Father God, Baba, Padre Dios…
our hearts cry out for your love & justice
to melt the ice seeking to destroy your work.
Comfort to those who mourn,
to all of our hearts in anguish
over so many losses.
Keith Porter, Jr., Renée Good,
Geraldo Lunas Campos, Víctor Manuel Díaz,
Heber Sánchez Domínguez, Parady La,
Luis Beltran Yanez Cruz,
Luis Gustavo Núñez Caceres, Alex Pretti,
Linda Davis, & those precious unnamed
are held in love & power.
Keep Oscar Vasquez Lopez safe.
#MeltTheIce
…and don’t say.
We’re compelled sometimes by forces beneath the surface and even around us that evoke reactions and responses to different events. Events include the words of others because words are events. They are the movement of energy from within one human into the world. Our words, our facial expressions, our online posts, the way we drive, the threads of communication weave their way around and through us into our world. And sometimes we look back and cringe, and we hit the delete button because we don’t want to be misunderstood. Or because of wounds unhealed, we believe that anything we say in criticism of another is somehow wrong. There are so many reactions we all manage consciously and even more unconsciously.
I know personally there are freezeframe moments of reactions to the genocide taking place in Gaza (and yes, other vital places) that I wish I could put into context, the context of who I am and what motivates different reactions at different times. I have been severely harsh at times. I called Biden and Harris both vipers because they were ignoring, as far as I could tell, the genocide taking place in various places around the world. But do I know everything at play in the job of presidency? I do not. Sometimes there are times when the work of growth within your own heart and mind requires you call someone a viper. It’s that complex. And I sit with what I said then and know I opened something up within myself that needed it. And I know neither of them are vipers. They care.
(And if you want to get on with my main point, scroll to the last paragraph. I understand!)
At the very same time I utter a harsh rebuke, I am striving to see every human being on this planet with the eyes of love and hope. Love of our shared humanity and hope for our growing into truth and love as we weave our way into the stories of life. Yes, that love includes our favorite enemies. I want to always hold to a spark of hope that the worst out there will one day emerge free of the rule of all that would destroy and devour. At the same time, a number of them would likely only receive rebuke from me until I see change because the lives they’re devastating require it of my heart. This is what First Lady Michelle Obama meant when she said, “…we go high.” We hold to the good in all humanity.
We each have unique needs to assert, to support, to pull back and to ignore depending on where we are at any given point on our paths. Some of us may seem not to care about what many are screaming about. As a result, some folks want to declare those who are silent to be in agreement with bullies et. al. But are we going to see our own complexities and not see those of our fellow humans? I know that silence in the vicinity of turmoil or oppression is so very often, if not always, not agreement with bullies or “the enemy,” but confusion, exhaustion, trauma, ignorance and fear. Some folks are deeply into a work of healing and nothing else can take their time or attention. And they long for those who’re being oppressed to be free. But they just cannot give time to anything else. Silence can also be an awareness of one’s limits and a sensitivity to the causes one has committed to. And it can be about sensing the timing of when to speak up.
Given all these complexities, we often must choose a cause to devote our time to for seasons because there is that much need in our world. Some folks have so many things to tend to in their daily lives, they literally must prioritize the causes they feel deeply about so that the very point of life itself is not devoured by advocacy or fear of not supporting all who need support. You can advocate to the point of depriving yourself of your own humanity and losing sight of the needs of yourself and your loved ones to great detriment. But you will look very good to everyone else. What are you fighting for when you leave no time to love those around you? And with thoughtful strategy and intention, we can all pitch in where there is need. When more of us are in agreement about different causes, the burden is lessened. So, why not move with assurance that your needs are legitimate?
We also advocate by choosing to focus exclusively on our own lives and learning how to walk our talk and be there for those in our lives. Any time we honor our own value, we are honoring all value.
