Your unshakeable truth
paves the way
for you to be of service
to the world.
Lauren Pasas
I’ve only ever wanted to be a mom and a homemaker.
This isn’t something a woman admits to in these equal rights, feminine power, days; yet it’s the truth, deep down.
All the other things I do have all manifested as an attempt to live these true desires into the world.
It is intriguing to me to see this from my current vantage point, and to be able to assess the whats and whys of my past choices and decisions from this longview from herenow.
I wasn’t playing with dolls as a little girl, nor can I recall enjoying pouring tea and serving invisible biscuits to a playing-along adult, squished into my tea-table chair.
It was not the child to hold that captured my attention; it was the creating of the place I inhabited.
Making a home from an empty space.
Creating beauty on a blank canvas….
I future-seek often; I always have. My biggest rememberings of activities other than those planned and carried out for me by my parents- soccer practice, band rehearsal, sleep away camp-are of dreaming in the tree tops I climbed to; of lying in the tall grass staring at clouds above or ants below; of jumping into the deep end of the pool and lingering in that silent cacophony.
These places were where only my imaginings existed.
In the past I have viewed all the desires and ways of being me as fault because they were not aligned to the worlds-way for the likes of me. I lived in constant trial to adjust these desires so that I fell into the alignment I thought I needed to in order to belong.
Anymore I can see these provide a place to see myself with new eyes.
No longer my fault lines, they intrigue me with what their ultimate intention has been all along.
Without doing the blame and shame game of ‘coulda woulda shoulda’, I realize a depth of appreciation and gratitude as well as wonder and excitement; this is all just right and on time.
I mightn’t have had this awakening if it weren’t for wrong-tracking for so long, with so much baggage.
I believe we carry what we carry and track where we do intentionally, and when we can look back in integrity, the truth is revealed and able to be of value going forward.
I have adored getting to be a mother four times over. My boys are my greatest creations and it is not lost to me what a wonder it has been to have them be a part of my life for over 30 years.
There is no defining me without their lives written into the definition.
That we are friends and allies even now is a gift I am continuously flipped over.
Yet as I said, I was not into the playing with dolls part of acting motherhood.
I see now that what I was playing out was about creating the place where motherhood could be, and children could coexist, and the bond that this is would be mine to partake in.
I have created seven homes for my boys. Eight if you count Australia as we traveled for two years. Every one of them was done in the way in which I have been designed to show up in love, and to show my love.
It has always been about making spaces in which I will be my most inviting, nurturing, and nourishing; by design.
Each workshop and retreat, each gathering and group, I am doing it all over again; trying to create space and place where I can hold others close in absolute safety, openness, and trust. Family is this first; and when it is not, we make it where we are.
I make it where I am.
The dreaming side of me is always leaning into change; the long-look forward into each evolution to a better way and a fresher environment.
As a child in the tree tops it was dreaming into the future where I was that reigning mother, creating a home, making a place for the world that was mine.
As an adult, now complete of the motherhood cycle of homemaking, I continue nonetheless: EncaustiCamp. EncaustiCastle. EncaustiCompound.
Will there be a next? A furthering on of, or a deepening into, the existing, as I continue?
A rebirth is happening and I have felt the contractions of delivery for a long time.
I now awaken to the realization that I am holding the infant in my arms, but the wonder of it has my head in a bit of a fog, and I am not entirely sure what to do with it now that it’s breathing into the world.
The beauty this time around, infant in arms, is that I have had practice.
I have realized so much through these 55 years and can say now, as I hold this dream-birthed close, I can wait for it to grow a bit more, and rather than trying to make it start walking in the world, I can let it grow in its own strength to take the next step in its own power and timing.
in love.
trish