Sequoia: healing from the roots up

Turn cardinal red, whose cap flies away, no hat fitting. My head is too big, swelled with pride my existence waits for me. The night unfolds the sad part of the face, gently asking the lines to rest sadness is not holding those lines in place to make wrinkles, The darkness is kind I unpack the suitcase of my mind and lay out all my socks and underwear in neat rows beside my pillow.

This New Year I bought my first tarot deck: The Wild Unknown. I am a newbie to tarot, though not to living a life strongly guided by intuition. I eagerly began with a full year spread and turned up the devil card as the theme for my year. I also pulled death, the tower (falling apart) and several other ‘portentous’ cards to define my year. This got me to take an honest look at the role of the shadow in my life. What role does the shadow play in my life? For many years I have been acquainted with isolation, in different measures, as I sifted through my shadows and my experiences. I learned to unplug from the idea that isolation (solitude) is ‘bad’. To understand that it is necessary. And then, again, to understand that it must not be permanent. That friendship, partnership, and love are a vital part of living in the light. Darkness/shadow/solitude will be sprinkled throughout the course of my life, and this is not bad, it is necessary. Sometimes t...

Sometimes I go to speak…. And it’s like every organ in my body has shut down. The ones that help me to breathe, dilute, process. It’s like a clamp is on my throat. It’s like my brain has been wiped clear. Sometimes I go to speak, and everything I am so passionate about is crowding on the other side of a thin curtain , but I cannot push the curtain aside to share my bounty of knowledge . Sometimes I go to speak and someone has turned the power-off button on my body. All that glorious, lived, authentic knowledge that I have culled over a lifetime is sitting there in my powered-off body, with no way to be communicated to those around me. Sometimes I go to speak and someone has turned all the bright lights on. They are blinding me and I am stunned into silence. Sometimes I go to speak and my soul remembers how it was born into silencing. Every bright, beautiful, true thought that I formulated was crushed in the fabricated ether of conformity to strict dogma. ...

Stories live in our bodies Our stories live in our bodies, like animals within the confines of the forest. They are safe there, but they need to be expressed. Let your body live your story, leaking out rays of its light and dance to the life all around it. And when it is time, let you body be absorbed back into the ground, sowing its particular story into the earth to become one with all the other stories since the dawn of time. Our stories need to be shared. They are crying to be shared with others. Sometimes our bodies are in pain, holding on to some trauma, grief or anger, which is held; safe kept in the compliant, faithful body , until the time should be right for it to be released. Our wise bodies know when that time is. Let them live there; trust their bounty, their wisdom. That of your stories, and your body. Over time your body will shed the husks of the stories that are no longer yours to carry within you. And still after mo...

 The fertile doing-nothing I am here. The fertile doing-nothing has taken me into her bosom. Slowly, after many years, I have finally succumbed to her insistency.   She was never loud, but she was  pervasive. Always there – in my subconscious, in my nature, in the deep things that called me to be true to myself.  Everything that was different than she is stood out like a sore thumb, grating at my spirit, sometimes clawing, until I could no longer resist.  I could no longer resist her beauty, insistency, and raw truth. I am here. And the fertile doing-nothing has taken me over. I am her willing captive, and I am free. She allows me to break free from all the half-truths that society has tried to shove down my throat since I was born into this world. The half-truths that promise glory in exchange for pain, pressure and stress. The half worn truths that compelled me to try to fit in, to be like everyone else, and to conform to a life that sucked ...