Wildcat,
Re-reading your history about your father below, I understand very well how his "spirit" remains in your consciousness long after his death. I can say this about him and you: you are both very intelligent people and his intelligence, his footprints lie all across your memory of childhood and adulthood. Let's say that your mind was, and is now, a field, a meadow of greenery and lush plant life. And this man, your father, a very important man in your life, has walked across your field many times in a fury made up of his 'demons' - he grinds his heels in when he stops and he kicks at the flowers as they brush his legs. He is a very angry man and is not made peaceful at this beauty all around him... all he sees and feels is his own rage.
Now he has left the field and you can look around and see where he has left his scuff marks and where he has broken the stems of some of your flowers. Then a day comes when he ceases to appear in your field. He is gone and his rages are gone with him. You have children running around and a husband running after them and you try to make the field beautiful for them all - but the flowers and the grass are still marked and crushed by your father's rages but, look, as the years pass the marks grow less as you re-new the field with new power and energy.
The pain involved in making this new power and energy is hard on you but you must keep producing it if the field is to become lush and fruitful again.
Some bruises go deep to the bone and take ages to heal and even when you are well again you can still feel the ache where the kicks and the grinding of heels hurt you years ago. But it is your "spirit", your link with the energy that has stretched throughout the human cosmos that is fighting to heal you despite the fatigue you might feel and the need to just leave the bruises alone and stop looking at them in favour of the unbroken exotic grasses of your mind.
I still remember all the rages and the bared teeth and the fury spitting in my face and the huge BANGS of my mother's palms against my ears. Many many times the same thing from 5 years old until I was seventeen. But when I think of her now I think of she and I sitting in a hotel bay window, just the two of us, I am 26 yrs or so and she is 60, looking out over the ocean, with gins and tonics on the table before us and we are talking like two adults and I hear her pain of her relationship with her father, my grandfather - how tough he was on her and yet how she was the only one of 4 daughters to go through University. How abusive he was of her, driving her, mocking her body and her intelligence. Why? All I heard was jealousy of her and of her opportunities which he had provided and with which he could have been truly a great man.... maybe! His anger was at not reaching the heights that he wanted to climb, while he saw his baby girl becoming more educated than he.
That was my mother's kharma and it is now mine. What is yours?
