by Charles
Burke
You may have grown
up in a perfect family, where everyone
got along beautifully. I did not.
My family was relatively dysfunctional.
Nevertheless, my early life has been
enormously helpful to me as a collection
of priceless learning experiences.
And this attitude of taking what life
gives and finding something useful
in it - I learned most of this from
my own mother.
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In February 1989 my father died.
That marked the end of my parents'
almost 50-year marriage. Fifty years of conflict,
fights and unremitting abuse.
My father was not a kind man, although
he was convinced he was, and often told us so.
My mother, born in an age when a
marriage vow was an unbreakable contract, "stood
by her man" through thick and thin. And it
was nearly all thin.
Dad's abuse mainly took the form
of psychological cruelty and taunting, but he
didn't mind the occasional slap, punch or kick.
Crushing confidence was his specialty.
Some abusive spouses are selective.
They may treat a wife or husband like dirt, while
reserving good treatment for their children.
Not Dad.
He was an equal opportunity abuser.
So that was the climate I grew up
in. I moved out on my own at the age of 19. But
I was utterly unprepared for adulthood, so thoroughly
had my self-confidence been stunted.
Even after I left home, Mom stayed.
Hoping, hoping that someday, somehow Dad would
change.
He never did change, of course.
But he did die, eventually, of a
heart attack at age 71.
And Mom set about the process of
healing 50 years of deliberate wounding.
That's when I began to see the amazing
process of Mom's instinctive alchemy.
According to legends, alchemists
knew the secret of taking ordinary "base"
metal and turning it into gold, the noblest and
most treasured of elements.
An alchemist, it was said, could
take a worthless piece of lead and convert it,
through his special touch, into something that
all people treasured... into gold.
I watched as Mom set about doing
exactly what the alchemists were rumored to be
capable of achieving.
She had always written poetry, unschooled
and untutored in conventional techniques though
she was. And she always had her own unique style.
Half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek,
she managed to trample all the customary boundaries
and rules of poetry, and still communicate her
insights in a voice that was part south Georgia
cotton field, part mountaintop ashram.
And following Dad's death, that
unique poetry began pouring from her in torrents
-- six, eight, sometimes ten poems a day. Every
day.
And although she often expressed
her pain, even bitterness,in her letters and conversations,
her poetry pulsed and glowed with warmth, humor
and... well... wisdom.
Mom grew up in the depths of the
depression, so she missed the opportunity to finish
high school. It wasn't till she was thirty that
she passed her equivalency exams and got a high
school certificate.
But no one, after reading her poetry,
could ever call her "uneducated."
It was my Mom who gave me my love
for books, reading to me every day until I learned
for myself the power contained in well chosen
words.
And so I continue to watch with
a bit of awe as Mom, now 81, still spins out her
golden verse, transforming the base metal and
bitter dregs of her 50-year marriage into words
that inspire and illuminate... into thoughts of
pure gold.
Now, that's true alchemy.
Charles Burke
helps people revive their zombie businesses.
If you’ve read all the marketing
and promo books, but your business
is still shambling along, more dead
than alive, you’ll want to study
the free cover report at http://www.charlesburke.com
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Many thanks.
Cheers from sunny Japan,
Charles Burke
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