Glibness

"fluent and voluble but insincere and shallow"

This is not what life in the wilds encourages. It is nearly impossible to live in a teeny village and maintain the glibness which is an all too common attribute of city life.

I had the serendipity of meeting a community member at the Post Office, a place where everyone collects their mail. He was in the midst of a meltdown. You know those 'invisible' people who sleep in the doorways in the city? Here in the teeny village we know their name. When they have a crisis because they don't have all the gifts, talents and abilities many of us do, they have a melt down right where they are, in front of the Post Office as it happened today.

This dear man was anything but glib. He was as vulnerable and sincere and clear sighted about his life as anyone I have ever known when he told me he was beyond help. That putting a gun into his mouth would be a way of finding solution.

I asked him to please not do that....my cousin did this two months ago and every nerve cell in my body was vibrating as he spoke those words.

I realize that in the context of a city life this type of encounter would usually be met with either something like avoidance or at best a phone call to 'the authorities'. Here in the wilderness this man is my neighbor, someone I know by name. I am, my neighbors are, the 'authorities'.

His distress activated in me a call to action. I was able to help him in some teeny ways and I let others of kind heart know the level of vulnerability he shared and they are also taking steps

When Barbed Wire is deeply embedded a tree will eventually die...

 to make sure he eats.

I have recently in my life been in active meditation on gratitude....I am so very grateful that I am not beyond help as this man sees (possible quite clearly) himself. That I can take baby steps in the direction of my dreams, that I even have dreams which have a chance of being real, that I have a place to eat, food to eat, the ability to navigate a bit of the complexity of every day life in America without having a public meltdown.

Please send your best thoughts and prayers for this dear hearted man...who shall remain nameless...send every best thought you might imagine you would need if you could not function and you were loved....love him....please.....love him NOW....

The Power of Ceremony

I am a big fan of using small fire ceremony for the release and surrender of old and the invitation of intentions for new. Many would call this prayer. That works.

Right now I appreciate the ceremony of laying the sticks, making visual offerings, taking time to write out what I am releasing....speaking it out loud before I strike the match.

I've been experiencing these tiny ceremonies as the invisible spearhead moving before me, creating room for me to move and live in life in a new way. The heat of the fire is magic alchemy, accelerating the process of change. I built the small offering in the photo on a tiny river beach near my home. I've been working with identifying and then letting go of the parts of my relationship to the father of my children which no longer serve anything good. Why? So I can live life as freely and creatively as possible, in love and compassion.

For the People in my Life

I spoke in a group of women a few months ago about having met the love of my life. They clapped and cheered. "I'd like to introduce her to you. Myself," I announced. Making this declaration out loud has had some quite astonishing consequences.

I hold you sweet women (and you dear ones in other circles) forever in my house of gratitude for creating a beautiful place to be able to speak that truth, hope, prayer, intention of forever self love out loud. I am grateful that in having received me you also hold some teeny invisible threads that help to hold together the container for that self love to grow, even if you have long forgotten what I said.

We are both the nectar and the harvesters of nectar.

Many things have begun to grow in my life that I had not thought possible. I do love the analogy of our lives as soil. My life soil had been cultivated until it was quite nearly depleted in vital nutrients and I nearly died. We all have these stories. Some of what led to my depletion...the death of my dear mother who was my best friend, my beloved children leaving the nest, a divorce that ended with my spouse hating me even though he initiated the divorce, a rebound engagement where a long time friend swept me off my feet and then tossed me away. Incorrect sourcing of my creative passion.

I think I understand that I had to have three long years of being inert, as much as that time was utterly disorienting. Depleted soil takes a long time to regenerate. It takes conscious intention to investigate how depletion occurred and to rebuild soil once it has come to that point. Until the soil is replenished nothing can grow.

Today I am grateful to be alive. I am grateful in this spring that creative expression, which I had thought lost to me forever, is beginning to grow once again. Somewhere deep in the root system of my being it never died. I am cautiously optimistic and deeply reverent for the return of this gift.

There is much I could say about the inert time. I will likely refer to it over and over again in many ways in these blogs in sincere attempts to encourage others. But the bottom line was that I had to go through the dark times to discover who was always there with me and learn to love her and trust her and cherish her deeply. She is the one who will never leave me. The love of my life. Love.

