Healing using wisdom

My Experience with Wisdom

In recovery, I employed wisdom by researching everything I could on toxic energy and the Dark Triad of personality disorders, and reading more than a dozen books until I knew beyond a doubt that the love had been an illusion, and that I must not engage with these types of individuals again. These souls whose light and positive energy are dim or weak rarely change, no matter what they promise or how hard they try to convince you that they are working on themselves.  

It has been said that they often masquerade as holy or religious people, loving parents, healers, or physicians who care only about their patients. This was certainly my experience, and because their “image” was so well crafted, it took me a long while to recognize the duplicity.

The poem That Year illustrates that wisdom is something we achieve over time.  It is wisdom that makes both change and recovery possible.  I am now able to look back at that year and see the nightmare I endured and how I could rise above it to a new place of wisdom and healing.

Ode to My Cat, Sarah

I often wonder what it’s like to quiver

slightly, when fingers knead precisely right,

to lounge and lie about with belly white

and wide, exposed, paws that tread–deliver

the hands of a praying nun, stretched to hum

on a quilted bed, downy chin muffled asleep

in a downy neck, with hair ruffled and heaped

like thistles in a winter garden, body numb.

I gaze at your blue eyes as they slowly sink

half-closed in murmurs, woozy eyes so dazed.

Lips in a half smile, teeth pointed and aired,

you purr slow sheet music with hardly a blink.

Is there meditation in your gaze

or just a kind of love, hushed and quite rare?

ILLUMINATION

I’m attracted to light,

not the dark under-

shadow on the leaves,

the ferns hiding

their true fronds,

outshone by brighter ones,

the butterfly obscured by branches,

its blue-grey wings silent,

the bushy tree veiled

by the sparkling sunlight.

I have lurked in the shadows

of my own life,

denied my light,

ignored my gifts. 

Could I just decide

to sparkle like a glistening

leaf, to shine?

Light glares in the summer heat,

dying earlier as winter stomps

its heavy feet. The light in autumn

signals endings, as leaves

drop sadly in the muted light.

Spring brings green shiny light,

earth approaches heaven

in its clarity.

Spring’s light: the one I choose.

Diagnosis

After the trace of blood showed up

and hushed whispers of cancer led

to CT scans and MRIs, I floundered

like a just-caught fish, flopping

in my mind to thoughts of death

to beliefs that nothing but a slight

infection caused my ills, the CT scan

only reflecting a temporary state.

I calmed myself, called on angels

to hold the hand my mother could not.

I searched the internet,

made my own diagnosis, then

veered to self-healing of kidney

problems. I read the book Hiring

the Heavens and recruited

angelic beings to relieve my pain,

my left flank throbbing like a fast-beating

heart.  I realized I still had much

to do: whatever I had was curable,

cured in this very instant. I thanked

my angels and strode forth into a new day.