Found in a journal ...

Sometimes I write and sometimes I don't, but I'm always crafting stories in my head. Stories about the man who crossed the street in front of my car or the girl who served my coffee or the tired voice on the other end of the phone line when I call my child in sick to school. I don't, and won't likely ever, know any of these people, but I create intricate back-stories for them, shaped from the way they carry the tension in their shoulders, or the way they've layered their clothing for the day, or the sligh hitch in the roll of their 'r'. These faceless, nameless people become a rich tapestry to the fantastical stories I write in my head as I weave my way through the everyday mundane.

Tree of Stars night (at LOST)

Journal prompt #1: Who is your superhero?

For a long time I would easily answer that with 'my sister' -- and while she for sure is my hero, always has held that spot in my world, now I think I have a new answer.  My kid is my superhero.  He is just turning 14 and he is already so headstrong & bold. He knows himself intimately in a way I, at nearly 40, am only just discovering.  My son was AFAB but that didn't stop him from claiming his true self and identity. He is embarking now on a journey of transition that I can do no more than scaffold him through -- the choices will be his and his alone (of course, Doctor-informed choices, but still, the direction he wants to take his body is a journey I cannot make with him) and I couldn't be prouder of how he is handling himself in all this new-ness!

Poem: The lost night of Tree of Stars (April 10th 6:30pmish)

I flew through the gaps
seeping into oblivion
I only knew it was never enough.
Try as I might
I couldn't find purchase in their land.
Spew my hurt into
physical being
I took this hate and turned
it into fuel.
I will expel until I dig
deep and discover joy.
Desire leaves me wanting
but truth will set me adrift
in a sea of my own
understanding.
Drowning is no longer an option
as I plant two feet upon this
soil and call it my own.

Journal prompt #2:  Name 7 things you can do for self-care that are free

1. Grounding --> earthing. Bare feet in the grass, sand, soil
2. Come to a group at LOST
3. Water. Drink it, bathe in it, play in it. Water is revitalizing.
4. Let it go. Grab a pillow and just scream into it. Let it all out.
5. Meet up with a friend. Go for a walk, sit in the park, just connect --> no phones!!
6. Find a free app or use YouTube. Play some relaxing music and burn some incense and meditate for 5 or 15 minutes. Gently bring yourself back to focus if your mind wanders
7. Journal. Do 'free writing' -- let your pen walk and don't think too hard about what you're writing. Get it out!

Overheard at event: Nothing can go wrong with a paper and a pen. 

The last day of Summer 2017...

Tomorrow is the first day of Autumn.... a time of maturity and bounty -- harvesting the fruits of our labour.....

I've been in a relationship since Spring. A wonderful, life-affirming relationship. I wake up every morning excited to face the day, knowing I'll get to interact with this relationship. I go to bed every night with happy memories and warm thoughts for the future.

Can it last?

I believe it can, but I worry that New Relationship Energy is still lingering, 6 months in, and one day we'll wake up to the cold reality that it's hard work and we cannot sustain this level of excitement for the rest of forever.

We've already had a few bumps along the way, at least two that threatened to tear us asunder -- and yet somehow the connection that pulled us through has only made us stronger on the other side, both times.

I drive to pick him up, and I watch through the windshield as he exits his house, turning to lock the door and quite literally my HEART BEATS FASTER. Six long months in, and I still feel my pulse quicken whenever I get to see him.  He sends a text, and I smile. He calls randomly from work, and I glow....... is this really still just NRE?

I'm certain it's love that is meant to last. I'm certain these are the telltale signs of something that is right, something that works, something that fits, something real.

But what if I'm wrong?

He has so much anxiety around relationships. He worries that he's not good enough for me, that I deserve better.  He wonders what I could possibly see in him ..... and sometimes, I wonder the same from my perspective -- why me? Why does he choose to spend his time with me? What have I done that's been so worthy of all this attention and energy?  I tend to only question this when he's questioning himself, but still, I question it ......

