Reframing the Past

I have written a lot about the less than ideal aspects of my past and their effect on me. Looking back is like a prism with different views. While not invalidating experiences, it useful I have found not to get stuck in one storyline.

I was blessed to be born into an educated relatively well off family, and I grew up in a beautiful area in a 100 year old house with a large garden full of old fruit trees and flowers. It wasn’t the perfect family by any means (mother prone to anger outbursts, distant father, sister I didn’t relate to) but with my fairy godmother like grandmother and fun uncles, it was good enough.

I was given enough confidence and support to try different avenues out in life. Freedom to wander and explore. Plenty of support to bring up a child as a single parent. Enough aspiration to want to get a degree and have a successful career I enjoy. Enough forgiveness to make mistakes and to forgive myself.

An awareness of aesthetics was part of my upbringing, including nature, interior design and architecture. My mum encouraged my art ability. My dad encouraged a love of music, values of fairness and helping others.

What a blessing this has been and led to the degree in landscape architecture and a lifelong love of nature and architecture and good design in general.

I thank those that provided all this for me. It has given me many strengths to build a decent life full of quality every day.

Ps and coincidentally a couple of days after I wrote this I read this

“There are two emotions that inform and animate the human animal; fear and a gratitude-love-awe mix that might best be called agape. As fear goes out, agape comes in. More accurately, a pure white light of consciousness hits the prism of self and splits outward to become the universe as we experience it. If the prism of self is gray and murky with ignorance, choked with fear, contaminated with ego, then so becomes the universe that radiates out from it. It’s that simple. As the prism becomes free of such flaws, then the whole universe changes with it. It resolves into clarity, becomes brighter, more playful and magical. Because we are the lens through which it is projected, we are participants in its shape and motion; co-creators of our own universe.”- Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare