“Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don’t even remember leaving open.”
~Rose Lane
Erika and William, today’s featured couple, found the secret to finding and building a lasting relationship.
They left the door of their heart (and their minds) open!
Want to bring more love and laughter into your life?
Leave the door open!
Join in the Fray: In what areas of your life do you need to “leave the door open?”
The Swirl World Team is committed to sharing 365 days of inspiration in 2015. Our goal is to help you stay motivated and inspired by bringing you positive, uplifting images and corresponding thoughts.
We’d love to FEATURE YOU in one of our Inspiration Daily posts! If you’d like to be featured, please send a nice, clear photo to InspirationDaily@TheSwirlWorld.com.
Copyright ©2015 Michelle Matthews Calloway, ASwirlGirl™, The Swirl World™, The Swirl World Podcast™, The Swirl World Inspiration Daily™, Swirl Nation™, All rights reserved. Photo used with permission.
Michelle, is Chile used no matter what the gender of the person being talked to? Or is there an equivalent term for females? Curious.
Would be happy to arrange an interview, you have my email via my registering, right?
“The key is finding someone who deserves it.” No kidding. Problem is, my strongest attraction is towards women from whom i’m in general culturally isolated, this being the Bay Area, reputation aside, we are all so split apart. In fact, feels like it’s had to communicate to women at all, even without ethnic/racial differences and age issues being present. One of the things i noticed looking through You Tube videos of black women talking about white guys is how many of them expressed negative feelings about “older” white guys looking at them.:-) Vetting implies multiple contacts, somehow i just don’t see that happening, but who knows?
Here’s something i think you’ll enjoy, totally in the spirit of swirl and what we’ve been discussing at this topic. It’s the Jerry Garcia Band doing Smokey Robinson’s The Hunter Gets Captured By the Game (a hit from the Marvelettes in ’67)back in April 1991. This was Jerry;s own band, aside from the Dead. His keyboardist from 1980 on (till Jerry’s death in ’95)was a black man, Melvin Seals, and the band included two black women vocalists as well, Jackie LaBranch and Gloria Jones. In ’96, Melvin revived the band as JGB, it still performs. In 2004, a new guitarist named Stu Allen joined, He was there fr 7 years, left when his wife gave birth to their daughter prematurely, and he decided he didn’t wanna spend his life on the road while his daughter was growing up. So he started doing these weekly things that i go to instead. He and Melvin are still friends, in fact the current backup vocalists of JGB (Cheryl Rucker and Shirley starks) were there this past week, and he did this very tune, also a spectacular performance.. Here’s Jerry.
Chile, you’d make a worthwhile interview subject on so many levels! (I know your name is Jeff; that’s the SW Louisiana jargon coming out of me. Just be glad I didn’t call you “Boo;” down here, you’re likely to be called Boo by just about anyone; from waitresses – and waiters – to store clerks, etc.)
You’ve got to let all that negative energy go, so you can be free to find love again. The key is finding someone who deserves it – making a good based on thorough vetting and taking your time. Lots of wonderful women in the world – and you only need to find one! 🙂
Thanks for that poem, Michelle. You know, i wish i could say that energy is really gone. But i can’t. I can still feel it, especially in my left shoulder, to some extent in my right one (which was the one that got “frozen”). I think, and my various physical therapists agree, that at least part of the reason it’s not all gone is that i’m afraid to let it go, afraid to open the door, as that will make me vulnerable. Still getting over a bunch of bad experiences since the divorce, all involving making myself vulnerable. These include an unexpected running into a friend at a music show 3 years ago, who was coupled when first met her in ’99, now divorced, was with my friend through whom i met her and with her ex, in fact. We spent a great second set together, Found out she was bipolar, but managing it. Well, turned out she wasn’t managing it at all. I let down my armor, and got crushed, even thinking of her as a friend, let alone a relationship. That did get me to start going to these weekly things, so maybe there was a purpose to all that.:-)
History/knowledge geek i am, indeed.. I post and send out a review of each show, talk a lot about the music theory involved. I simply enjoy doing that. And yes, good point about the “sell-out” factor, there would be some who’d call blacks going to a Dead show “sellouts.” Though early this month, at Jerry Day, held every year in early August, a period when Jerry was born and when he died, at an outdoor theater in a park in San Francisco in the ‘hood where he grew up, i saw a lot more black people than i’ve ever seen at this occasion, including even black couples. Someone who has been part of the “scene” at the weekly thing i attend for a long time was with his apparently new girlfriend, who’s black, first time i’ve seen him with a woman, period. Maybe something is changing.
