Happy Holidays…

At this rate, 2022 is coming to a close and I’ve managed only a few posts. ME/CFS sidelined my progress as I scrambled to re-establish a baseline that appears to be taking shape now. But this isn’t the first time that baseline has appeared to be showing itself. So I’m semi-encouraged, but mostly holding my breath. In the meantime, I’ve been gradually developing a shop on Etsy and how I’m going to tie everything together remains to be seen/known. But I’m proud to have persisted in the fits and starts available to me here and there along the path.

What is a baseline, you might wonder. For someone with ME/CFS, it’s the level of activity and alternating rest that can be relied on, for the most part, to not trigger worsening of already existing/perpetual symptoms, a crash or relapse. It is found by mostly resting. Rest, good nutrition, supplements and medications take all of your time and can persist for months or years until you find you can get away with something like prepping a meal once a week (not doing the dishes afterwards or putting leftovers in the fridge, but hey, progress). So, you do the thing you can get away with, the one thing and it’s added along with resting, nutrition, etc. What’s glorious? Finding you can shower once a week without severe backlash. But it’s important to maintain the one new thing for at least a month before adding any other new things. The tenacity required shames every doctor out there who presumes this illness is psychosomatic or a result of mental illness. It asks for a level of mental stamina and willpower most never have to discover. Not that I’m bragging? I’m just fed up with what I see now emerging for folks with Long Covid. The same b.s. with people in key positions concluding the problem is the patient, not the lack of knowledge about post-viral illness. So, baselines. I had a beauty of a baseline before my 2nd Pfizer jab. That was over a year and a half ago. I’ve avoided the boosters for obvious reasons and having come close to a baseline previously, I’m clinging tightly to the progress made at this point.

I’ve managed the gradual work towards the shop on Etsy over the past 12 months by eliminating outings, cutting down on basics like meal-prep, dishes, laundry, avoiding news when it’s especially stressful (if possible), curtailing lengthy conversations, literally insisting on no-communication days sometimes and other things folks just take for granted. Multi-tasking has mostly gone out the window. One thing. At a time. And I have been sure to take long stretches of rest without doing the one thing I can do. I say no to others more often than I ever knew I could before and I say yes more often to my needs and desires as I’m able.

Can I just say…so few realize how precious each breath, each habit, each thing taken in stride is. I see pictures of a hike I went on a few years back with my sister and I just grin and catch my breath. It’s almost like you might expect someone to react if they’re coming across the photo of the time they met their most beloved actor or writer or athlete. Hey, look, I did a thing called living that day. I paid heavily for it. It was worth every ounce of pain and backlash.

Life is incalculably valuable. And that is all I have to say given the winding down of this day and my need to conserve.

Here’s a link to my humble, but gradually growing, shop: Digital SoulSpeak

Happy Holidays!

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Cuppa Life…

When snow falls even just a wee bit, softness following
on the howling slams of wind and thunder slapping awake
a peaceful slumber, you sit quietly in the half light
sighing hours later, gulping in the stillness
as it falls outside the window of your reverie.

The words above reflect on the night before last when winds and thunder snarled my sleeping in a surreal rush of clamoring. The noise was akin to dreams and transformations, the kind that sweep you up out of nowhere in a whirlwind of change and awareness. Surreal. Magical. Frightening and exhilarating at the same time. The storm windows on my bedroom windows clanged loudly, evoking visions of trees uprooted, hurling themselves at the night.

So, awakening to snowfall, the gentle quiet of it all was a wonderful contrast and I felt deserved reflection.

Not that it’s about the new year, but I’ve resolved to more posting here in order to participate more in my power to create, however small. One of the challenges of disability, and particularly of the MECFS variety, is that of escaping the sense of feeling imprisoned, held captive by the power of the illness itself and this is especially true as it has real power to do that very thing, to imprison. And so, we veterans of such imprisonment get to learn the sort of freedom that defies chains and bars. It’s not a lesson I’d wish on most folks. But it is what life has dished out to some of us and my past attempts to pretend it might all go away have faded into an awareness that the only way out is through and that sort of pretending becomes a self rejection. I refuse such.

So, here’s to deeper acceptance and finding ways to own and participate in one’s power, bit by bit.

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Refuge

“This magnificent refuge is inside you.
Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway.
Be bold. Be humble.
Put away the incense and forget
the incantations they taught you.
Ask no permission from the authorities.
Close your eyes and follow your breath
to the still place that leads to the
invisible path that leads you home.”
St. Theresa of Avila

Photo by Jay Manti

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The Living Vow

“This is the living vow: to show up with increasing presence for the moment. To make an honest encounter with your longing at every turn. To listen to it, learning which way the energy of your life wants to go. Paradoxically, it is in our emptiness—another way of saying willingness—that we become full. It is in our being fully where we are that we are put in touch with our next becoming. This grows you. You begin to understand that your life belongs to more than yourself alone. It belongs to a momentum which is set in motion towards its destiny through longing.”

Excerpt from “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” by Toko-pa Turner

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Prayer #5 (for the self-proclaimed reformed womanizers)

May you know the value you trivialize by believing any form of womanizing is worthwhile.

May you know your worth without first shooting up intellectualism,
riding the high so high and icy cold.

May you come home to the earth of acceptance, not the mind palace constructed
against itself and in that coming home awaken the warmth of uncloaked knowing.

May you take a massive nose-dive into the divine feminine grace eschewed
by your grandiosity, and as your face hits the dirt there,
may you experience an actual fullness,
the presence of true welcome unadorned by any methodology or presentation.

