Empty Cereal Box

Views From Inside an Adoptee

May 24, 2006

Dread vs. Nature

(Written last night-May 23 ) We left Portland today (below are some photos to give you an idea of some of the magnificent beauty we drove through). I feel dreadful sorrow inside me, an uncried cry as big as the open sea. It's a huge hollowness that burns and terrifies me by its sheer power. It's the feeling I get whenever I must leave my K, like my nmom left me. All I want to do is to cry from that bottomless place of abandonment, that fear of loss that eats away once again. I held back my tears, but even R wiped his eyes as we pulled out onto the highway.

Breathe. Stay in the now, trusting each moment to lead into the next. Right now I'm sitting in a motel room in Weed, CA at the foot of Mt. Shasta. R is watching HBO and I'm sitting next to him on the bed.

I think much of my trepidation is that every once in awhile I remember that K is going to leave for Guatemala on June 6 for seven weeks to do field work for her graduate studies, learning Mayan healing arts for women's health from two elderly women who speak very little English.

I feel dread. I know I must trust, but I still dread. I fear for K's well being. A single young woman, all the fevers-dengue, malaria, and who knows what else; right at the cusp of hurricaine season with global warming making ever-more ferocious storms, all strangers, so far away. We're working on setting up Skype, so that should help with communications. Oh, by the way, I helped her to set up a blog to journal her exepriences. You can click here if you want to read it. I'll also add it to my links.

Why do I always feel terrible that I could be doing so much more for my children? Why do I feel I can never do enough, that I'm a terrible mom? Why do I always fear the worst for them? I try to keep it all inside, but it hurts so much.

Still, on the road it's easier to breathe, to see a larger picture of the Earth and my place in it. Below are some photos I took as we drove from Portland toward Mt. Shasta. All the while this battle goes on inside me. It's metaphorical for adoption to me. The adoption industry vs. mother and child. I read where a certain dictator is planning to sell off to logging industry and developers much of the American wilderness and national forests. Then I stumble across quotes like this:

The way of nature is the cosmic path, infinitely older than the religious paths, which, by comparison are tiny ripples on the river of time. The path of nature is older than time itself. It was here in the creation of the universe and in the symmetry-breaking of the physical forces. It is no human myth or fantasy. It is woven with the warp and weft of biology and quantum mechanics. In it is encapsulated the paradox of conscious existence in a physical universe.-unknown







4 Comments:

Blogger Rhonda said...

Your photography is just beautiful, Marie. And, since it is of my homeland, and I'm terribly homesick at the moment, it made me ache.

About that sense of dread. I share it. I put my son on a plane this morning and couldn't shake that feeling of impending doom on the way home. It doesn't matter how irrational the thought is, it truly seems that for many of us who lost our families before ever knowing them carry that memory in every fiber of our being - and the fear that those we love the most will simple vanish into the ether rears it's ugly head whenever triggered by a goodbye.

25.5.06  
Blogger HeatherRainbow said...

((Marie))

The pictures you took are beautiful. I believe that the force of Nature will win out in the end. And, it will always have beauty, as that is what creation is... beauty.

26.5.06  
Blogger Marie said...

Thank you all for your comments.

Rhonda-I don't even live there and already my heart, my whole being, aches to go back. It's the only place where I can find sanity outside my own brief encounters with stillness of the present moment.

kim kim-It's so difficult to be couragous in the face of dread and foreboding, but nature provides such deep and healing wisdom that the cynicism just melts away.

heatherrrainbow-I feel deep in my bones that you're right. The power of creation was here long before we got here and will continue long after we're gone.

26.5.06  
Blogger Andromeda Jazmon said...

I am catching up on you, finally have my computer on the weekend. Your pictures are so beautiful!! I want to go back there and I've never been!

I am sending my oldest son to college way far away from my this fall, and I am no where near prepared for the separation. I know you must be proud of K though! What an adventure!

3.6.06  

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