Quick update Jan. 2012: my Uncle "B" is still alive and I'm going to see him today (as a matter of fact!). Since my last post, he's been hospitalized twice...first for "sepsis"; the second time after having fallen twice and busting up his head and his elbow. I can tell you that when I saw him last week, he actually said "Thank you for coming.." as I was leaving him. That was a first. So I can at least be grateful for small progresses made in spite of historical patterns of behavior towards others. (I'm not invisible anymore!)
But I digress. This post is most about the family "scrapbook" I have begun with the onset of this new year. I had wanted to pursue this type of project for a long time---but had always found ways to avoid it. Yet with all the "stuff" that has been going on around me, I rationalized that it was time to distract myself with something that had a purpose bigger than myself and my current stresses. What I didn't count on or expect was the healing that would come along with this process of categorizing, organizing, and making sense of our hundreds of family photos.....
And YES, there IS a big link between my family "scrapbook" project and my Uncle B (and everyone else in our family and anywhere else on planet earth who is "like" him).
Going back to the "oldest" family photo in I and my husband's possession...it is a formal portrait of my husband's maternal great-grandparents. This was the "start" of my scrapbooking project (identified by me as "Photo 1"). As I began to combine this photo with the other "oldest" photos we have of my husband's grandparents...and my own grandparents, I was reminded of the painting "A Dance To the Music of Time" by Nicolas Poussin. Commissoned in the 1600s by Pope Clement IX, the painting depicts four people who symbolically represent the four seasons of the year. They are facing outward, holding hands, and "dancing" in a continuous circle to the music of time. The dance never ends...time always passes, and each of the people in the circle represent part of a bigger cycle all humanity experiences and/or will struggle with throughout their lives. Poverty (person #1)....Labor (person #2)...Riches (person #3)...and Pleasure (person #4)...before the cycle repeats itself. Over and over again as time keeps passing each of us (and all of us!) by.
In our respective families' cases....I and my husband's people got stuck at "Labor" and did not move past that portion of the cycle in their own lives. Each hardworking to a fault and stuck in lifestyles that offered little in the way of creature comforts or a ticket out of Dodge (Yugoslavia in my paternal grandmother's case and Italy in my husband's maternal great-grandparents' case); their lives were primarily about trying to move away from poverty...and staying away.
Yet as is so true for anyone who has been "born" poor; you can only work so hard and for so long without paying some heavy prices. Beyond the obvious (health-related "drama")...a vast majority of these "worker bees" got and remained stuck emotionally in a "survivor" mentality. Everything was and needed to be about their own survival---literally and figuratively. Like my uncle for example. He was the last of 11 children born in a village somewhere in outer Croatia; a "highlight" story from his past had to do with his father's head being lodged inside a bear's mouth. Clearly, life was no bowl of porridge for my uncle. Or for my father...or for both sets of my grandparents...or my husband's grandparents. Do you notice a pattern beginning to emerge here? In our case, the "dance" to the music of time for both sides of our extended family system was stuck somewhere between poverty (and pain!) and labor (and more pain!) for way too many decades.
It has been said that when the student is ready, the teachers suddenly begin to appear. I am hoping that in spite of our circumstances, in spite of what happens to us, and in spite of how "good" or how "bad" the things are that happen to us---that we will always be open to being "students" in the school of our lives...and our relationships.
After all...I can't think of anyone who likes being stuck between anything for too long!
But I digress. This post is most about the family "scrapbook" I have begun with the onset of this new year. I had wanted to pursue this type of project for a long time---but had always found ways to avoid it. Yet with all the "stuff" that has been going on around me, I rationalized that it was time to distract myself with something that had a purpose bigger than myself and my current stresses. What I didn't count on or expect was the healing that would come along with this process of categorizing, organizing, and making sense of our hundreds of family photos.....
And YES, there IS a big link between my family "scrapbook" project and my Uncle B (and everyone else in our family and anywhere else on planet earth who is "like" him).
Going back to the "oldest" family photo in I and my husband's possession...it is a formal portrait of my husband's maternal great-grandparents. This was the "start" of my scrapbooking project (identified by me as "Photo 1"). As I began to combine this photo with the other "oldest" photos we have of my husband's grandparents...and my own grandparents, I was reminded of the painting "A Dance To the Music of Time" by Nicolas Poussin. Commissoned in the 1600s by Pope Clement IX, the painting depicts four people who symbolically represent the four seasons of the year. They are facing outward, holding hands, and "dancing" in a continuous circle to the music of time. The dance never ends...time always passes, and each of the people in the circle represent part of a bigger cycle all humanity experiences and/or will struggle with throughout their lives. Poverty (person #1)....Labor (person #2)...Riches (person #3)...and Pleasure (person #4)...before the cycle repeats itself. Over and over again as time keeps passing each of us (and all of us!) by.
In our respective families' cases....I and my husband's people got stuck at "Labor" and did not move past that portion of the cycle in their own lives. Each hardworking to a fault and stuck in lifestyles that offered little in the way of creature comforts or a ticket out of Dodge (Yugoslavia in my paternal grandmother's case and Italy in my husband's maternal great-grandparents' case); their lives were primarily about trying to move away from poverty...and staying away.
Yet as is so true for anyone who has been "born" poor; you can only work so hard and for so long without paying some heavy prices. Beyond the obvious (health-related "drama")...a vast majority of these "worker bees" got and remained stuck emotionally in a "survivor" mentality. Everything was and needed to be about their own survival---literally and figuratively. Like my uncle for example. He was the last of 11 children born in a village somewhere in outer Croatia; a "highlight" story from his past had to do with his father's head being lodged inside a bear's mouth. Clearly, life was no bowl of porridge for my uncle. Or for my father...or for both sets of my grandparents...or my husband's grandparents. Do you notice a pattern beginning to emerge here? In our case, the "dance" to the music of time for both sides of our extended family system was stuck somewhere between poverty (and pain!) and labor (and more pain!) for way too many decades.
It has been said that when the student is ready, the teachers suddenly begin to appear. I am hoping that in spite of our circumstances, in spite of what happens to us, and in spite of how "good" or how "bad" the things are that happen to us---that we will always be open to being "students" in the school of our lives...and our relationships.
After all...I can't think of anyone who likes being stuck between anything for too long!