Flames of light are licking the horizon
The wind nudges my ribs
“Wake UP!
Sweep the crusties out of your eyes
Wipe away the sleepy tears.
You’re gonna want to see this.”
Could it be?
That I wasn’t crazy?
That my tornados of faith and
Hurricanes of trust
Did more than tear down “was”?
Sly and grinning,
Their chaos might have planted my dreams right
Where I would trip over them
Just when I was least expecting it
Purple night still sparkles around me
Still
Quiet the dew falls
Sinking into my thirsty lips
Bringing news
That the dark
Cold
Dry
Bones of night
Are yielding
Making way
For my heart to resound once again
My veins to flow with a joyful river
Of love
A song I’ve never heard is echoing
Through the stars
I’m made of
Some Words and a Story
Nothing Is My Only Lover
I had a vision recently of what exists at the core of every single person. The spirit hovering over waters, and in particular, the space between.
A reverse whirlpool if you will, where every thing original to that individual emerges into their conscious awareness.
The key to the creative life, a crafted life, a life lived on purpose, is to espouse oneself to the nothingless and allow. To keep thought, fear, egoic static and interference from staining the perfect expression of Source that wants to flow through you.
The beautiful part is our ability to dance with it. We are not merely vessels – in some mysterious way we leave our fingerprint on God as He is born through us. There is a true dance, a beautiful, painful, estatic, and at times perfectly harmonious play that can unfold at the heart of each of us as we strain to give birth to ourselves.
And this space of nothing is the only oasis in the authentic life. Space is necessary from all things, created and uncreated, and only in the void can true rest be found.
The only way we can forge a fruitful relationship with any aspect of life is to put as much distance as possible between us at that aspect, not out of fear and avoidance, but by recognizing that more than anything, we are the nothing. The more time we abide in spacious rest, the clearer our view becomes of ourselves, the easier it becomes to release the parts and patterns that would choke out all we are striving to cultivate.
A deeply luscious clarity crystallizes in our relationship to the world, and from there we receive the satisfaction we once chased before recognizing the exclusive substance of nothingness.
We discover a universe in each word, magic begins to follow us like a loyal and playful puppy, and ordinary begins to be replaced with a richly colored and endless stream of beauty beyond all longing. Aslan’s country.
The irony of it all is that this is what I learned from the last 6 weeks of bear fighting all the patterns that created an ebb and flow of suicidal ideation over â…” of my life.
Sitting on the curb at a corner near my house, blankly staring at each car rolling through, I realized that no one could ever give me anything I had not already given myself. My love affair with nothing fast became a marriage fusion.
I’ve lived my life in the invisible war zone of unconscious trauma, that felt more like a nuclear war zone for the last 4 years I made that trauma conscious by choosing to recover. I’ve spent literally every moment of that time fighting to the death to save my life. Invited into deeper and more profound ego deathes over time, exhausted beyond reason and having forgotten the taste of living, I began to question the purpose in going on.
On that curb I decided one last time that if I’m ready to die now, I might as well wait and see what I can make of my life until it ends naturally. Having journeyed mainly alone through this life (thanks trauma) I realized that if no one could help me, no one could get in my way either.
All of sudden, and it was just me and every galaxy in the universe and whatever I could fathom to invite through the birth portal of my heart.
And at long last, I have arrived at the beginning.
The Deep
The current pulls me
This way and that
The darkness guiding
My fingers trail along the ocean floor
Collecting the deepest and most
Impactful
Trails left along my DNA
Mangled remains of what should have been
My humanity
Tearfully, tenderly sorting
Untangling
Grief rips through me
Removing all the festering fragments
Of ego
Defensiveness
And false realities
Removing why, when, how, who
It’s warm hands on my shoulders
“Look up, loved one.
Remember the only reason you are here.
Swim towards the stars.”
Washing up somewhere between death and hope
My mother lifts me gently
It’s hard to tell where she ends and I
Begin
I sprinkle myself through her forests
Cycle myself through her heart
Where birth and death intertwine
Where her sweet, full
Silence
Dissolves
Returns
Me to
The pulse of life
Build
I dip a feather into this ink
The one my heart supplies, steady and sure
Close my eyes
And begin to draw
I watch the image forming
Surprised to see no black or white
Not even grey
So many shades of pain
Of decisions
No one should have to make
I wasn’t prepared for this
Test
That has no right answer
There’s no room for cerebral gloating here
The multiple choice options are “numb”
“Dead”
“Alive”
Yet daisies and trains of sunlight follow me
Sparkling glasses of ordinary
With a shot of bewilderment
No one prepared me for this
Class
The empty train station
Where you’re left alone to assemble the train from
Whatever you can scavage
Using whatever tools you can fashion
From your own imagination
And the bench’s boards
Boarding it with a straight back
Hands folded neatly
Filling the car with solitude
Respect
And emptiness
Trust is the conductor
Blue yonder the only map
Facing east
As the sun rises
The Eye
I want to tell you a story
But it’s not over
So instead I’ll tell you
How God has turned my pain
Into fireworks
He’s taken
The peaces
The Pacific rage
My cages and chains and fractured
Function
All my love untethered
A kaleidescope rug is lain down
Warmth for the feet of others
Joy for my own heart
Every color it’s own
Love story
He’s rearranged it all
Placing a peace within the rage
An answering in
The breaking itself
Weaving a larger
Mandala
Out of the rough, bleeding edges
Than I can even see
Content to rest here
In the eye of the storm
Tired
Years have waltzed by
As I’ve danced in the circle of love
And yet
This beautiful animal that I am has been
Forgotten
In my pursuit of higher things
As I’ve drifted down to the ground I find her
Moaning in exhaustion
Soul eyes piercing
“When does time come for me?
