Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

I still feel it, at night, every time it happens.  Something as round as a hill is beneath me and I toss and turn over it and around it, unignorably.  It isn’t the same as having regular old repetitive night thoughts…I’ve pretty much done away with those.  It’s specific.  It carries meaning when it happens.  It’s the pea.

And it doesn’t just happen at night either.  Oh no.  It happens often…the world is full of peas that even under a hundred mattresses I can feel, even when most people couldn’t.  It comes of feeling so much, and it is one of the prices of awareness.  But don’t get me wrong…every pea has a gift.  But I haven’t gotten to that part of this story yet…

Maybe it is a misunderstanding, or an issue that requires sensitivity, or an unspoken truth…in any case it is something that doesn’t feel right, in too deep a way to brush off.  I know by now, in fact have known for a very long time now that there is nothing to do with a pea but address it, head on.  I can’t will it away, the only way to manage it is to climb down the towering ladder and wrestle around with my arms reaching awkwardly between mattresses until I find it, and pull it out.  What that means outside of my very-real-feeling metaphor is that I have to get down to what feels wrong and make it right.  I have to call the person who I need to say something to, or attend the meeting and bring up the important issue, or follow up on the email, or cancel the subscription, or salvage the project, or leave the group.  I have to do whatever I can, culling the pearls from deep in my heart, to make it right.

Perhaps it sounds glamorous to be such a brave-seeming truth speaker, but let me tell you, with thousands of years’ experience, sometimes it is really, really hard to feel every pea, and very, very energetically demanding to constantly be putting things right (“right” not in some general way which cannot be defined, but right in accordance with my own heart to the best of my abilities.)  I have been standing up and saying, “This isn’t right” when something feels wrong for so many ages now.  Again, don’t get me wrong, it isn’t bleak…there is a good part and I still I haven’t gotten to that yet.  And it is not like I have to put on my spiritual armor and fight with all the grit and will and sheer soul force of my deepest spirit, as I also have done in so many other lifetimes.  It is more like I am suiting up in a uniform I’ve been putting on for a lifetime of getting under buildings to fix pipes.  Not particularly glamorous seeming anymore, right?  Not super sexy, though I suppose some might disagree.  Just something I happen to be good at, and can’t freaking ignore.  Trust me, I don’t think being good at something is enough of a reason to need to do it.  I know it is time to do what brings us joy, and that that will be our greatest service again, as it once was.  But until the world fully catches up with the new plan, this is as necessary as breathing to me.  It’s literally physically unbearable for me to not address things that reach pea status.  There just is no rug for me to sweep it under…only lots of wood floors and a whole ton of mattresses that don’t even blot it out a bit.

Those of you who know all about peas, and feeling so much all the time, are practically wiggling in your seats in agreement and relating so completely as you read this.  And yes, now it is time for the good news.  So, you lose friends who are tired of always being called on stuff, and you ruffle feathers and bring up uncomfortable topics.  Yeah, you can’t go certain places where people are just too unconscious and it always feels like you are pointing out what others don’t want to see.  Sleepless nights, heartache, and isolation?  Yeah, some of all that too.  But that isn’t all…

If you do it long enough, you sift your entire life down to people who celebrate you, surroundings that enhance and reflect you, projects that light you up, and standards that rock.  And that, my friends, is the sign of a princess.  After all, that was the point of the story…remember?  Your sensitivity is testimony to your royalty.  Your soul royalty.  And while we all have these gifts at some level, those of us who are aware of them are blessed indeed, and anybody who makes you feel bad about that doesn’t belong in your life, and doesn’t deserve your company.

Because for every person that gets defensive and blows you out of their lives for being translucent and real and asking for the same, there is someone who will thank you, deeply, for caring enough to say what you really think and feel.  If you haven’t found those people yet, you will.  Hold on, and keep up the endless housekeeping of peas, grateful for the periods when they seem to go away for a while.  Before you know it, you will have so many wonderful things filling the spaces emptied by what you had to let go of to be true to yourself.

