Bon Voyage, Anthony

I don’t have words for the sadness I feel to have lost such a legend and hero. On a personal level, it hits me hard because Anthony Bourdain is one of the biggest influences and inspirations in my hunger to soak up the world and its stunning array of cultures, to travel far & wide & never stop exploring. He has been a personal hero of mine since I was a teenager, then just a traveling tadpole w/only a few trips under my baby belt. He whetted my appetite for bigger & grander (and longer) exploits in my future. Watching him engage with the world on his escapades made me starry-eyed. He made the great big world of grand adventure seem so doable (and MUST-doable) to me, and he made strange lands with unpronounceable names seem so approachable and magnetic. Those who really know me, know that I don’t see travel & exploring & soaking up the world’s cultures as mere luxuries. They’re therapy. Medicine. A lifestyle that has the power to heal – us & the world. They’re the best kind of education one could have on earth. And I relate to travel the way some would relate to their religion. For its values, the culture of travelers, its traditions, its lessons, its sacredness, its promises, its transformation, its way of connecting you to the Truth of yourself and of life, for all this, I have always claimed travel to be a sort of religion for me. And Anthony was a guru in that religion. Someone I look to with not only great reverence, but great relief and gratitude that he was on my team, forwarding an important mission that I so desperately want the whole world to be a part of. If only everyone were to travel more and engage with other cultures more often, I truly believe this world would be a much more peaceful, loving, richer place for everyone….So thank you, Anthony, with all of my traveling soul, for helping bring that possibility to life. For helping to restore the world one great adventure at a time. Your impact was colossal, your spirit magnanimous…Happy trails to you, on your next Big Adventure… 😥🙏🏽🌎💔✈️🍱🌮🥠🥡

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Separation is a prison

Separation is a prison.

I once rehearsed for a play using a Barbara Streisand song. Strange for a girl of 13 years old, but it called to me. The song was People from the film Funny Girl.

“People who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” it went. “We’re children, needing other children. And yet letting a grown-up pride hide all the need inside.”

I’ll never be too proud or too grown-up or too independent to say I need people. Community. Connection. I need support and I need kinship.

Can I survive without that? You bet. But the experience is that of solitary confinement. I can survive in a prison. I can pretty much survive anything. But I’m not interested in surviving. I’m interested in self-actualization, for all of us. We can’t be the fullest expression of ourselves without others, without relationship, without connection.

It seems really “cool” to say you don’t need anyone. I get the sexy mystery of that whole “lone wolf” gig. But I think the coolest people are the ones who surrender to the interdependence innate to their humanity. Though it’s not an easy task trying to make it in life without support or connection (even though it can be done doesn’t mean it should), for the official record, maybe we don’t need anyone to survive. But we sure as hell do to thrive. And for those of us who can own that, well, we are the lucky ones.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with you all, in our co-thriving,
Lyss

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It’s the Clutching That’s Hard

Maybe things feel hard because i’m clinging so tightly to the past and to the way i think they ought to be. When the winds try to blow you loose, of course it hurts if you’re clutching to a tree fighting against them. Losing the past surely brings some pain, but it’s nothing compared to the pain of grasping on to what is no longer for you.

I think underneath all this pain and struggle i’m feeling right now is ultimately the sense of losing myself – the self i’ve always recognized as me. The Alyssa I was with a mother on the planet, the loss of which reshapes the whole configuration of one’s world entirely. Mom’s not coming back, and I’m still busy resisting that, therefore i’m also resisting that the Alyssa I knew back when i had her is no longer the me that i am or am emerging into. I’m something i do not yet know. And that scares the LIVING BEJEEZUS out of me. I have never known me without her. I have never not known the security and familiarity of the me that I am through her eyes. I’d venture to say she was the most influential, impactful factor to my life, and thus the life i had was largely shaped by her being in it. My whole world had her stamp. The struggle i’m now in feels like one of survival, and the threat of it has been showing up all over the place – in the realm of money, living situations, work, relationships, well-being, etc.….but ultimately, I think it’s about surviving her departure with the Alyssa I know still intact. It’s a losing game, because that just isn’t possible. I’m not that girl anymore. I want to be, but i simply can’t be. I can keep parts of her, but by definition, i am not the Alyssa i was and have known for so many decades. So the overriding essence that’s there all over my life is this feeling of being no one for some time. This in-between being that isn’t this or that. Not anything definable or knowable. Not even to my own self. Just one big edgeless becoming. Into what I don’t know, because even the plans and visions and intentions I once had for myself – well they’re all part of the me that I was. With these past few topsy-turvy, turned-inside-out-y years, all has been detonated. Everything must be reconfigured. Except there is no “re-“ to any of this. I am not rebuilding because that would call for reconstruction from the old parts to build again some sense of order that I once knew. I have more new parts to me now than old and I’ve no idea yet how they work, what makes them go, what new things they can do.

