ways of being?

©Carol Desjarlais 28.11.20

Whimsical Portrait inspired by NexJENeration Tuesday’s challenge, Nov 10