For you might think that feeling all the peas, and dealing with all the peas, makes you quite a handful…a picky, neurotic, potentially annoying mess.  But that is actually what happens to people who have a hundred peas under their mattresses that they don’t even know about, and practically never deal with.  People who feel the peas and show up to address them are the people who don’t have to carry heavy burdens over long periods of time the same way, and are therefore more able to be light, and carefree, surprisingly easygoing, open-minded, and great fun.  If you feel all the peas but that still doesn’t seem like you, read on…

Yes, the pea under all those mattresses was a test to find out if the woman who showed up that rainy night really was a princess as she claimed.  (This goes for all you princes too!…Or if you identify as any other gender identity feel free to pick your own royal title.)  And trust me, the kind of princess I am talking about is the kind you want to be.  The kind who is in line to be queen of her own life and heart.  The kind who knows herself, and honors herself, and lives in her true power.  Not a harsh ruler, but a wildflower, growing where and as she was meant to…free. This is what it takes to be free.  And freedom to be your true self is worth any price, and in the end costs you nothing.

There is one more little thing to remember though…one more thing that made the princess claim her throne.  The next morning when she was asked how she slept, in some versions of the story she deliberated about whether to be polite and say she slept well or tell the truth, and unknowingly receive her kingdom…Tell the truth.  There will always be moments when you choose to be polite because it isn’t worth the energy to expose what you really feel, but when that isn’t the case…tell the truth.  Say the mattresses were terrible.  Risk offending someone.  Someone has freaking got to if this world is going to change.  And more and more often you will find that your authenticity, your truth, your realness is something people thank you for.  Something people ask for, and yearn for, and want to be around, and celebrate.  We, the sensitive ones who also have the courage to speak up, will change the world.  And when we have, we will get together in the break room for one last meal together and maybe a knowing smoke, thinking of the years we spent fixing pipes, and then take off our uniforms for the last time, and walk into the new day together…

I will see you then, and every day on the job until then, you Princess-Warrior-Oracle-Queen.  For though I am describing a laborious workspace, the truth is this is the work of the stars.  Fine, immaculate, and shimmering.  This is the work of the Divine Feminine returning to the earth in all her fiery-dragon-tongued and sweet-honey blazing glory.  It is time for the Oracles to speak again.  About whatever they wish.  About peas, and better times…about love and little things.  About whatever lives in your heart.

Speak up Princess.  I see your royalty.  I’ll meet you in the sweet pea field where we will roll around on them and squish them everywhere and we will laugh…about it all…

Love You,

Jennifer

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Or Why We Sometimes Have to go through Hell to Get to Heaven

Friday, February 17th, 2012

“I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”

~Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey

That was the quote on the card my friend gave me when we were about seventeen…

The words hovered under an image of the moon on the cover.  It was perfect, and carried in its little package of syllables all the promise we felt inside, and knew would be kept.  It was all we could do to wait to see the world, neither of us having left the country yet.  It was like the most delicious meal, savored in advance.  The world was going to be ours.  I don’t know if the world is hers now or not, we drifted apart like two continents so long ago, but I know it is mine…

Thanks to a road trip through Europe and long journey to the other side of the world, I had visited nine countries by the age of 19.  And yes, I never was the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world…on my toes, bluish in its light in my nightie on the roof in India, even though my family there said I shouldn’t go out at night (the mosquitos.)  I would have risked many more bites just to watch the moon glow on a land that was more foreign than any other I have still ever been to, and yet more my home and familiar to me than any other as well.  The moon, I used to say, was the only thing that was the same.  You can’t imagine the freakish and exquisite feeling it was to be so young and so very free.  Or maybe you can.  My epic yearning for intensity was quenched in a way it hadn’t ever been before.  I could have disappeared into the fabric of the universe.  I loved it.

Even more miraculously perhaps, I still feel that young and free…read on to find out why…

It was hard on me then, just as it is now.  Having been to twenty countries now, I pace myself.  It isn’t just because it is so world-rockingly physically demanding to travel, especially to the wildest and most wonderful edges of the earth, but because it breaks your heart.  Because, if you are very lucky, you fall in love…with everything.  Even the worst parts glow.  You meet people who will live within you always, but whom you may never see again.  I don’t just mean the nice person you sit next to on the airplane.  I mean the people who feed you, and show you their hearts, and fall in love with you too.  And sometimes, you even find family, like I did in India.  Family that if you close your eyes hard enough and reach our your arm to at night you can feel grab your hand on the other side of the world.

They don’t have to be that far away.  The people you leave.  I remember I had only been in New Hampshire for two weeks (and was only staying for six more) when a new friend I had been spending time with leaned over a table to me, drunken, and whispered into my ear, “Don’t leave, Jennifer.”  That is when I knew I had to stop traveling.  At least for a little while.

