“What Do I Really Want?”

I haven’t been back here for a while; sheer laziness and the proverbial hustle if you ask me, but the compulsion to write and share bits of my soul has been kept alive in closed groups and has brought me back full circle to ….My Boudoir…My Secret Place!

I found that place within and stretched my heart out to share it without; hoping that one day at a time, one heart at a time, one life at a time will take a piece of mine and make it theirs; to me that’s my Purpose Fulfilled!

Many people have hard and fast rules about being in an abusive relationship (whether it’s emotional, mental or physical); some people asked me to stay and hold on to God to change my ex and I did for a season, very few people said leave simply because it was unheard of to do so a few years ago, hardly anyone bothered to ask what I really wanted, which was the most surprising. I learnt years later that it was important to know what one wants otherwise you’ll run the risk of trying to live someone else’s life, and make it yours but it’ll only fit like an oversized or pinched shoe, a large Mac that let’s the rain seep in.
So that has become my number one question when I listen to male and/or female friends talking about their relationship challenges …..

“What Do YOU Really Want?”

Sounds almost redundant but trust me, most people in pain can never give you an answer that they are 100% sure of, to that question. Stage 1 – First comes the pain, then the numbness, then the silence….that’s the scariest one! With each stage comes a new season, a new lesson, a new reason to keep putting one foot in front of another on that journey that we must all take, Our Journey into Fulfilling Purpose.

So ask yourself this – What do I really Want??

EYES WIDE SHUT

I always thought that was a contradiction in terms (obviously) but lately I’ve had a rethink after reading a woman’s perspective on the commitment of Love online a few days ago.
People who know me used to tell me never to lie about how I felt because my eyes always gave the game away; if I was ecstatic they glistened with excitement and the brown was almost translucent, if I was content they were a warmer shade of brown and drew a picture of restive pleasure, if I was sad and/or angry they became a darker brown and left my entire face looking lifeless. When I think about it now, I say to myself “Is that the wideness of eye that displays the emotions and wellbeing of heart in it’s changes?”….hmmmm
So how can my eyes remain wide and shut at the same time, I wonder? L.O.V.E! Simply put
This woman postulated on the female mind’s ability to live many lifetimes in little moments with her eyes wide shut; experiencing the excitement, the laughter, the contentment, the pain and the passion of love with a gullible heart that automatically insulates itself from all extremes of emotion in order to savor each of these moments. She enthuses about how our desire to love and be loved almost makes us blind to the possibility and/or reality of the painful part that might leave our hearts cold and our eyes lifeless, simple because we want to enjoy the euphoria of the times of passion, excitement and contentment for a little longer. So we live our lives savoring those moments when we willingly have our ‘eyes wide shut’ so we can feel alive even for a moment.
It reminds me that I can be the daughter that loves and honors her mother no matter how crabby she gets as she ages, I can be the sister who loves regardless of whether your siblings appreciate or return the favor, I can be the mother who loves her children unconditionally no matter how good or badly they behave, I can be a friend who is there no matter what regardless of whether I’m left to stand alone in my times of need, I can be the lover who wears her heart on her sleeves and gives her love freely to the one she shares her life with, no holds barred…….it means I can open my eyes to every possibility of love, while shutting out the fear that drives one to go through life without having experienced any of these emotions even if they lasted only for a season.
With Eyes Wide Shut…..I LIKE IT!!!

SHARING ‘THE BLUES’

It’s that time of the month so I’m having the blues and all I can think about is something a wise person once told me…..”writers are not made, nor are they born; writers are people who live on their recurrent moments of nostalgia and/or reminiscence and are able to share it with an audience they may never see….a true writer writes ‘truth from his/her soul’…in past, present or imagined future”

So today I’m sharing the blues with my unseen audience…..

Everything around me seems to disappear when i write; the feelings of being taken advantage of by everyone I love in the littlest ways that should be insignificant but are not….the hug my youngest gives me when she wants to ask me for something I may not ordinarily want to give but I’m willing to trade for the ‘feeling of being love’ that comes with that hug; the times when my son reminds me that he’s my only boy and as such the most important man in my life, which gives me the warmest feeling laced with dread for the time in the future when I’ll be duly replaced by the woman he truly loves (and I want that for him even though it scares me shitless!); the growing code of secrecy shared by my oldest two that gladdens my heart to see how close they are even though it shuts me out just because I’m Mama; the lover that needs you the most when he needs you but can’t seem to see you when it’s your need that’s greatest; the friend who calls with her heart breaking and just wants you to listen, oblivious off the tears that are coursing down your cheeks because you want to scream from your own pain within, professional contemporaries who ‘nicely’ request a favour but refuse to pay you when that request becomes revenue……..so I disappear…..and so I write to a bunch of people I can’t see, hoping that they can see me ‘just as I am’.

