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Limned: A Braided Essay For World Storytelling Day

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FFOA

Today, March 20th, is World Storytelling Day.

And, I have a story to share with you. Many stories really, but first this one…

 

For years now…

I’ve been moving in spaces of the feminine, whether that be in energies of the feminine principle, the elements of the Earth, or spaces solely filled with women. My experiences in these have unveiled and reshaped who I know myself to be not just as a human being, but as a woman and who I am with women. This was my hope when I founded Unabashedly Female – to come to know the feminine as She moves through me, as She is in other women, as She is in men, and as She moves through the worlds.

For me, both storytelling and writing have been a part of this process. Two deeply creative acts. Through writing my stories and sharing them here, I’ve discovered deeper layers of the feminine. In writing the stories, I began to see things about myself, my life, and my relationship to the world, from a deeper, wider arc. By sharing them, I began to hear from you that these stories guided you to see things about the feminine, about yourself, and about who you are becoming. Sharing our stories does this. And writing from down in where we excavate the deeper truths does this.

All too often the Voice of Judgment (VOJ), another deep and powerful way of seeing the Inner Critic especially with regard to creativity, vehemently hates us sharing these deeper stories of truth that lay waiting inside of us for breath and life and ears to listen. These are the stories that truly unveil, the stories that cast light where there was shadow.

And so, of course, as Life would want…

I managed to find a way to begin to write these stories AND share them. Though in the beginning, it had to be with a very small group of women who are writers and with whom I felt comfortable enough to go there…to write these stories. Writing with these women – Ronna Detrick, Amy Palko, and- for over two years has been the fertile ground of my becoming, and fertile for each of them as well.

Today on World Storytelling Day…

Our group, which we have named Fierce For One Another, is sharing one of our many braided essays – Limned. We have many braided essays; enough to fill a beautiful woven book of feminine voice and experience. We did this through a process of discovery.

Yes, we are fierce for one another. Through writing together, for the most part weekly over the past two plus years, we have found a place where no matter what we write and read to each other over our weekly calls, we hold the line of fierceness for the words, the stories, and the woman we have been and are becoming.

About a year into our time together, we began to braid our words together. Braiding is a very feminine attribute as is this process of writing together. Weaving together into relationship, through story, finding the lines that meet, walk together, then meander to another. Words that call resonate, phrases that catch the breath and must be penned again, essential fragrances of womanhood that demand to be known again in the light of the heart, in this realm of flesh and blood, in this day and time.

In this process, each of us would begin a piece and then we came together to read them. Then, we would each pass our words onto another woman who would carry on from our last word to share her story that, while indeed her own, was born out of the first. We then came back to read, and then we passed them on again. And so on, until the piece returned to the first woman, who sometimes would finish with her words, and would sometimes feel that the piece already stood on its own.

Today, we offer you Limned.

It is a braided story that in some ways is also about story and tales. But these aren’t fairy tales. These are rich, embodied, stories of our lives, sometimes sharing memories and sometimes coming directly out of our felt experience of that moment.

I hope you enjoy Limned. And if you do not know Ronna, Amy, or Tanya, I hope this leads you to their work for they are powerfully creative women whose businesses are about empowering the women to live as we are.

A p.s. : we sometimes swear … a fair bit.

After listening, I’d love to know what you feel and think of this long braided story. It’s just over 36 minutes so you might listen as you walk in the woods, or urban woods if you live in the city like me. Or curl up on your sofa and with hot tea in hand, sink in.

However you listen, I hope you feel the power of four women coming together to write what is true in that moment, to share their stories together, to become so in love with each other that we hold each other’s words, stories, and lives as sacred and worthy of ears who will listen without judgment and with love. I wish this for you. Not necessarily the writing, but the closeness with women, this space of love, this acceptance of whom you are and the stories you have to tell.

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What is the Feminine Narrative?

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Doesmall
photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash

 

 

There is a tenderness to this world that is often seen as weak.

There is an inherent beauty to all things that is so often trampled upon, like the tender violet finding its way toward sunlight.

There is a necessary quality of care for human beings who are very vulnerable – the young, the old, and the ill – that is close to invisible in our cultural conversation.

There is a mysterious nature to life and death that we fear and so we, both men and women, project it onto those who embody this mystery – women.

The feminine has been normalized in a way that is not an accurate or dignified representation of the feminine nor of those human beings who embody her.