I believe we can and will all one day know that, just as this earth holds venomous creatures, she also holds butterflies and birds singing to the heavens in the same vicinity of what lies beneath. And as it is with the earth, so it is with the human. The hope we possess rests in a longing to see our lives ruled by a love and awareness of these polarities while we traverse a path up the middle, reaching sometimes into extremes as we weave the truth of all our value in love. We really don’t want the worst of our swamp creatures to decide what we do or say, do we?
So, the words we say empower or devour, inform or obscure, or, or, or…the possibilities are endless. What we desperately need is a world of people growing ever more aware that we have more than enough love to hold each other in faith that we will ultimately grow beyond any presumed failure of truth or justice or love. In other words, hopefully we can give people room to be who they are in love. And we do that by acknowledging that damning any one person for a thing s/he said (and yes, even what s/he did) way back when, serves none of us. It’s the pattern of the life itself and that life is still speaking, and we’ll know their truth by what they create in this world. Who knows, maybe if we hold the seemingly worst of us in love and faith for change while holding them accountable, our world will transform and truly new days will bloom beyond what seemed to be impossible wreckage.
The Minnesotans who sang from the streets, lifting their voices to ICE agents, telling them it’s okay to change, to see where you’re in the wrong, are an example of the truth that there is enough love to redeem us all and save our world from the forces seeking to destroy our humanity and to devour the work of love. The most extreme of us are literally in need of compassion along with accountability and you will find their wounds are what lead them. They don’t realize it, but their actions are weeping a call for healing and release from fear. But we can, by being sensitive to why we’re saying what we’re saying when we’re saying it, hear that call within ourselves and in the lives around us.
To many things there is a season, and knowing when and how to speak is a work in progress for everyone who gives a damn about life and love. I hope we can all cover each other in grace and love at every possible turn.
On with it…
Fromm’s words, quoted above, on the nature of humanity and how it must intersect with, if not completely overtake, our social existence resonates powerfully with me every day. History, especially as it reflects negatively on us, suggests we’re divorced from our loving nature and the idea that we might devise a way to weave our loving ways into the social fabric of our world seems almost other-worldly. As if, as if we might actually manage to pull off a total revolution of love such that all of our social constructs and systems, sources and industrial complexes transform into a state we would identify as love-infused, the thought whispers something of heaven on earth. And all I can say to that is, “Why not?!”.
Truly, if we do not aim for the highest, the utmost best living for ourselves and for each other, we will not move beyond the now that appears to be solely dominated by greed, by fear and hatred, by war, by sexual oppression, by empire and by an industry-riddled human/body concept of being human. We appear to have been totally assimilated by the Borg, and in fact, many of us have been trapped. Without a tribe, without friendships and community, without healing, without neighborhoods standing up to the agents frozen in their icy refusals of love we cannot rise above the entrapments so many of us have endured generation after generation.
But there are such neighborhoods, aren’t there? We live in a world where ICE is sent packing and people come together in refusal of the big lie, the lie fear poses across the canvas of our world each day, the lie that we are not one, not truly knitted to each other for eternity. We truly are tied together. And that fact can guide our choices each day as we face the world roiling, as we choose to refuse defeat and despair (and get the help we need for defeat and despair). One way we can choose that refusal is to commit to befriending our own humanity and the humanity of those with whom we’re connected and those we encounter as strangers. Love must be fully embraced on deeply personal, life-altering levels by every precious human being on this wonderful planet.
Without love, we are all strangers in a strange land, alienated from any possible richness of living. But the wonderful truth here is that we are not without love. We are not without the presence of a divine source within and beyond us, a force calling us to reach higher and grasp more deeply. Love is not an airy fairy, pie-in-the-sky notional vibration. Love is play and toil, sweat and laughter, tears and healing, blood and strength, plans and shouts, integrity and intent. Presence. Action. Vision. Commitment. These are the stuff of love and they speak to the truth that any society can insist itself into a love-focus, a love-commitment that transforms and births a beautiful world where we are not only one in our hearts, but in our actions and in our creations.
A transformation embracing the whole world, a revolution that heals every life open to the truth of our unity is as simple as refusing any other motive force but love.
