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: #SFstormsarenojoke
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.
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.
Leaning in to Me
The Dig.
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.
Move Over, Broken Way.
Suicide didn’t really take her. Depression & Anxiety did. Isolation and the pain of pleasurelessness did. The tragedy of lack of community was her sickle. It’s what happens when our joy is strangled; when our Truth is ripped out from our skin. We die. In many kinds of ways. With some, it happens slowly over the decades, while in others, it tears in quick like a snake, all at once in that crushing soul-blow kind of way.
It came in like that with her, a swift and sudden venom. Only the last 3 or 4 months of life did the Fog of Lies descend to the degree that they did, to maul her Truth apart. But that was enough. She fought her big beautiful heart out, to the death. But they won. They told her that true, cozy, artful and yummy Joy was out of her reach. That Tribe was the thing of ancient legend and fable, not to be believed in this day, at her age. And if you want to know how it is I fiercely carry on, it is that I’m on a mission to avenge my mother’s killers. I’m out to invest the rest of my life telling depression to go FUCK itself on behalf of all its cheated victims by way of catalyzing the potent power of play and laughter to free all beings on earth, birthrighted to their Truth – which is to say we are none more than bliss and bone. A wild love incarnate.
On my watch, society will no longer regard joy-inducing things as an afterthought luxury partitioned for our leisure time, but will recognize them as lifesaving medicine. Or I will die trying. As long as I’m breathing, this world will have to deal with me on my fluorescent soapbox, shouting with all my might in a unicorn onesie and clown nose on, that the silly is sacred, that exploring is our mind’s air, that sock-sliding across floors saves souls, dance breaks at work need be standard and secret handshakes a modus operandi, intimacy in community is healthcare, sisterhood & brotherhood are as crucial to wellness as water, cuddling is cellular regrowth, music is a salve, making art, any art, is our spirit’s devotion to its maker, hand-holding is as natural as blinking, comedians, healers, shamans and artists are on par with doctors, games are as necessary as taxes, lightheartedness is the new heart surgery, grounding practices and belly laughter and ample time outdoors with our bare feet caressing the earth should be written into our medical plans.
The Puritanical reign is as OVER as it was murderous. Let the stuffy, buttoned-up kin suffer in sweetless silence, but let my people go. F..R..E..E..D..O..M is having its heyday now, and hey hey brethren, can I tag you in? FUN is about to rightly displace the stupidity of boring convention and all that is heavy will step down from its false throne. I hereby declare my life as a coup to overthrow the status quo, which never did know what the hell it was ever doing for us in the first place. The era of the carrot-chasing, the buckled-down, the disconnected, disenchanted isolated is going DOWN, for it is no match for me. For the Love Warriors who make up my army. We are the loosey-goosey, UNbuckled clowns. The wild ones who haven’t forgotten the bliss in our blood. The ones willingly swept up by sweet whimsy, intoxicated by life’s constant enchantment, for we can still smell the magic, our senses not yet punched out of us.
To those who smirk and speak of love and laughter as a cheesy cliche, like too-cool-for-school girls, you better RUN from me. I will call you out on your cowardice. I will make a mockery of your oh-so-serious systems. Your straight-laced, poker-faced, undergraced, spirit-sucking systems. Make way, all you nose-to-the-grindstone, pleasureless zombies. You got some trouble coming your way and it’s about to rock your stiff, dumb joke of a paradigm. The soul-suppression you subscribe to took my mother but forgot she had a successor, and it messed with the WRONG om-ie. I’m ushering in a new day dawning, and it means business about FUN and play. It has to now; it’s come down to a matter of life and death.
If you’re not with me, and I know many who aren’t, you can go take a goddam hike. And I mean that quite literally. It could very well un-chisel and change your mind.
Do it in a tutu, get a few long tree hugs in there, and it just might save your soul…
The Dig
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 the source yields is ever-changing, ever-springing forth newness, yours to tweak, till & harvest, exhume, or weed 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, Earthbeings.
On the Habit of Using Everything
When the wrecking ball slams in, when the bottom drops out, you have the right to suffer in its void. And it would be expected, and okay’d.
You also have the option to become a builder.
I recommend a good dose of stillness, letting the debris settle, then strap on your Timberlands and get out on the construction site. Rebuild from alignment with your Truth over being done wrong. Your future Self is always talking to you, pulling for you, whispering “It all turned out frigging awesome, just keep going!”
But resentment clogs our spirit’s hearing. Open yourself to all that is, and you’ll see that all that is, is the building blocks to bliss. All that happens can be used to architect your greatest life.
It’s all for you. Just keep building.
