A Journey 
Chapter 2
 
Blessed sleep. It is to slide between the sheets and float into somewhere else while the body slows down, fading as a soft light does in the turning of a dimmer switch.
 
Sleeping heals the body, while the soul breathes and stretches and lives its full immortality without the weight of flesh and bones and all the other interferences this body brings, for it has chained itself to it by free will for this lifetime.
 
My growing up years were also marked by wonderful times full of love and crazy rip roaring get togethers that had us all laughing so hard, we would sometimes hold our stomachs and cry as the tears ran down our cheeks. How long has it been since I laughed that hard?
 
I can’t remember, but I know it won’t be long before I do this again because I am through feeling guilty for having fun.
 
My neighborhood was poor, but one could always smell a barbecue going on somewhere on the street, or music wafting easily from open doors and windows in the sweltering heat of a summer night.
 
There were so many children on our dead end street, we would spend most of our days playing outside, running and jumping around from one friend’s house to the other, gathering in playgrounds, or at each others’ yards with our toys of the day such as cap guns and homemade bow and arrows. Most times it was to play cowboys and Indians. I was always the captured one due to my long hair that I’d braid into two pigtails with either a crow, raven, partridge or seagull feather stuck in at the crown. I am a quarter Mohawk so with my father’s exotic features and deep complexion I was a pretty convincing brown eyed French speaking Indian princess in those days.
 
At any given time, one of our moms would call from the front porch…"Pauletttte"… then came the litany of names for the rest of her brood ... "dinnnnerrrrr!" Another one could be heard afterwards "Sandyyyyy, Ronnyyyyy, Diannnneeee, Garyyyyyy, get in here now or else!!!" Some I remember actually used one of their cooking pots and a big spoon clanging away till they responded "Coming mommm!" No cell phones there, or digital watches.
 
Most were stay at home moms, and many such as mine had big families that kept them very busy, especially in our area because we lived between a dirty fast flowing creek and the Canadian Pacific Railway railroad crossing. The train went right through our city, behind our street on Second Avenue, almost touching our backyards and every half hour or so we would hear the loud drawn out scream of its whistle stretching all the way through and beyond the sixth house on our block.
 
I can remember my mother counting heads when she’d call us all in… "Right Now!!!",  if she thought she had picked up an unusual sound and so she had to make sure we were all there.
 
My brothers and I fished with each other more than once out of Chippewa creek when the water would run high in the spring, and we would walk along or cross the railroad tracks about a million times a day to get to the other side to look for blueberries or fools gold.
 
It’s a wonder we didn’t drown or get hit by one of those trains. Mom’s heart must have been in her throat all the time.
 
It has taken me years to get past the blame I heaped upon her for leaning on me so much when I was growing up. She had an awful load on her shoulders, and so did my father, but it was hard and they did what they could do in their own way, and most of us turned out pretty ok.
  
Some times we would have huge games that would go on for hours and hours. Hide and seek games were such fun, we continued playing them right into our teens, but instead of hiding outdoors we brought the fun inside.
 
Thinking back, these memories brings such joyful feelings. It was so much fun, I know that if I were to be asked to join in a game of hide and seek right now, I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute.
 
These are moments a person hangs on to and cherishes till they’re old and grey. The good times, the fun times... times when all that mattered was enjoying the day without a care in the world, every sense tuned perfectly and in sync with life.
 
When I think back to those days of running with so much energy, and so many friends to play with, I get to longing for them. A child is so much in the "now" and can forget what bothers them, and revel in just being in the moment. 
 
I have always been able to capture a memory in time and bring it back to myself in the "now". I don’t know if it’s because I am so sensitive to my emotions or feelings, but when I close my eyes I can see, smell and taste myself right back there and its wonderful.
 
Having fun is a gift to yourself of accepting you and your right to be. There should be no guilt attached to feeling joy.
 
There are experiences that children should not have. Plain and simple. Some can zip through them and it doesn’t seem to affect them much, and some can have the same things happen to them and it creates havoc for the rest of their lives, so we give birth to our babies, and sometimes think they don’t see or understand what is going on around them, and that if something happens to them, they might never even remember. Maybe this is sometimes true, but not always.
 
A child is a person with feelings and a lot of growing to do, but is also fresh from the other side of the veil and comes into a world so different from the one he just left, that all the things that touch him or her physically or emotionally through love and kindness, or through ignorance and downright cruely, gets sifted and filtered through their eyes and ears and all their senses. I believe that all children begin their lives in various degrees of disadvantages because we have all heard that children don’t come with instructions and so parents can only do their best, and we all know that some don’t even bother to try. 
 
My grandmother used to say, "Don’t laugh too much or too hard, because you will end up crying before the day is over." For years I believed that I was going to pay for every little bit of happiness that would come into my life because I was told we were put on earth to suffer life because of our sins.
 
This is hogwash! This is probably one of the biggest reasons for my writing this book, or journal, or whatever one wants to call it. I’d like anyone who cares to read this, that the little child that is still hurting inside that grown up body of yours was meant to come into life and soak it up with joy.
 
Of course there are going to be hardships, it’s all a part of learning to be you.  
You have every right to have a good life, full of happiness, free of guilt, free of the fear that if you don’t follow everything to the letter your faith says you have to, you’ll burn in hell if you don’t, because God will punish you. That is so not true. A loving God wouldn’t do this, besides there is no hell unless you want to call it that because of what you probably went through getting to this point in your life.
 
You have the right to feel like a kid. You have the right to laugh great big noisy belly laughs.You have the right to cry and whine sometimes, and the right to say No to people if you feel like it.
 
You have the right to put yourself first because you are here, a wonderful person that has kept your magic eyes of childhood, and keep, in spite of it all, the wonder and beauty of the world around and inside you, that you have locked up so tightly for so long. You still became the person you are right now, in this moment, a pretty nice human being.
 
We are survivors. It’s time you throw away the key that has locked up your heart and learn to enjoy life again.
 
It took me a long time to come to this understanding of my own worth, and why I am here in life. I love "me", and feel proud that I have survived up to now, and am still able to sing to myself, and sometimes for others when it suits me, because I feel like it, not because I have to. I am 60 years old and still doing silly things just because it feels good being me and living in the now.
 
Time really is just an illusion, for example;
 
I can feel what it's like to see television for the first time. The marvel of the first time I lived this childhood moment is at my fingertips.I kneel in front of my television in my apartment with a cloth and a bottle of glass cleaner, and as soon as I touch the screen and start wiping the glass, I can at will be the little girl who was given the chore to keep the family’s new TV screen nice and clean, and so as I wipe and polish very slowly, I am there savoring all the exquisite vibrations of what it feels like to be 8 years old in the fifties.
 
And so I chose to remember the wonderful times pretty much by closing my eyes and willing myself there. In this way, when nasty memories come to mind, I say NO, and lead myself away from them by focusing on something that makes me feel good, like flowers, or a spectacular sunset on a far away beach somewhere that I’m going to someday travel to.
 
It works for me and is easy to focus on bringing wonderful dreams and wishes I have held in check for so long into reality.
 
And so it was that in the early fifties and sixties, I was developing and growing in a loving, yet dysfunctional home, just like everybody else. A lucky girl because we had the first television on the street, in a beautiful little city that was on the shores of a big, clean sparkling lake in Northern Ontario Canada.