On with it…
Paulo Freire’s articulation of the human condition, of the divide between human solidarity and alienation, whispers to me of the grueling mission of working out our own salvation in “fear and trembling”, as the scriptures state. In his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire states:
“The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized.”
I stop here with these words and reach deeply within my own experiences of having been ravaged by violation and oppression in my childhood and beyond. The work of healing requires intimacy with these truths expressed so perfectly by Freire. We must literally face the danger of becoming a shell of who we truly are unless we own that our living has become, or might’ve always been, a reaction against the internalized mechanisms of oppression formed in the badlands of trauma. Our thinking, our comprehension of ourselves and others is held captive by the minds of those who grasped us and shaped our sense of self, of other and of the world by their violence against us. I’ve found many internalized strongholds of self-accusation, self-annihilation and outright fear of who I am stemming from the decrees and energy directed at me by those who wanted me to forget, to never recognize their hand of oppression and violence in my life. And the damnedest thing is, I’m seeing how these constructs against the oppressor within pose as my most discerning self, the one surest of my frailty or my inadequacy or my shameful power, and even my beauty.
Freire goes on to say:
“The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the world.”
And with those words I’m lifted up to an altitude perspective where my vision encompasses all the intersecting threads of choices, fears and shame extending through and entwining with life after life after life the world over, institution after institution after institution after…after every human and every human construct. These threads unite us all, a tangle surreal, though we were already united in our value, however ignorant of it.
The oppressed are everywhere. We are, until we can reach into the fathoms of our losses, our traumas, our generational afflictions, suspended in a slow motion suicide while careening through the timelines so thin, so quickly consumed by history. I think of my sisters and how we, each one, morphed into reactions against tremendous violation and horrifying oppression and how we then turned it on each other in the ways families can become cauldrons of reaction, of actions desperate and even depraved. It, if you look on the whole of it from up high there in the air, appears hopeless.
And yet. We have found ways to heal our wounds in love. And love, as a muscled, visionary, relentless, courageous, undaunted force most creative, most transformative empowers us, each one, to seek and to find discernment and healing. Who am I really? Who am I when I’m no longer afraid of my power, my beauty, my voice? And why did I ever believe that which is beautiful is bad? Violation of a certain type creates such a mindset. And that mindset then determines to erect a “do not disturb” sign on a life languishing in hope for tribe, for unity. The irony bites. But love and unflinching determination to unearth all the corpses crying out within our being wrests us from the bitterest ironies. And eventually, as we work to lift some of the heaviest of weights, as we envision a work of restoration, much like the work of surgery and physical therapy, we gradually move ourselves into authenticity, into being who we are in love. But we cannot afford to overlook the wounds more deeply embedded into our souls.
And to say it is a work of “fear and trembling” is not to exaggerate. I’ve quaked, sobbed, shook and shouted my way through some memories so unreal and seemingly unending and the work continues. And I hear, “it is for freedom Christ set us free…” and “I am come that you might know my Father…” and a passage speaking of the “love of Christ” surpassing understanding and I find myself embracing a work of salvation wrought first by one who walked this earth, one human and holy, just as we all are in love, just as we all are when we face fear, shame, and the death wrought by trauma and the ravages of alienation. And this is the Jesus I always knew though he had morphed into the oppressor by way of those internalizations only trauma etches on the earth of our being. People of every color and creed have experienced Jesus as the oppressor ‘though his life shouted freedom and love, his words whispered of union and truth. And he was presented to me via the minds and hands of those who’d brutalized my soul, eventually brutalizing my sense of the flesh and blood, bone and hum of Jesus’ most beautiful self, of his wholly being human and Divine.
