You know, I sure have never seen the inside of the eye of the storm, but you’ve heard the stories, right? That…in the dead center, if you were to stand there, it is deathly calm, and there is a barricade of wind stopping the destruction from entering that very middle.
I imagine that they call it the eye of the storm because of way that the swirling pattern looks from way up high…birds eye view, way up high where there is no destruction, just a bird looking down at a pattern, swirling forward.
Coming back down to the vantage point of INSIDE the storm, in the eye, there is calm, and there is clarity. Being this eye, and being this calm…seeing your storms clearly, makes a world (or a whirl) of difference.
This month has seen me activate many new levels in my life – moving on to a new season. Rest assured that the season I have just come from is adamant that I must either stay in it, or be so bothered by the moving storm that I shift my focus away from the calm encircling my vision. I see the truth of where I am standing and seeing that, it makes the storm swirl around me BEYOND the barrier of wind.
Let me bring this into focus for you.
My father…not quite the man people think he is..least of all him..is an abusive and manipulative man, who has chosen for all of his life, to plaster on the face of good works, and of being a ‘good’ Samaritan, rather than face himself in the mirror. Deep down he knows that this masquerade will eventually push to the far corners of his world, everything that he has tried to keep close.
The more that I leaned into my own personal healing, was the more that I saw and became strong enough to bear the weight of who he really is, as a man, and as a human being. I was able to really feel the weight of the pain my inner child felt – the defenceless little girl he abandoned to someone else’s care whilst he lived a mere 15 minutes away and neither called, nor visited. I was able to put into proper perspective that whilst he may not admit to himself that he is an angry, wife beater, I am only responsible to myself for telling myself the truth of what I saw in him as a child where there was another story spilling out like blood onto the floor. Every smiling, self-congratulating thing that he has ever said to himself about himself is lost behind the whirling lies that he has created in his own life. He has projected the evil he saw in himself onto my brother, and like the sweet and affable person that I do miss, my brother sapped it up and became the monster that my father pretended that he himself was not. They both could have healed, but my brother trapped himself in his pain whilst assuming my father’s lies.
In the last year, I’ve seen how powerful we humans can be, whether or not we understand that truly, we create each and every circumstance in our own lives. I’ve seen my father, spit lies from his mouth, whilst the truth of his soul creates circumstances that match the weight of his burden – the burden of lies. Rather than manifest healing, by admitting to himself, “Me..I am that monster,” instead, he has never, not even once, acknowledged nor admitted to any of his wrongs. Rather, everything is all everyone else’s fault – his wife LEFT him, the government is terrible, his neighbours are atrocious and all the ‘other’ people are assholes.
For a decade, I chose to remain here and live with him, mostly to stay close to my nephew, but also because I chose during that time to focus on my own healing, rather than activate whatever vengeance I could have harboured for the man. Instead I learned to both love him, flaws and all but also, see him in his whole truth, at the same rate that I saw myself in all my own truth.
The brunt of my healing, now completed, I can move on, and have chosen to. I told him I was moving. The next day he fell and burst his head. I cleaned the bruise, patched it, encouraged him to seek medical attention, but instead he spiritedly walked around the neighbourhood telling everyone how he fell, seeking their pity and lapping up the attention he got over his fall. It was quite convenient that this fall should happen when he learned that finally he would be left alone to face his own demons.
Spiritual Sabotage
Realising that he was continuing to sprout the narrative that I would, as I had done before, go for another long haunting stretch to my other places, Grande Riviere, and Tobago but return for a spell at some point, I reminded him a few days ago, that no, I was leaving, for good. I’m leaving. I’m not returning, not soon, not ever. He had a seizure yesterday morning.
Now, I did the right thing, and called the ambulance, attended to him, made sure he got to the hospital and everything related to his care yesterday. However, in my spirit, where I have chosen to pull truth up every time I am facing the option of lies or truth, I’ve seen how powerfully this man’s manipulative grasp is wanting to extend into me. It was not enough that I was merely a punching bag for his weak ego all my life. Now, that he is losing grasp and he can see in my eyes, that I’ve seen him in the fullness of his true self, and am no longer drinking his Kool-aid, his spirit is now entertaining a slew of antics.
The doctors discovered nothing in his blood, X-Ray, CT-Scan or ECG to confirm that a seizure should have happened, or would happen again. This was entirely manifested by the storm raging around his own denial, about himself.
In clarity and calm, I see his storm raging around me, along with everything else form my past that has tossed itself into the winds in the last two weeks and wanting to hold me bondage to the family and life that I am leaving behind when I move out of my father’s house at the end of this month.
I won’t crash his narrative. I will play along until I am just not there to be a part of the play anymore, and whatever story is left behind will be his to tell, and re-tell.
I live in truth, and in the eye of the storm, I see the storm clearly. The storm will die away if you just, stand still…stand still in truth.
Lies, even the ones that you tell yourself manifest a chaotic life… a loveless life, a frenetic and stressed life as you focus so gingerly each day on preserving the lie, that you don’t realise that you are swirling around and around and going nowhere.
Five years ago, I stepped out of the storm of my own life, and it has increasingly given me the peace and clarity to stay out of storms entirely.
It is as quiet today, as it was the yesterday and the day before that, here in the truthful eye of the storm.
JanBerry 