Let's see if I can make these thoughts rolling around in circles in my head come out in a straight enough line to make a complete thought....

My Mother is getting worse pretty quickly. Some days she does ok, some days she doesn't. Mostly these days it is driving me out of my mind. I am not the most patient of people to begin with and her constant nagging is really starting to get to me. For weeks now she is at my house before I ever get out of bed, wanting something from me. It goes on all day long (she only lives about 50 yards from us). She never has anything to say about anything other than herself, her needs, her problems (mostly imagined). She is so focused on herself that she has completely forgotten that she has kids and grand kids and great grand kids that she could be filling her life with in these the last days of her life. Instead her only focus is her, her money, her...

This morning's episode was just almost more than I could bear. It pretty much sent me over the edge. I sent her home. My nerves were shot.

I knew I needed to do something to calm myself down.

I turned on XM radio on Audio Visions (my zen music station) and I immediately felt myself being drawn into a centering place. At first I kept cleaning (when I'm upset I either clean or eat -today it is cleaning), then I just sat down on a bar stool for a minute and before you know it I was stretched out on the sofa, eyes closed, relaxing, listening, being drawn into center which spawned this train of thought....

The centering for me becomes worship. I slip quickly and easily into that place. I have always been a worshiper. As I sat in this place I thought how odd, how different from my life, say, five or six years ago when I was still entrenched in religion.

I came out of church because of all the things that I could see that were wrong there, mostly that I saw more people getting hurt than getting helped. Only then I was just seeing what was wrong on the surface, I wasn't seeing the deep problems of how the church has been perverted by a greedy patriarchal system and how that effected me as a woman.
When I first left church I spent years looking to more enlightened men like Andrew Jones (tall skinny kiwi) and Gordon Atkinson (Real Live Preacher) and several others. It only recently dawned on me how that all came down, how I turned to men for guidance in that time of my life and how over the last three or four years how that has progressed to a different place.
As I searched for how to connect to the divine, in my search for what would work for me, I slowly began to turn to other women. I resisted at first because I had been taught by religion to stay away from those feminist voices because they were dangerous. HA! But, my instincts, my search, slowly brought to a place of being able to hear that voice,not only the voice of other women, but my own voice.. crying out for a way, a connection that was mine, my place in the heart of God.

I have always believed that those who truly seek for truth will find it... it might not be comfortable, it might come with much change and probably some pain but if you want truth, it is available. You just have to search for it.

In that moment this morning as I quickly centered down into a place of worship and letting go of my anger I knew that I have begun to find my place.