One of our greatest challenges as human beings is the inability to just be……be courageous, be scared, be ugly inside, be beautiful from within, be happy, be sad, fail, succeed, be anything, in anyway, to everyone without worrying about how they perceive you….. JUST Be!!! I don’t want to stop being nice because it’s who I am, I don’t want to stop giving of myself daily because it’s who i am, i don’t want to be constantly on guard just because the world always has a hidden agenda….I just want to Be!!!

I’m having a hormonal day with a cocktail of nostalgia mixed with reminiscence and a healthy dash of reality that feels like added Tabasco sauce to a Bloody Mary on a cold winter afternoon in Lake Como. Truth be told, I’m needing my baby’s hug, my son’s love, shared secrets with my oldest daughters, my lover’s attention that has no benefits to him, my friend to call just because she wants to see if I need to talk, my contemporaries to be honest when requests granted turn to revenue.

A member of my staff just walked in the door as I wrote and handed me a little boxed gift….a business cardholder….the rays of sun seeped through the window as he closed the door on his way out and I looked up at the ceiling and felt God smile, sharing the blues with me!

I CALL HER ‘Female’

What is the true definition of less?…..the one I think is more appropriate in describing my thoughts reads from the dictionary as “of lower rank and importance”. You may wonder why I picked that one and my reasons are simple….today I cry out against tradition and culture that reduces the psyche of special beings and had sold them a lie! These same traditions are hated in the core of our being but are celebrated on the outside in order to maintain status quo so we don’t appear to be different and as such ‘unsubmitted to the authority placed upon us’…..today I ask WOMEN why we settle for less.

The Bible says in Genesis 1:27-28 “…in the image of God he created ‘them’; male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and said, Be fruitful….multiply…fill the earth….govern it…” and He saw that it was good! In chapter 2:18 God decided to address the Physical Man’s need for companionship when he thought to himself that “it is not good for the (Physical Man) to be alone. I will make a Helper suitable for him”….so the Lord made a Physical Woman and brought her to the the Physical Man. Did that in anyway negate her first commission in creation? Absolutely not!!

I have read these parts of scripture more times than I can count, especially in my quest to understand a generation of Women who have decided that the entirety of who they are created to be can be relegated to the background, while they wade through life enduring the pain of performing at less than optimal at who they truly are. At the time we were first created as spiritual beings we were given the same commission as the one similar to us, because together we are the fullness of God; but, in the face of creating us as separate physical beings we appear to have forgotten the reason why we were created in the first place! I have met so many women who have tremendous capacity for greatness on the inside but choose to shrink back so they may follow the traditions set and be seen to be doing what is expected of them.

So I think to myself, is it better to be called Female instead of Woman so we can get our heads back to the true reason why we were created? Will that remind us to ‘be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth, to govern it’ without calling it Women’s Liberation, Girl Power or some absurd euphemism that makes a mockery of who we truly are? I sat and watched the life of Nelson ‘Madiba’ Mandela in the last couple of days and swung between admiration for his singlemindedness of purpose regardless of the challenges and/or victories he faced, and a sick feeling in my stomach at the monumental waste that stares me in the face daily when I look at the ‘man in the mirror’ living at less than optimal value.

So Today…..I Call the ‘Mirror Man’ FEMALE …..because I need to be reminded that though the Woman may have physical limitations that will become dust at her end; the one created by God in His image and after His likeness has No Limitations! The breath of life that gave the Physical Being a soul can only experience it’s fullness if it spends more time with the Female and not the Woman.

Today I’m looking at the Me in the Mirror and asking her to become Female again!

A CLOSET GEISHA’S BUCKET LIST

I just had a birthday and it was a blast…..no partying but my kinda quiet reveling in my soul with the best company ever! Now that may seem strange to some people but as they say “different strokes for different folks babe!” I just wanted to share my day with strangers and end it with someone that made me feel like a million bucks and some, and I did just that.

My dear friend Bubs put up a picture of me and someone said to her; “Wow! Is she getting married again?”….I laughed when she told me and she said; “Well, they just want you to be happy, with a hunk beside you”….(ROTFL!!!!!)…….Happiness – ‘a temporary state of being that is often connected with external stimuli’…..Hunk – ‘a modern day version of a Mills & Boon created picture of a perfect to look at male’……why on earth would I want temporary stimulus induced happiness with a man who might amount to nothing as his looks fade?? (more ROTFL!!!!)

My 14 year old asked me to write a bucket list at Easter; I said to her; “Baby, you’re too young to read a Geisha’s bucket list” to which she replied, “What’s a Geisha, Mama?” (wink wink)……bucket lists are started in the time of rediscovery but oftentimes are never finished
in one lifetime, but start somewhere we must so here goes…..