In our human conversation,

there is much judgment and labeling of what is good and valuable, and what is bad and worth little, rather than a discerning eye for the nature of things as they are.

While we might want to believe that humans aren’t capable of discerning without judging, I disagree. When we become more conscious of our direct experience, we begin to be able to put words to our experience in a way that creates a whole-encompassing narrative rather than categorizing into a hierarchy of worth and value.

Perhaps that is the key – that we find a way to help each other to become more conscious of our own direct experience. One way we can do this is to begin to put words to it.

Over the past few months, something has been noodling in my thoughts. I’ve noticed how, at least in the United States where I live, our cultural conversation has ‘normalized’ things that are not normal.  I’ve watched how the cultural narrative has shifted as different people have come into power. Angry – really rageful – rhetoric is now seen by many to be a ‘normal’ way of speaking to another. Statements are made as fact, even if they are not. These statements are repeated over and over until people begin to believe they are fact. And then a new narrative is born based on lies, deceit, and ignorance.

When people in power speak and behave in a certain way, we can begin to believe it is the new ‘normal’ or that it is ‘true’. And then, suddenly, we have a new narrative about what is ‘real’.

Consider the cultural narrative about women and the feminine.

When I listen to how women are portrayed and discussed in our culture, I am not hearing or seeing my experience, which is very different. I am not hearing my narrative spoken. While my white experience is reflected, my experience of being a woman is not.

So I offer this to you…

Who will normalize the female experience if we do not as women? Who will normalize and make explicit one’s experience of the feminine aspects of life if those of us who are becoming conscious of them do not?

We have a creative opportunity at hand. We get to write our own narrative about ourselves – about women and the feminine. If we are willing to pay attention to the truth of our lives and the truth of ourselves, we can come to write a narrative of what it is to be female and what it is to embody the feminine. I am not saying we are all the same. Not at all. But, there are certain strands and threads that run through our experiences because these strands and threads run through the feminine herself.

[And by the way, I hope men do this, too. I sense the current cultural narrative of what it is to be a man is not based on many men’s experiences.]

The feminine is not only white.
The feminine is not only straight.
The feminine is not only Christian.
The feminine is not only thin.
The feminine is not only ‘beautiful’.
And, the feminine is not just female.

Who will define (and normalize) the feminine or the female experience if we do not? If we, ourselves, are not willing to be vocal about what this experience is?

Since the election,

I’ve been posting on Facebook in the early morning hours for exactly this purpose. In these hours when the night sky is black and my deepest thoughts are most lucid, I manage to find words that shed light on my personal experience as a woman without them becoming too linear and logical. In these early hours, I write from the deeper places in my body and soul, the places from which the feminine can be known, for the feminine is the internal world, she is the world of soul, she is the beautiful darkness and never-to-be-fully-known mysterious nature of life. She is much more than this, but these are ways to speak of her.

We can give voice to our experience. We can offer our narrative to each other and to the world. The feminine has been hidden and now she is becoming visible again, and one way she can is through feminine expression into the world of form.

We can write her into being and we will have a more accurate representation and narrative if all women do so.

If you were to offer a narrative of the feminine, what would you say and how would you share it? How would you give voice to your real and true experience?

We’re in this together and we need all of us, together, to normalize the feminine narrative. Isn’t that a wonderful realization?

 

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A Walk Can Be a Question

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Detail of wooden gate on Divisadero St.

 

Sometimes, when I feel the nudge, I take a walk here in the city over from my place to Divisadero Street and then walk down Divisadero toward Market Street. As I walk this section of Divisadero, I thoroughly enjoy the feeling in this part of the city. There’s a lot going on. I find inspiration everywhere: in the people, in the diversity in general, and in the architecture and design of things. Like the gate above, the color, the creativity, the craftsmanship.

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afternoon light

There’s a cafe I love. The people are friendly enough, but also have that hip edge. They combine the love of coffee and bread, baking the bread fresh there so the smells fill the space. The windows and high ceilings offer amazing light to work in. They play music is from a phonograph and records (and often the music of my teenage years). And the customers are hip in a design kind of way.

I walk, sometimes stop in the cafe, and generally just soak it all in. And, I find that when I return home, I am inspired to dive into and work on what has been sitting on my desk waiting for my return.