Not surprised that Californians are active at your page, they tend to be cyber-active, and there are a lot of us. Me, a podcast star? 🙂 Enticing idea.. Not sure why i’m a worthwhile interview subject.
Yes, that energy is gone, and there’s no place else to go other than onward and upward. These lines from Kelly Clarkson’s Stronger come to mind:
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
Stand a little taller
Doesn’t mean I’m lonely when I’m alone
What doesn’t kill you makes a fighter
Footsteps even lighter
Doesn’t mean I’m over cause you’re gone
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, stronger
Just me, myself and I
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
Stand a little taller
Doesn’t mean I’m lonely when I’m alone
You, Brenda and Adrienne are what I call music “history/knowledge” geeks; I’m more knowledgeable about lyrics and song titles. A book about black Deadheads would definitely have a market. Thankfully, more and more black people are willing to share and discuss their music tastes w/o caring about being ridiculed or called a sell out.
From our stats, a LOT Of people in Cali (and the Bay area to narrow it down a bit) are active on the Facebook page, blog, and in particular, the podcast. California is our top state, edging out NY by about 200 people. Listen to the podcast and let me know what you think. We can get you on the show and chat you up!
Thanks for the hopeful theme in your first paragraph. Didn’t think of that, but you are right, the energy released included the bad energy attracting the like.
Wouldn’t classify the Dead as heavy metal, much more R&B./jazz/blues influenced improvisational music. But neat about Brenda Thompson and her experience! Will check out. Just came back from this week’s show. Several black men regularly attend, a couple did show up, and one very irregular attendee, in fact lives in Boston and comes when in town, showed up. There was a woman who used to come all the time, became a participant back in ;97, when it was a weekly tape thing, became a part of the live music thing when it came in late ’11, but suddenly pretty much stopped Spring of last year, didn’t ever tell me why (we were friends), she either wrote a book about black Deadheads or was going to do so (she’s a professional writer). I think that many people have an image of the Dead world as being a bunch of privileged young “white” people, mostly guys. Also a lot of polarization in the Bay Area. I hope Bay Area black women read your site/FB page.:-)
Hopefully the energy you released drained you of whatever was in you attracting emotionally unstable women. Lots of ways to look at “why” that was (and I’m saying “was” because hopefully that negative “attraction” energy is firmly in your past, and you’re moving on to better relationship choices). You know what to look for now; you recognize the signs. The key is to make the right choices – as my Mother would say, “Honor the red flags, and stay away from them.” When you see the red flags of emotional balance (and you should pick up on it easily, even the ones most people would miss), keep it moving.
You should check out the blog post and podcast we did with Brenda Thompson – she’s been swirling since the 70’s and is good friends with members of various heavy metal bands. Her episode was entitled, “How To Swirl With Rock Stars.” She knows the history of those bands like nobody’s business – you two should meet! 🙂 Adrienne, who co-hosts the podcast, is also a music history buff and knows all these back stories. Hard to believe you could be in Cali and no (or very few) Black women attend the music event you describe. Tsk, tsk, tsk . . . .
Michelle, didn’t know about you being a marriage therapist. Cool!
I TOTALLY believe that the release of energy opened something. I had no idea that the energy could be released like that, so my own desires in terms of opening stuff up had nothing to do with it, the opening happened. A friend of mine related this as well to the total lunar eclipse in April which coincided with the day Good Friday and Passover’s first day both took place, as it turned out this specific eclipse was supposedly about letting go of past bad energy related to relationships so as to open space for new ones.
