This Is My Goat: Learning Grace

 

 

 

This is my goat

Not your goat

You cannot get my goat.

We were meant, since our creation, to need, to support, to nurture, to connect with each other.  Along the line, somewhere, we began to need too much and forgot we need to be responsible for our own actions, and to stand on our own in courage and bravery, to defend against conditioning that does not fit one’s soul, and need to be a little bit stubborn and a little bit willing to surrender.

Dictionary.com defines the phrase “being an old goat, as being an elderly man who is disliked, especially for being mean to or disapproving of younger people. a lecherous man, especially one considerably older than those to whom he is attracted.  But I believe the ‘old men’ is universal for men and or women.  Being BoHo can sometimes be taken too far so that we forget that the first golden rule of being human is to take care of one another, be kind, nurturing, supportive of others. Yes, it can mean falling from grace a thousand thousand times.  It can be a magnificent obsession and we can be willing to learn the lessons the first few times we fall.  And sometimes, it means to love yourself free!

Yes, we will stumble and fall on our face.  When we stumble and we fall, we will find ourselves flat on our face along with others who have s sense of having fallen from grace.   In my free-falling, I met another one who fell regularly.  I believed in his dreams not mine.  I wanted to save him.  Eventually, I had to be stubborn enough to override my need to nurture, to care, to forgive.   

This is my late husband.  He wrote this song when we were together.  She is me.  We had a complex relationship where we were only together the months he was clean and sober.  And, yes, when he was clean and sober, he could be around me and my kids.  He was a beautiful tortured soul whose master was addictions of every kind.  But when he was clean and sober he was a caring beautiful man, an incredible artist, a wonderful caring human being, and would follow the Good Red Road right from his very soul and he was able to loved deeply.  But he was, as I said, a tortured soul.  We never divorced but I had not seen him since 1994.  We lived a relationship where we thought a great deal of each other right to the end (and thinking well of him meant that I honored his best, not his worst and we slipped through life and away from each other since he could not beat his demons).  He was part of who kept me a gypsy, full of adventure and passion, laughter and love, and wonderful times and we did ‘try’ our three times – I always give everyone three chances – and, yes, he would come to me broken and I would help him when he helped himself.

 

I eventually learned to break the codependency.  I wanted to save him in spite of himself and he wanted someone to catch him when he fell.  Eventually I had to catch and save myself. 

He died a few months ago.  It was a strange time for me.  I had to remember why I left him and I had to remember the good things about him as well.  Someone said, “you never mentioned him in all those years!”  What could I say?  That I loved a broken man?  That we were, in that relationship, both broken?  That it was he that kept me young and free?  He was one of my great teachers and the lessons I learned were hard lessons to learn.  But he also taught me grace.

Eventually I had to be a stubborn old goat.  I had to stop butting heads with him and simply let him go free to be who he was and I had to move on, without regrets that I owned, and let him own his own falls and rises.  Override!  Sometimes we take a steep rise, or take the high road of perching on stone walls.  Sometimes we have to go against our own nature and walk away from the things we need to see the best of, the potential, the spent passions and walk away. To try to find our own grace. 

©Carol Desjarlais 6.5.21