As are we all…whether we embrace religion or embrace the truths present within those human constructs, constructs inspired by Divine awareness. On this side of a growing awareness of a deeper walk with the Divine all I can say at this point is this: Do not call me Christian. Do not speak to me of sin. Speak to me, instead, of the love and the relationship, the union within, the dominion of freedom and Divinity found in the deepest wells of our being, that deep calling unto deep, making us whole as we face the work of becoming who we truly are…in love and beauty. If all some of us ever desire to realize in our lives is a vision of Christ as symbol and his life as guide, if we can take that and apply it in love, facing the shame that binds us, we will find that we are at one and the same time, both human and Divine. Many people within every religion, and even within agnosticism, do the work of salvation within their souls via a process so closely resembling the Christ process we really cannot afford to lay claim to the one true path, can we? We are, ultimately, each one of us a part of the One in love and we carve our paths from the soil of our experiences, hopefully finding that unity Christ so deeply longed for us all to experience whether we embrace him or not.
On with it…
In the woods somewhere
sweet swaying songs bear witness
to wounds deep, the worst sort
of gutting, how large the teeth,
and how far I’d seeped and seeped
and seeped completely down in seed
and in a gone-ing, a yawning crypt
held and holding eruptions,
creations’ secret reddest colors
for deeply hewn stutters fluttering
across a canvas as yet unknown
‘til my heart knew
and out I flew into one,
and one and one, (yet still One)
and yet still not knowing the known
and the hiding
from a creature lunging,
a bite’s longest reach
still bleeding,
but an ancient design called,
a bridge eternal healing,
deepest love promising,
then subsiding
‘til the singing resurrection,
a transformation from tomb
to tower to long desperate hours
within hours and hours blending
miracles wending, sending
every inch of me calling,
falling up and all over every spec,
dot, bindu, wreck not wrecking
as the beckoning out
of richest colors wrought whole
and healing a song
to raise the dead,
to know the unknowing
into love flowing
rivers, a heaven on earth begging…
Wonder, dear, wander here
where will and mystery meld
a history awaiting your discovery.
Beckon transformation’s song,
fiery orange paired
with faerie floral,
and your soul will know,
grow the you held by
your tenderest self,
the one back in time still
holding sway with music,
twirling grace and heart open
to a Creator your path
eventually stripped away.
Backtrack, backtrack, backtrack
and take your hand there in mid-air
as hope retakes your truth,
the deepest knowing of love
bestowing life to all and healing
to those who weep the call.
I wrote the quote below here in 2009 in response to a quote from Alan Watts’ book, Nature, Man and Woman:
“Lose your mind, stop your go, find a place central within and unfold. It’s not bliss-ninny ohmmful denial of life’s demands or all those great plans. It’s a presence-centered way of being, always-the-lover-on-the-verge, but mentally sharp in response to life’s provocation, always deeply looking. Not so much the frenzied, grab-it-all-fast and figure and finagle and fret, but respond from the soil of your life’s lessons. Define what matters here and now and cultivate the awareness of how alive and beautiful is that one glimpse of sky you reach. And watch, look, breathe it all in as you realize that the craving quest finds it all within.
Then from there, from that fullness the going, grabbing, exploring times hum with one who is always right here now, drinking deeply in love’s peace.
Is this where we end the addictive processes, in the feast of here, now, opening heart in love not because we’ll get a prize but because being is the prize?
Maybe…”
16 years later I may have some things to say about the above quote from this blog.
Lose your mind, indeed. The past month and a half qualifies me for having lost my mind a wee bit after retrieving some repressed memories from my childhood. Those memories stopped my go and forced me to find a place central within where I might unfold. And unfold I did, perhaps a bit much.
Writing, pointillism, kicking against some restrictions and bantering with the allegedly unhinged bits within myself, I found bits of Jezness I’d long lost in the tides of motherhood. While it wasn’t bliss-ninny ohmmful denial of life’s demands, I certainly withdrew from those same demands and placed all my attention on processing those memories and all they implied, all they revealed about my present, not merely my past. The work continues, of course.
But I found myself responding from the soil of many life lessons and what I found is this: love chases you everywhere you go and sometimes especially where life insists you land whether you want to land there or not. The only way “the craving quest finds it all within” is through the presence of love within and the awareness of love beyond self, a resonance imparting strength, a roadmap to the place within where we may truly drink deeply in love’s peace.
