a beautiful warm spring day

My first priority was to join a Cyberspinners bike ride through the Eastatoe valley just south of Route 11. We stopped at one abandoned house with a large field full of daffodils. We did about 30 hilly miles and my knee twinged less than yesterday when I did about 25 flatter slower miles.

Somehow I also got a paper rewritten today to give at a conference this Friday. Actually it still needs to be cut in half, but at least I feel I have a text to work from that goes where I want to go. Cutting it is going to be hard, as the argument hinges on some complicated technical details. The session organizer emailed me today to ask me to circulate my paper right away, so I barely squeaked under the wire on that one.

Church today left me thinkig about the story of the raising of Lazarus, who "stinketh" (in the worlds of the King James version). And about a comment someone made in our Sunday school class on Celtic spirituality: that we meet evil but we know the good inside us is stronger. My first reaction was that it didn't work that way for me as a kid. But I do like the Celtic emphasis on the goodness of creation.

the bridge

Here is my image of the bridge:

more ideas

I met with K., whom I see as a spiritual director but who is trained as a Jungian analyst. We had a creative conversation about the question of different strategies people use to live with having done something bad.

He said two images came up for him. The first was the 19th century Second Great Awakening paradigm of the conversion process. I read conversion accounts years ago (for a project on science at Mount Holyoke College) and the pattern is that the unconverted one feels worse and worse about herself, more intensely unworthy, until the selfhatred has grown and grown until it finally breaks and the young person feels God's love and acceptance.

K.'s second image was an old Cherokee ritual called going to water. On a given day every year the members of a community would take off their old clothes by a river and enter the water and follow it downstream to another place where they left the water and put on all new clothes. All wrongs except murder were forgiven by the process of going through the water and other people had to be forgiven all wrongs and debts.

I said I don't want to leave the child in me behind in order to find a new life, and K. had an image of a mother carrying a child with her through the water.

That was powerful for me but I started looking for images that weren't of leaving the old behind and starting anew. One possible direction is to trust that God will bring good out of all that is in me. I know I wouldn't want to be the person I would be if I hadn't had the bad experiences. Rotten stuff is good fertilizer.

I had a stubborn image in my head of a bridge, though I resisted it, not wanting to be a bridge between the world where the harm happened and the new. K. suggested I could be a drawbridge, but the image in my mind is of a suspension bridge. I need to make the picture before I try to say what it means.

A friend sent me this link for making friends with the shadow.

strategies

I'm working with feelings about something I did as a child. While I could say that I was too young to be responsible, that isn't touching some of the deepest feelings inside me so I am looking for other possible approaches. One of my philosophies of life is that there are always more than two alternatives, so I am trying to think of as many alternatives as I can for how people live with having done something bad. Here's what I have so far:

• repression--forget that it happened
• always feel inside "I'm bad"
• find God's forgiveness
• throw yourself into working for some related good cause

I'm trying to think of more alternatives. They don't have to be desirable alternatives--I'm not looking for an answer but rather trying to enlarge what I call the possibility space, the range of ideas available to me. More generally, the direction I want to go in is the Jungian idea of embracing the shadow.

belated ride report

I had a lovely bike ride of just over 3 hours on Saturday. The mountain was early in the ride and most of the climb was moderate with occasional level patches. There was one stretch where I was above 90% maximum heart rate for longer than I have ever been before. Downhill was no fun--steep and curving and a rough road so I had to ride the brakes the whole way. Then there was a long flat stretch and I kept my pace up. The last uphill was tough.

The most interesting things I saw were two belted cows, which look to me like they ought to be pigs, and an old apple orchard that had just been pruned. The apple trees were pruned not in the open-center style I am used to but with central trunks like telephone poles and horizontal branches alternating directions, called central leader pruning.

gratitude

I regret going out in my car early in the morning to run instead of just rolling out the door, but the track is easier on my joints and just too far to walk. But this morning it was a good thing, because I knew early that my car wouldn't start. It has been starting sluggishly and I have been worrying how to know whether it just needed a new battery or whether there was something more wrong. After not being used all weekend it couldn't quite get going, and when I tried again later it didn't turn over at all. That certainly suggested that the battery was failing--it didn't show the recovery that a battery usually will. My husband jumped it and I stopped and bought a new battery after dropping my son at school. I bought this car used so I didn't know if it still had the original battery, but the brand on the battery was Motorcraft so it probably was original. The car is a 1998 Ford Escort that now has 120,000 miles on it, so it has certainly earned a new battery. I'm happy that it looks like the problem was so easy to fix.

weekend

I'm looking forward to a weekend of hiking and biking at Kanuga. I tend to make spending time outdoors a higher priority when at Kanuga than the program of my church's retreat weekend, and particularly so if a lot is going on in my personal journey. It is easier to face the difficult memories if I can burn off my pain hiking or biking. Last summer I did the 42 mile Apple Festival Challenge route but went around the mountain--I'm hoping tomorrow to do the whole 2924 cumulative vertical feet.