I am not helpless.

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. Rainer Maria Rilke

When I was a little girl my father used the strap to punish me. I hated it. And I hated him in those moments. It was a dichotomy. I was a little girl who loved her father. How could two such diametrically opposed emotions exist in the same body? The presence of hate in love. The absence of love in hate. How could the two co-exist in harmony? To compound it, in the lexicon of my family, I was a 'bad' girl for even thinking the word 'hate'.

I remember the last time he used it. I was thirteen. We lived in Metz, France. I had spent the afternoon walking with 'a boy'. He was older. Fifteen. He lived in a village an hour away, though why that is relevant I don't know. It is a thought that sticks with me. Perhaps, it justified in my mind spending a sunny afternoon with him. He was from 'away'. I couldn't be blamed for attaching myself to him for an afternoon. When I returned home, my father asked where I had been all afternoon. I lied. I didn't want to get in trouble for telling the truth -- and the truth, in my experience, always got me in trouble. So did lying.

I remember the fear. The loathing. The sense of futility that invaded me. I hadn't done anything wrong. I'd only walked with a boy in the woods behind where we lived. I remember it as a hot day. I remember lying in the grass on a hillside, looking through the wildflowers at the ridge below. Side by side. Never touching. I remember wishing he'd kiss me. But he didn't. He wasn't my boyfriend. Just a friend.

My father didn't like the idea of my walking with a boy. He didn't like the idea that I lied about where I'd been. And so, he punished me.

Helplessness.

I couldn't stop him. I couldn't convince him that my lie was based on my fear of the truth. Either way, I knew I was in trouble. Truth or lie. I knew there was nothing I could do to make my father hear me. I knew I could never talk about my fear of the truth. I knew I could not talk about my fear of my father.

And so, I embraced my helplessness.

Last night, in that state of waking up dreaming, I revisited those incidents with my father and his dreaded belt. I revisited my feelings of shame. Of fear. Of hate and loathing and helplessness. And I released them.

My father only knew what he knew. He didn't know any better. He couldn't. He was from a time and place, an era where children did what they were told or faced the consequences. In his life, the consequence had been tied up in a beating out of the spirit of disobedience by the Jesuit monks where he attended boarding school. It was compounded by a war that pushed his voice back into the sorrow of all he witnessed, all he lost on the battlefront of a world gone mad. For my father, the best way to get a child's attention, to right a wrong, to change the world, was to use force. It was a continuation of all he knew, all he had experienced, all he had endured.

As a child. I didn't know any better. As an adult, I do. As a child, I felt helpless. Enraged. Angry. Hurt. Confused. Expressing what was wrong, was never safe in my family of origin. We were a place of secrets. Of feelings and emotions suppressed as we smiled at the world from behind our 'perfect' depiction of the everyday family. I knew it was a lie. I could never speak the truth. Mute. Sad. Lonely. I wove the thread of helplessness into the theme of my adult life. I have struggled to undo the knot. To release myself from the limiting belief that I must stay silent in the presence of adversity. Never show fear. Never show tears. Never let them know I hurt.

I breathe. I set the thread of helplessness beyond me, move it from my internal landscape out into the external world. It is not mine to own. I am not its to be owned. I set it free from my psyche.

I untie the knot. Release the thread and set myself free.

In all of us, threads of the past weave through the tapestry of our life today. Sometimes, their colours are vibrant hues of life lived on the edge of our comfort zone, beyond the edge of reason, out there in the land of 'making it all happen' to our design.

Sometimes, the threads warp and buckle as we pull ourselves out of the weave we thought we needed to sew ourselves into in order to fit in. Sometimes, the threads become stiff and hardened, limiting our movement in the now with their insistent clinging to the way things were. Fighting against their taut hold on the way things 'ought to be', we tug and pull and struggle to break free. And sometimes, in our fight to weave a new tapestry, we tangle ourselves up in the past so tightly we cannot break free until we clip the threads of shame and guilt, and fear and anger, that hold us fast to blaming the past for where we are stuck today.

Reality is, I am the weaver. The warp. The thread and the loom. I determine the tapestry I weave today with every breath I take, every thread I pull, every knot I make.

I am not helpless.

This is my tapestry of life.

This morning, I discovered a warp I hadn't seen woven beneath the surface of my tapestry of life. This morning, I embraced the ugly truth, and freed myself to weave forgiveness, love and harmony into my tapestry today.

This morning, I helped myself shine. I am not helpless. I am powerful beyond my imaginings. A Woman of Worth. A WoW of incredible gifts weaving truth and beauty into peace of mind with grace and ease.

The question is: What threads are you pulling? What warp is knotting you up, limiting your experience of weaving the most incredible, beautiful tapestry of your life in freedom today?

Fellow Blogger, Maureen, linked me to Peter Ps wonderful site -- Please go check it out. It's great! What amazing talent there is in this world!