New Life in Boulder

January 23, 2008 ~ New Life in Boulder

I see that my last blog was November 16. These last two months have been life-changing and, while there were impulses to write and I started several writings about what was happening, I didn’t complete any of those writings. I now see it would have been taking the cookies out of the oven half-baked. The words were not there because the experiences were still cooking and were not ready to be written. I continually notice the difference and sometimes dissonance between what the mind says and what actually is happening. My mind wanted to document what was happening, and the writing just wasn’t happening. Attending to the dissonance between what is and what the mind says is a powerful practice for me. I am devoted to what is, meeting what is, and yet, the mind can easily captivate my attention.

I returned to Boulder October 10th and spent the next month moving into temporary quarters with another woman for the winter. The day before I was to return to Boulder, I put forth an email to the Boulder community asking for a ‘cave’ for the winter, in which to write and recover from my travels, and it immediately appeared. One email from a woman I barely knew, saying she had a place and a dog and my little dog would be welcome. Yet again, as I have experienced numerous times, what was needed appeared, and it was perfect. I am in love with Divine Arrangement, have great respect for its Intelligence to know what I need beyond what I could ever know.

When I landed in Boulder, I had a wonderful place to settle for the winter and spent the next month moving in and arriving, re-connecting with friends, and feeling truly welcomed back. I began to meet new people and live into the question “What is my life now?” I was very happy to be back, to be home in Boulder among my tribe again. I re-joined my women’s group and began seriously working with my writing guide, Max, on the book that was gestated over the summer via the blog writing. I hadn’t written in a year or so until I started the blog and found it to be a phenomenal form for me, allowing me to write from a spontaneous, authentic place, beginning in the middle of a conversation instead of being bound by the ‘rules’ etched into the brains of English majors about writings needing to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I found a form that did not include the internal editor and felt happily liberated. I was loving writing!! I didn’t love it at all in the past when the inner editor started chopping every sentence before it was finished.

Upon arrival, I heard about an uncanny number of women, some I knew, who were meeting men, finding their life partners. It was noteworthy, as it has been quite a desert here for new relationships for as long as I have lived here. There are so many fabulous, powerful, creative, conscious women here and they long for partnership, but few were meeting men. I had not been in a relationship for about six years, finding being alone more fulfilling than dating. Being a highly relational woman, I could never have predicted this for myself. It turned out to be a very rich and fulfilling time creatively and spiritually. I painted a lot and deepened in my spiritual practice, and also came to really enjoy and treasure my solitude. From there, I could not imagine being in a relationship, and for long stretches of time, felt no need or longing for one. I certainly could not imagine living with any being with less than four legs. I was just fine and happy living with my little poodleman, Rumi.

Many women I knew had resigned themselves to being alone, many decided they liked that lifestyle and gave up being open to men, and many still felt their longing. So, to suddenly hear that many were meeting men and falling in love and creating real partnerships was very exciting, as well as curious. What’s going on?
The night before I drove the Shaggy Pony into Boulder, I stayed at the Joyful Journey Hot Springs just outside of Crestone, CO. For more than 15 years, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and Crestone have been central to my spiritual life. It’s a power place for me, so utterly perfect for the last night of the RV traveling part of my Shaggy Pony ride. During the trip I came to realize that I was feeling ready and open to have a man in my life, not only wanting companionship for this next/last phase of my earth journey, but understanding that there are certain learnings and deepening spiritual development that can only happen in the context of intimate relationship. I feel called to that. Not everyone is. Partnership is essential to my nature, and now, having experienced and enjoyed living and traveling alone, I was ready to step into relationship again.

At sundown that last evening before going to Boulder, I sat outside in the glowing warmth with my sacred pipe and filled the bowl with mapacho, the sacred tobacco from the Amazon. I did the purification ceremony and made my prayers of gratitude. The first prayer was for the sacred pipe and the ancient lineage of pipe prayers, the privilege of being given this gift several years before by a friend. I thank my ancestors, my Cree lineage and teacher Rose, the ancient lineage of medicine people, for all of their guidance and help.
I love the pipe, love the visible, embodied tangibility of the prayers that go with each puff of smoke. This was a ceremony of gratitude for all that I had been given on this journey, for the safety and help I experienced as I travelled, for the wonderful people, old friends and strangers, I encountered along the way.

I was grateful for the visit with my dear friend of 30 years, Victoria, whose husband of 38 years had just died two weeks before my arrival in San Luis Obispo; grateful for the beautiful time spent on the beach at Whidbey Island at my friend Sue’s magical cottage on the bay; grateful for the beauty of all the different landscapes I visited, the family of sea otters that came up on the deck to my surprise, the raw wildness of the Pacific coastline, the welcome and easy time with friends in Ashland.

