Song Nine

Funny how a song playing in the background of a busy day can bring back memories and make you realise that even as a child you knew who you truly were… and that other people can have such a profound impact on your true self and that it can take years to get back to the truth you knew deep in your heart as a child.

I can recall very clearly a day as a young child thinking the song” Vincent (Starry Starry Night)” about Vincent Van Gogh was so incredibly beautiful yet heartbreakingly sad – although I was yet to fully understand heartbreak – and that the haunting tune brought tears to my eyes. But Mum said that Vincent was nothing but a layabout who tried to get attention by cutting his ear off and that he didn’t deserve a song to be written about him, even if the song was boring! She made it all too clear to me with her facial expressions that I wasn’t to find any loveliness in the story, or the song: that I was being silly to cry over it. Her behaviour and attitude made me feel that my inner being was useless. So I hardened my heart and turned away from what my true spirit was drawn too…. I mentally walked away from the beauty I was pulled towards and firmly set my resolve to making my mother approve of me… and that meant seeing things in the world her way.

Now I’m 30-something, and desperately searching and striving for my own true spirit once more. I struggle for creativity. I yearn to be more productive in my creative skills; I want to produce magnificence in the world around me. And I sit here listening to Josh Groban singing about Vincent, the memories come flooding back of that conversation and the realisations; the ramifications hits home.

The song was a big hit in the 1970’s for Don McLean, which suggests to me that I have pushed my true feelings about this story down rather than allow it to fill my soul with the beauty I felt even as a very young child. It’s almost as if I can pinpoint an exact moment in my childhood when I learnt that creativity, beauty as I saw it, was not acceptable in this world. And the message I understood loud and clear on that day was that I had to change my inner being, that which I really was, to be acceptable to the one person who matter to me the most.

Your parents may never have felt that they had the right, much less the opportunity, to get what they wanted out of life. Let’s face it. How many of our mothers really had a chance to do anything but keep house, raise babies, and maybe work to supplement the family income? How many of our fathers really got the chance to explore their own talents and interests? Most of them had to start earning a living and supporting a family when their own lives had hardly begun. My parents were like that. If yours were, how do you imagine they felt when you came along? Proud. Delighted. Hopeful. But then you began to grow… and demand …. and suddenly they saw blooming in you all the qualities they’d had to squelch in themselves: open, shameless wanting; free fantasy; originality; ambition; pride. They saw you grabbing the limelight when they had never gotten enough of it. They had learned at great inner cost to be modest and self-sacrificing and resigned – often for your sake – and they said,” I learned that lesson. You’ll learn it too.”

As very small children, we sense that message. We’d rather forget our destiny than risk hurting or angering the person whose love is life itself to us.

Wishcraft – How to Get What You Really Want.
Sher, B., with Gottlieb, A., 1979, 1983, Page 20

Without a doubt, my mother would be devastated if she knew I carried a memory like this around with me today. As a young woman trying to be my mother, she had no strong, stable, good examples of parenthood to emulate. She was too busy crawling out of  a situation of neglect that defies description to be purposely mean spirited. She would never knowingly have squelched my inner being; she loved me more than life itself. She was simply a product of her life experiences, trying to figure out how to help another life bloom when she had never fully bloomed herself. And I know how blessed I am that as an adult woman, I now have a mother who cares very much for my dreams, encourages my flights of fancy and rejoices in every attempt at creativity. I’m well aware that for some people, such love and acceptance from a parent will never be forthcoming.

I’m grateful that today I can rejoice in the pleasure of the song; that it’s no longer meaningless to me. I can celebrate the fact that my true self understands, that it is the identical desperation of yearning for the same self actualisation that Vincent strove for all those years ago. I can take heart in the fact that even if I don’t achieve success in the worlds view during my lifetime, maybe in the future the things I created will be seen with the same love and passion that I created them with now. I can rejoice, slump in comfort and understand that my yearning are not mine alone, that it is the same journey that every artist person has striven towards for all of time. One day I too will have my starry, starry night. One day my life will be a beautiful story of inspiration for others.  Do you have your starry, starry night already? If not, what will it  be like?

No related posts.