Are we only fooling ourselves? Are we just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl...... grasping on to straw-filled dreams?

Polynormal

this path I’ve chosen

cleaved in two

a magician couldn’t dance between

near half as deft as I

but it leaves me drained

and questioning

just what did I think

I was getting myself into?

love grows the more you love

spread love with all

who cross your path

and love will exponentially multiply

at least, that’s the theory…

the practicality, the reality, is

we’ve all been conditioned in a world

full of hate and sin

too hard on ourselves

too stuck in our heads

too worried we’ll lose

too busy fulfilling those prophecies all on our own

so why do I feel like

two and two and two make one?

can I really ever breathe again after this?

12:25pm Aug 24/17

With Teeth

Have you seen it? That’s what it’s like. Dark. Tangled. A mess of limbs and faces and hands. It is the hands I can’t stop seeing. The faces are all contorted, they don’t even look human. But the hands. They are pushing and pulling. And reaching. What they are reaching for I can’t quite explain, perhaps don’t even fully understand. Where the light comes from, so I can see in this heaving, thriving, pulsing mass of bodies, simply doesn’t make sense. But I can see. I can feel. I can smell. How to convey the sense of smell with a digital blip on a screen. If I simply said it smells bad, maybe you can dredge up your own sense of what that means. Is it a rancid garbage heap? Or a dirty gym bag forgotten in the bottom of a closet for months on end. I’m not sure what that bad smell is for you, but this place smells worse than you could ever even begin to imagine. It has been rotting for so long it might as well be eternity. Time doesn’t stop here. It goes on and on, without any method to mark it. A moment stretches for all time. There is movement, but no space within which to move. There is no travel beyond the position. The sound is deafening. It is constant and so becomes unheard. With you every breath of the way. There is nothing to breathe. Every inhale is like being under water and every exhale is like pushing against a tank with your shoulder and expecting it to move. Can you see it? Can you smell it? Can you feel it? Can you hear it? How could I forget ….. taste. It is so dry that the idea of water is long forgotten and dust seems like the perfect drink, if only your tongue would stop sending signals to your mind, then there might be a moment’s reprieve from the taste of rot in your mouth. 

Someone once said your life cycle determines your death cycle.  I’m here to tell you it is the other way around. 

From the moment we are born our body is dying. It has an expiration date. Our cells recover and regenerate, but only so much. They age and rust with every oxygenated breath. We are literally breathing in the poison that will eventually kill us. But without it, we cannot live.

Like pomegranate seeds packed together tightly. Or better yet, soap bubbles in suds. Each their own unit, but connected, sharing the same walls, the same whole substance. A big cloud of these bubbles all touching and floating together. Noise like a cocktail party, only no real music or conversations, just the hubbub of sound. Happiness, but more like contentment, but not really because it is the absence of hate, fear, jealousy, rage, remorse, guilt, shame, anger, resentment, envy.. no concept of sin, of wrong-doing… simply existing and being, and being complete by that existing. All connected. All accepting. No worry about the past or the future. Only the ever-present now. Lighter than air. The best words might be warm and home. An ever-present bubbling from centre towards the outer edge. Once reached, the outer-most bubbles break off and fall down to join. There is no sense of loss, no good bye. Simply an acknowledgement of it being the next turn.

But why would we ever leave?

To know.

To know what it is to touch. To feel. To cry. To laugh. To think and share and listen and be heard, to create. To run in the wind and dance in the rain. To fall in love and to have your heart broken. To have faith. To pray. To want. To need. To be entitled. To last. To win and lose. To ask and learn. To give, to receive. To give life, to take life. To fight, to hurt, to kill. And to die.

And we come back.

Oh do we come back.

We remember, but we forget. We learn the same lessons and learn new lessons. We watch ourselves from afar and forget ourselves in the moment. 

But we come back.