So, when addictive processes have ceased clamoring, and they have on many fronts in my life, and when I open my heart in love no matter where the memory flotsam hurls me, the prize continues to be in the being itself. The sweetness of that treasure rests, too, in recognizing nothing, no memories’ hurl, no devastating revelations from those same memories and no resulting crash, can separate me (or you) from love.
The trickiest bit rests there in knowing that love chases us constantly. Do you know love is chasing you everyday? I sure hope so. I’ve found that the only way to know it is to believe or even just accept it to be true and then to look for the signs. Love inevitably turns up unannounced in the damnedest of places and sometimes, if you’re lucky, in the most healing ways possible.
Do you hear the birdsong outside, a flash of fawn beauty on the edge of woods? Hmmm…maybe love?
Definitely…
A rhythm hums and jives
beneath the fear,
the rage, the tears, desires,
grief, multiple stress fires,
under all the dross a drumbeat
defies loss, gains,
and suggestions of inadequacy.
But first: feel, wail, stomp,
tell the story yet another time,
grind your teeth, your hips,
your angst and every fucking fit.
Don’t stop there, let your face display
the rage, the sorrow,
the joy, the lip-curling bliss
and the sweetest ecstasies.
Let it all roll through,
tips of toes to top of head
and everything, everywhere
in-between… roll up, roll down
a spine afire, not finished
with living, not done giving, filling,
jumping, gyrating this being human.
Don’t let disaster freeze your body
for fear of losing sight
of the decimated, losing the fight
for a kinder humanity ’cause grief and rage
clamor loudest.
Run to the pleasure,
the places sweet and tender,
and howl ‘til animal you births
a truer you, resilient, feet moving,
hips swaying, shimmying flow,
plotting overthrows of fear, greed,
and oppression by a love refusing defeat
‘Cause your feet, yes, yours,
mine, theirs, crave the sweetest trance
dance delighting, satisfying, magnifying,
electrifying every fiber of our being one,
every last one of us…
“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future?” Herman Hesse
We cannot see. Anthony Doerr’s six potent words float up to the surface when pondering expression here. What do you say on a blog/website with an activity level of almost nil these days? Where to begin and who will even read/listen?
2023 consisted of a number of challenges, not the least of which was the work on my Etsy shop. Besides that, being present for landmark, wonderful moments with my children while mourning the loss of one of our tribe, mentioned earlier in 2023, blurs behind me. Everything feels out of focus.
So much muddied over, trampled in the dust of racism, ethnic annihilation and corruption. Is there light to be seen? Whatever meaning some may have taken from the book/movie, All the Light We Cannot See, I can point to human resilience as an echo in the back of my mind. It lingers. And yet all the light we can see feels eclipsed by genocide and by the attack on 10/7/23 that triggered a landslide of public outcry. All over the world. First the protest and anguish of the initial carnage, and then the inevitable spotlight on Gaza, on Palestinians. How could we not see what we’ve known unfolds for Gazans decade after decade? And then the explosion of gaslighting. It turns out some folks willfully refuse the complexity possible in people’s perceptions of events. I can condemn the slaughter of 10/7 while simultaneously protesting the ongoing slaughter of innocent civilians while holding my breath for the release of hostages on both sides. Most especially, yes, I’m going there, those hostages held by Israel long before 10/7. There is no innocence in Israel’s history as far as I can see. None in the history here in the United States. Perhaps none anywhere.
I had quit yelling about Palestine somewhere between the end of Obama’s presidency and the onslaught of tsunamic shifts in my personal world. It wasn’t a lack of concern, but all my passion focused on struggles for one of my children’s well-being, and at times it felt, their very life. A pandemic tosses around in the mix of memories, isolation, fears. The 2nd Pfizer jab laid me flat for 18 months and here I emerge into a world I barely recognize.