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Victorian detail

The inspiration fuels my creativity. Diversity in people and in all things does that. It feeds and nourishes us and our own essential expression.

When we’re working hard or perhaps even struggling with something that we don’t quite know how to move forward on, it can be helpful to remember that we aren’t separate from the world. Often, this idea is seen as a kind of esoteric, spiritual idea – you know, like the idea of Oneness in that we aren’t separate from each other. But, it is a practical understanding, too. When we venture into the world in a state of amazement and wonder, following the thread of the things that spark our interest in the things we intrinsically love, we stimulate our creativity. We become aware of ways things can bridge together. We become aware of ideas and insights that can be just the thing to spark what is waiting on our ‘desk’ for our return.

Our creativity is fed by what is present here, right now. Life responds to the questions we ask, even when the question we are asking is something as simple as a walk down Divisadero Street.

Yes, a walk can be a question if we are open and attentive, and listening deeply for the answers life is offering.

Life is a creative process, so any walk, activity can be such.

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Red light overhead

And, when you are deep in a current process, actively strategizing within the incubation phase of this process, activities you consciously engage in to stimulate responses, knowings, and cross-pollination become rich sources of inspiration for that wonderful AHA! moment you are working toward.

When I take a walk down Divisadero Street, paying attention to all that appears before me as I go, I come into direct relationship with the answers life is offering to my question. I am stimulated by life, by the things that inspire me.

A practice for you.

If you’re working within a creative process right now – and I am sure you are as just about everything we do is in some way a creative act – make time to explore. Take a walk down a street or path, or to a place that inspires you, that calls to you. It might be in nature, but it can just as well be in a part of town that stimulates you. On your walk, pay attention to everything. Look for a particular color, or a particular shape, or a particular anything that gets you to really look at your surroundings in a way that is brand new. Then, watch what happens.

Fair warning:
This can cause you to be happy, feel alive and grateful, and unleash your creative joy into the world!

 

 

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On Writing – Each Word a World Coming into Being

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photo by Bennett Dungan at Unsplash.com

 

I want to share something with you about creativity and its source.

It really has to do with creativity, about the place from which our creativity flows, and about how we long to communicate with each other what is inside of us and how difficult of a task that really is. And on some level, it is about the (truly) unconditional love and understanding that holds us as we attempt this communication. Even when we feel we haven’t been understood, on some level something is always understanding. Even when we feel as if we haven’t been loved, something is always loving us.

When I first offered Writing Raw, I wrote something out to read on the very first call, hoping to answer this question for myself first:

What is Writing Raw?

And then on one of our calls this week, I was asked this question. And, so, I read what I wrote a few years back…

Writing Raw is writing from the edge of experience. Writing from the Soul. Writing that is formed in its own way and form that does not (have to) fit any currently acceptable writing format (e.g. essay, poetry, paragraph sentence, word. Writing that comes out of something else, first, before the words form.

Writing Raw has no particular outcome or result is intended. Instead, it is simple to deepen your capacity to listen, to feel, to hear, to open to and receive what is emerging from within your own body and soul so that it can be shared into this world.

Writing directly from these sources: sensation, internal images, visions, feelings, and the sense using guided visualization and  sense-guided exercises, and (not included on our calls) music and movement.

Writing Raw is learning to trust in what you sense is here, trusting that it will tell you what it is, trusting in the unseen and what you know and sense.

 

As I read the words aloud, my awareness moved down into this place from where words arise, a place deep within. And, out of this question and my sincere response, something opened up in me – a place that I’ve felt before, but never so clearly and powerfully. And my writing in this same session reflected this place…

 

My voice reverberates throughout my body,
Liquid words rising up out of
This dark pool of Being,
The ground of all that is.

As I hear my words, I feel
A velvet sense of love here, a radically kind presence,
Simple in its being, always
Holding me in radical kindness.

Bathed in Understanding, no matter
What I write or say, I am understood.
This radical kindness holds everything close, in love.
Nothing I do can push this presence away.
There is no away. There is no away.

And so,
I rest,
Here in this kindness,
A speechless wind on my lips.

And then in the next writing,

Held in this Absolute Understanding,
I am free. I am gradual ecstasy.
Nothing holds me but love,
A radical kindness that never leaves.

Nowhere to be found and everywhere, too,
I am
Held in nothingness.
Loved in everything.