I felt heart-bursting gratitude to have seen my son, a passionate and talented songwriter/singer in Los Angeles, perform a midnight gig in his milieu. It brings tears to my eyes now as I recall this. I have heard him sing his songs many times in my home, and it was stunning to see him do what he does in his world, see the largeness of his being and the recognition and respect given him as an artist and friend. Several of his friends actually thanked me for giving birth to him, some talked to me about his extraordinary gift. I felt so so proud and grateful for him, for what is unfolding in his career as he is becoming recognized for his gift, especially since his emergence into the world has not been easy.

I also spoke prayers of gratitude for the very difficult visit with my daughter on the front end of my travels. There is so much heartbreak in our relationship, in our family with respect to her, I cannot begin to write about it yet. There are no words. It’s a chapter of our lives as yet incomplete, a terrible mystery that has yet to reveal itself. She has taught me to keep my heart open in hell, and for that I am deeply grateful. It has allowed me to walk with other mothers whose children have taken them to the hell realms in one way or another.

My children have been my primary Gurus in that they have been the catalysts for stripping me of all ideas I had about who they are, how to mother, what their journeys are, and any inkling that I know anything about what their souls require or what they should do or be. I have had to learn to surrender everything where each of them is concerned, over and over again, and just keep loving them whole-heartedly. Each in their own ways, have brought me to my knees with helplessness and fear, and broken my heart open into boundless love.

The last prayer was my prayer of willingness to have a man in my life, a true partner. My favorite prayer of asking is “I am willing, you arrange it.” Two months to the day after I arrived in Boulder, on December 10th, I was face to face with a man who has become very important to me. It appears that the Mothership has landed, or at least is hovering, with wonderful men for women whose time is right to be in relationship.

Seductions from Contact with Self

November 16, 2007, 7:11 AM

I awoke this morning, as usual, around 5 AM, and it wasn’t long before the energy that I can perceive or name as ‘fear’ or ‘terror’ began to build. I just witnessed the energy, didn’t attach it to anything or get into a story of what it’s ‘about’ but just hung out with it until the intensity required that I get up and get going. I can call it ‘terror’ or ‘fear’ but I don’t really know. It’s energy and the experience of it is just what it is, doesn’t have to be named as the names we give to experiences come with a whole lot of baggage.
I usually wake up between 4:30 and 5 AM-ish every morning and like the ‘raw material’ that arises in my consciousness at that time of day. I like to get up and write at that time…it’s fresh.
I set up my new private writing blog two days ago, accessible only to me and my writing coach, Max, but spent the last two days working on my website, not writing. I am getting trained to make web changes myself, and I love both the creativity of it as well as the empowerment I feel as I become increasingly technologically competent. I love being able to do this myself, and have great backup help and coaching from Judi when I need it.
This is a highly creative time for me, which I love. I am rearranging my websites, adding two new guided mp3 journeys co-created with my didgeridoo friend Gusty, and I am writing my blog and my book. Writing was happening every day for the last couple of weeks until I got too busy with web work, visiting with friends, and various interesting Boulder events. My intention is to keep most mornings for writing. My book is being structured around my 60th year, beginning with some significant events a couple of months before my 59th birthday, documenting this year on many levels, with numerous flashbacks to stories about other times, teachings, and experiences in my life.
Life in Boulder is wonderful and also very seductive, full of amazing friends and cool things to go to and do, many of them creative or spiritually oriented. I have not been alone with myself enough these last two weeks. I am missing me, which I had more of in all the spaciousness of time I had when I was in my Shaggy Pony. At times it was too much then. I am seeing, that , as wonderful as it is, these great things can also be distractions from being present to my inner life. A lot is happening, within me on many inner levels as well as outer, and I have not made enough time to just be with it all. I need time to metablolize and integrate life as it happens. The backlog that happens when this integration time is insufficient, creates a gap and it feels yuky. It’s too easy to be swept up by all the goodies ‘out there’. I recall feeling relief from all the wonderful seductions at times while I was in my Shaggy Pony.
My prayer is to listen to myself, to listen when I hear myself say “enough!” or “stay home,” or “do nothing for the next hour.” I think the fear energetic comes in the early mornings when I have not been in deep enough contact with myself, having the right balance between attention to outer and inner life.

