|
When my mother abandoned me at thirteen, all I had left to remind me of her was a little gold heart-shaped ring and her Bible. I was fourteen when I decided to read it from cover to cover, soon becoming bored with all the begetting. However there was one form of begetting that captured my whole attention: the begetting of wisdom. When I discovered that pain was one of its necessary ingredients, it became my goal in life to turn the pain of my childhood into the wisdom of understanding.
My father’s gift to me was a love of the sea and painting. Long solitary walks by the sea and night watches sailing off shore taught me to reflect. Painting revealed the secrets and patterns that controlled my life so that I could learn to carve out a different destiny.
At sixteen my stepmother sent me off to work as a clerk in a bank, declaring that it was more important to educate the boys and besides, I would only end up getting married and having kids. Well, I did get married and have kids. But I also put myself through university, majoring in art, to become a teacher. And I painted and sold my work, getting us out of debt when drought crippled the family farm.
When my mother-in-law’s bitterness reflected my unhappiness in marriage, I thought of my mother and the bedtime stories she read – not the ‘happily-ever-after’ variety –but tales of the Greek Heroes, and in particular, Jason and the Argonaut’s search for the Golden Fleece. This was my mother’s gift to me, for it gave me the courage to embark on a journey of my own.
Ironically this happened after the yacht my husband I had bought, planning to sail the world, foundered on a sandbar just after our marriage hit the rocks. Abandoned, the yacht’s fate was in my hands. I chose to rebuild her. Not only did the experience teach me how to rebuild my own life, but while living on her for two years after work on the refit was well under way, I wrote the initial manuscript for a book on divorce I had wanted to write since I was twenty.
This plotted the course of my life. After an astute editor plucked my manuscript from Doubleday’s slush pile in 1990 he said, “You haven’t told the whole story.” It took almost twenty years to find that story, aided by numerous rewrites, my painting, the people I met while traveling in North America and France, living and teaching in New Zealand, and sailing offshore to Tonga and Fiji.
Although there has been much pain and heartache on this journey, the wisdom I have gained has allowed me to find the gifts, insights and talents I can now share with others. That is what this web site is about.
Throughout this long journey, these three quotes sustained me, which I would like to acknowledge and share with you…
From Zorba the Greek: “A man needs a little madness, lest he dare not cut the rope and be free.”
From Richard Bach: “There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands.”
From Rabindranath Tagore: “Life is like a wild tiger. You can either sit on its back and ride it; or lie down and let it lay its paw upon your head.”
Perhaps if we took these sayings to heart there would be less people who choose the way of the scorpion that stings itself to death when cornered – but with drugs and alcohol and depression.
Although I have PTSD from early childhood trauma, I have learned to maneuver around the limitations it has created to lead a meaningful life doing the things I love. The choice I made when I was twenty to write a book about divorce was to show me a way to become an advocate for children. Their creativity, love of learning, imagination and ability to think and reflect needs room to stretch and grow that cannot happen in homes with authoritarian rule, or classrooms governed by national standards with desks arranged in straight rows which show no respect or understanding for their developmental needs.
My hope is that by sharing something of my life’s experiences, my art, photography, and writing, it may touch something within you, perhaps connecting you to the gifts and talents that lie dormant, waiting for you to make a choice to develop the courage and belief in yourself to nurture them to life, and then share them with others.
I now live on beautiful Waiheke Island, just a thirty-five-minute ferry trip from Auckland in New Zealand.
|
