Toilets

Happy February 2022!

Hello, how are you? Here is something I wrote in January.

How much can we know about your life from the toilet?  (a writing prompt from instagram by @magdafying) 

This prompt is appealing from a dreamwork perspective because of how common it is to dream of toilets. Have you? I have dreamt of tiny toilets. A toilet next to the Christmas tree. Toilets that are overflowing, a sopping wet, cranky woman inside a toilet. Toilets often have an association with shame, an affective experience that plagues humans. Another way to say this is: It is common to have a part of self that uses shame as a protection, which diminishes access to feeling one's Essence.

Okay, here is a story that includes toilets:

TW: mentions child pornography

When I was in elementary school, I lived across the street from The Boys and Girls Club, housed in a giant Victorian set back on a sprawling lawn. It was the only time I forged my parents’ signature on a permission slip, just because I wanted the experience. I was pretty shy there and never experienced the easy fluidity embodied in the posse of children who claimed it as their place and wrestled freely in the  B.O. filled room with padded walls. Something about the place made me aware of my inner serious adult just like overnight summer camp and all places designated for  “kids to be kids."  My afternoons became an automatic migration to the woodworking area in the basement guided by a man named Rick (the caretaker who lived on the 2nd floor). He helped me make Christmas presents for my parents. Rick was a slight, quiet man who was balding with a gap between his teeth and light blue eyes that seemed like they had a space in them when you looked at him. 

Truthfully, he did much of the more complex work while I messed around, creating uneven lines with the woodburning tool. I loved the smell of it and the power of singeing wood. To be a child trusted with a tool that could burn surfaces was elating. 

First I made a plaque of a horse because it was the easiest thing to start with. It was a clumsy wood burned outline of a horse. That eventually got stored in my mother’s closet. I made a square wooden lamp. That was my biggest project which included me standing near Rick who used a machine to shave off pieces of a pillar of pine to my specifications and then I  did wood burning “detailing.” It was also very ugly. 

My favorite project-gift by far was a picture of a toilet, another wood burned plaque, this time an ill-proportioned, hand-drawn commode with my stepfather’s name “DAVE” on the seat to pay homage to his work. Dave cleaned a Catholic church for the majority of my childhood and is a shifter of spaces through cleaning and organizing. He cleans athletically with remarkable endurance and I’ve always had a strong pride in his precious ability to make everything more safe-feeling and good-smelling. I spent a fair amount of time in childhood helping him clean other people’s toilets. He had a fancy toilet brush that shot blue liquid out of it and when I was done with it, it rested in the central spot of a plastic caddy.  

In the newspaper,  shortly after my woodworking lessons when I had lost interest, my parents found out Rick had been arrested for harboring massive amounts of child pornography. His humble upstairs apartment had been raided and he’d been arrested. That was an aspect of my childhood, the ability to float in my own essence-bubble a few inches beyond really dark stuff. I was in my child-world with the earthy fragrance of the wood-burning tool, lugging a huge lamp and a toilet plaque home  while Rick was evidently deep in child porn.  Again, I return to Marie Howe, one of my favorite poets, who in an interview said, "In writing you use your life like wood and you burn it up to make the heat and the energy for the poem."  May we all use the way shame divides the self to burn up and make the heat and energy for the poem and reconnection with the Divine.

I read something recently by Sondra Ray, the vibrant 80 year old originator of Liberation Breathwork, “Ascension happens through feeling (the feminine approach)" and immediately, I lit up, because that rings true for me. The desire to be in that river of feeling has always been my invisible thread to follow.

For this feeling process, I use the good stepfather I had as well as the shadowy Rick. I use the ebullience of an elder breath-worker, my propensity to flit between shamed observer and immersive wild-feeler and whatever mysterious protection/connection I had back then, which I now know after being a therapist for a decade to be incredible luck. May you be loved, May you be fully at ease. May you experience hysterical laughter with someone you love. May you experience your undivided and immersive self beyond the confines of shame. May you find your way into the river of feeling if you have a longing for it.

Here is a story about a Corgi found in a toilet who is now adopted by someone in Western MA! I wish you inner nourishment and exploration in your moments offline.  May you remember your dreams if that path calls to you.

Song recommendation:  Rather obvious this time, "Every Time The Sun Comes Up" by Sharon Van Etten. A song with the wonderfully memorable both/and shame lyrics, "I wash your dishes/then I shit in your bathroom."

Love,

Vanessa