Selling the Shaggy Pony and the DO-er

10/31/07
Last week, I was moved to put the Shaggy Pony on the RV market. There are listing services, so I signed on with a couple of them, not really knowing if I am to sell her, if that traveling part of this journey is done, or if it is simply practical from a financial perspective. I had mixed feelings about doing it, but was clearly moved to lay her on the ‘altar’ and see what arises. I don’t know what is to be, I rarely do, if ever, but am completely surrendered to following the movements of Being as they happen. I was clearly ambivalent, feeling that I have just gotten my feet wet on this summer’s journey, and don’t feel quite ‘done’ with it all. Also, the way the Shaggy Pony ‘appeared’ with such grace and ease, and obviously the next step in my life’s unfolding, it seems odd in a way that it’s complete. I would actually love to go out on the road again in her when the warm weather comes – and the accountant within said that may not be possible given the givens of my minimalist work situation, at this moment. I had no idea that it would cost so much to travel the 7,000 miles I drove last summer, the main expenses being diesel gas, campground stays, insurance and the monthly payment on the Pony.

So, I was moved to put it on the market- really on the altar since I don’t know anything - and see what wants to happen, what the next installment of the ‘divine arrangement’ is to be. Yesterday I had to go to the storage garage where the Pony is being kept for the winter so that I could move her to a smaller, less expensive ‘stall.’ I hadn’t driven her in a couple weeks, she was all cleaned up from the road trip, and I loved getting into the driver’s seat. I felt how much pleasure I have had in driving around and living in her, how much I love her. My heart does not want to let her go. I don’t know how it is all going to work out. I realized that I don’t want to cling if the Pony is meant to go. So a sacrifice of the heart is to be made here, and I recognized that as I parked her in her new stall. I cried deep tears as I drove away and made the intention to make the sacrifice if that is what is wanted of me.

The root of the word ‘sacrifice’ means ‘to make sacred.’ The Shaggy Pony has been a sacred gift to me from the beginning, in ways I can feel and have not yet been able to articulate. So, I am letting her go if that is holy will, not my will, and we will see what happens. I feel much grief as I write this now. I also realized as I headed back to Boulder that more income would be a solution and allow me to keep her. Even realizing that, I keep surrendering the Shaggy Pony – not my will but thine. As I drove, my thoughts turned to the creative juice that is now bubbling up again for the Sacred Feminine work that I devoted so many years to, realizing how I am interested again and it feels as though it is wanting to emerge with a whole new flavor and maturation here in Boulder, as well as in my writing.

During my 25 years of working in Maryland, I developed the women’s mystery school and a private practice, all of which became self-generating after a few years. During the 13 years of commuting from Boulder to Maryland, especially the six years we were working on our evocumentary film, Eve’s Fire, I had no time or energy, nor was there any guidance, to build a practice here in Boulder. As Maryland was coming to a natural, organic close, I thought I would be bringing the Sacred Feminine work here, as I saw nothing similar going on here. The last year of traveling to Maryland, and the 18 months since ending frequent trips to Maryland, it just was not in me to do. My energy was low, exhaustion was ongoing even though I was taking care of myself, getting a lot of body work for the chronic back and neck pain issues that continued to sap my energy. All I could do was be with what was happening, as it was – and that was not about creating work here.

In retrospect, I see that for two + years, I was in physical pain a lot of that time and experiencing a huge energy drain. All of which is so contrary to seeing myself as a healthy person. This past July, it all came to a crisis when my gall bladder exploded and I had surgery to remove it. I had not had digestive issues, but in researching gall bladder phenomena, I discovered that back pain as well as chest pain, can be indicative of gall bladder inflammation. Since the surgery I have not had any back issues, except for a few days last week when I consciously, intentionally, willfully pushed myself over my body’s edge of tolerance for schlepping boxes. My will-full thinking mind was pushing hard to get the damn storage bin emptied. Now! For a week, that was my priority, not what my body/being knew was good for me. I paid the price for a few days and got the lesson much more quickly than ever.

These days, I am increasingly conscious of not wanting to ‘make’ anything happen -- except when the egoic ” I” am on a ‘mission’ of doing something my conditioned mind thinks must be done now or yesterday. Doing is one of my most familiar ways of not being in contact with my Be-ing, my self, my bodyself, my feelings, my fear, anxiety, terror. Doing fills a huge gap in each of us, keeps us from the truth and from ourselves in destructive and painful ways at times. Most of us have been rewarded for our doing, at times punished for not doing or not doing enough, enculturated, encouraged, and valued by family, school, church, and society to be do-ers, not to ‘waste our time’ just be-ing. Doing is so often tied up with, activated by, what the thinking mind wants/desires, rather than what is organically happening, what actually IS.