Some of you may have read a passage somewhere out there in the personal growth space about a biology teacher named Mr. Bartlett. Here it is (by unknown):

I remember Mr. Bartlett. In biology class he discusses the transformation of caterpillar into butterfly —

”What is the process that goes on inside a cocoon?” he asks. “Has anyone ever seen a picture of the insect at the halfway point between caterpillar and butterfly? Does anyone know what it looks like?” No one has or does. The next week, Mr. Bartlett finds a cocoon in the woods and brings it into the classroom. We crowd around as he takes a blade and neatly slices it in two.

The cocoon looks empty.

“There is nothing in there,” says one of the kids.

“Oh, it’s in there,” says Mr Bartlett. “It just doesn’t have a shape right now. The living organic material is spun right into the cocoon. Caterpillar is gone, butterfly is yet to come.” We stare in wonder.

“Real Transformation” says Mr Bartlett, “means giving up one form before you have another. It requires the willingness to be nothing for a while….”

If you’re reading this and you’re one of the ones on my team who loves me, thank you for the space you’ve given me to be who I am, what I am becoming, and to be nothing in the in-between. And thank you for the grace you give me to be scared but listening me as strong through it all.

Have you also been clinging to a you or a past or some iteration of something that no longer is, and can you too feel the constraint of that gravity? Can you give yourself the permission to let go and be in the wilderness of the unknown for a while, in order to become something beyond your current definitions and known edges? Can you see the adventure in that, and are you willing to feel the pain and the fears of Real Transformation, trusting it will all be okay? Way way better than okay, for life rewards bravery. Can you keep in this sacred knowing? I am holding space for you.

Cheers to life, in all its configurations

OJ / Lyss

Recovering Shameaholic

Just as any addiction, we can put ourselves in recovery from shame. Shame too has its way of weaving itself through your life, saturating your world. It too has its way with your body, soul, and mind, until you feel pulverized and worn. And so we can, if we choose, come to a place, empty and bedraggled from the war we’ve been through, dragging our done-for, weary bones to the doorstep of healing, and enter our recovery. And through that door is a commitment. Is a declaration. To rehab all the parts of ourselves that habitually go to shame as some kind penance. Or just plain awful habit (one we didn’t generate but copied). It ought to be a strict and consistent practice in the beginning, a daily one. A moment by moment one. Consciously choosing to give up the pull towards that ugly vice we’re weaning ourselves off of. Listening to the soft voice we can’t often hear over the loudness of shame, the one that so clearly tells us what it needs but we so often snuff out and deprive. Practice — until you’ve rebuilt yourself anew, liberated from the grips of shame and replacing it with self-love. So much self-love. Honor and compassion and grace, too. They’re all there. Because self-love is a gift that never stops yielding more of the juicy good stuff. That’s the kind of high I’m after. What say you? 🙏🏽

