Doubly Maternally-Blessed, Thanks Mom and Happy Mother’s Day 2009

by Enlightenedpsych2 in Holidays, May 10, 2009

This is really a tribute for Mother’s day because it is about my dear moms father. She is what she is because he was the greatest man that ever breathed life into even the darkest and deadest of nights, days, emotions, experiences, etc.

I was intrigued by the story-tellers in my family and it was as if myth was woven by complete choice into these great people’s tapestries of life. Their looms were brimming with color and creative expression. It was as if their existence (because I sensed as a child when a story with purpose was going to be spoken), would be best understood with symbolism, visualization and maybe even a bit of character development (embellishment).

The one person who stands out in my mind especially when I was a child and early adolescent, a genuine and comical heart-wrenching and imaginative soul housed in an attractive physical body, was my maternal grandfather. We called him DyiDyi which is grandpop in yukie, his native tongue, Ukrainian in this he would weave the stories of pain, suffering and torment between the morbid threads of survival, famine and death just so we could see his tapestry was very war-torn and integrity-shattered.

He additionally painted and professed his way through this life by using the easel and the blank page as tools of the trade for enlightening those who sought his wisdom. The life he had lived since 1915 was recreated for me in stories about his own hunger, his own hand dismemberment after stepping on a landmine, his own heartache in watching most of his family slaughtered, and his own survival techniques that led him out of religious, political, social and psychological bondage and into employment slavery by coming into the land of opportunity: America.

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Grandpa recalled being seven and fearing for certain things that were going on in his world. He was living in the Ukraine while my great-grandfather served in the regime of Czar Alexander as a hussar, which is a cavalry officer and captain of the Russian people. It was a dark time followed by several darker times before some light shone at the end of the Lincoln Tunnel and grandpa found himself in New York City with a beautiful wife and two wonderful children, my mom and uncle, in 1950.

As grandpa became more melancholic on his involvement in pre and post WWII, I could almost feel what the words ’suffrage and poverty’ really felt like to those that experienced it firsthand. His soul was always in his storytelling as well as in his life, so it breathed life into the reflection. He would shed tears for the cries of thousands dying in the streets that he and his family left behind. I could sense his despair.

This was my grandfathers and great-grandfathers legacy to me: to really grasp and understand the importance of myth and how it serves a purpose by representing the glue that holds together portions of our human existence. We are all connected in some mysterious way and equally share a set of mythologies handed down to us from generation to generation that serves a purpose to teach. Questions like ‘where did I come from? Or “where am I going”, can be addressed by story especially through the enthusiasm of an old-timer with a remote viewing skill classified nowadays as a psychic ability, or just a vivid imagination.

As to my mother’s role in all of this, she taught me the femine way of standing sytrong in your own convictions and believing in yourself despite what anyone thinks. My mother gives me an incredible passion for living in what my imagination says should be the real nirvana. As difficult as the challenges are that face me to bringing some success to the lives of my family members and loved ones, then I will know that having faith and stock in both mom and grandpa is the best investment I have ever made.