Kindness finds its way into my cells,
Always fluid, in flux, changing
With the breath. Up and down.
Rise and fall, heart echoing against these nowhere-to-be-found walls.

This dance between worlds appears in words
And the spaces in between, each word
A wholeness in itself, each word
A world coming into being, that dies away as soon as it comes.

There is no solidity, and yet
We communicate.
Me to you and you to me,
Passing words back and forth

In the hope of landing in a place of
Understanding for just a moment,
In the hope of standing,
Together on some small patch of ground.

I share this with you because it has been so hard to articulate what Writing Raw is and offers. I see it is the nature of what we are doing – learning to write from a place that is before words, learning to trust in what is unseen yet felt and intuited.

orangeandgreenwritingrawI know the other women on the call felt this place of radical kindness and understanding. I could feel that we found this understanding between all of us, for just a moment, together standing on this small patch of ground, for a moment, just a moment, until it changed with the next breath. But what doesn’t leave, doesn’t change, is the radical kindness and deeper Understanding that is love at its core, as well as the sense of connection and community that flowers when we share from this place with one another.

This is where we write from. This is Writing Raw.

We have finished our first week, yet you can still join. All of our calls are recorded, so you can catch up by listening and writing to these recordings, and by entering into our Facebook group and introducing yourself.

Find out more and register here.

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A Deeper Relationship With Earth

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Sunrise, Tara Mandala, 4:30 am

 

It’s 4:20 am and I’m awake. Sleepily, my eyes open to the amazing night sky out the window just next to my bed. For some reason, even though this day is going to be a long, full one and I know I will need the sleep, I can’t sleep. The light from the soon-to-be-rising sun is just barely perceptible along the edge of the San Juan Mountain range outside my window, and even now at this early hour, the saffron-colored walls begin to come alive with this new day.

As I lie here hoping to go back to sleep, deeper within I know something different. I hear an inner voice say, “Get up and go outside.” This  beautiful land is inviting me outside. The land called me here to Tara Mandala, and I responded. I am here for just a few days to co-lead WisdomWomen’s Visionary Gathering. My time here is precious.

So, I get up, throw on my clothes, grab my camera (phone) and journal. I head out into the early morning, down the stairs of Prajna Residence Hall, and out on the path to the community center. Along the way, I pass by the small pond along the road and turn to see the color of the sun barely noticeable in the water’s reflection. I take a picture. It is time-stamped 4:34. It is early and cold. There are no signs of anyone else up yet.

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Temple at Tara Mandala Buddhist Retreat Center

As I enter the community building, it is dark. The kitchen staff doesn’t begin till much later. I decide to have coffee, something I do when I am away, especially when I am on retreat. The coffee smells divine as it drips into my cup. I then take my hot cup and journal and go outside to a spot I’d found the day before, just off the side of the community building. There are two plastic chairs. So I sit down in one. My view is looking out at the Tibetan red temple up on the hill where we began our retreat the night before and where we will spend much of our full day ahead. It’s still dark so the temple is hard to make out, but even so, I can see the recognizable red from this distance. As I sit and take it all in, I can feel Her. I can feel the earth –swollen with life waking up from a night separated from the sun.

I pull out my journal and write:

The land here at Tara Mandala is incredibly powerful. She has a kind of holding I’ve never experienced before. I woke up at 4:00 am and felt Her pull in my heart. She told me to come to her, down into Her. To look directly into Her heart. To remember what it is to be Her daughter, and to now wake up to and grow into the sacred blueprint of what it is to be a mature human being who loves all of Her children as She does. To be here, now, fully and open-heartedly, as a vital member of Her joyful family. She longs for this. She longs for us to remember and see and know the beauty of Her heart and soul, and to walk on Her skin with delight and a fierce determination to return Her body to a home where all beings are safe and at peace.

This is the great trauma we have endured and are enduring- this separation from the Great Mother, from Her love, which is also the painful separation from each other and all beings. And She is clear, we can return to Her right now, at any moment by feeling how our blood and bones are held in the rivulets of her waters and the deep valleys of her heart. 

Here, right now, I can feel her so clearly. I can feel her love. I feel immersed in her. Everything in me ripples with her love. Time seems to stand still as I watch the sun come closer, the Blue Jays flit between branches, and the Deer meander through the meadow directly in front of me. The Jays are noisy this morning. Probably they are noisy every morning, but their insistence on being heard reminds me of how life is busy at this time of day even though most humans are still fast asleep.