It does not matter to me if you like to say She, or for that matter He and call the one (or One) who is with me someone other than myself. What I learned in the dark is that there is room for so much....and that where I fundamentally source everything in my life from....this is an ongoing Research Project about love....

To the lovely ladies of the circle, of my life....blowing you kisses borne on the breeze of violet perfumed love...for your beauty, vulnerability, the courage you offer by showing up for yourself and for all of us...

To the lovely men in my circles, in my life... nourishing love for your deep tender hearts and all it takes to be a male bodied person in these times....love coming to you through the beeswax scented fir blossoms intoxicating you with desire for opening even more...

Trauma Creates a Trailhead into a Healing Path

I was in a Mystery School many years ago studying with Carol Kamen. She ran an exercise called something like "how I got them to do this to me" in which we detailed out some awful event and tried to frame it in a way that brought full responsibility onto ourselves. It is a really interesting exercise and I am grateful for it.

All these years later and I now see that 'trauma', whatever it is, creates an opportunity to heal. A bold statement. I've been the 'victim' of cruelty by others. Some would call it 'uncalled for'. At this point in life I admit I am curious about how my inner wisdom might have been 'calling for' everything that comes my way, whether it looks good or feels good on the outside or not. A hurt is an opportunity to reflect on what is being mirrored to me about how I am living and showing up in life. The possibility of becoming Whole exists.

I do know that healing happens when I open to that possibility and intend to move in that direction. There are times when I am a reluctant healer, preferring to point my finger at the one who hurt me and stay in my hurt. But when I am clearer I know that no one can hurt me, that most essential me.

I hold myself. I hold the ability to frame how things land with me. And I can also surrender past hurts and allow healing to enter and repattern the parts of me that have held hurt inside.

Dreaming Myself Alive

Three years ago today marks the anniversary of my death. It happened suddenly though the symptoms had been there for a few weeks. Even as I write about it I feel the lump in my throat and the involuntary downturn of my mouth as tears press to flow wildly. I must have known I was going to die. I began to cry when I was near him without knowing why. His cruelty was not something I knew about yet but it came as a chill wind in advance of his actions, the way Harry Potter feels Dementors, and before Harry, Frodo felt the Wraithes.

HE killed me. In all honesty I put my own throat out for him to cut, opened my heart up to him. I thought he was alive, a human being, someone with a genuine heart and soul. He was a coward, a fraud, fake. I know this now. He survives by camouflage. His cover is so deep it took me many years to figure this out and only after we became closer than he had ever been to another human being. Then the knives came out and he carved me to bits and left me for dead.

Dying while alive is no tunnel filled with white light. Dying while alive is agonizing. I think I get the fascination with zombies…I was one so I guess others are too. One of the people first on scene told me I was in a spiritual emergency. She helped to frame what would become the next three years. An energetic healer told me I lost nearly all of my chi, the spiritual equivalent of bleeding out.

My life priorities became totally altered. Imagine losing your connection to everything that ever brought you joy or passion. I spent enormous amounts of time sitting in meditation with what was underneath all the feelings of pain and loss. One dear friend literally sat with me to help me know how to be with myself in suffering.

A few days ago I was able to say that his murder of me was a gift. Living in a stripped down way made what is most essential and vital readily apparent once I was ready to experience this. Following the smallest sparks of interest led me into living life from a very different place. It turns out that what HE killed, the places he stuck his knives into, were parts of me that needed to die. He can’t help that he is a vampire and knows where and how to suck the vitality from another. But I now understand that I am the one who holds myself, no one else, and I was not aware of where I was not caring for myself. Now I have learned how to hold myself, to live with wholeness, a holiness, that I did not know before.

There is talk about the caterpillar turning in to the butterfly. I learned about the period of time in which this small being is mush, neither one thing nor the other. I was mush. In the mush there are dreamer cells that are the cells that orient the mush towards new life. Those few cells know when they are being called to orient. I knew it too. The small flames were vivid, having lived for nearly a year in the dark without any sense of a dream, when the cells began to call and orient my life. It is a miraculous gift life holds, this ability to regenerate. I am in awe on this day, three years after I died, that I am once again alive, dreamed alive by life...new and different.

