To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. (Pema Chodron) is is
What if the very enemy who needs to be loved lies within, what then? (C.G. Jung)
I’m spending a whole week alone at the shore — what luxury, to read and walk by the water and not be responsible for doing anything. But this morning I woke up with a dream about “something” in the basement. Something not good, something very scary . . . “Oh, great,” I snarled to the half-grown cat who sat on my chest looking at me with his usual alarmed-omygosh kinda expression. “Just another shadow dream, when I longed for something numinous and profound, like all the books have in ’em.” Or maybe I had channeled the cat who, as the youngest member of our gang, is the original “scaredy-cat.”
As I lay there feeling grouchy at the prospect of having to do my duty as a good (even if retired) shrink, and try to figure out what this Something in my dream was all about, one of my favorite childhood games flashed into my mind, and made me chuckle: Booger in the Cellar.
This outdoor game, at least for my sister and me and as many neighborhood kids as we could corral, could only be played in summertime twilight, and meant that the designated Booger would hide in the outside cellar-well, and wait for the other kids to meander by, and then leap forth, attacking in her best monster-booger style. Oh, the shrieking delight of it all!
Funny thing — I wasn’t nearly as delighted about this “something” in my dream cellar. Because it was bound to be yet one more face of my own personal Booger that my dream was presenting for me to deal with.
Really? Ugh. One more time I have to do this work of looking at the less than lovable parts of me that I keep carefully hidden away in the cellar?
But I know that if I do this work of acknowledgment and acceptance of all that I am — the resentments, the petty jealousies and envies, the unkindnesses, the thoughtlessness, the careless lack of attention, and maybe worst of all the indifference and the pretending — then I won’t have to act these things out, or project them self-righteously onto some other person or group of people. Or exhaust myself, or make myself ill trying to hold that cellar door shut.
My Booger. I know where he came from, constructed early on in childhood out of pieces of hot anger, helpless powerlessness, frustrated wantings, frightened imaginings, aching insecurities. The place where all our individual Boogers arise, same process, even tho’ different story-content for each of us.
And maybe this day, I can integrate a little more of my Booger by accepting that this, too, is part of who I am — accepting and understanding his origins with compassion, instead of wanting to kill him off.
Who knows? Maybe I can even get to the point where I can actually enjoy playing Booger in the Cellar again!