I sit and sip my coffee, just listening and watching as life emerges from night to day. To fall into her embrace, we must soften. We must let go into being here and being human.

I am softening into her, and as I do I am consciously choosing to be here, now. To be here fully in my life. To accept that she is my mother and I am her daughter. To no longer fight against life. To draw her nourishment up into me through deep strong roots into her. I never put these roots down into her because for most of my life I didn’t want to be here. I think this is more common than we believe.

Without the roots, we cannot be nourished by her.

Without the roots, we float in our human existence.

Without these roots, we cannot know the depth of love that is here for us, and cannot truly love her and be the eyes, the ears, the touch, and a voice for her soul.

 

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Into the Flesh of Full Human Participation

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“Since suffering as well as joy comes with being human, I urge you to remember this:
Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.”
~ Parker Palmer

 

The other morning, I woke up with words hovering right at that edge between night and day. Words about grieving – grieving not just death but also life.

I had to get them all down. So, with a yellow, dollar store composition book in hand, I walked to my local cafe to write. Along the way, I passed by my favorite beautiful tree that sits at the end of my street, right at the entrance to the park. She’s stately. She’s broken off – branches ending without warning or explanation. With one of her limbs sitting atop another, she supports herself to keep living. It’s clear she’s been through events that have hacked away at her body. But she still stands, an elder, each morning taking in the sunrise from the east.

I feel like that sometimes. An elder, a bit worse for wear as I grow older, limbs helping each other to keep standing upright.

I got to the coffee shop, ordered my almond milk and cocoa powder hot chocolate, and sat down to write in my yellow book, the words still hovering right at that edge. With the sun rising through and into the window in front of me, the words began to pour out, words about how I had to find a way to grieve life – to actively grieve life – to grieve the pain I feel living in the world today.

The words came out in chunks, different chunks about grief and life and death and how hard it can be to just be here as a human being on this earth.

I’ve written so much about how beautiful it is to live life in a human body. But this was all about how hard it is and how so often I don’t want to be here – not in the literal way of taking my life but rather in the energetic way of wanting to just numb or distract myself.

***

It is incredibly vulnerable to be here in a human body. My life is a cake walk compared to the majority of people on the planet, yet for most of my life, I’ve had this underlying resistance to being here, completely and fully.

We are taught that grieving is for death, and sometimes we are taught that is for other losses, too. When my husband died, I didn’t know how to grieve. Grief is a natural human thing, but the truth is we’ve not been taught how, and we’ve not been encouraged, to grieve fully. We learn our emotions are too much. We learn to talk ourselves out of grief, telling ourselves to get on with life, to not dwell in the past, to not wallow in our feelings.

In my life, I’ve come to see that grief fully entered into and embodied is nature’s way of bringing us out of denial and into reality. It’s an intelligent process. When we feel it fully and wholly, it moves through us, cleaning out of us all the ways we fight reality, and leaving us with the capacity to know true and deep abiding joy.

When we feel great discord with the way things are, something is off within us. When we have no outlet for our suffering, we become disconnected from life – which then allows us to be violent and not feel that violence in our hearts.

Grief is our human way to be with our suffering. Fully experienced grief will bring us into right relationship with life. That is what grief does.

Thomas Berry wrote,

“Only now have we begun to listen with some attention and with a willingness to respond to earth’s demands that we cease our industrial assault, that we abandon our inner rage against the conditions of our earthly existence, that we renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe.”

We don’t grieve the life we are afraid to live and the Self we refuse to be.

We don’t grieve the rage we feel.

We don’t grieve that life is beautiful, but that this beauty encompasses the totality of experience – the sublime and the horrific – and everything in between.

We don’t grieve, because we will not acknowledge that we are powerless to life and death.

We don’t feel our suffering because we are often taught that if our lives don’t go well, we’ve done something wrong. We are taught that if we are suffering we are at fault for that suffering. The cultural message is that to suffer shows weakness and to grieve shows weakness so we walk around all armored up as if nothing can touch us.

We do not want to see what is really here – the powerlessness we feel in response to life. Instead, we are taught we are all powerful so we attempt to control what we let in. Life then becomes something that can only be good/successful/happy (fake), sad (fake), not real, not alive, not spontaneous, not full of wonder and magic.