For a long time now, with myself and with others, I have witnessed the split that happens between what the conditioned thinking mind says and what is actually happening. So often, we listen to the thinking mind as if it were the TRUTH, overriding what the heart and/or body is saying. For example, when I was moving in here, my will-full thinking mind told me I had to get that second storage bin emptied out as soon as yesterday. Forget that I was exhausted. Forget that my neck was just beginning to twinge its ominous warning to slow down, take my time, be organic about the process. My thinking mind would have none of it. So I pushed til it was done, finally got help from a friend with the last few items, and mission accomplished. I also went to my chiropractor and committed to my bodybeing that I would now rest, recover, sloooowww way down, which I have.

In exploring the roots of this kind of doing, of this overriding willfulness that will keep pushing, keep doing, no matter how much pain or wisdom I have about it, it took me back to a very significant moment in my personal history, to when I was two years old.

On that day, not long after Gramma died, I am standing alone in my mother's kitchen. I am wearing a red sweater, red Buster Brown shoes with buckles, and a red plaid dress. I am clutching my torn swatch of pink chenille bedspread. It smells like me and like mommy. I feel alone. I am frozen, not able to speak, as I watch my mother march back and forth from the pantry to the stove, from the stove to the pantry. She’s very busy cooking. I don't like the look on her face. She looks mad. It scares me. She doesn't look at me. She walks by me as if she does not see me. She is dark, unhappy. My 15 year old sister, Jane, is in her bedroom. Somehow I know she isn’t coming out to be with me.
My mother walks by me, back and forth, to and from the pantry. She never looks in my face. I feel frozen with terror. Something bad is happening and I don’t know what. I have heard Mommy and Jane whispering about me since Gramma died. They stop talking when I come up to them. I must have done something bad. I must be a very bad girl. I won't do it again. I don't know what I did but I won't do it again. I think, but can’t speak, “Mommy look at me. Tell me what's wrong. I won't be a bad girl anymore. Please look at me.”
My red Buster Browns can’t hold me to the floor. I float up to the ceiling and watch. From there, I don’t feel so bad. Mommy keeps being busy, walking back and forth to the stove and the pantry. I hear a knock on the door. Mommy opens it and my Aunt Madge and Uncle Rowse come in. They talk but I can’t understand the words they say. I can’t really hear them, but see their lips moving. I am numb, silent, inside and outside, up on the ceiling, and no one notices. I am invisible. I float through the ceiling into a quiet, black space where I don't have to listen or see.

There is a startling jolt! My uncle picks me up and takes me out the kitchen door. I kick and scream as hard as I can. I want to bite someone. I look into my mother's tearful, anguished face as she closes the door on me. I don’t remember what happened next.

My Place

Throughout my life, having a place of my own was a central need. My bedroom was my place. Place has been THE central issue for me in this conditioned human experience, as I was an unwanted child of my mother’s love and passion with a man who was not her husband. By the time I was three, I had been sent to live with my aunt and uncle, but never really felt like that was my place, especially after I started school at six years old. I realized that every other kid lived in what I thought was a ‘normal’ family. Remember “Leave It to Beaver”? I felt enormous shame at being a kind of orphan, obviously not wanted by my family, not having a ‘normal’ family or life that I imagined all the other kids had.

After being sent away ti live with my aunt and uncle at two, I never again felt I had a place in my family of origin. I was always ‘visiting.’ I went to Catholic schools and, because I did not live in the neighborhoods where all my school friends did, I didn’t have a place in what went on after school and weekends. I always felt on the edge, even though the kids liked me and I had my special friends, I always felt as if I were outside of things. I died of shame every time someone asked me about my family and learned to either lie about it or be evasive.

The bottom line for me is that the core the template of my human condition that I am here to see through, the Big Lie that I am here to dispel, is that there is no ‘place’ for me. As an adult, I learned to find my place by simply stepping forth with as much authenticity as I had in the moment. After grad school, I did not fit into the model of counseling psychology and psychotherapy that was taught or which traditional institutions recognized. It became clear to me twenty-five years ago that I was on a different path than the traditional. I was working on a second graduate degree, trying to find my place by getting a doctorate, when the Kundalini began to rise and it became so clear that I was to drop the graduate program and step into the Unknown. Friends who were walking a more traditional path, getting their tickets to success stamped ‘properly’ warned me not to go the way I was going, but I see now that it was truly choiceless. My place was not where theirs was and I had no idea where mine was then—but I was willing to go. I was also scared shitless.