The madness roiling across the global landscape dares me to cherish what I can see, what I experience as sanity and coherence. Meaning. My daughter is expecting her first child…new life gestating, kicking around in the womb of a beautiful person. I can’t type those words without tears, our wonderful good fortune both beautiful and a direct contrast to so much loss, and all while highlighting how precious it all is. The whole world should fare as well as my children and my children’s children. Everyone deserves peace, autonomy, wellness, shelter, freedom from the greed and unchecked power of the corrupt. But not everyone finds such. I can hold these truths simultaneously. But they feel especially heavy today.
Meaning morphs itself, gestating vision, birthing mission. What am I about now? Love is still the only point, isn’t it? It is, but why can’t love feed the hungry, end wars. Perhaps the question is, why do we allow greed and corruption to blockade the works of love, humanitarian relief? Why are all the wrong people holding all the power and what in love’s name can we do about it?
Maybe all we can do consists of the stuff we can’t yet see. I look at my youngest’s earrings adorning both ears. They’re gorgeous understated simplicity. Gold. I wore them in my 20s, before the life and light of one Evan. Suicidal ideation held a lot of sway back then for me. So many wounds to heal and denial to shed and Jesus dogged my every footfall, stalking my sanity. I had no clue what my future held and how much meaning it would infuse into my life and how much darkness it would dispel even as far back into my history as my 20s. My nonbinary youngest who graced our world the same week of 9/11 stands a beautiful 6 feet 3 inches above all I see. I look at those earrings these days and, call me crazy, but it feels like redemption to know they went from a fundie’s failing moments to the ears of a person whose childhood looked nothing like mine. Not that they didn’t struggle (!). But…their life, their siblings’ lives, the life gestating…light. They were there back when I wanted to die. They weren’t physically there, but they. were. there. The light I had yet to see.
I’m finding my mission to be one of reclaiming faith. Faith, not in a religion’s deity, but in how love can shape a life and how persistence and commitment carry that meaning, love meaning, forward into new eras. It’s not that I lost my faith as much as my life changed so dramatically, I’ve been disoriented, shocked, groping about in, yes, darkness, trying to find what remains. Love remains though it doesn’t always look or feel like it. Everything about being/doing/gestating love was immediate and real when my kids all lived under my roof, relying on me as mama. And while I worked hard to not let that be my only outlet and focus, it held so much of me. When the nest empties, everything feels foreign. Who is this person now? Toss in some apocalyptic goings on, challenging times and it’s easy to feel lost. So many struggles are boiling over all over the world. Masks ripped off some powerful faces, revealing gross darkness. A nation’s decline, a country’s struggles, our standing in the world literally affects us, each one. And ours isn’t the only nation wobbling, is it? I would not have predicted one of the most despairing situations I would contend with in my 50s would be the state of our nation and what we’re supporting with our tax dollars. But here I am and here we are stumbling around, grasping at what feels like endless darkness.
Democracy is literally hanging in the balance here in the U.S. and Biden’s total silence on the value of Gazan life nuked my respect for his accomplishments. I may have to vote for him regardless. I would rather stand in front of him and scream at him, literally scream. How could you abandon all that matters when you’re the president following on the heels of Trump and all his hellions? How could you be such a grotesque caricature of integrity at this point in the game? How could you be so obvious in your racism? How can you live with these war crimes? WHERE IS YOUR LIGHT?
Just to persist requires a faith not easily held these days. Gazans prove the fact that to exist, just to exist, is a rebellion of love itself in the face of so much devastation, corruption and betrayal. Just as a people whose lives hung by a thread, crammed into railcars heading for the deepest darkness, were breathing all our value with each breath, a revolt against the coming loss, much hangs in the balance now. We owe it to them to stop the madness growing more dark each day in the Middle East. The only way most of us can do that is to keep screaming, keep protesting, keep calling it what it is.
We owe it to the lives to come and to the light they’ll be.
How do I convey 6 months of epic challenge on many fronts, what has been going on?
Deep breaths, self-love and a lot of room for grieving.
Tense, gaining more awareness of the person I’m becoming.
Settled into the truth that my life belongs to me (as a former fundie, this is crucial).