And when we control, we lose awareness of Source within us. This is the ultimate loss. Once we lose connection to Source, it becomes much easier to be violent.

When we grieve everything fully, though, we make our way back to this Source within. Our hearts break open and we begin to feel the distinct presence within of something greater than ourselves. We come down into our flesh. We begin to know the wisdom in our bones. We feel the depth of our humanity and our powerlessness to both life and death. This is what I felt when I was in the rock bottom depths of grieving my husband’s death.

Grieving fully is not quick nor is it easy, but it is the doorway into being fully alive.

***

As I finished writing, I noticed the sun had risen quite a way up into the sky, the entire population of the cafe had changed, and cocoa was empty and I was hungry, ready to eat breakfast.

I gathered my things together, including my now slightly heavier yellow notebook, and began my walk back home. As I came upon the tree again, the day was moving into mid-morning and the sun was now shining upon her.

I felt such love for her seeing her there in the sunlight and thankful for what she gives to me and my neighbors who live in her radius. I sense that in appreciating her and deepening my relationship with her, I am deepening my “human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe.”

Being here on earth offers the most amazing possibility: to know self as human and Self as Source, to become conscious of the love that we are so that we might live this love on earth.

May we all find our way down into the flesh of full human participation.

 

 

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Pure Prowl

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redpeonyunsplashcropped

image by Roksolana Zasiadko

 

 

Wildness, thick and dark.
Blood red.
Saturated Indigo.
Golden suppleness.

Jewel tones are captivating my pen.
Deep, rich, saturated succulence.
Vibrant, thick power.
It’s like I cannot get enough,
like my hands want to get into the colors,
and knead them like bread,
like a panther, midnight black,
big thick paws, claws extended,
making bread on mother earth.

There is no word for what I am feeling.
There’s only feeling and a low deep rumble,
like a growl with purr wrapped around the edges.
Definitely friendly, yet fierce nonetheless.

Thick, rich hindquarters moving in elegant cadence,
supremely sensuous,
all body, no thinking.
Pure prowl.

Brown eyes, wide,
slow like doe eyes,
yet piercing the night air with desire.

Yes, desire.
Desire and God.
Desire and freedom.
Pure prowl.
Jewel tones captivating my pen,
so thick I can’t get enough.

***

I wrote this during one session of Writing Raw during the fifth week where we cross the threshold of taboo to write about things that we have forbidden ourselves to write.

A taboo for me is the complete freedom to express all parts of myself, including this instinctive, powerful, sensuous desire that prowls just under my skin.

When we cross the threshold of taboo, we do not need to understand why it was made taboo. We simply get to explore what is considered off limits by writing about it, then reading without judgment, critic, or praise.

What is taboo for you to put into words, then read aloud?

The next session of Writing Raw begins May 24th, Tuesday at 9:00 am PDT. There is always a second session each week on Thursday at 5:00 pm PDT.

I would love to have you join us!

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Softer and More Real

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photo yin yang

 

“The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.

…

I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love. “

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrow

 

Twenty-one years ago, today:

How can I walk away from his body, knowing I will never see him again? I stroke his hair, golden with light. He looks so old, and yet he looks young again, too, young like when I met him. He’s always been so alive, so full of everything. He didn’t do anything half way. He was intensely loving and intensely alive. A million memories flash before my eyes. When we married, and I said, “’til death do us part”, I wondered when that might be, even if only for a split second. And now I know. Death has parted us and I now know it is time to go.

It is hard to take this last look and give this last kiss. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I touch his face, trying to capture the memory of him into the layers of my skin. His golden hair is the last piece of his body I touch before I turn to walk away.

 

April 17th, today:

Looking back, it’s been a long, long time since I said goodbye, yet through these years of journeying to find myself, to wake up, to come to some realization of who and what I am, I’m discovering that I’m also coming to know in a deeper way who my late husband Gary was, to have ‘a more perfect understanding’ of who we both were and are.

Yes, his death was painful. It was a tearing apart of two souls. And, it was also a tearing apart of places where we held each other up in this life, where he was my ground and I his.

It was also beautiful in that it opened me to a larger view of what it means to be a human being. No longer protected from pain, I found myself, as Joanna Macy describes in her interview with Krista Tippett, “dipped in beauty”. I remember lying on my bed, racked with grief, and realizing that I was experiencing a profound beauty. It was puzzling at first because those two things didn’t seem to fit together – painful grief and beauty. But there it was – the distinct experience of the beautiful.

