This painting, hanging in a restaurant a few blocks from our house, is across the street from the hotel where we got married one year ago today.

The man's predicament is self-evident. We've all been in the tree, out on a limb. Some hold on. Others let go. 

I let go. 

The dog, however, seems open to interpretation.

If the dog represents fear, I like to think I outran it. 

If the dog represents security, concern and support on the way --- as in, what are you doing way up there so far out on the limb? Come down! I'll be here when you fall! I'm a man's best friend -- we have nothing to fear by letting go. 

Check her out! Tara Brach, that is ... in particular, this podcast: 

www.tarabrach.com/good-othering/


Tara is helping me navigate some lingering, inconvenient emotions (okay anger) about a certain person. No, not my ex. This person, Tara reminds me, can't help that he was born with a silver spoon up his ass. Nor his propensity to lie under oath despite his Ivy League pedigree. It's not his fault that he has to hide in his spacesuit, having drowned his gold with Jack Daniels (hidden in the garage) and deception. His secrets, from cross dressing to infatuations with women other than his wife, are the least of his issues, when considering his blind, boundless ego.

All of which make him fodder for thinly-veiled fiction, perhaps as here. 

My therapist, through EMDR, allowed me to see him as a deeply sad person. Then as a young bully who--like the bullies in every movie we've ever seen--has been a victim of bullying (which would explain, but not excuse, the aggression and cheap shots on the soccer field well into his adult years). Then as a flawed human ... afraid of loss, of disappointing others. And in that, surely there's a modicum of goodness and gold, no matter how adept he has become at suppressing it.  

"Write about it; move it through and out of you," my therapist said. 

Done.