When is rest? Safety?
When will you let me play again?
When will you feed me what I truly need,
Instead of pouring my food out at the table
Of others?
You promised.”
Tears roll hot.
The one I was given first,
I’ve left for last
Because they said so.
“It’s selfish,”
They said,
As if eating and enjoyment and rest
And needing the companionship of others
We’re the greatest sins one could commit.
And I believed them.
But I know the taste of sunlight
And the deep seal of sleep
Over my scabby soul
I’ve drank freedom on a mountain side
And in candle lit water running down
My body in the darkness
The eternal well springs strong and deep within.
Finally I turn my face to the east
I don’t know what I’ll find there
But I know I will finally find
Enough.
How Could I Have Known?
Pain is doorway
Disguised as a barbed wire fence
Don’t look
Leap
Loss is an illusion
A mirage
When we walk through it
We find our keys on the other side
The key to the door
The one you looked for your whole life
THAT door
The one that would free you
All those days thinking
“There must be more”
All that wondering
About the magic and the romance
The pulsing, radiating light
That would fade
As soon as you reached out to touch it
When life pulls your dreams from your hands
Whether by gentle tug or violent twist
It’s checking to see
How badly you want them
How many risks will you take?
How many unknown roads explore?
How long will you lean into the pain until maybe, just maybe, you fall through to the other side?
Betrayal
The “no”s pile onto my chest
Slowly the breath is squeezed out my soul
The hunger out of my body
The will to live begins to flicker ominously
Like a pile of boulders they sit, undisturbed
By their own crushing impact
Many of them placed there by my kin
My brothers and sisters
Where is a soul to take even one away?
Where is the Good Samaritan now?
Old ways of coping stalk me
A pack of wolves offering temporary relief
Where is yes?
My being howls in pain
Day and night
Not a moment’s true respite
It’s been years since I tasted rest
That lasted long enough to touch the marrow
My rage burns the bridges of false belonging
Strung between bitterness and true solitude
I only pray that once this has finished
This slow death
Whatever is left
Becomes medicine
For this unforgivable
Betrayal
Becoming
I take myself by the hand
“Deep breath. You ready? Remember to relax into it.”
Together we leap to icy depths
The weight of it pounding in on all sides
I lean into the burn
Unfurl my toes to the piercing embrace
The shock reminds me what the point is
It’s not the treasures at the bottom
As my impatience would like me to believe
The fact that I can even feel
Tells me
“You’re alive. You’re becoming.
Becoming makes you a palace
Where you can gather the treasures in
Arrange them for the friends who will grace these halls and windows
And live each day supported by the warmth of the trees and suns
The wildflower and thistles
Those mountain breezes that whistle silence through your soul
You are becoming big enough for all of this.
Unfurl.”
Drink
The pattering drapes itself over
My tiny abode
I sigh with relief as my mother speaks my heart for me
I press still deeper into the steady rhythm
The rasp of love and it’s mirror, pain
Sculpt my spirit in the deluge
I take refuge by burrowing
Sinking
Reach, woman
Use your strength
Down this time
Hold onto the roots that already
Sprout from your sacrum
And drink
Midnight
Quiet in
Listen
Whispered voices, world over
Are swelling and swirling bed time tales
One note
One brush stroke
If you strain to hear a heart break
You just might find the wholeness of beauty
The dark side of moon
Making things complete
Forks clang like typewriters
The highways lilt lullabies
We’re all telling a story
Most of us unknowingly
Perhaps even unwillingly
Meanwhile the masters
True heroes
The ones who’ve decided
Are mutely leaking their masterpieces
On the walls of space and time
Knowingly
Willingly
Wielding and relinquishing their legacies
For us to stumble upon one dusty
Dried up day
An enigmatic gaze reaching
Framed on the wall
Wrinkled words that used to pass you by
Now calling your name
Just in time
Their creaking, earth trembling strength
Their war cries
Joy cries
Songs of laughter
Wails of grief
Shattering your self doubt
Their blood runs through you
Together we weave
Together we ride these waves
The never ending glory
Of life