The Myths We Love
Last week was about myths and values on the epic scale because this moment is colossal. The virus is a stasis across continents, across ages, across the scopes of time and space.
And yet… it’s all so intimate. My son and I have been holed up for weeks. The only person we see is a friend who has kept her café open. I get my daily latte, and we speak our mother tongue. She is the only woman I speak my birthright language with on a daily basis. This relationship is incredibly intimate for me because of this shared language… the one I captured for myself in my son’s name.
So many of our myths are incredibly intimate, and because they are so close, so tightly held, they have incredible power. We carry them in our breath and our gestures. I wrote last week about the power in those myths. What we believe has power is carried in the stories. What happens to the powers we don’t recognize, don’t carry in our stories?
The inherent power of the avocado… my son and I have planted two pits; we check them every few weeks—they are growing painfully slowly in this Northern sun, even in our Southern windows.
This intimate moment of quarantine in our homes is powerful with memories and hopes. Stasis is like that. It has gravity, and gravity pulls more of its like to itself. This time reminds me of being home with my son when he was a newborn. Time out of time, I called it. His father wasn’t around much, and it was mostly me and mijo. Our relationship was strained before the baby. But once I’d given birth (dar a luz, give to the light), my shadow also began to catch light. Here I am, again, cocooned with my son, feeling the aloneness of my motherhood. And the great togetherness of us.
I was one who learned how to love in reverse. People say it all the time, “you have to love yourself before you can love another.” But that wasn’t true for me. I loved others with a fierceness that could only come from a woman painfully deprived of love. I gave what I wanted to receive. I did not love myself then, and that’s how I came to be with a man I should not have been with. What I loved in him was all the ways he wasn’t me. I didn’t love myself because I didn’t accept myself. I hoped standing next to him would change me. It’s no wonder, then, that we loved so differently, and that I didn’t feel loved.
Love between adults is complicated. Love with my son was not. It was only when he was born that I saw so clearly how deeply and fiercely I love. I found myself asking if anyone loved me as much as I loved my son. That question evolved: had I loved myself as well as I loved him? The answer left me reeling.
My son offered me a reflection of myself I had never seen before. I was shattered. I had built a life on a denial of myself. How could I be true, if I did not accept and love myself? How could I be present if I did not love myself? What did I have to give, if I was not living as myself? That was eight years ago. It feels like a lifetime.
This January, I decided to stop dating for a while. I believed it was because I needed everything in myself to recreate my life around my life purpose—something that I had not yet made central enough (motherhood, cancer, divorce—you know, survival sh*t—had taken up my time). But as I look back now, I remember something before that… in the worst moments of my shadow, in the fall, was a moment of feeling that I didn’t stand strongly enough in myself to be with someone else. Those were the words. That I wasn’t standing on a foundation of myself, the power of my feet planted in the ground—my own electric line to creation, source. The gravity of my purpose. Now, I know that can be translated as… I didn’t love myself enough. Again. I didn’t trust myself to be myself with someone else. Yet. Again.
I got divorced a long time ago. I’ve been in therapy. I’ve dated some really amazing men. I’ve come a long way in learning to love and live myself since my son was born. But sometimes behaviors creep back—especially with the prolonged stress I’ve endured—and they call back the the habits of mind and heart. It’s muscle memory. It wasn’t a lover this time. It was a job. A role that asked me to be a fish who climbs trees. Failure was ensured. The job rewarded me for being what it wanted me to be, not who I am. It was a life built around a false me. Again.
And here we are… the intimate pain of that epic American myth. The myth of my value. I am what I produce. I am the money I make for them. If they don’t value my gifts, they are not valuable. The inherent power of the avocado denied. The soul’s purpose waiting but for so long in the sun, and finally falling to the soil.
We are all, in this moment, asked to recognize our power and purpose—and value them. Capitalism’s myth of productivity is the myth of our worthlessness. It denies our inherent purpose and power. That myth rewards us with “comfortable lives” when we agree to its story. When we write a different kind of story—step outside that myth—we are too often punished, unable to find a place in the “market” that will sustain our lives while we give what we are made to give. But that life makes me feel worthless. Because my power, my gifts are struggling to find enough light to survive, to rise, to offer their fruit to the world. We live in strangled light.
I will have to love myself consciously again. I will have to mindfully remind myself every day what my gifts are, and find places to give them where they are recognized and received. I will become my own light, pull my own growth from the soil—until my fruit rises and my tribe arrives to feast with me. This is loving myself. Loving myself will be regarding and honoring my own creative force every day, and giving it space to rise. I will be my own sun for a time, my own rain for a time. I will tell my story. I will not wilt in the shadow of their myth. I will stand in the power of my creative force, rooted in source itself.
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