The message from the Getty.

I've been a bit out of sorts for awhile and, since I don't want to be negative on this blog, I've not written any posts lately, so thanks to all of you patient readers for waiting. It's like I haven't known what to write and I couldn't figure out where to start and then I knew I was going to visit the Getty Museum in Pacific Palisades today and thought maybe there'd been some food for thought there. And I was right.

The remodeled Getty Museum is a copy of a villa from 79 AD in Greece. It seems that there was this village that was buried by a volcanic eruption and then another town was built on top of the long-dry lava. It wasn't until the 1700s when this town was digging for water and came up with bits of glass and marble that someone realized what was under them. So J. Paul Getty, the wealthy oil magnate, built this amazing copy of the original villa, from careful pictures drawn by the excavators, to house his collection of antiquities. It is a beautiful museum with gardens made to imitate what would have been in the home of an early Grecian, definitely worth a day of your time. (There is another Getty Museum in Los Angeles - see http://www.getty.edu/visit/ for details of each one.)

So what does this have to do with my recent funk? I've been, for decades it seems, uncovering layer up layer of my baggage, undoubtably created by my childhood reaction to a rather unpleasant and unloving family life. Since I abhor the victim mentality ("I can't function now because my dad yelled at me when I was five...") I have almost ignored the difficulties I had growing up in a troubled household until recently when it just all came bubbling up to the surface. My reaction has been anger, yes, this soft and kind person has been angry and, sorry to say, taking it out on a few of my closest friends.

So, upon hearing of the magnificent village beneath the surface of this new town, I realized that I could also think of myself in the same way. That, even though I'm come to face some nasty stuff in my past, what really has surfaced is a lovely me, that I was a sweet and beautiful child, and I was not deserving of being made to feel unwelcome in my own family. I tell this story because I think many of us grow up believing the messages we hear from our family or teachers, that we're stupid or unworthy or not going to amount to anything, and their words are just wrong, but by now they are a part of our life and influence our actions every day.

The morale here is to really, really see who is the person under all the baggage. To really figure out what negative messages we have learned to repeat year after year and to contradict them with loving messages. And to think of ourselves as beautiful and perfect, just as we are today.