Year 2013:
(a) A one night stand – curious but I think it may be overrated still if he has a private jet to fly me to a private island and back to base in 24 hours….maybe….(huge grin!)
(b) Travel with my best friends – maybe 3 times but the one that will be an absolute blast will certainly not be female (sorry ladies!)
(c) Open a bar – jus a regular ‘come sit and eat so I don’t have to worry about the bills’ business that generates income for utilities
(d) Living free – I’m a glorified geisha; a mistress that’s treated with the courtesy of a married courtesan but hasn’t the encumbrances of daily caring for a house full of children and a complaining spouse…(now that’s the one that scares my ex-posse because I was Mrs Squeaky Clean for more years than I care to count!)

To my friends – I may always remain the divorced aunt whose many adventures keep your children close, listening to exciting stories their mamas may never tell…have no fear, they’d always get right counsel but with one helluva crazy story to keep them thinking the narrow path is the better option (hehehehe!)….to my family – I’m all you gat of my type and the best ‘me’ in and out of season so just enjoy me! (grin!)…..to the one who holds my heart (for now) – I do love you especially because you taught me to love me better than I do you so that’s definitely put you up there with Blue Cheese and Champagne

I’m obviously a geisha in my mind only and may never have the ‘liver’ to try most geisha-rized acts but would I give it my best shot in my own way? Damn straight I would!!!!

Here’s to the next 7 years of filling my bucket list……cheers people!

OUTSIDE MY HOTEL ROOM WINDOW

I hate hotel rooms…….small ones, large ones, cosy ones, posh upscale ones (the whole lot of them!)….I know that sounds weird to some people but I have my reasons and all of them came to roost today as I stared mindlessly out of the one I’m currently in at a building under construction. The building looked so stark and empty against the grey skies; it’s lifeless frame just sitting there but still it compared like a second skin to the emotional starkness I feel each time I have to make ‘home’ in yet another hotel room!
Suddenly this thought came to mind and stayed longer than was comfortable…….”Naked and vulnerable”…..then it occurred to me that it was how I felt each time I tried to make a home for a season in yet another hotel room. It’s funny how one thought naturally progresses into another because here I was staring at a lifeless building with it’s open windows and doorways, yet feeling a different kind of vulnerability that reminded me of the reasons why human nature is so complex.
I am like the lifeless building more times than I care to count…..sometimes a kind heart walks in with a coat of paint, soft furnishings and great company then leaves and I become that building again, sometimes busy hands put in a desk, a chair, a computer and a piled in-tray but soon enough the tray empties and there is no longer any use for the desk, chair and computer so I become the building again, at other times the illicit one night stand, the scandalous affair, the theft of company resources, the stowaway heart steeped in selfish irresponsibility (and all their dreaded relatives) fill my thoughts, words or deeds but only for a season before I become that building again…….”naked and completely open to anything”
I wish that life would hand me a separate deck of cards; the one where my aces meant I didn’t need to feel, to cry, to live through this stark lifeless corridors daily waiting for the Master Decorator Himself so I could finally see colours….(anything but this grey Lord!). Still I sit staring, with my one single thought……the lifeless building outside my hotel room window!

RELIGIOUSITY……”The House of the Lord” (PART 1)

I sat in my room last night thinking……..it’s Sunday tomorrow and I haven’t been to the ‘House of the Lord’ for two months; “what’s going on with you Dionne?”, I thought to myself and so I prayed and tried to find a space in my heart where guilt dwelt; guilt for deviating from the laws of propriety both in the Church and in Nigeria, but I felt none.

Sunday morning came with my usual commune with my Father, my Husband, my Lover, my Friend but today I didn’t want to watch the service online, I just wanted to read the word, be in a place of thanksgiving and enjoy our little spats of conversation through the day. My mother expressed her concern about my lack of enthusiasm for the weekly visits to the ‘House of the Lord; I smiled and said to her “Mama….the Word is alive and in my heart, before my eyes, in my mouth daily; that’s my mojo, not the church pews…..I am taking a well deserved break from meaningless worship”

Now I can hear the holy rollers saying to themselves “Meaningless Worship??!!! Sister Dionne!” but what is meaningful to me differs from what is to another. My context of meaningless worship in this instance does not refer to the Church but to the fact that my current season with the Father is best spent in quiet, secluded worship with Him in the absence of religious church-going and collective fellowship in a large congregation. By 3pm today, my younger brother who is a youth pastor, his wife and another couple stopped by and we had a wonderful time of ‘fellowship’ (sharing life and love in the context of who we are – Children of God) that was even more fulfilling for me than ‘the gathering of the saints in a building called The House of the Lord’