Faith? No. I don’t have faith. I simply know.

A creator you ask? Oh. You and me, we created this all. I think I’ll have a long chat with the limbs department — why two hands and not three?!

The separation between you and me is the same between one of my cells and the next. If you take a sample of my blood or my skin or my hair, is that still me? Once you cut it away from me and look at it under a microscope and see the cells before they die, are they still me? Or once they’ve left my body, are they no longer me? What about the dead parts of me? Hair? Finger nails? What about my teeth? 

What is it to be _me_ that makes me different from the chair I sit in or the tree across the street? Am I separate from the screen in front of me, or am I just using a very archaic form of communication by keying these letters on an actual keyboard?

Does what I say mean anything beyond being a pixel in a jumble of other pixels? It certainly won’t last. Unless perhaps I use ancient Egyptian hieroglyph techniques and immortalize it in stone for countless generations to ponder over. But even then, in the grand scheme of this great moving thing we call time, how much do those generations really matter? And more importantly, is it tea time yet?

The river of grief and how to keep being

This article is so very well written, I had to share it... grief is a topic we so rarely discuss in common conversation -- but we all experience it and we all fumble our way through it... this article gives it a framework for pushing through and I think everyone should read it:

In grief we must take time to be in our bodies, even when our minds couldn’t possibly go on.

Written by Jini Maxwell

 

 

When I think about grief, words don’t really come to mind. What I do get is the visceral feeling of being too deep underwater. When I think of grief, I imagine the sudden stab of fear that accompanies a realisation that you’ve dived deeper than you first thought: your trapped breath like a weight in your chest, the glimmer of oxygen perpetually too many arm lengths away.

Grief is more than a feeling. It’s really an environment, a new condition to your life that you have to meet with your whole self. No amount of swimming against the current, or scrambling up the banks, will make it easier to navigate. Most importantly, it is not a puzzle you can think your way out of. It’s something more bodily than that, like the mammalian diving instinct.

At first contact with water, an infant’s heart rate slows, oxygen moves more slowly, and the glottis spontaneously blocks access to the lungs, all before the conscious mind can react at all. Living with grief is an animal experience, and surviving it requires the action of a body that knows how to keep being when the mind couldn’t possibly go on. Your body knows how to keep you safe, not just before your conscious mind, but instead of it. You just have to be in it, and it has to be processed as a part of you.

The bad news is, no amount of time in rivers of grief will prepare you for a new one. The good news is, you didn’t drown then and you’re not drowning now. Your body is carrying you through the experience on instinct. Take a deep breath and listen to yourself from the toes up. Feelings are hard, inconvenient and unpredictable, but the less time you spend fighting your body’s messages, the more you can learn from them.

Survival is, in the end, a game of trust, and not of thought. You have to trust that you can survive your own emotions. You have to feel, even if it’s overwhelming. The most important thing to remember about the river of grief is you’re not surviving it wrong. It’s not taking too long. You’re not moving too quickly. The river you are in is just the river you are in, without moral resonance. Trust that you can cope with doing what you need.

It’s easier to think of grief as something of a redemption arc, starting with pain and ending with the well being you knew before. But mourning exists without narrative; it’s not something you can itemise in a eulogy. The river’s current will stick with you for longer than you expect, and you’ll emerge and re-emerge from the worst parts of it feeling as shocked by the ways you’ve stayed the same as you are by the way you’ve changed. Like a newborn in a swimming pool, trying to analyse your progress is only going to make the water feel heavier around you. Your body knows what it’s doing.

In the moments that you feel yourself entirely submerged, trust that your heart rate may slow, your throat may close and the pressure may build, but your body knows how to navigate this space, even if your mind does not. Every fibre of you is already working slowly and carefully to navigate this new emotional landscape, if you let it. That’s how survival happens—by gentle instinct, not by achievement or analysis. Take the time to be in your body, listen to every soft and hurting part of yourself whenever you feel the urge: beat to beat, without scrutiny, until you can resurface.