The Possible, and Perhaps Forgotten, Magic in our Mouths
It’s important to get that in a very real and marked way, one conversation really can spark new worlds, open new possibilities, change a life – the nature of it, the context, the shape of its future and trajectory of its path. I recall a countless sum of these flavorful kinds of conversations, both one on one and in a community or group setting alike, that as I look back and scan the outflow that came of that dialogue, I’m connected to the shifts and course changes that would have never ensued otherwise. A whole other world sprouted out of a moment in time spent sharing words that mattered. A new future emerges. Just like that. It was this breed of conversation that catapulted me to California, 3000 miles from all that was familiar and safe, driving west to manifest destiny. Somewhere in a parallel reality, the shape of my life is entirely unrecognizable, were I able to peep a glimpse. And where it split off was in a conversation. Fierce words that pierced my fear and awoke a slumbering Self. Yet this was a cooperative and participatory act, for words that make a difference only do so in those willing for a difference to be made, those willing to put themselves at stake, and gamble familiarity (*beware this league of communication – there is often a shore to leave; but oh those glimmering horizons towards which they may cast you).
And so, my brilliant bevy of mattering word utterers…engage. Pivot the chronic pull to figure it all out in the confines and isolated crevices of your mind. Check in to life and with others, fully, out here, where life is happening, and have important conversations. Your engagement with the world, and the folks with whom you share it, brings honor to life and all it has to say; lends a wide open platform to unfurl its secrets. Hold them up to your heart and hear the soft taps of truth and tale. Offer others the gracious space of your sacred listening on which to unfold their own found magic. Invite dialogue that digs. Ask questions that raise eyebrows and tickle brains. Dare to be intimate. Be willing to get messy.
Request coaching and contribution and support from the lush and endless resources that abound in your life (Google’s got nuthin’ over personal exchange). Place your know-all up on a mantle, let it rest for just a while (don’t worry, you can have it back), and allow for naivete to be an asset now. Tap in to the lives of others and fold their findings into your cache (this could potentionally be one of your highest yielding life hacks). Nothing lights people up like contributing what they know and sharing life experience; let them be that gift. Voice your wants and challenges and make bold requests for what you need. Put the whispers of your heart on loud speaker. Then listen keenly. Plug in. Seek, explore, play, co-create through language. Generate possibilities into being starting with the word; this really can be linguistic alchemy. Try things on. Lean in to life, and try out someone else’s model of living and working, for a day, an hour. See what happens. Experiment with what is said, even when it’s totally new and uncomfortable (perhaps especially when).
In these exchanges, allow the seemingly fixed parts of you to re-order and contort for the sake of expansion. Put your identity at risk. The uncomfortability will soon be assuaged by a newfangled, thrilling existence, where you may just find the magic sauce, the sweet spot. We weren’t meant to level off or for rigor mortis living. I think we were always meant for the becoming; any moment of interaction is a next possible abracadabra.
Accept that even a mere sentence has the power to go THUD in a room and rearrange the formula of the future. Be open to discoveries in a single interaction that can alter everything on a dime, because anything can – if we’re open.
And above all, it begins with the willingness to have any of it profoundly make a difference.
Happy conversing. Everything you want really is here for you.
I Saved a Seat for You, Next To Me.
Your pain doesn’t wait for an appropriate time to diffuse or digest itself. It can make a surprise showing with the simple cue of a simple word at any time it decides to swoop right in and scramble an otherwise chipper time; like a hypnotist says “chicken” and **booiiinng** you’re gone, tuned out. Or you start walking on all fours and barking at people’s ankles. It will make your unwitting body a marionette to its ventriloquist jaunts, and as far as I can tell, fighting back just makes it more awkward.
If you are no stranger to pain-trauma, my hurt welcomes your hurt to lay here flat with me and hold my hand as our unmetabolized, murky waves of grief and tragedy pass through our bodies and deliver us back to our distilled centers of the purest love and light.
I don’t think you weirdo or crazy or too much for the astounding shapes your hurt takes, for how it pours out of your body, even in its most maladjusted forms, during the times it’s a most unwelcomed guest, the most obnoxious in the room. I know what’s happening there and I know you’re as much a witness to it as anyone else standing aside.
What the fuck ever can we do to wield such an uproarious, hot force? I think maybe nothing – but bend into it. Surrender, and do it together; let’s tribe up through the erratic hurts of living and deep gashes of loss, and let’s kiss our cuts endearingly and piggyback each other onward and let’s feed one other thick soup and giddy movies, cozy nose nuzzles and spicy, hot tea with cinnamon sticks for that extra touch (sometimes we need so much of extra touch).
Let’s share our pain at a common table family style, when it all gets too wound-y to stomach alone in the vast wide gray. All of that downhome, good healing really does begin with “We”….I really don’t know how else to be.
The Blyss Catalyst 