Farma Over Pharma

4/20/17

Having to hide that you use reefer in any form but not that you drink alcohol or buy pharmaceuticals is the stupidest form of editing oneself in my opinion, because it’s like feeling free to say what’s true insofar as it is condoned by what society & the Feds dictate is okay, never mind that that archaic determination of what’s “okay” is completely based on manipulative, agenda-driven lies and pernicious propaganda propagated for 100 years, with not an iota of truth or the public’s interest in mind. For those of us not at risk of detrimentally impacting our livelihood or other integral areas of life (again, UGH at that sad fact), I say come clean that you’re green! Stand proud! Stop the normalization of the vilification of the natural, healing, non-addictive, panacea of the plant medicines that this earth yields us in plenty. There’s nothing wrong with you if you choose farma over pharma, green over machine. You can still be a highly productive, successful, upstanding member of society making moves and living in accordance with integrity, and be pro-cannabis. It just makes you a happier, less stressed member 😉 (not to mention more connected & conscious)…..Happy 420, all! #legalizenationwide

It Could Be Worse

Some days it feels like all of my energy and all of my time and all of the space of me is spent arduously fending off the razor-edged fangs of cynicism. Resignation’s piercing claws. It isn’t me, but some contagious condition, and still it’s my battle to bare at times. My venom to alchemize.
….but hey, at least I didn’t have a day like this guy’s: #SFstormsarenojokescreen shot 2019-01-13 at 6.23.38 pm

Standing Like a Rock

Standing Rock is about more than a trending news narrative. It’s about honor and standing one’s ground, even to the death, even through hundreds of years. Integrity can be an ancestral legacy.
A bit o’ background from alotta research before getting to my final thud of a point [*this is just a brief overview of one small piece of the centuries-long conflict put in my own summation, and i skip an exhaustive list of gory, shocking events & details of even this one part]:
Millions of acres of land throughout North & South Dakota have always belonged to the 9 tribes of Sioux Nation (Standing Rock is home to one) — what was called the Great Sioux Reservation, and after hundreds of years of fighting to keep and safeguard their sacred, lush land rife with resources, and consistently being *under siege (*killed, raped, pillaged, vandalized, and terrorized in the doing), it was officially sanctioned on record as lawfully theirs by a treaty between the US Gov’t and Sioux council back in 1868. [In fact, there were many treaties through the centuries, but that’s for a more in-depth account]. Despite this law-binding agreement that the United States gov’t itself co-wrote & signed, our federal government has both directly and indirectly usurped the law and confiscated their territory chunk by chunk over the past 170+ years: directly by seizing the land (knowingly breaking the statutes of the treaty and disregarding the unlawful unjustness of that, even advertising & auctioning land sales while the Sioux occupied the very land being sold), and indirectly by backing corporate invasion and refusing to step in and uphold law when rights are being infringed upon.
In 1980 (after decades of trying to file a suit), the Tribal Council was finally heard by the Supreme Court, who swiftly stepped in like, “Whoa whoa whoa, this shit ain’t right” (I’m, um, paraphrasing here; but they did in fact state this verbatim: “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.” damn. calling some thieving fed bullshit OUT.) The Court declared that the land had in fact been seized illegally, and it ruled that the territories were to be reclaimed in full by the Sioux, WITH payment AND interest for the time it’d been apprehended (*note: the original case records in full are open to be viewed online). The U.S. Gov’t reticently acquiesced and coughed up 102 million dollars to the Sioux….To which, the Sioux REFUSED, knowing the complicated and compounded implications of treating their beloved homeland like a financial transaction as if haggling over some commodity, and because accepting the money would legally terminate Sioux demands for the hopeful, eventual return of the Black Hills, the spiritual center for all the tribes which holds particular sacred value amongst all the land (as well, stolen from them and not returned in the 1868 treaty of Fort Laramie)….They don’t want the damned money. They want those holy Black Hills back under their protection.
Fast forward to now, that money has since been sitting in a protected trust still earmarked for them, compounding interest that’s accrued to 1.3 BILLION dollars today…..and the Sioux STILL won’t take it.
They stand their ground, literally, that what is sacred cannot be bought.
Fucking. Epic.
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Grieve First, Then Rise (also titled: how the GOP unwittingly became our accomplice)

