This was written in early July, but I thought many of you would be able to relate to it.

Chapter Ten.
Story Teller: I think the Lost Child of our original story, is listening to this story of a lost child struggling, so I am going to continue.

Each time the Lost Child was determined to speak - to go to the woman, The Finder, and say " Hold me, please, hold me' she lost her nerve at the last moment. This woman as far as she could tell was safe and as far as she could tell would not hurt her. but she had encountered Lost Child Finders before. Once, some years ago, she crept right out and talked to a Finder and even let him know her hurts. He thought he was a good and kind Finder but he had his own hurts and his own fears and eventually the sheer openness and vulnerability was too much of a temptation to him and he tried to eat her up.


She ran away back into the darkness and she has not come out since.

Before that there was another Finder, who was good and true, and she liked him very much and trusted him very much, and she talked to him and may even have asked him to hold her, but a new pathway opened up and she went and took it for it held great promise and in taking that path, she lost him. He reappeared a few years later when the hungry Finder came and tried to make her into his supper and the Good Finder stood by as a strong woman faced the Bad Finder and struck him down. That is the Bad Finder story and too painful just now to tell properly.

So not all Finders are good. This woman in this story seems to be a Finder, she seems to belong to the group of Finders, called "The Finders Who Find First", the most skilled Finders of all. She can sense where Lost Children are and she can wait for them. So if she is a Finder and she is not going to hurt the Lost Child, why is this Lost Child so stuck? Because it hurts to be rejected once you have shown where you hurt. It is humiliating, it is damaging, or re traumatizing and it is excrutiatingly exposing. Also, this Lost Child knows from previous experience that the relief of being held is short lived and then the times of not being held are like burnings to the skin. {At this the Lost Child of our own story really starts to listen intently}

So one day the Lost Child in this story asked to be held, came out and asked to be held. She opened her mouth, she said the words, she asked, she let it be known, she let it be heard.

"PLEASE HOLD ME"

And the Finder

DID NOT HEAR HER !

She asked again, a second time and again the Finder did not hear her. How bad does it have to get?

The Lost Child was trying so hard and not getting heard. She wanted to reach out her hand and pull the Finder to her. She wanted to just say what she wanted and felt so badly. She was screaming with the frustration of it inside. But one day the Finder just said, "Do you want to be held?' and the Lost Child nodded, which felt a bit like jumping off a cliff

and the Lost Child was held.


and held

Simple.



It is like crossing from a black and white world into a coloured world.

photo by Nancy Ruben
The Lost CHild did not want to go back to the Black and White world anymore.
But the Finder did not come by often and so the waiting times in between were agony, but the Lost Child tried to make little stepping stones, ways of coping until the next time the Finder came by. It was a difficult time, it was painful. {here the Lost Child of our original story listens intently, she knows that pain, that lost place of waiting. Almost hooked by the kindness of a Finder and wishing not to feel like a fish being reeled in but also not being able to stay Lost.}