Sequoia: healing from the roots up

Today, an angel walked by, dressed as an elderly lady in a maroon beret. She smiled right into my dramatic spat with my lover in the park and said, "Have you had breakfast yet? It's a beautiful day." And I hid my face and wept. Even when I am in pain, and my world is falling apart, these things hold true. Have your breakfast. It is a beautiful day. I am here to be soft.  To be crushed, and like mossy sponge, spring back to life. But stronger, more complex, more resilient each time. My strength is that I am resilient. I always come back. It is this way for the soft ones in the world. Some buckle under the eternal pressure. Some rise again. I rise again, over and over. In my own way. My rising belongs to me. Every hard thing that my softness comes into contact with becomes softer, though I may get bruised in the process. This is why flowers and mosses enthral me. Each expression of life in this great pulsating tapestry has something unique to say....

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul. -Rebecca West The quality of light coming in through my window is dark and dank, cheap and easy. It reflects night to me. I can see my face in it. It is viscous. I see it. I remember the way he touched my cheek. The deep light in his eyes as he looked directly through my paper skin, into my soul, waiting to be excavated. Grief lasts for many long years. It ebbs and flows like the ocean. Climbs heights and scales depths like the mountains underneath the surface of the water. Grief is not only sad. It is every descriptive word, of every variety and implication. It lives here permanently. It is a way of life. But still, sparkling heights are available. Even within this slow song-dance of grief (which everyone defines and lives differently.) The whole world is available to an open soul. Diamond caves are tucked into the murky, crowded cities of seaweed un...

You are wise to let it be messy. I bless the mess you make for the sake of your freedom. Our mess is sacred. Cleanliness is too neat, it is not free enough. My mess is down and dirty, It is ripe, rife, and creative, it is ALIVE. It is like a river, flowing mighty. Your clean neat perfect is like a dry mud hole. Mud is better when there is a clean river flowing freely over it, and through it, making clouds, making a dance. And we find our sisters there, In the mud, in the cloud, shouting and banging, in life alive, life untamed. Sister, sister in the mud, I bless you. I do not want to be perfect, I want to be free. I want to reveal my freedom layer by layer. Not neat and tidy, but loud and flamboyant. It is time for this. The world needs us to be messy now. Now. Now. Now. Hallelujah for the mess, for the joy dance. ...

Pray in sweet ocean cycles. Create a thousand raw truths. Spring deep, Sing new. Come question a bone well. Find inner stream chant, She spirit, Whole night laugh. And wake To pure surrender of being.

We are unfurling ourselves across the universe.   It just takes shaking the banner out, over and over again.  When we shake out the banner together, worlds fly free. We need each other. When you speak up, you give me courage. When I shake the banner, I connect myself to you. When you rise, I rise. When I heal, you can see your way to healing. When you breathe, shout, laugh, dance, swear, weep, pray, fuck, face your darkness - I, too, am given permission to do these things. We are all woven together by love.  And we are shaking out the banner together.  We will get there. Don't lose heart.

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...