How do you like your eggs?

Spring breeze drifts through an open window

and brings life into suffocating heart

Winter is gone

You are free like an early summer dawn

I wrote this during my meditation. The words came and asked to be written down on paper.

A thought popped into my head, ‘Is it good?’ And then the answer ‘Who to judge when it comes from the depth of your heart?’
I wanted to become a poet when I was six or seven years old. I remember writing and trying to make it good. I can’t remember what the poems were about but I remember desperately hiding my notebook so no one would ever see it and laugh at me.

I was a sensitive soul, a dreamer, connected to nature and animals. It was fairly easy to do that growing up on a farm. I was surrounded by nature and animals, there were no phones, no computers, just one black and white TV set and a radio.

In summer I’d go out and wade in the nearby stream, or pick flowers from a meadow, or go and pick wild strawberries and string them on a stem of bentgrass like a necklace, or steal a few slices of rye bread and go feed baby calves, or play with the dogs. In winter there were frozen ponds, snow covered hillocks and sleds, and a hay barn where I could play with the dogs. Life was blissful in this way…

And then there was a broken family with desperately unhappy parents. 

Father with his deep dark pain locked away and soothed by copious amounts of alcohol. Who would lose his shit at my mother at a drop of a hat. Who knew how to show affection to other people’s kids but not us. 

Mother who was trying to hold it all together by working on the farm dawn till dusk, looking after animals, making sure there was enough food and money and using work to sooth her own pain. 

My mother has always been tough, too tough. Her favorite phrase is ‘Other people have it worse’. She thought that expressing emotions and being sensitive will not help me to survive in the world.

Hence the reason for hiding my poetry notebook. I learned that being myself wasn’t ok, that my emotions weren’t valid, that my needs were inconvenient. As a kid I learned that if I wanted approval and a chance of survival I had to be the way other people wanted me to be. It became a pattern, I took on other people’s way of being and neglected myself.  I’ve lived my life with this lump in my throat of not being able to express myself, feeling like I’m suffocating. Until the fear of suffocating became bigger than the fear of being myself. 

I was talking to my therapist about it the other day. She told me about Julia Roberts' character in the Runaway Bride who didn’t know how she liked her eggs cooked. Because she thought that she liked her eggs the way her husbands-to-be liked theirs. I could identify with that character so much…with the exception of the eggs. That’s one of the things I know. I like all of them: scrambled, fried, poached, boiled, hard, soft. 

And now I’m figuring out the rest, finding my voice, trusting my inner compass, my heart, my intuition. I’m going past the limitations that have been imposed unknowingly by others and unknowingly taken on by me. 

With awareness comes the ability to recognise old patterns, dig deep to see what’s underneath them and come back to myself, come home. 

So…

Do you know how you like your eggs?