Soul Mapping

This is one of my very favorite photos of my mother and my sister. Two women who have been known to drive me batty and at the same time to inspire a fierce love and desire to protect. If I could give them everything they've ever wanted in the universe, I would do it. Just to make it clear, I have been known to drive them just as batty. We are all so different that we have to spend time trying to bridge the divides between our reasoning selves. At the same time, and what fascinates me about families, is that we share some elemental qualities in common. Elements of our true selves that often lay hidden in the folds of living.

My mother is many things. Among her strongest attributes is her earthiness. Her connection to the living body, the dirt we walk on, the food we eat, the physical sensation of living, the light that makes us grow, the primal drive to love, to explore, to move on and on and on, is strong in her. For so much of my life I have thought of myself as being so different from my mother. So separate in qualities.

Where she throws caution to the wind, I am constantly assessing risk and cautiously moving forward. Where she is completely comfortable with our corporeal existence, I hated the moment I had to start shopping for bras because I didn't want to be reminded of my body and it's dusky growth, it's neediness, and it's potential for abuse from others as well as from myself. While my mum has been more or less on a never ending safari hunt for the best spiritual expression, my spiritual life has been the same for most of my life, merely growing in definition rather than changing in essentials.

My mother has lived fearlessly, trying on new lives, new mediums for expression, new jobs, new adventures. She has lived in a commune, lived in Europe, written a cookbook, designed book covers, raised three children, raised chickens, built incredible gardens from huge patches of weeds and fallow earth, been married three times, been a pregnant farmer in British Columbia, was a part of the first wave of urban homesteaders*, lived in a tee-pee, sang in a gospel choir, and has marched against things she felt were corrosive to the human experience such as war, and she's gone to jail for it**.

In the past couple of years I have been surprised to discover that I am very much my mother's daughter. That I was cut from the same cloth. I'm not sure if my sister has always known that she is also very much my mother's daughter, but she is. All three of us share more in common than we share differences. My sister, for example, has the restlessness that made my mother move and move again. My sister has moved across the country and back. She always seems happiest when in motion.

Both of us take risks just as our mother does. I didn't see it for so many years. But my happy marriage was achieved through a strange sudden realization that I needed to marry Philip because he was so different than the men I usually unhappily went out with. The stranger realization that I couldn't date him, I just needed to marry him. I didn't think of it as taking a risk so much as I saw an opportunity that I could either grab onto or lose. We hardly knew each other when we married and certainly we've had the usual rough patches, but fourteen years later I see what others saw at the time; that marrying a virtual stranger constitutes quite a bit of risk. My sister takes risks too. Both of us have hauled off and moved to different states to start fresh lives. Just like our mother has done before us, over and over.

I can't write all that could be said about our sameness in one post. It would take days to write and longer to read. Right now my mum is starting fresh again. She's just graduated from her masters program and is interning to earn her license as an MFT (Marriage and Family Therapist). There is no one I can think of better suited to this job than a woman who has lived as large and as colorfully as she has. She has made a lot of choices along the way with both happy and unhappy consequences, but if seen from the therapist's lens, I think those choices have endowed her with a greater understanding of where life can take you, which makes her peculiarly suited to helping others steer their own boats away from shoals.

She is moving up here to Oregon in a couple of weeks to live with us while she gets replacement hip surgery. It's been a grueling past twelve months for her, living with such tremendous pain and getting no help from Kaiser. She has started a blog and I would like to invite all of you to check it out. She has made a set of cards that are her own version of a tarot deck. Every week she draws cards to see what the coming week may bring to us all. She's started to write about how her readings have panned out in her own week, which is very interesting. If you think tarot readings are nothing but witchy mumbo jumbo, I can promise you that this is no hokey promise of riches and husbands being doled out by a traveling gypsy, though, I must confess that my mother has always seemed like a gypsy to me.

She's going to put up her own shingle in Portland as soon as she has recovered from the surgery but needs to focus on something besides her pain to get through this time. So help keep her mind off of the surgery: ask her a question, ask her advice on just about anything. You can e-mail her at lorena laforest [laforest@sonic.net]and after a little dialog between you she will publish your question (anonymously) and post the answer. She can either address your quandary with strait therapy, or you can ask her to draw cards for you (which is basically just a tool for getting at the issues at hand) and use the cards to help answer your needs. I have to tell you that the cards are almost always right.

But aside from that, she's great at giving advice. I've found it annoying as her daughter at times to have her always being right; to have her telling me what I definitely don't want to hear, but knowing that it's always exactly what I need to hear. So this is your chance to get some free advice on how to choose new directions in life, how to overcome the patterns in your life that are keeping you from your dreams, how to mend relationships, and how to heal yourself. How to make tough decisions of all kinds.

Just remember, my mom was always the cool one, the one my friends wished was their mom. This can be annoying when you're a kid. But I've learned to live with her coolness.


*Urban homesteading as I see it is the desire to live as self sufficiently as one can in the modern context, the best you can without having a farm or more land than a city lot. She grew as much food as she could in our big yard and she also preserved as much of that bounty as she could through canning and freezing the food.

**I consider it an honorable thing to go to jail for protesting, for exercising our right to do so. I very much respect this. Just for the record though, her stay was the usual brief interlude of hours reserved for protesters.