I do not know why a church building where a mixed multitude of people gather to pray, praise and hear the Word from the mouth of a ‘man of God’ is the standard for the place to be on a Sunday morning, I do not know why in this season my spirit that is one with God’s Spirit will not carry a load of guilt around for the absence of an activity I have done religiously for half my life, I do not even attempt to decipher fully what this might mean in the big scheme of things where walking daily with the Father is concerned; but this one thing I am clear about …….”that my current state of heart in the discovery of self in an inward journey on a narrow path, is not an outward expression of the preoccupation with religious beliefs, themes or content, it is not religiousity and as such holds no interest for me in it’s Sunday Sunday Daraprin expression that is more cultural than it is holy”

So today I am thankful for family, for friendship, for fellowship and for the freedom in Christ that I enjoy!!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“THE SHELL”

I haven’t been on this page for months because I just stopped…..I stopping thinking, stopped feeling, stopped ‘acting’ the way I had grown accustomed to that made everyone happy and comfortable because anything else would have meant they had to adjust to the ‘new me’ and as such be out of their comfort zone.

I stopped going to church as ‘religiously’ as I used to (SHOCK HORROR!!!) because I couldn’t take one more sermon that attempted to soothe the pain of thousands with real challenges that would take the person sitting next to you a little sacrifice to heal but he/she was too absorbed in putting his/her own request before God that he/she didn’t notice your pain. I was tired of seeing needs that I also was powerless to meet because I hate the “It is well, God will provide” slogan that had slowly become cold comfort and so I wasn’t in the mood to say it to someone else in need such as I.

So I sat in my shell……….a shell…….first a protective covering from the outside world, then a small enclosure that allows an organism grow before it emerges, often different in form

In the shell I found proitection in the arms of the only One who could come into the shell with me…..Jehovah! We talked, we dined, we laughed, we cried, He wrapped protective arms around me and watched me grow in strength from within. Then one day He said, it’s time……time to come out again!

So now I’m out with only the sweet still voice of Him who had the time to ‘rest’ with me….saying…..”Stay in the Fog; only walk as far as you can see per time, two feet in front of you…..trust me because I right there in the Fog!”………

So here I am on a different journey; one that started with a journey within but must end with a journey without.

 

THE LONG ROAD

I had an epiphany of sorts last week; it was nothing earth-shattering or spiritual but it left me feeling the need for good company……my company!

We live in a new world with microwave answers to faster questions that barely read the last line before your brain starts to process the next one. Why are we in such a hurry to think, to speak, to see? Why can’t we stop to ponder, to be quiet and to really look before we ‘leap’? I sat still for a while with my mind trying to process a happy though…,a new developme….,a juicy bit of gossi…., who to call to share it wit…., how it will make me feel if I spread it furth…., why should I feel ba…, why am I changing who I am just because…., and the list went on until I arrived at the final thought that was complete but needed me to actually think a complete thought for a second……”HOW DID I MOVE FROM A HAPPY THOUGHT TO AN ANXIOUS THOUGHT IN 10 MILLISECONDS?”

Hmmmm…..after sitting for a while till my thoughts cleared, I realized that I had just taken a mental journey through a thick fog that got thicker as I proceeded until I stopped for a second to try to get my bearings! Deep within the fog I stopped, became quiet from within and looked deeper in front of me; I saw several semi-clear paths but didn’t know which one to follow so I became quieter still so I could ponder for a second what laid at the end of each one, then I chose a path. As I walked further on my chosen path, the fog began to clear and every unfinished question became completed answers…..finally I had arrived at my destination, finally I could see clearly after taking the long road

The long road may seem like a bad idea but if it helps you look instead of just see, ponder instead of just think and be quiet from within before you speak…..then I’ll choose the long road every time!

WE ARE KESHI!!!! (about Life, Love & Fading Lustre)

I’m sitting here trying to write something meaningful about life and love but for the life of me I can’t seem to reach deep enough for it to be meaningful. So I ask myself instead; why do I feel so empty? Then I thought about the way pearls are formed……

A keshi pearl is a non-beaded pearl formed by accident as a by-product of a pearl culturing operation; it is formed when the oyster rejects and spits out the implanted nucleus before the culturing process is complete, or the implanted mantle tissue fractures and forms separate pearl sacs without nuclei. These pearl sacs eventually produce pearls without a nucleus.  Since there is no nucleus to guide the ultimate shaping of the pearl, their shapes vary widely. In fact, they have a greater luster than even the highest quality cultured pearls.

 

When we are been beaten often by life and love’s challenges, we feel a sense of displacement, a loss of that ‘centre’ (our nucleus) that may express itself as an echoing emptiness with silent voices that often speak of nothing, in many tongues. We feel nothing, think nothing, can speak of nothing and picture ourselves in the sea of the fading luster of nothingness.

 

Today I discovered that we are not nothing; just something different created as a bi-product of the natural process of life! We are like the Keshi pearl that even though is formed by accident has a harder shell, a greater luster and a different shape. WE ARE KESHI!!!!!!