I see so clearly now, know in my bones, that my place has always been to be where I was, however ‘deviant’ it seemed in comparison to those around me. Often my place is at the edge… being an edge-walker has its benefits!
Like many people I know, I have always felt my place in nature. When I first arrived in Boulder I felt such a strong, embodied sense that I belong to this place, I could not possibly refuse to move here. I began to call this experience the ‘darshan of place,’ the blessing or recognition that we feel when we feel at one with some place in nature. I felt this darshan in Sedona, too.

Here it is, October 29, I am living in north Boulder, on yet a new Shaggy Pony Ride in a house share, and many universes have been created and destroyed since I last blogged a month ago. So much has happened that I could not keep up, but will begin here.
My last day in Sedona, October 6, I did a few errands, returned my rental car, bought some deli food for my trip, and around 4 pm, I was relaxing in the Shaggy Pony when a knock came at the door. A woman who worked at the campground said she was sorry to be the bearer of the bad news but, according to their records, I was supposed to have left by noon. I had to pack up and get out, go somewhere else!

I literally went into shock. It was so physical, I did not dissociate as we usually do when we go into shock. Instead, my attention was riveted on the physical and energetic intensity of the sensations and the stillness that took me over. I said I was in shock to the woman from the campground, saying there had to be a mistake—I had gone back and said I wanted three more days there just an hour after I had arrived at the campground. It felt so good and I knew I needed to rest before heading to Boulder.

She drove me over to the office where the woman in charge said ‘No, you have to leave. We only registered you for Thursday and Friday, and someone is waiting to get into that spot. And, sorry, we have no more spaces. Here’s a list of other campgrounds you can call, the nearest is 20 miles away.” The experience of shock continued, there was no argument to be made as they had only charged me for two extra nights instead of the three I asked for.

I learned to be meticulous about making arrangements ahead for the next stop or two because these places are always full. It was all so new to me that I was extremely careful and double checked maps and numbers and miles etc. So, regardless of the mixup, I stood there in a weird stillness, looking at this woman who was kicking me out, feeling the intense physicality of the shock of being kicked out. That was that. I stared at the paper with the other campground numbers on it. My cell phone was not working, I didn’t even know how I was going to make the calls to find a place at nearly 5 pm as the light was going.

I have a memory blank spot about what happened next but suddenly, before being taken back to my camper to pack up, the same woman who had just told me to go find a place suddenly said that I could stay in an area of the campground that is not an actual campsite but they could hook me up with electric. I was stunned. She refused payment. I wasn’t sure what had happened.

The original woman took me back to my RV, I packed up pretty quickly, and she guided me to a beautiful spot in a park-like area with no other RVs around. She got me an electrical cord, and while I was setting up she and I talked. She told me her name is Storm and said that she felt she had to intervene because of the way I handled the situation. (Apparently lots of folks thow huge rage fits when this sort of mistake occurs.)

Clearly there had been a mistake in communication originally, I just went with what was happening, and Storm asked the woman in charge to help me out. As Storm and I talked, she told me that she is an Apache woman and she works at the campground some of the time so she can leave her RV there and live there when she’s not off doing what she loves most, what she is deeply called to. Storm is a guide for a wilderness school and takes people on vision quests into Death Valley, to ‘die’. We started quite a conversation around that one… She said that she feels a deep sense of place, of belonging, in Death Valley.

I shared some of what I am/have been up to and a blessed meeting happened. I felt as if Grace arrived with her stretcher, and my last night in Sedona, though not as I had imagined it, was utter perfection. The shock disappeared and I felt as though the root of this thing about place was penetrated with awake awareness and compassion and beautifully witnessed by a woman who ‘got’ it. Another beautiful divine arrangement, and a deepening realization that i always have a place. We all do.

The Stretcher from Grace

The Zero Circle

Be helpless, dumbfounded, unable
To say yes or no
Then a stretcher will come from Grace
To gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we do, we’re lying.

If we say no, we don’t see it,
That “no” will chop off our head
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

Let us, therefore, not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that,
So that miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall finally be saying with tremendous eloquence
“Lead us.”
When we have totally surrendered to that Beauty
We shall be a mighty kindness.
- Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks

Angels

September 24, 2007 - Morro Bay, CA- the drive south on the coastal highway from Half Moon Bay yesterday was gorgous. I grew up on the Atlantic and spent a lot of my childhood and teen years at the ocean, and it is a very different landscape and vibe than the Pacific coast. All along the way, there were amazing, giant volcanic stone ‘sentinels’ or guardians just offshore. The shoreline itself was black and volcanic in places, the surf wild, the beaches wide. At one beach, hundreds of elephant seals were just lying side-by-side on the beach at the water’s edge and for a heart-stopping moment, I thought they were dead and had washed up. Lots of people were standing on the landing looking at them when I saw seals in the water swimming to the shore. A moment later, a little farther down the beach, there were more seals, lying on their backs sunning themselves. The weather here is gorgeous - very different than the gray, 50 degrees I left in Ashland. I saw a number of pure, white egrets along the way, too.

