Changes

I had just finished a home visit with a family on my caseload on a cold, late-January evening. After leaving, I noticed I had a voicemail on my phone. The number was a restricted number. I listened to the message, assuming it was my aunt, the only person I knew who had a restricted number.

The voice on the other end was not my aunt. It was my father.

I had finally gotten the nerve to mail him the letter just the week before. I had updated it to include my phone number and email address, and providing a new mailing address. He had emailed me and called me on the very day he received the letter.

We talked for about thirty minutes. He asked me about pictures he had seen online - it turns out he had been keeping tabs on me all these years, just waiting for me to contact him. He told me several times how proud he is of me. We spent the next several days emailing each other. I finally got the questions I had wanted answered for twenty years, answered. I heard his side of how things went down between he and my mother. His only remaining family is a sister and some nephews and nieces, and I am his only child. He married soon after things ended with my mother, but they divorced and he has not married since. He is very nomadic, having moved from state to state simply for the hell of it, because he gets tired of living somewhere. He emailed me a picture of himself so I would know what he looked like. Turns out we are almost carbon copies of each other. After hearing his side of events, and seeing how much we looked alike, so many of my childhood issues finally seemed to be making sense. No wonder my mom treated me the way she did when I was a child - we look so much alike, I was a constant reminder of decisions and days that she would rather have forgotten.  When he asked, I was honest (well, to a point) about what my mother had told me about him. What really amazed me, is that after years of being told by her that he was practically the devil incarnate, and never having a nice thing to say about him, he has not once said anything negative about her. In fact, his advice was to never stop loving my family, and not let myself be consumed by hatred, because he's been down that road and it ruined him. He still views my mother as "the one that got away", and says that the day that she walked out on him, with me in her arms, is the hardest thing he's ever been through.

January had already been a whirlwind month. By this point in the month, I had already gone on several dates with a beautiful girl whom I was very attracted to. We initially met up at Barnes and Noble. We talked for four hours straight. Throughout the course of the month, she stated that she was very interested in me, but was wanting to take it slow because I'm her first post-divorce dating experience. I, of course, was perfectly okay with taking things slowly, as I haven't been in a relationship since 2007, and didn't want to jump into anything myself. I had also just passed my licensing exam, making me an official LMSW. And my roommate and I had just obtained approval on a house for rent, and would be moving at the first of March. I would no longer be sleeping on a couch. I would have my own space. Be able to get my own furniture. Be able to get all of my stuff back out of storage. For the first time in a long time, I felt good about my life. I was excited that so many things seemed to finally be coming together at once. I was relieved that my father was receptive to connecting with me, and that I had found a girl I thought I could potentially be happy with. But yet, so much was changing in my life, in just one month, that I was apprehensive. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. After all, it would seem that nothing positive ever lasts for long when it concerns me. The other shoe always finds a way to drop. And so, I waited. And hoped I was wrong.

Life's Lullaby

So after getting to bed at around 12:30am, I woke up at around 4:10am, at which point my parents, sister, and I packed into my parents' minivan and went to the mountains of Tennessee to join my grandparents in a cabin in the wooded mountains of Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge. It was actually a decent ride, for the most part. I finished the book I was reading, which will be reviewed soon in an upcoming book review. We arrived at our cabin at around 10:00am - pictures to come soon, hopefully. The only real incident was when my sister had a temper tantrum, crying and giving me the silent treatment for almost an hour because I grew tired of hearing her talk about the music group Hanson. Don't get me wrong, I like Hanson myself. I have their latest CD, and have posted a video or two of them on my facebook. They are very involved in some humanitarian efforts that I support. But I don't want to hear about them every five minutes. I guess I should mention at this point that my sister is 22 years old! The only other frustration today has been general fatigue and difficulties getting this mobile broadband to work. Now that I have it going(hopefully), it's great. I'm not on the computer as much as I normally am, I mainly got it in case I needed to check email or email my professors or field placement instructor. But it's also great to blog while out in nature.


Like right now. I'm sitting on the back porch of our cabin, tucked away in a mountainous forest, listening to crickets and cicadas singing to each other. The sun will likely set soon. What a great way to celebrate life, to renew yourself, to get to know Pleroma! Though Pleroma didn't exactly have a direct hand in this worldly creation, I feel Its life within it all. I feel anger and sadness over some of the bears that are kept caged up and made into local tourist traps around here. I feel a connection with the trees in front of me and all the miniscule, yet infinitely important, insects, rodents, reptiles.... everything. They all have a place. Without one, the others would not be able to exist either. Only humans seem to have truly been able to, at least momentarily, break away from this connection, at least superficially. Too bad we don't realize yet just what that disconnect has done to everything else on the planet.

It is in this respect that I feel like I am truly beginning to understand Abraxas more clearly as well. I already know that he is the Aeon of balance, the Gnostic version of the yin and yang. But what is more balancing than an evening out in nature? In nature, something dies so that something else can live. Others work together for mutual survival. They live day in and day out, eating, sleeping, mating, giving no thought to the past or the future. The forces of nature threaten life, and life gets right back up and survives anyways, in one form or another. Life seems to seek balance.

And for now, I feel balanced. Even cooped up in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with a family that is crazier than I've ever known, for this second, with the crickets and cicadas, I feel at home.