Took me a long time to even admit to myself that i was the victim of domestic abuse, and that there were warning signs along the way which i ignored. But even since then, i seem to be attracting no one except emotionally and even mentally unbalanced women. Hard to heal under such circumstances. Not impossible, just very hard. Healing takes time, but 24 years is a LONG time.
Meet only one person? There’s a song titled Chance in a Million. 999,000 good byes don’t make one hello, you got to improvise. I don’t know very many who can handle 99 good byes, let alone 999,000 of them, in the hope that there will be an hello.:-)
By the way, to clarify, i am not someone who is totally isolated socially. Every week, i go to a music event at a nearby club, one guitarist who gets different people to play with him every week, either a Grateful Dead theme show or Jerry Garcia Band one. This has been going on since late 2011, and had developed into a social scene, some of us even talk of it as like our church service. There’s a reason i’m relating this, in that the Grateful Dead story has a chapter which is directly relevant to this site’s main theme, BW/WM relationships. One of the founding members of the Dead, Ron McKernan, better known as Pigpen, grew up in a neighborhood in Palo Alto which was predominately black. His father worked as a DJ at a blues station for many years. Pigpen became a musician in his teens, totally into the blues and R&B, which were one of the basic roots of the Dead’s music. And in 1966, when the band was just becoming well-known in the Bay Area, he became involved with a black woman named Veronica Barnard. They had a stormy relationship for over 6 years. He and the “family” helped her through a stroke in October ’68. He wrote a song about her, Easy Wind, which was on an album. In November ”72 he told her to go away, he didn’t wanna have her go through his dying, He died the following March, as anticipated (liver disease). This interracial relationship is not well known even amongst Deadheads, i’ve not seen it mentioned at sites which discuss such relationships. There’s an extensive history of black involvement in the Dead scene, but the event i go to shows little of that. Not a likely place for me to meet a black woman.
Jeff, how interesting! I’m a licensed massage therapist and I’ve done quite a bit of advanced study, so I totally get the energy storage and releases you experienced. Do you at all believe in some ways that the release of energy opened some doors (whether you wanted it to or not? Food for thought).
Seems like beating ourselves up when a relationship ends is inevitable. Why do we do that??? Reflection and even introspection has its place; I know, yet I believe we take those things to
the stratospherea whole new level. Saying “learn from your mistakes” is easy, but the actual process? Nah. Nope. Not at all. Healing takes time, darn it. But you know what? With the passage of time, and by coming to grips with certain facts/factors, both good and bad, you really do heal.And who knows? Maybe when your “next chapter” begins, you may find opportunity to explore your predilections. Meeting someone compatible is not as hard as it seems – you only need to meet one person! 🙂
Where do i start? Sticking to relationships, i need to open the door in the first place, not “leave it open,” since it hasn’t really been open for a long while, I discovered this pretty recently, as a consequence to getting acupuncture treatment for a “frozen” shoulder, which ended up releasing a huge amount of stored energy, psychic energy turned into physical energy and held in the body’s tissues, an energy “lump” which is coursing through my body, the subject of further sessions of acupuncture, massage/acupressure (which i’ve been getting for years, from a pro who’s also a friend, like the acupuncturist() and even crania-sacral therapy (again, a fried who’s also a pro).
Getting over a long term relationship which resulted in (my) physical abuse, and also just getting over the endless frustration of feeling like i made a really bad choice and stayed with it in spite of many signals, is a difficult process, And the odds of meeting someone compatible just get longer with age and a growing overall social isolation as more and more people retreat inward “thanks” in large part to telecommunications. (e.g. even couples nowadays walk around chatting on cellphones, not to each other). Interestingly, all this arose about the time i also started thinking a lot about interracial relationships, i.e.. my own history and predilections. It’s often hard to leave the door open given how much we don’t like comes through it, but even harder to open it when it’s all but locked up.