I am here for four days to spend time with my long-time friend Victoria, and see what shows up. I love being near the water and will get a rental car this afternoon so Rumi and I can cruise around the state parks which are on the beach. Most of the ocean front here is state park, not condos. Today we are going to Avilla hot spring and getting massages, something I reeealllly need. I have had no bodywork since leaving Boulder a month ago. Was it only a month? It feels like at least two lifetimes on the inner levels…

When I arrived yesterday, I had another sewer hose moment. This time, the hose I had been using, the one that came with my Pony, was too short. While in Ashland, I had rented a car from a sweet old guy who delivered the car to my RV site. I was taking him back to his home which is near an RV supply store and mentioned that I needed a better sewer hose with a nozzle like so many of the experienced RVers had. He said he had an extra one, extra long, and gave it to me. I bagged it and put it in my storage loft. Yesterday it was just what I needed for the hookup here. Angels are everywhere, and we often don’t recognize them as such. As I have been traveling, and so new and unsure about all of this, I am on the lookout for angels all the time. I feel blessed by their presence in such simple, ordinary moments. Sometimes they appear as people, of course, and sometimes animals. Sometimes they are just a whisper in a moment of panicky oh-my-god-what-to-do?

When I was at that strange little RV park in Williams, CA, the one night before arriving at Half Moon Bay, I had arrived mid afternoon and hooked everything up without a problem. I was near the building with the laundry so I put in a small wash. While I was waiting for the wash, I decided to color my hair. I first did my roots and waited twenty minutes, then put the rest all over my head for ten more minutes. When the time was up, I turned on the shower to rinse out the color, and the water only dribbled. NO WATER! I checked the outside faucet, even changed to a different one, still no more than a dribble. All the while I am realizing that the color is ‘doing’ my hair, so I went to see where the public women’s showers were, figuring I’d just rinse it out there.

This was the first RV park I have been to that did NOT have public showers! I was beyond concern about the color by this time, and was remembering a story, holding a horrifying image, from years ago about a woman whose hair fell out in clumps from a bad hair coloring job in a salon. I am not a hat-wearing woman… I also started to laugh because concurrently, I was feeling like Lucy in an I LOVE LUCY episode. I keep feeling myself in many parallel universes, some utterly hilarious.

Suddenly I heard a silent whisper – no doubt from an angel – who suggested I re-check my water hose. I did and discovered it had a crimp, a fold in the hose that was cutting off the flow of water. That fixed, I was able to rinse out my now darker hair, but at least I still have some hair.

I keep getting reminders that we truly do not know moment to moment what is going to be. We cannot assume that what worked yesterday, or ten minutes ago, will work now or be there tomorrow. This morning my cell phone worked fine, then suddenly I had no signal for a half hour. Constant reminders that there is only NOW, and the mind is operating in a linear, chronological paradigm that thinks in terms of past and future and forever and endless, unwarranted expectations.

Thank goodness for ANGELS! Have you noticed the Angels in your life lately?

More Shit & Grace Happening

Half Moon Bay, CA (just outside of San Francisco)

On the outer level last week, when I could not write a word, shit started happening, literally. I had a campsite with no hookup for my ‘black (toilet) water’ so I had to unplug the electric and water and drive over to the dump station. As I was unpacking the dump hose and getting it screwed on, my cell phone rang and I got into a deep conversation with my friend Karin. The topic right there at the dump station, as I was attaching the dump hose was my relationships with men, my shadow (shit) in that department. I had had two beautiful conversations with a new male friend that week and it brought up a lot of my stuff related to men. It had been a week of feeling a lot of primal terror and grief, ambivalence about having a relationship with a man again, and all of a sudden the big dump hose came undone and gallons of shit water poured out at my feet. Shit everywhere, inside and out. It happened again a few days later, even though I took special efforts to secure the hose.

Aren’t we living in the dreamtime all the time?!! Lots of shit to look at….

Being unhinged from the life I have known, the activities, friends, and the familiar landscape of my life there, without a home to go back to, with no idea yet where I will be guided to go September 30 when I leave LA, brings an icy terror to my bones at times when I feel separate from the Source, the Beloved. I contract so intensely my neck hurts, it’s hard to eat or sleep, and I sometimes shake with the terror. I am also realizing that this shaking is releasing ancient trauma, too. Sometimes I feel in shock with what is happening, realizing that it is an old trauma surfacing. “I” am not doing this journey and suddenly that ‘I’ pops up and realizes it has no control over any of this and wants to get the hell out of here. But where to go that’s not here? There’s no geographic cure for this malady.