About Being with Not Knowing

I love stories. I really do. I have gobbled up fiction from the time I was a small child. In the neighborhood I grew up in, there used to be a book mobile. A large RV filled with books. It stopped right across the street from my house every week. My great pleasure was going in to the RV and filling my arms with as many books as I could carry. I traveled all over the world, back and forward in time and into the lives of very different people through the fictional and stories.

These last three years I have read very little. Instead I have become deeply interested in the lives of  people who I encounter on a regular basis. I become intrigued with who they are, how they live, what motivates them. All these stories are happening all around me all the time.

I learned something about the human brain from a lecture I heard a few years back. We have what is known as a Reticular Activating System, RAS. This is the part of us that filters, sees and sorts what is happening all around us. In that same lecture I learned we have this other system, the MSU. For those places that we do not have data our brains do this amazing thing. We Make Stuff Up to explain what we do not see or know.

The thing about written stories is that they have a beginning, middle and end. The lives of people are not so neat. There is not always the way to know and understand. So very often I find myself inventing, Making Stuff Up in an attempt to understand and explain the lives of those around me and my own life. The problem with this way of engaging with life is that it takes up a lot of time and effort and rarely is my MSU correct.

Much more difficult, and a dear friend said 'terrifying, at first' is to realize that I do not know. In a culture that has trained us to have the right answers and 'know', leaning in to not knowing is a very new place to be. Greeting the unexpected or anything that arises with a 'not knowing' attitude asks me to be in curiosity. When it comes to myself and the melody of emotions riding through or the stories I tell to explain my own life to me...staying in 'not knowing' is beginning to create more spaciousness. My one year old grandson does not know anything more than what he is doing in the moment. Can I gift myself with that same freedom? And when it comes to being with others around me....what about greeting whatever arises with the same generous curious place rather than leaping in with my MSU?

Another friend said, "not knowing is the safest place to be". This was in response to my attempts to understand why my brilliant and well loved cousin chose to end his life. And what choosing to not know does is to free me from the mind and return me to what is real and present in front of me now, the only time in which I can truly be here.

Living with the Melody of Emotions

I make a regular long drive once a month. I have nearly 7 hours in the car. I've taken to creating changing playlists on my shuffle device. As time has gone on these playlists change. I went through a very long period of time when all I payed was kirtan, Jai Uttal being my favorite. I mean, I could play one song (Ganesha Sharanam) over and over and over again flying down I-5 in the Central Valley of California. Certain songs cultivate different feeling states in me. I use the music to shift in to a state I want to experience.

What is new, as I am becoming more fluid in allowing my emotions to simply be, arise, be felt and then pass through without creating a story around them....is a discovery of a new way of listening to music.

I listen to a very diverse range of music from Opera to rap and everything in between. I credit one of my brothers and my two children for expanding my musical horizons. My father cultivated a deep love of classical, my mother folk music. So I put together a playlist with piano concertos, James Taylor, Maria Callas, Sublime, Aretha Franklin, Coldplay, Rolling Stones, Jai Uttal, Tom Waits, Metallica, Louis Armstrong, Wilson Pickett, Celtic Bagpipes, Sur Sudha, Carla Bruni, Ze Manel, Cypress Hill, Murray Kyle, Bolot and Nohon Altai and whole lot more.

I discovered that allowing random play of all the different genres to go freely without skipping pieces that I am in the moment not attracted to has given me an unexpected gift. Each piece provokes its feeling state. I might normally be inclined to favorite certain pieces or resist others. But in allowing the play to move freely I am finding that I am becoming much more fluid in moving in my emotional being. Non attachment to any particular state.

And I have been attached to states, clearly, in playing Ganesha over and over, just as in life I prefer some emotions to others. No judgment on this, but it is true. Just finding it so very interesting now to develop my emotional fluidity using this random play of a diverse list. The very act of noticing my resistance to certain pieces then releasing and surrendering is totally fascinating to me. I am letting the music move me through a very large continuum of feeling states. The random nature of shuffle surprises me with what will be placed in line. Maria Callas into Metallica. Talk about learning to shift states!

I am quite ecstatic with this new tool!