Terri Clements Dean / PhD Traveling Stories

Lessons from the Journey of Life
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-939472-17-5
Verlag: LifeStory Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Traveling Stories is a collection of teaching stories drawn from the author's experiences as a therapist, as a traveler, and as a person in search of the answers to life's most important questions. Each of the stories is complete in itself, easy to read and entertaining, yet each contains a bit of wisdom that can be applied to any life. The organizing metaphor of the collection is 'life is a journey' and the journey is toward greater wholeness. The stories in the collection reveal some of the ways that we learn how to be wholly ourselves and to participate deeply and fully in life. Together, the stories describe the journey and offer advice about how to get the most from it. They offer the opportunity for insight without preaching, judging, moralizing, or dogma, gently urging the reader onward. Told with humor and compassion for the human condition, they nonetheless encourage a fearless, responsible involvement in life with all its complexity. The book draws on a deep study of several disciplines, including Jungian psychology, anthropology, and philosophy as well as the author's travels, clinical work, and personal experience. Its key points are these: •Life is a journey toward wholeness. •Life's lessons are found on the journey, •The lessons are offered freely and come in many forms, most importantly in the stories that we tell and hear and in the symptoms and symbols that demand our consideration. •Our part is to be honest, pay attention, trust the process, and work hard. The stories are simultaneously grounded in everyday life and awake to the possibilities for transformation bound in the mysteries of being. Symptom, symbol and ordinary experience reveal themselves to be the teachers that help us answer our deepest questions, learn more of the truth of who we are and can become, and open ourselves to greater freedom and a more precise intention for our lives.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Terri Clements Dean, PhD