When I am feeling fully surrendered, awake to what is rather than I-dentified with some aspect of my woundedness, it’s great, fun, exciting. No problem. It’s just that these circumstances, living so fully in liminal space, inevitably bring forth the most primitive, structural elements of my human condition, my deepest most pre-verbal wounds, needing to be met with awareness. On a good day, I can say that’s what I signed up for: let’s just bring it all to consciousness. Bring it on!

On an “identified” day, when I am in shit up to my ankles, every bit of despair, hopelessness, and terror surfaces. The all of everything is here. Expansion, in my experience, is followed by contraction, an influx of light eventually calls what is in shadow up to the surface. When I am so contracted and deep into identification with separation, I can’t feel Presence, or pray, or surrender, or ask the Beloved for direction, nor do I even feel the will to go looking for it. I somehow need to just stay in it awhile, at least until something shifts of its own accord.

Jung wrote about the experience of enantiadromia: an energy has to go all the way into its fullness—like an in-breath—before it can naturally release into the opposite direction into what may seem or feel like its opposite expression. This happens all the time. These contractions, regressions, descents into the darkness are predictable and take us to much earlier times in our lives and incarnational history, including conception and prenatal experiences, where the templates of this life emerge out of the nothingness. Call it karma, our central ‘task’ for awkening in this lifetime.

For me, this lifetime’s task has had to do with feeling that I have no place to be or live, I was not wanted or welcomed into my family of origin, and was sent away by my mother before I was three. This past week I was feeling the structure of this on a cellular level, as ancient as my conception and in utero life, the central ‘lie’ about who I am from which I must awaken.
Historically, I was conceived as a child of passion with my mother’s lover, not her husband, and I was definitely not wanted, although my mother did not choose abortion. Her sister-in-law died of an aseptic abortion, so I am fairly certain my mother felt she didn’t have much choice but to go through with the pregnancy. She was filled with fear the whole time she was pregnant with me and after.

My mother’s other two kids by her husband, a psychotic alcoholic abuser, were 12 and 18 at the time I came along. The family was one of alcoholic dysfunction and chaos, lots of secrets, and my mother’s Irish mother-in-law hated her and hated me until I was actually born, then Gramma had a change of heart about me. I was very adorable! She died when I was nearly three and shortly after that, my mother sent me away to live with an aunt and uncle. This has been for me a core karmic structure, an identitiy with many layers which I have had to work with throughout this lifetime. What better arrangement to get to the bottom of it, to ground zero, than this current orchestration/arrangement of my life as a vagabond? If I am not ‘tethered’ and belong to a home/place/community, who am I? How do I live as such, without the usual guideposts and reflections of who I am?

I am remembering a most poignant moment 25 years ago when I was in Jungian analaysis with a wise man named Jacob Goering in Maryland. He was there at a time when my entire world was crashing at every level—divorce, splitting my children up, not living with my son, the death of my friends across the street in a horrendous house fire two nights after my own daughter slept there, and the violent explosion of kundalini in me a couple of days after the fire. I thought I was losing it, as I had no idea what kundalini was, no one in my world did then. I see now I was in shock, dissociated by all the trauma, and was speaking to Jake about this horrible sense of not belonging anywhere, feeling disconnected from my family, terrified as a mother, not knowing how to mother a son who didn’t live with me any longer, no idea how I would make a living or even continue to live given the givens of all the weird phenomena associated with the kundalini.

I thought I was going psychotic. Where do I belong?
Jake said to me quietly, stating a simple fact: “You belong to God.”

His words penetrated my heart and I wept with the recognition of the Truth of it.
Last week, back in Ashland, it was getting cold and gray—in the 50’s— thoughts about winter coming on were scary, for I had no clue as to where to go or what to do. I thought about going back to Boulder for the winter. I’d have to get through the mountains before November and it is almost October. Future thinking from a fearful place is for me an open window for the demons to rush through. It’s different than making plans or tuning in what’s next when I feel in surrender to the will of the Beloved. When I am living in the moment, asking the Beloved Shaggy Pony, “What do you want for me now, where do we go from here?” (geographically speaking, I do have to make reservations at RV places as they are often fully booked), I feel no fear or anxiety, I live in the peaceful knowing that everything needed is provided, I am taken care of, all is well. Awakening in a human body certainly opens us to the all of everything!!