Sometimes we have to know the deepest pain and grief of death in order to feel the most glorious joy and aliveness of life.

Now, twenty-one years later, as I sit more fully in my humanity, I see what a powerful teacher death can be. To live many years with this significant loss is an opportunity to not deny death but to carry it with me as I live. When I turned 47, the age Gary was when he died, I felt grateful to be alive. When my daughters married, again I felt so fortunate to be there to witness those important rites. And, when each of my grandchildren came into this world, I relished the moments much more than I might have if Gary had been there with us, too. Because death is a part of life.

There’s a bittersweetness to life when you carry death with you. By ‘carry’ I don’t mean to hang onto because I’m not willing to see reality. Rather, I mean living with the knowing that I am alive and he is not, and that his death helps me to remember that totality of this existence.

Gary’s death woke me up to that deep longing inside to want to know who and what I am. His death brought me more into life. I don’t know how my life might have unfolded if he had lived, but I do know that I would not have seen the deep, deep beauty that is inherent in the heart breaking open. His death also brought me to come to appreciate him more. The deeper I come into myself, the more I realize how deep he was and how much of him I never got to know. And, through his death and the profound grief I encountered, I’ve been able to be with the parts of my life, and in the world today, that have been, and are, truly heartbreaking since that day I said good-bye.

I share this with you as a celebration of the whole of life, as a remembrance to hold the whole of life with great love. I feel death can make us softer and more real.

 

 

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Intimacy of Soul: A Wordless Conversation

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rosebud

 

 

“…nothing is of such value or of such importance as woman’s rescue of herself. This is something very difficult for woman to accept because in the past the whole impulsion of her nature has been to respond to the needs of others. The fact that she herself is in greatest need of her own help, support and understanding is the very first step in the direction of polishing the moon.” ~ Anne Baring

 

I see the world through my own lens, just as we all do.

Seeing the world this way means we often project things onto the world, often in not so great ways. But, it also means we have a unique genius to how we see the world and how we communicate our particular view.

Oftentimes, I’ve been ridiculed, judged, and shamed for how I see beauty, value tenderness, and am in love with the sensuous. I imagine you’ve experienced something similar for expressing your unique view and genius, especially if it is a highly sensitive one in a culture that tends to shun what it deems to be weak.

What I’ve come to see in my own life is that pure joy is available when we truly and simply accept then express what we feel in our hearts, see through our eyes, and know in our soul. It is an acceptance of Self at a deep level. It is me accepting how Source expresses through me, and it is me honoring how Source appears as me. This is the acceptance I had been looking for from others, but this is an acceptance only I can give to myself, and it is the acceptance only you can give to yourself.

This rose is truly an expression of what I feel in my heart so often but could never find words to express. There are no words for how the petals of my heart open when I come into relationship with beauty such as this.

I’ve been in a bit of a tumultous time, trying to come to know what it is I truly want to spend the rest of my life doing. I love my work and I love to work hard at what I love. I want to live my life doing what I love, what my soul is here to do. And, it has been hard getting in touch with the place inside me where I know what I want, not what I learned I should want.

I learned well what I was taught. I learned well how to ‘respond to the needs of others’. But, I was not taught how to support myself or ensure my needs were met or even to listen so well to myself that I came to understand me. Yes, of course, I take care of my daily needs. But this call to know Self is much deeper. And, not only know Self, but honor Self and express Self through this vessel of me.

As I grow older, I see that I don’t want to die having only lived what I learned I should be. I do not want to die without having lived what I am, without having rescued myself into being.

For me, this is not living what the culture deems is worthy of living. I do not care to live in order to satisfy some external sense of a good life. I want to live the longing I feel in my soul. I want to live the longing that life has to live through me as me. I want to come to know myself as Self.

And so, this requires a softening that comes when everything is accepted, even the resistance to that softening and acceptance. It feels like a ‘dissolving into’.

I want to know the immediate intimacy of soul, both mine and yours. I want to experience myself this way and I want to know you this way, too.

And I want to know if you are feeling this same longing and desire? I want to know if you are coming to see that what can only be expressed through you is the most glorious thing you could ever hope to express in this lifetime?

This is the wordless conversation I want to have with myself, with you, and with life.