But overall, I find myself defining this year as exactly that: definitive.
Someone absolutely, poignantly and beautifully precious to me and to my immediate family died suddenly.
She lived on borrowed time, but nothing prepares you. I’ve been unable to write any kind of memorial or much of anything at all. Instead I’ve either actively allowed the grief or ballistically refused any emotions associated with the grief. It turns out there’s only so much active and outward grieving a body can take within a certain timeframe.
So I’m finding the year punctuated by a few pauses. Particularly after the loss, pause/crash prevailed even if it looked like I was functioning. And when I’m not paused, I live in a way that feels like a tribute not only to the preciousness of my own life, but especially to all that Sarah couldn’t participate in for long, if at all. Just typing that little bit conjures tears. But I am seldom allowing much of their spill. It’s more about one step, then the next.
And along the way, the many newsworthy goings on hammer away at peace if you allow it. Need I state the obvious about our nation and the world? No. We all get it. But today, most of us awakened to the ongoing progress of holding the former president accountable. Fingers crossed for an actual measure of accountability and justice.
Besides all of that, I’m working even harder on what I think about and how I think while remaining aware of the energy I’m brewing. The aim is to cultivate everything that imparts creativity within myself and my world here. And I find the work of cultivation mostly to be about love and acceptance. Love informing the tasks at hand as I create and work to manifest a measure of financial abundance. “Manifest” is only used in that I acknowledge my attitudes and beliefs can either serve me or sabotage me. I acknowledge there have been times when it seemed like the universe brought me what I focused on receiving. There’s a bit of that sort of manifestation awareness at work, too. But the tricky, potentially upsetting bit rattles around reminding me that our main source of income is gone for now, daring me to indulge in fear, desperation.
Mostly the path has been massively stressful unless I insist my thoughts and actions along lines of resilience, faith and strength. And so, that is where I reside as much as possible. This insistence encompasses the ongoing work towards now keeping and improving my baseline of activity and rest. As a person with MECFS, the baseline can be lost and never retrieved depending on the circumstances. So far, retrieval has always eventually occurred for me. I’ve been very fortunate. Once a baseline is established, it’s wisest to maintain it for a period of 3 to 6 months (or longer should the MECFS experience be especially risk saturated). Beyond that, the path unfolds with gradually adding on new activities and then following those additions with maintenance months or years. It’s a tedious work wherein you seek to hold to a faith in your body’s ability to recover while recognizing MECFS can put you in the spin cycle out of nowhere. Maintaining a non-traumatized relationship to your health both challenges and galls simultaneously. So, insisting thoughts of resilience, faith and strength, saturating myself in love and patience bolsters and affirms as I work and play towards hopefully broader fields of living.
I would say that I can’t believe I’ve not posted since the holidays. But then I look at the trail behind me, and it makes plenty of sense. Throughout these challenges, the focus on Digital SoulSpeak continues, also experiencing pauses along the way. That I can even attempt an Etsy shop reveals how my world enables me, a person with MECFS, to focus on projects most folks with this illness can’t even remotely consider. I’m daily aware of the sheer luck and privilege at play in my life. My gratitude flourishes every time I recognize those bonuses as does a longing for everyone to experience the same. That’s not to say this has been easy. I’ve channeled the strength I’ve gained towards the shop and have had to rely on others for daily basics most take for granted. I would have visited my daughter when she noted how long it’s been since I’ve made the trip to see her, but now it’s just not possible. And though my visits have encompassed previously understood days of rest once I arrive at my destination, my energy needs to go towards creating and managing revenue streams. The risk is too high at this point.
So, it’s no surprise that the world of the ignored and underserved chronically ill remains uppermost in my thoughts. As I develop printables for Digital SoulSpeak, my aim is to shed light on that same world. In the meantime, my hope is to begin a website for the purposes of sharing and selling those products (and others) as I’m able. For now, my blog here should suffice as a platform for sharing the shop’s progress.
And that is it, in a rather large nutshell, the past 6 months.
Onward…