Alchemically speaking, as we go high we go low, and last week the terror crept in with the cold and identification took over and I felt separate from Presence, divine guidance, from friends, from life, from any sense of purpose, meaning or wanting to live. I went into isolation for a couple days, curled inward for awhile, and just was with the despair and sense of utter aloneness and no place to be, go or live. Very ancient stuff. I couldn’t pray, didn’t want to sit in silence, didn’t want to write, didn’t want to call anyone for help, didn’t want to ask the Beloved to show me the way. I wanted to run back to Boulder and yet that felt utterly empty, too. There was nowhere I wanted to go, no place on the planet I wanted to be. Everything felt little ‘e’ empty, pointless and meaningless. I was witnessing all of this, though. The watcher was watching.

I also noticed that anything I said out loud to someone from this state sounded like crap. It had no substance. It reminds me of doing acid 30 years ago and seeing words come out of my mouth and disappear, kind of like cartoon bubbles. There was nothing in them, no meaning, no truth, just one-dimensional, meaningless letters floating by.

I see how making meaning of life, feeling like I have a point or purpose for my existence, is a major way I keep myself from falling into ‘e’ emptiness. Can I actually live without a purpose or the belief that I am here to do something meaning-full or that there is a point to this life?
This feels like a deep sacred question, a koan of sorts, that I want to be with. If everything is just ‘happening’, arising and disappearing as we all have and eventually will, how can it be intrinsically meaningful? Our minds make meaning of it all, for some of us this helped us survive in dysfunctional families. If my suffering as a child had meaning, then I could survive it. I learned to make meaning at a very young age and sought out writers, literature, poetry, and even psychology books to help me make meaning of the bizarre life I was having as a kid. Victor Frankl, the eminent doctor who survived the Nazi camps wrote in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, that the difference that made the difference in most of the survivors of the camps that he knew was that they were able to make meaning of it somehow. Making meaning serves us in certain circumstances of this human condition.

I am now looking at what making meaning serves for me now. Does it serve my awakening or is it adding to my conditioning? What if I don’t make meaning of this journey I am on? I notice that making meaning is something I do with my mind usually when I feel upset or frightened or unsure. When I am fully present, being with what is, I don’t do it. I don’t need to do anything except directly experience what is happening. Interesting to witness this…

At a certain point in a descent, something happens, things start to shift and I get interested in what goes on inside of the descent. Witnessing is so powerful. It begins the process of dis-identification from the "I" experiencing the heavy emotions. I say happens because “I” does nothing. There really is no "I." On this side of it, free of it, it is easy to say that descent is Grace, too (although it feels like shit), just as the beauty and generosity and the goodies that come are Grace. Grace {call it BEINGNESS or G*D or the Beloved, whatever works for you} does it all. How can it be otherwise if there is nothing but Grace/ALL THAT IS? It’s just my egoic mind that judges it otherwise, separates the two when there is only ONE, not two.

There is nothing else going on. Nothing!

When I am deep in the shit, i-dentified up the wazoo with emotion and story, there is a voice-over that says “You should pray, or sit in silence, or call a friend, do something to get through this fast.” And something in me just won’t, can’t, does not. I can’t do anything until ‘it happens.’ Increasingly I am practicing allowing what is to be what it is, even this. Allowing life to be what it is, especially THIS life in THIS body, noticing the voices that want something else, want it to be different or to hurry up and get there. I notice on a daily basis in this RV that there is no there. I really got that cellularly the other day when I imagined going back to Boulder to escape this and saw so clearly that this is it, and Boulder and all that is there would not take away this emptiness I was feeling.

In the temple work we often speak of the image from the Sumerian myth of Queen Inanna, where she has been summoned to the underworld, has been slain and dismembered, and is hanging on a wooden peg, a ‘meathook’, turning to green rotting meat. When we are on that meathook, green and rotting, it can feel like an eternity. We have to just hang there til we don’t, and “I” can’t decide when that is. It’s never soon enough for me, for the “I” that is hanging. We cannot make ourselves surrender or will it to be over. There is, in fact, no one in here to will or do anything. IT happens when it happens by Grace. The stretcher from Grace comes when it will.

Today, Saturday, it has been raining in Half Moon Bay. I am spending this day asking the Beloved for direction. First Rumi and I were led on a gorgeous walk. Lots of green, flowers, homes with beautiful patios. Then a couple of phone calls. Then I began this writing. Then I took a break to clean out and re-organize my storage closet shelves. Now writing. A walk is next – the rain has stopped. The beach is just a few blocks away. I am looking out at tall pines and rolling hills in the distance. It feels good to be present again. Thank you for holding this space with me.