However you’re going, you’re going okay.

[ source: https://www.dumbofeather.com/articles/the-river-of-grief-and-how-to-keep-being/ ]

About Loss:

The relationships we have in our lives shape and guide us into the person we are to become tomorrow.  When they end, they can change us just as much as they do while we are in them.  Sometimes they smooth our edges. Sometimes they harden our resolve. And sometimes, one comes along that seems to carve out our insides and lay us bare before all of creation.

I think some people shy away from those last sort…. saying that they never want to love again, if it means they are going to hurt that way, or cause someone else to hurt that way, ever again!

But I think it is this last sort that make living all the more worth it. Only a great love can leave us so completely devastated. Only a truly deep connection, one that meets us on so many fronts, one that seems like it ought to last an eternity of lifetimes, not just one lifetime, can gut us to our core when it finally reaches an end.

Only the very few are lucky to meet their life partner early on in the process and spend a lifetime together.  For the rest of us, we must be worked through the ringer several times over, before we connect “for the last time” and even then, some of us may never make that lasting connection.

Are we really so afraid of the loss, that we’d be willing to give up the depth of love that comes before the crash? Is the pain so great as to wash away the feelings that built to be able to create such a maelstrom of destruction in our hearts and psyche?

I can’t imagine ever not wanting that loss, if it means I could have what comes before.

Sure, it’d be best if what comes before could last — but even knowing the risk involved, I’d still take that leap of faith required of me to fall in love. Every. Single. Time.

And y’know what, I think you would, too.

Human beings are born with the capacity to love. We love our parents before we even know words, let alone the definition of love. We love animals just as easily as other human beings. We love friends and family. And eventually, if we’re lucky, we fall head over heels over senses in love. We throw all caution to the wind and we give ourselves completely to the vulnerability that is love. We let that love grow and surround us; we attempt to find balance, but so many times we tip over and let love ruin us.

I’m not going to talk here about how to maintain a relationship — that’s for another post, another time. What is important here is the idea that …. love is worth the loss.  The truly amazing high is worth the truly destructive low. It’s what we do with both of them that matters.

Love like there is no tomorrow. Love like every moment with your loved ones is your last. Say what you need to say, be honest, be bold, let your feelings show. Never shy away from how you feel. Let your partner in and let them in all the way. Build trust and be honest and always communicate. Love freely, unquestioningly, without conditions. Love with your whole self.

And if it still ends, when it’s over, it’s okay to hurt. It’s normal to hurt. It would be abnormal if you didn’t hurt after a love like that. Let yourself feel the pain, allow yourself the freedom to mourn for a great love lost. Cry in the shower, write angry poetry, listen to music that makes your soul bleed. Hurt like you’ve been carved apart with a knife over and over again; like your heart still beats, but it does so outside of your body. Ache like you’re never ached before. Long for the love back and long for death to stop the pain.

But as time ebbs and flows, it will take away small parts of the pain, it will soften the edge of the sharp knife and eventually the pain, when touched, will be almost gentle.

It will happen. It may take more time than you’d like, but it will happen. You will be almost numb to the hurt, almost, but never fully.

And when that finally happens, take a deep breath, and be open! Be open to another opportunity to feel that great love again. Be open to the small loves and the medium loves, be open to friendships so deep they’re almost like that great love. But always be open to the great loves again! Even knowing the hurt that may come, never give up on the great loves.

For what other reason is there to be alive, than to feel the way a great love does?

All things are impermanent, and life is the longest thing you’ll ever know. Love like it is your last breath, and I promise, every breath while you love will be easier and life will feel excitingly longer.

They say we all die alone, but I think we all bring those great loves to us in those last moments. We wear them like a hug, like a cloak, like a living shroud …. we are whisked away on the wings of our memories. And it is the great loves that we will remember the longest.