PhD,

Leseproben

WHO AM I? “What’s your name,” Coraline asked the cat.
“Look, I’m Coraline. Okay?”
“Cats don’t have names,” it said.
“No?” said Coraline.
“No,” said the cat. “Now you people have names. That’s because
you don’t know who you are. We know who we are,
so we don’t need names.” —Neil Gaiman, novelist, graphic novelist, screenwriter The winter-brown cemetery grass crinkled underfoot as Katie walked to the grave. The sun made it look warm, but it was icy cold, for Georgia anyhow. Her father's composure seemed real enough, but he was hard to read. His mother's death was sudden, so Katie was watchful for signs that he needed help or comfort. Not that she would know what to do if anything happened. Her father was a mystery to her in so many ways. The aunts and uncles moved slowly toward the graveside. Of the five, the youngest was eighty-four, the oldest ninety-two—her daddy’s aunts and their husbands, old people here to bury their sister, the youngest, most beautiful of the six. And then the man walked up, reached out his hand to her father and said, “Hi, you won't remember me; my name is Leon Carter. I was renting a room from your parents when they adopted you.” No one knows what else the man said. The earth shuddered, went still, and then the aunts and uncles surrounded her father, reassuring him. Katie stood beside them, not with them. Her father had not known. How could that be? A man in his fifties, and he did not know he was adopted? So his daughter didn’t know either, and now they did. What did this mean for their lives? These four paragraphs represent the entirety of the novel I meant to write about my paternal grandmother’s journey. The facts are true, except there is no Katie. I am she, and the man is my father. I was thirty-three years old, married with children, and my father was fifty-eight when we learned we were not who we thought we were. When we left the cemetery the day of my grandmother’s funeral, we went back to my great-aunt’s house. My dad and his aunts and uncles went into a room and stayed for hours; I was not included. When Dad and I left later in the day to make the four-hour drive back to his house, he had little to say. I wanted to know what he had learned, but in my family, you didn’t ask questions. He only said they told him he had been adopted shortly before his father was killed and that his mother meant to tell him one day but never found the right time. “I remember thinking or hearing that I was adopted when I was a little boy, but Mother told me I wasn’t, and I believed her,” was all he told me that day. My father’s father died when Dad was two years old. A law enforcement officer, he was shot outside the main bank in Columbus, Georgia, around noon on a weekday. Bullets entered his body from five different directions, the first shot disabling his right hand. He was known to be an excellent marksman. There were allegations at the time of corruption by both my grandfather and his killers, who were themselves in law enforcement and who were eventually convicted of the murder. I know this because I read the newspaper accounts once I heard the story of his death, following my grandmother’s funeral and the news that my Dad was adopted. Before I was an adult, I only knew Grandfather died in 1922 when Dad was two; Grandmother and her sisters reared Dad. Dad’s mother, Mama Kate to me, was my intriguing grandmother. She visited my life in whirlwinds of romance and adventure. What I now understand is that she never really had a home. She lived with one of her sisters or with wealthy women for whom she served as companion. But, oh, was she beautiful! She had coal black hair, sparkling blue eyes, and pale ivory skin that glowed. When she came for her brief visits, she brought gifts and laughter and love. She taught me how to take care of my nails and hair and told me I was beautiful. (I was not; I was shy and fat and bit my nails.) She wore the prettiest clothes I had ever seen, and she played poker with the men and won! She traveled the globe, and she married for the sixth time when I was fourteen. I never met him or any of her husbands. I don’t think Daddy did either. They were somewhat temporary. I imagine the adults in the family had things to say about Mama Kate’s gadabout ways and multiple marriages, but I didn’t hear them. I just thought she had to be the most desirable woman in the world. When I graduated from high school, she sent me a telegram! I didn’t know anyone who had ever received a telegram. I still have it. My father was named for his adopted father; Dad’s mother and her family called him Junior. It didn’t seem odd to me that I had never met any of my grandfather’s family. If I thought about it at all, I assumed he had died so long ago that they had drifted away. Kids tend to just accept what is, and in my family, children didn’t ask questions. Everyone talked about how much Dad looked like his father. Of course, we didn’t know then he was adopted. Nor did we know the rest of the story. The part of the story my father didn’t tell me the day of my grandmother’s funeral was that he was the natural child of his adopted father and another woman. He had been given to my grandmother to care for only a few weeks before his father’s murder. Offcial documents confirmed this. Mama Kate’s only other child was stillborn near the time of my father’s birth. Dad went in search of his natural mother and his father’s family after he learned the story, but everyone was dead by then. He did learn that his father’s family included several attorneys and judges, my father’s own profession. Nothing changed on the outside following these revelations. Dad continued with his work and his life with his second wife and her family. I carried on with my life. My father and I hadn’t been close since he married my stepmother when I was twenty-five, just after he and my mother divorced. His new wife was about my age and had five children of her own. She didn’t like me, and I didn’t like her. There was too much that couldn’t be talked about concerning my parents’ divorce and my mother’s death, which followed soon after Dad’s remarriage. Dad and I were what I’d call friendly. Our relationship was cordial and warm, but I didn’t think of his family as my family, and he was definitely immersed in his new family. He was the center of their universe. He had found his first real home, and it couldn’t be my home. So, back to one of life’s questions: Who am I? How did Dad answer that question when he was growing up, as a young soldier during World War II, as a successful member of his community with a sad and stressful home life? How about when he was an older man with a younger, demanding, but devoted wife, and then as an elderly widower? (She died years before he did.) Did his perception of himself change when he learned he was adopted? When Dad developed dementia and knew he was losing his mental abilities, who did he believe himself to be? Who am I? How do we know who we are? Are we where we come from— our hometowns, our families, and our heritage? Are we our accomplishments or our failures? Are we the sum of our experiences or some stir-pot of genetics, learning, and experience? And, if we are that, how do we find identity within the mixture? Who am I? I am not simply the daughter of a man deceived about who he was for most of his life. I am also the daughter of a man who spent his life trying to belong someplace. His life story surely had its effects on me and on my identity but how and in what ways? Am I the beautiful girl my grandmother said I was or the shy, fat, damaged girl I thought I was? Am I the granddaughter of an excellent marksman who may or may not have been corrupt? I am a crack shot, by the way! (Who knew? I picked up a gun at a shooting range for the first time when I was forty-five years old, took aim, and hit the mark—a natural.) When I was a girl, I wanted to be like my glamorous grandmother, not like my sweet, sad maternal grandmother. But Mama Kate was not my biological grandmother—she was the woman who accepted her philandering husband’s child and did the best she could to get him to adulthood by herself. Then she went wandering. Did she find herself? Was she looking to discover exactly who she was? This could be a story about how secrets can destroy, but it’s not. It’s not even the story of my grandmother’s life, my father’s life, or my life. It’s a story about how we know who we are and how much we want our self to be knowable, how to hold onto an identity, and how to fix our star in the universe. We create stories that tell us who we are from the raw materials around us, and for a time, we believe those stories. But life is a journey, and along the way, experiences happen; we make mistakes; we see new sights—and the story changes. Who am I? How do we know who we are? In my therapy office, I ask each new client to write that question on a sheet of paper and then list ten separate answers. The list usually looks something like this: •Wife •...