I have a memory of being with my father in the morning, when he went down to the sheds, to use the tractor. I followed him to be near him. My head was a bundle of fuzzy curls on top, as I examined a piece of hay in my hand. I stood between the big back wheel and the smaller front wheel of the tractor, in a little plaid dress with a white collar. When he turned on the engine, the loud noise and that lovely smell were all around me.

I wriggled out of my father’s arms, when he carried me down the stair, as an infant. I landed on my right side, shoulder hitting first, and had a concussion, where my head hit the stairs, as I continued to fall down the wooden steps. My mother and her mother nursed me back, without consulting anyone. I did not hear this story directly from my mother. When I asked her, she walked away with a pained grimace, shaking her head.

I was home, waiting for my visa to come through, so I could join my husband in the states, when my father was dying of cancer. In the small back bedroom, mostly filled with double bed, heater, wardrobe, dresser and fireplace, I would place a chair and sit and read to him. I read my favorite passages from the Bible to him. When I got to 30 minutes, he said “that is enough.” I told him then that he was a wonderful father and thanked him. He told me that he was not always a good father.

He went upstairs to get me from the Moses Basket, a basket placed up high on a shelf, when I was a crying infant. He took me out of the basket to change me. As he did so, he was overwhelmed with his own feelings and in the process caused me to scream. He came back to himself and cleaned me up. My fall was a symbol of my rejection of a behavior that hurt me, reorienting him in the process.

While he was still active, yet diagnosed with cancer his thumb hurt him. I was sure I could be helpful with his thumb pain. It was swollen and colored yellow from the iodine he had painted onto it. I steeped his hand in melted Epsom salts and hot water and then massaged his thumb for a half hour more or less. He complained it did not help at all. I so wanted to be a miracle worker for his hand and for his cancer.

My father’s hand

This is some of what has to be laid out and down with the masks of the father. Otherwise the heart is full of discarded rags and bones, which holds my pain. When I want to tend to the roots of the tree of life in me, in my first chakra, these weeds, these pains of life have to be lifted and taken out of the matter in my body so that the energies of the first chakra can make its way through me to my heart and upwards.

I loved my sweet father dearly, followed him around, whenever I could, out into farmland, on the back of the tractor, holding on to the big wheel guards with my sister, bumping along, making hay, thinning carrots and playing in the farm’s nooks and crannies, while he worked nearby. There were hedges with primroses, big pale yellow disks, streams with bridges and a one-foot waterfall, a sandpit where the snowdrops grew, a railway line with small wild strawberries and bowls of cream from the cows he milked each morning and evening.

These remembrances are pieced together from history and from psychic glimpses of what happened. It would be easy to say none of it is true or all of it is true. I still love that man and appreciate his love and connection to me. May both of us feel the better of my remembrances and may my soul be satisfied with this inner work of lifting and taking out. May all recover from the times their parents forgot themselves, may I recover myself from the times I forgot myself. May I be touched in the here and now, with the sacredness of the sacrum, so that the burning candle of the tree of life is free to rise in me. May he rest in peace, free to be.

If you have any desire to go inward and work with your dreams and images, contact me under the contact tab and I would love to work with you to help release trauma from your particular live. Thank you for being with me in this blog.