Let all that you claim to be break open,
the husk falling away to reveal what you’ve refused.

May you recognize your need, your deep, deep need for love,
especially the love you disdain and declare fiction,
and when you find it, may you finally know what you’re gonna do with it.

May you take a great rolling leap into the truth beyond your carefully constructed dogma
as your face melts away, shining your visage,
a sun of authenticity feasts and open-hearted screams.

May your dance of control, your Georgie Porgie role reverse itself and succumb
to the surrender you chase, as the skirts all fall down around your face naked.

May you find there the map drawn by the lines of your perpetual retreat
posing pursuit and finally begin the treasure seek as one not master,
not switch, not submissive, but one, just one you.

May your knowing strip you of the sign you hide behind
and dart back and forth from as you desperately evade true connection.

May you turn to grasp that bowl of Peanuts at the bar of life
and find you were the one both setting up the kickoff and aborting it in turn,
over and over again, so sure the spurn was not within you.

And finally, may you learn that in spite of posing, gaming, playing and hopscotch skipping
‘round the block another umpteenth time, your true essence managed to shine,
making revolution alongside the confusion, the obviousness of the game,
breaking at least one heart in ways never broken before,
and leaving a wake of pieces to gather on the floor of a soul
trying now not to hope you know the breadth of the misstep your reformation made.

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Prayer #4 (in the aftermath of rape)

Let me not do more than slam, hammer, pound
and send all the contents smashing against the ground,
the wall, glasses, books, whatever in the vicinity of this holy rage.

Let me not grind my teeth endlessly or linger too long
in the fantasy of obliterating the one who trampled innocence.

Call the gatekeepers, please.

Call the standard bearers, too.

Rouse the warriors against the wave of scurrying human cowardice
that reaches rapidly to blank out, redact accountability
and stroke, stroke, stroke the enablers.

Let me not be so done with children posing adulthood
so fury-blind that I alienate them every last one
in the fallout of the brutalization of one actual child.

Open our eyes to the beasts we pursue in the hopes to subdue,
subsume and subjugate, feeding our own inner monsters
while we weep under the light of the moon
wondering why our children have been devoured.

Stop the generational wreckage smash and crash
rolling through the fast lane in the here and now.
For once, end the long game, the one where the children pay
and pay, and pay for the violations of the fathers.

Keep us all sane, keep us all open to being better people
so the ones who’ve paid a price not their own,
can know safety in our presence.
Make our lives, our days, our minds, our hearts
and our actions a refuge from delusion and insanity.

Waken the dead, the walking dead
who thrive more in pretending love
than the doing of care, of forethought, of protection.

Wash over the blistering wounds made,
the whispering haunt and the innocence fade.
Conjure from the cracks a tree more resilient,
refusing that perpetual derision as it rolls downhill,
mocking how precious the sighs and pulse
of our children, our heritage, our hope.

Conjure creation’s cure, a resounding war cry,
calling from the heart of mother and father divine a raging justice,
insisting growth, smashing lies and building newness in the after.

photo by j. ruth kelly, all rights reserved

 

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Power Over

“What posturing and performance share in common is a deep disconnect between the inspired heart and our gut instincts, between rising up and sensing ground where all life dissolves into the rich humus of earth. Make no mistake white bodies are capable of sensing deeply and can become conscious of the insidious ways that colonization is held within our flesh and blood. We may squirm and distract ourselves, but we have what it takes to dissolve these century-old impulses to cage, control and power over body. With awareness, we can begin to recognize our conditioning and through attention we can allow our primal impulses to grow a capacity to dissolve the distortions and claim life-supportive gestures and expressions.” Liz Koch, excerpted from the post on her website, Core Awareness, titled “White Bodies, Psoas, & Gesturing Power Over”

We colonized the land and the people of the land we now call the United States of America and we colonized our own bodies. Power over is the rabid beast created when we divorce ourselves from being soft, hairy animal human. We infused our religious beliefs with power over. We insisted on obedience like we insisted on this land, raping and violating the bodies of children in the name of discipline and good behavior and, for some, godliness. I can say that my daughter and two sons have birthed me because they broke my heart open and opened me up to my own tenderness and the validity of the wild human. I could not fathom how the sort of discipline inflicted on me, and on my sisters, in the name of Jesus was anything remotely connected to love and that realization occurred when a baby girl came out of my body. Everything changed. Who was this sacred creature? How could you thump her on the forehead for speaking her mind or challenging you at the dinner table? How? You must be divorced from your own body, colonized from head to toe to soul if you do this and you must be addicted to power over. Dethroning the inner tyrant anchored on the seat of the heart and placed there by fear, that is a work on which to commit a life. Enshrining love as a fully-muscled set of doings and thinkings and makings of solid evidence of love and value decolonizes the body, rids the mind of toxins long dormant. And the work never ends. There is no arrival. I don’t know what I’d do without people like James Baldwin who lives though he’s gone and Liz Koch who is here and now shining light on needful truths.

Here’s to freedom from power over and losing all the baggage that goes with it.

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Prayer #3 (for protesters)

Each step taken, every chant and cry,
every movement for justice,
every insistence on equal rights,
every standard and arm raised for safety,
for the end to brutality and racism at the hands of…

police, government, the system,

each one land home, right to the heart
of what brings true change, what sets aright
the system set in motion against humanity itself.

Revolutionize hope, radicalize grace.

Every effort met with heaven’s support,
earth’s nurturance and the flesh and blood strength
of all who embody truth and justice.

Each one held safely by love.

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