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Where Three Waters Meet

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esalenwatersmall

Esalen and the Pacific Ocean

I manage to make my way out of bed despite the darkness, the rain, and what I know is going to be cold morning air. I throw on warm clothes and a raincoat, grab my flashlight, and climb down the steep stairs to the first floor of our bungalow where one of my roommates, Corinne, is just about ready to head out. Her smile tells me she’s glad I managed to get myself out of bed to join her. We head out the door into the early morning, and the first thing I notice is the ocean’s roar. Here at Esalen, the land hangs right out over the ocean. Everywhere you go, you hear it…the roar of water coming home.

As we make our way down to the hot spring baths, which also hang right over the ocean, we meet up with another friend, Rachel, also on her way to the baths. It’s still dark, with the morning light just barely here. Off in the distance in the West, there’s an early morning sunrise forming just over the cliffs with new reds and pinks bleeding into the darkness. Now at the baths, we undress, shower, and make our way into the water. It’s hot, very hot, the tub just filled. I lower myself in slowly. Very slowly. The heat on my skin against the cold of the air takes my breath away, so I inhale and exhale, consciously, to bring myself back into my body.

Within a couple of minutes, I’m all the way in, minus my head, which is now being rained upon by very gentle raindrops. I’m listening to the roar of the ocean just below us and feeling the hot spring water wrapping itself around me. The cold raindrops increase rapidly and I suddenly, and distinctly, hear the words, “Where three waters meet.” I realize that here in this spot, in this moment, I am experiencing the medicine of three different waters at once, each distinct in its form, each offering itself to me in its own way.

We are here at Esalen for WisdomWomen, and over the first two days of this gathering of women from around the world many have spoken of medicine: how we all – human and animal, tree, rock, and water, sun and moon – have it; and how each medicine offers something profoundly unique and absolutely necessary for creation to wake up to and know itself.

Here, we’ve gathered to go deep with the land, to listen to what we know and don’t know, to source ourselves from something greater than any one of us, and to discover what life is asking of us so that we may serve life {my take on this time together}. And, in this moment where I meet these three waters, I can feel distinct qualities from each, and I want to know each water as it is. I sincerely ask each expression of water to reveal its medicine to me.

As I sit in the hot sulphur water, everything but my neck and face are underwater, soaking. I bring my well-heated hands out of the water and to my face, which is cold from the rain and wind. My hands meet the skin on my face and the heat travels into my cheek and brow bones. I feel this heat meet my bones, and feel how a subtle pain and tension in my face is soothed by the heat. The sulphur water has come from the earth, while the rain on my head and neck falls from the sky. And the ocean below, while not touching my skin, is meeting my ears and eyes. I am being bathed in many ways and for whatever reason, in this moment I am supremely conscious of the ways water and I are meeting.

The water of the earth and sky meet the water of my body and soul, just like the land of the earth meets the land of my body. Our bodies are the world and the world is the body. As above, so below. As within, so out there in the outer world. And, here in this moment, all division dissolves, all appearances disappear.

Where three waters meet, here, at this confluence of consciousness. 

I tell my friends of hearing the words, “Where Three Waters Meet”. A few moments later, Rachel responds out loud with a spontaneous Dekaaz, her trademark form of ‘lucid expression, that you create then speak out loud‘:

Meeting
Three Waters
Hot Springs. Ocean. Rain.

Corinne, Rachel, and I feel the rhythm of the words as we feel the water’s medicine. And then, I spot small dark heads out in the ocean. I think they are seals, but another woman states they are otters. Just out past where the waves break, the otters are bobbing together in the waves, up and down.

I’m feeling great joy. With women I’ve just gotten to know, on beautiful land, doing deep work as part of WisdomWomen, I feel at peace, at home. The weekend has been filled with moments of profound love on this land – so much love that simply walking on the land brings great tears and a breaking open of the heart.

When women gather, giving great respect, love, and attention to the land and creatures, we have the chance to come into contact with the deep knowing within ourselves. We remember what we are – of the earth, of the sky, of the water, of the elements – and, we remember how sacredly creative we are; how divinely in touch with creation our bodies and psyches are; and, how powerful we are – not in the image we’ve come to know power, but rather in the natural, organic, life-affirming power that lives not for itself but for life.

Where three waters meet…there is life, there is love, there is the joy of being alive, in this body, here, now, ready to set sail for waters unknown.

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