This has been on my mind because I have spent more years with them as adults than I did with them as children.
From Miles Trell I learned how adults can trust one another.
When he was well into his thirties he reached out to me with a health problem.
He stretched out his hand and in return, I gave him mine.
That is all I could do. And that is all he needed.
He told me that my job was to walk beside him.
He would be in control of the work that had to be done.
My job was only to “posse” him, he said.
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| I never imagined I would have a son would would eat fire. |
I learned to walk the posse-track. Sometimes, a few steps behind him or to the side of him.
Never ahead of him.
I learned to listen to him in way that I hadn’t listened to another adult before. He showed me how his mind was working. As well, he offered an unbounded trust to me.
I do not have words to explain the respect I felt for him in his journey.
Arta
Fire eater and transformer of rocks! and yes, i think often of what i have learned from Trell about the importance of being the posse some ASKS you to be, vs. being the posse you WANT to be.
ReplyDeleteDavid gave me the same advice recently. Avdice I sought out from him.
DeleteI told him I needed his help solving a problem. On the one hand, I could see he gets very stressed if I try to talk with him about his homework, and I don't want to cause him stress. On the other hand, I get stressed if I don't help him with his homework.
I explained to him I have a cultural belief that may be false. My belief is that parents should help children with their homework, good parents that is. And I want to be a good parent to him.
He released me from the bondage of the false belief. He told me, a parent should only help when their child asks for help. How freeing. Now when I see him doing, or not doing his homework, I know that for him being a good parent is letting him ask for help if he wants to. Stepping back and trusting, as he puts it, "I got this, mom." Yes. He does. He's got this.
I like our idea about being in the bondage of false beliefs. I am glad that David released you from one of those. I am going to think a bit more about the bondage of false beliefs. I have some of those myself. The old idea, once a mother, always a mother? I have had a slow release from that idea.
DeleteHave you got any ideas on how people who release themselves from the bondage of false ideas are able to step back from them and not have those false ideas still reverberate in their lives.
I had a hard case of my own. I thought I had ben an inadequate parent to Doral. I didn't feel that was true with any of my other kids. Only Doral. I had to tell Doral this and he absolutely released me on that point, telling me how he had loved his teen-age years and he didn't think I had been an absent parent at all.
Oh! The the bondage of false beliefs. Thanks for bringing up this point, Bonnie. And thank you to Doral for that release.
Speaking of being a transformer of rocks, I have a rock hammer in my garage at the lake. Tre;; is the one who bought it. Whenever I look at the hammer on the wall, I think of him.
ReplyDeleteAs well, when I walk down the stream and come to the place where skunk cabbage grows out of the running water just below the culver, then just to the right is a whole wall of rocks that Trell arranged under the ewe tree. Just to say that all of my children have left imprints on the land and so I see people around me when I go for walks, even though they are now in other places.
As a child I learned from Trell that it is faster to walk across the diagonal of a rectangular school yard to get to the corner store, than to walk around the outside of the fence, covering the distance of one long and one short side.
ReplyDeleteWhen I hear the word "hypotenuse", I am transported back to that walk to the candy store with him. I loved having older siblings to go to for help or information. It felt so much easier than asking an adult.
The comment box is a dangerous place. Unforgiving. There is no going back and correcting a mistake. For Rebecca, right now her mac won't let her comment, so she must have some settings that are a bit off. I have always been afraid to go into the comment boxes on other blogs. I can hardly do it on the blogs of people I know, let alone on strangers' blogs.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to embarrass myself or others. Now when I was typing above, I was thinking about the name of the tree under which Trell did the rock art, and I got the sound of it out right, but not the name right. It is a yew tree.
Forgiveness. That is what people need to have when reading what we do in comment boxes.