Fearing the blues

Go ahead and play the blues if it'll make you happy. Dan Castellaneta

I do not remember a time in my life when my mother was not sad. When 'the blues' didn't reside within her delicate frame colouring my childhood world with fear and hesitation.

It is perhaps where my sunny disposition found its roots. I always worried if I was ever sad, I would be sad forever.

I don't regret my disposition. I do, sometimes, wish my mother had been other than who she was - and I know. I know. All the wishes in the world will not change another. Will not change the past.

And still, the blues scare me.

I feel powerless, useless, incapable of changing someone else's mood -- especially because I am not powerful enough to change someone else's mood, or disposition, or life.

When I became a mother, I wanted to change the world. I wanted to end war and famine, strife and hunger. Cruelty and abuse. I wanted the world to be safe for my daughters. I wanted the world to stop turning in on itself and start turning up for eachother, for us, we human beings who inhabit this planet along with thousands of species of insects and birds and fish and mammals and other creatures.

And I could not change the world.

All I could do was my best. All I could do, can do, is change the way I move in the world. The way I am within myself and those around me.

And somedays, my best is to simply hold a space, to open a place where those I love can be exactly who they are, exactly the way they are, freely.

I struggle with that as a mother. I struggle with letting be, so that I do not become someone other than who I am, who I want to be in this world. And I struggle with it because I want to 'make the world right' for those I love. I want to ease their burdens, share their load, shift their perspectives, open up their dispositions.

And I am not that powerful.

Recently, in a conversation with a woman who is almost nine months pregnant, I told her that 'becoming a mother is the best thing I ever did in my life'.

Becoming a mother has made me a better person. It has opened me up to all the wonder of the world -- and the sorrow and sadness too.

And in that opening, I have discovered the depth of my heart, the capacity of my love to grow and grow and widen out to encompass all living beings, all things, all aspects of life on this magnificent ball spinning through space, turning around and around the sun.

And in that opening, my heart feels. Deeply. My heart knows. Deeply. And my heart hurts. Deeply.

I want to make the world a perfect place for my children, for everyone's children.

And all I can do is make it a perfect place for me to be who I am, and make room for those around me to be who they are, perfect imperfect humans being together in all our human perfection running freely through and amidst all the colours of the rainbow.

Within those colours are, the blues. They are as perfect as sunshiney yellow, autumn gold and red red rose. They add colour where sunny dispositions fear to go lest they get caught in the deep blue wonder of the soul.

I need not fear the blues.

I need only to learn to move through my fear of not being able to change them into sunlight tones so that even the blues have room to blossom into the beauty of the soul carrying them so carefully through the night. So that even the blues can let their colours show, however they may appear.

Namaste.