Don’t get me wrong.  Love is good.  Love is so much more than good that I have no name for how good it is.  And I won’t ever shrink from it, but to really know love you have got to feel it.  You can’t just keep pushing on and loading up and sloughing off.  So I stopped for a few years, and I felt it all.

Believe me, there are few things I love more than an ever-moving train that is always stopping somewhere new, or even a tucked away seat on a greyhound (which used to be, strangely I know, my favorite thing.)  When you move like that life is even more clearly a poem that is being written with your every step.  The secret is to capture that feeling while mostly stationary too.  Actually I want to spill out all the secrets I can to you today about how to have the gifts of traveling wherever you are, and it is all because of Fiji.

I know we wouldn’t have gone there last month if it weren’t for a special invitation.  I knew what it would mean.  To cross the world you have to shed a skin, always.  You have to let go of everything you know, and surrender to the unknown.  When you board a plane to cross a great dark ocean, you are saying yes to total transformation, whether you feel ready or not.

But then something happens, when you have just what you need in a bag and you arrive somewhere and smell a new wind, even if your body is so broken and exhausted from days of travel that you are not sure how you can walk.  Traveling reminds us we are free, that we are making it up as we go, that we are not limited to our routines or what the people around us think of us, that we are not our circumstances, that we may have changed since we last reflected on ourselves that deeply.  Travel gives us perspective…priceless perspective.  It breaks up what we’ve held onto, sometimes painfully.  It takes our cracked places and hits them hard, splitting us open.  It makes us surrender.  And finally, if you open up, it teaches you to take risks, claim who you are, and be fearless.  Then, if you take what it gives you in deeply enough, you integrate it so fully that you are always a traveler, and always at home.

You see, I’ve found buried treasure.  And if I showed you everything I’d known and seen, just in this one life alone, (not to mention all the others) you would gasp at the beauty of what would seem like piles of the most shimmering gems that ever caught light.  That is what you get when you compress coal…diamonds.  And that is why we go through such hell sometimes to get to heaven.  Hell presses the captured light out of us, so we can really know our own gifts.  Besides, for those of you who have really been through it, once you have been through every corner of the dark forest and know your way home from there, once you know every nook and cranny of the underworld, there is nothing to be afraid of anymore.

(Also, then you know the way…always…and naturally you are a guide, without even trying to be one, for the others who are lost and just need a little light to see their path by again.)

In the picture with this writing you’ll see me in paradise.  Not just any paradise (there are so many, ) but the straight-out-of-a-postcard paradise.  In fact, you are seeing me on the most beautiful beach I have ever laid eyes on, in a tropical heaven…an untouched beach my husband and I had all to ourselves.  And yes, everything that didn’t need to be there toppled out of my body and went away.  Yes, surrounded by untouched 2000-year-old rainforest I was healed in new ways.  But just for the record, I practically had to crawl there.  I was so wrecked by food that didn’t go well with me, heat stroke, motion sickness, and a full-on Indiana-Jones-style hike through the jungle that I hardly wanted to move.  That is usually just about how we feel before a breakthrough…before the equivalent of our perfect paradise beach with a hammock just for you arrives.

I am here to say hold on.  Take risks.  Don’t let your circumstances or the people around you decide who you are.  If you can’t get to the other side of the world right now, know that you don’t even need to.  Just dedicate a whole afternoon to go to the nearest natural area and be entirely in your own space for as many hours as you can.  I remember that (when I dwelled in cities) all it took for me was a cafe with a decent latte where I could sit by a big window and write.  If you are going through hell, know it is paving your way to heaven.  Trust against all odds.  Let yourself be taken on magical journeys when they knock at your door.  You may think that they don’t knock, but perhaps you just weren’t listening for them.  Listen for them.  I don’t agree that we only have this one life, but I do think we should live like we do.  Magic is worth taking chances for, and if your bright sunflower blossom is being strangled by someone else’s fear (or collective fear) it is time to snip it.  No more parasite vines.  Let people say what they will, and bloom….bloom…bloom…bloom.  You can’t ever do it wrongly.  Each little petal of sunlit gold knows just what to do.  Every seed knows how to get plump and ripe and fill with life.  If you close your eyes right now and check inside you can find the place of the new blossom that wants to come forward, and you can feel whether you are holding it back or not, and if you are and if you feel really deeply, you can even find out why…

We need sunflowers on the earth right now.  We need brilliant blazes of buttery golden glow waving gently in the breeze who aren’t afraid to stand tall and strong with their light.  Find your new blossom, let it thrive, and I’ll see you at the edge of the world…

Love, Jennifer