Vulnerability - what I wax born knowing

It feels like I was born with a constructive image of vulnerability.  Maybe Mim & Mom were too.  Maybe life experiences knocked their awareness off kilter, because by the time I came along, they seemed to sense vulnerability as a quality right up there with the most deadly toxins.

As an "ancient," Mom came to have a different experience of vulnerability.  Maybe it was her body getting tattered, while she felt still strong in spirit.  Maybe she needed all those years of racking up knowledge experience wisdom before she could circle back to an acceptance of vulnerability as an essential. 

Her closing years were filled with new mentors:  Stephen Covey & Nathaniel Brandon, Marianne Williamson & Ram Dass, so many others.  She devoured their books, listened raptly to their audiotapes.  She said it felt like a homecoming, hearing things she didn't know she already knew - circling back to embracing a knowledge she'd been born with, but had pushed to the deep recesses of her spirit.


There is no doubt in my mind that she would have gotten a big kick out of reading Brene Brown, especially the easy breezy style.  I wonder what she would have thought of Brene describing vulnerability as neither good nor bad, not a deep darkness nor a bright bouncy light, but "the core of all emotions & feelings.  To feel is to be vulnerable."  For most of Mom's life - even when Dad was alive - she acted as if to feel all emotions was terrifying.  I like to think that thought would have been another "homecoming" aha.

While I was born with a forever awareness of vulnerability, my family situation left me disavowing it.  With a chronically cynical oldest bro, a dark-spirited older sis & parents who...  I've never been able to fathom their response to my sibs, but it confused me way more than  either Peter or Mim ever did.  In time, I developed a deep fear of anything that might smack of vulnerability, setting up complex obstacle courses of invisible barriers, brimmed with emotional barbed wire to discourage acceptance closeness intimacy.  

And then, at 37, I fell in love with John.  John, who breaths in brokenness & out vulnerability like some wondrous tonglen.  

Then I was blessed to teach biology, discovering vulnerability is essential to our good health.

Reading Brene, it dawns on me that what Mom came to accept & embrace was vulnerabiity. That it was okay to have emotions & feelings.  That before she could feel anything, she had to first feel vulnerable.  

In the last years of her life, as she tipped the "old-o-meter" from her 80s into her 90s, Mom had a homecoming experience with vulnerability as a birthright gift.  A gift that too many of us want to return in exchange for a suit of armor.  


Years ago, Dave & Candy gave me a wonderful book, The Twelve Gifts of Birth.  To those twelve gifts - strength, beauty, courage, compassion, hope, joy, talent, imagination, reverence, wisdom, love, faith - may I add one last.  May the ultimate gift of birth be vulnerability, the ability feel to express all of the twelve, to open up to more, much more.  A birthright & a birth promise.