This is the face of deep deep ache. My own. My ancestors. A lineage of those who died renouncing what may have just been reinstated tonight. This is the pained expression of a pulpy lump of faith lay slain. This searing river down this anguished face — these are their tears too. Dear God, [Half-] America. What have you done?
Simply this:
You broke– no, pulverized my heart. You ripped its stuffing out.
You deflated Love’s expanding dream. Tore into a hopeful innocence just nearly on the mend.
You made a mockery of those who’d shed their blood, starved their bodies, made an exodus from their homelands in hopes of securing even one of the rights you now put at risk.
You fed us the opiate of ignorance, in place of the soul-food to which a spreading bulk of us have grown accustomed. You lulled a large sum of us back to sleep, when we’d only just begun to awaken; tricked enough of us back into the trance of the monger that the lot of us got dragged too, fully conscious and clawing at the tarmac. Back to a place we worked SO. DAMNED. HARD. to evacuate.
You made every unconsented-to man right whomever laid their vile hands on us, the sacred women who raised you, nourished you, sent you off into the world hoping you’d live into the men we needed you to be for the world. You spit right in the face of the great Motherhead to whom you owe your very breath to.
You made every racist, misogynistic, bigoted, hate-laden remark permissible by a nation. A nation closely watched by the world, a world who must now be tisking its tongue at our regression and repugnance. It had such high hopes for us. It wanted to take us with it, into an innovation-sustained, brilliance-based future. You made us a facsimile of our own cliche that we’ve been hard at work dismantling in the eyes of the global community….{My Dear World, beloved sister-brother nations, I…don’t yet have the words…this for another day.}
You made it okay to esteem our country a locker room – the kind, no less, which would never yield a champion of any kind of order. You casualized communication, only the very foundation for this whole human paradigm, from which all else arises. (So yes, remarks are a big FUCKING deal. And NO, not all men talk like that. And more would stop if they were held accountable for how NOT okay this is and how damaging to their own society).
You resurrected every last bully from our haunted pasts, and peeled back the healing we’ve done to leave those fools back there.
You said we’ll put up walls but build no bridges. You said we’ll use alienation as our defense, contempt as our offense. You said let’s make America great again, but failed to inform that your version of great was sans honor and decency. Was replete with venom and violation.
You sent us back 50…100…500 years. Back to dark, deplorable ages where violence with body and speech isn’t an answer but the programmed go-to nonetheless.
You made every persecutor a proxy hero, every unevolved man of entitlement and privilege but no honor whomever took pleasure in humiliating those with lesser status, the status quo.
Half-America, you are not the motherland I know. Not the home in my heart that protects and nurtures me and gives space for my necessary voice. You have made nothing great again. And he will NEVER be MY president, not ever.
But, Divided America, you have also done something else, despite yourself. Against your own sordid agenda, you’ve incited an uprising of magnanimous proportions, a conscious awakening in response to this blow. The love revolution soon fires back at your behest, brighter and more blazing than you are prepared for, relinquish any doubt about that.
So thank you for your inadvertent partnership, for your part in shaking awake the required powers that’ve lain dormant too long. You sent a quake of devastation through half a betrayed nation…but now watch us surf that wave, dear, unwitting conspirators who have another thing coming. We may feel this hot slap now, but a face-slapping of the consciousness order reverbs much louder, and deeper into the future.
Those who side with Love will rise, fierce and beefed up with more resolve than ever before, and it will be because of you.
But first, I mourn. As all rising women do.
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The Dig.

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And at the bottom of our shame is, “I want to be good, to know I’m okay, to be safe to be me….because I want to be loved.”
And so our shame, like everything else, is born of love too. Just some iteration of it that got contorted along the way. Be like an archaeologist in your own life, and you will always find that the dig leads you back to love, the source of all your expressions. And the source of a current can never change – and your life is essentially an energy current. Only what springs from the well of the source is ever-changing, yours to tweak, grow, till, exhume, or chuck out.
You have all the tools. You get to build what you want with whatever fertile or sometimes rotted lot you’ve got. You are enough to unearth and heal any shame, any misdeed that’s perpetrated your innocence, and get yourself back to the seat of the source.
Love. You. Same source. Same thing.
Happy digging, lovebeings.