Sunday, March 27th, 2011

I was getting ready for a party…the way I usually do.  I drag my behind up the stairs when I am down to the wire on having time to do something between sprucing up and completely glamming out (depending on the event.)  It doesn’t matter how potentially tired or anti-social I am beforehand.  I don’t miss chances to party…not only because they don’t come every night in the small but very special place I live, but because the parties here are usually so unique and fabulous it makes them unmissable.)  I lug our big boombox into the upstairs bathroom with me and the rougher I feel beforehand, the louder I play the music while I glitter myself up.  I come out not just with the right clothes on, but with my heart pounding and my mind totally made over.  I am ready to go out into the night and find out what it holds for me.  I am ready to dance.

A month or two ago it was one of those nights.  It was a 70s party and I had on the psychedelic turquoise and red dress on, a sequin hat I had a fun hell of a time trying to get my curls to stay inside, and huge glitter sunglasses on.  I even got to buy the screaming red lipstick I had just bought (for a “towel-dry my hair, put on tinted lipstick and fly out of the house” kind of girl this is a lot of dressing up and quite exciting…)  And suddenly in the midst of my mix of new music, a new Adele song started playing, and before too long I was singing along…and then the lines of life were blurring.  I was looking into my own eyes in the mirror, as I sang with my full heart and whole soul, and I was seeing myself.  I saw all of my passion and beauty, and it was a landslide…an avalanche…it was dams breaking open.  It was knowing that even the smallest doubts that had cropped up in my garden, in the places I’d not been looking, had no sway in this wildfire.  They were all consumed.  And all in a moment…

Because I sang a song, a song I had to put on repeat to learn as I went because I’d never heard it before.  A song about heartache that I didn’t even have, but that we all have known.  We all knew it before we were born, we remembered it even in the land of pure love, because we knew it wasn’t over…not just yet.  All because I sang a song, to myself, with all that I had, in my 7os costume on an otherwise-slow Sunday night, trying to rally myself to go out and shake everything I’ve got.

I knew that if anyone had a problem with me…looked down on me in any way…they just didn’t know me.  Their loss, too.  Because I was so damn beautiful…all the way through.  There just wasn’t any other way to see it.  And I know…you’d think I didn’t even need this.  I was, after all, as I often speak and write of, born loving myself…it is my greatest gift.  But I also say that knowing yourself, and loving yourself, is a moment to moment practice and friends…this is how I do it.  This is what I am always talking about…bringing yourself back to yourself by doing things that remind you of who you really are.  Over and over again until you are just so good at it that it happens on its own, like it did to me that night.

That’s why I go outside every with chance I can steal…why I stare at the blue sky, and the ocean, and the moon.  It’s why I rally to go to every party.  It’s why I love hard no matter how much I have been hurt.  It’s why I open again and again to try to make friends.  It’s why I dance…why I sing…why I teach…why I write…why I went up into my art room the other day, closed the door, played my guitar, took photos, painted, drew, and banged out soft poems on my old typewriter.  It’s why I wore overalls all weekend.  It’s why I am going to the sauna tonight to sweat until I can’t remember what it felt like to be sort-of sick all week, and to find out what it feels like when I am hot enough to melt and my skin is wet and soft like the seal I am somewhere inside.  Selkie, I return to the sea…to the wild tempest inside of me, and the wildfire that burns me, again and again, but which shows me the stars.  Living as a lover is hard, but there is no finer gold, no sweeter honey…no more beautiful thing than that life.  I won’t ever give it up.  Some might think I will eventually get broken, but they just don’t know how broken I have already been…and how it opened me up to the sunburst waiting underneath.

If only we all knew that falling apart is okay…if you can just endure it, in any way that gets you through, it will always take you somewhere better.  And if you are not there yet it is because you aren’t done falling apart.  Just find something…anything that brings you back to yourself…and then keep visiting it.  Don’t leave it alone.  Make it your temple.  But not the temple of should…never the temple of should.  Only the temple of what your soul and soft body longs for in any moment.  Find that, and you will never be empty.  Your mirror will never be too clouded to let you see yourself.  Remember what I always say…”It isn’t that I never forget.  It’s that I never forget how to remember.”

You have to find what makes you real again.  What makes you come to life again.  It is you loving yourself that will make you real like the Velveteen Rabbit.  It is you kissing yourself that will make you wake from the thousand years sleep…and don’t worry.  There will still be princes.  (Princesses too of course for those who would prefer one. : )

Here is the thing.  I was watching the most beautiful animated movie about magical Owls and, of course, there was the dark and the light…there were the good guys and the bad.  And the old warrior-priestess rose up in my blood and I felt myself ready for battle as I once did.  I know that story, I thought.  I know that story so well.  Don’t you just remember it in your bones?  The battle between the light and the dark?  Only it isn’t a question of spears and swords, no.  It isn’t a battle of a lost ancientness or of the future.  It is the hidden battle that rages on right now.  Not between disembodied dark forces soaring through hyperspace in Harry Potter’s nightmares (well…maybe a little like that…)  It is the battle inside of you over whether you will decide that you are okay…that you are good…that you are worthy and beautiful and exquisite and brilliant…or whether you will succumb to what others around you have told you, in words or silently, about who you are that is in any way negative or less than the sparkling stunning-ness that you are.  And the battle is won when you decide that nobody has the right to make you feel bad about yourself.  And that you still have the right to feel bad if you need to…you can bless all of your feelings and embrace them all and trust that they have a purpose and a meaning and a value.  But you can just decide that you are damn-well worth every beauty in this life.  That you are not what anyone who has thought less of you has said you are, or insinuated you are, or tried to show you that you are.

You can grab the psychic glass-cleaner (self-love and self-empowerment) and wipe clean the mirror inside of you…so you can finally see yourself, for yourself.  If you aren’t sure go to the ocean and ask her how you are looking today.  Ask the stars if they think you have anything beautiful to say.  Ask your loving pet or that one friend who is always your cheerleader and celebrator (through the good and the bad…with honesty and integrity.)  Ask your freckles, ask the flowers in your garden.  Ask your paintbrush, your pen, your hands.  Then shut out the leaky places where the drafts are getting in, and bask in your warmth.  And then, sweet firefly friend of mine, you will light the world up, even more and ever more, with your glow…

Love, Jennifer

Friday, February 25th, 2011

I often feel like I am the woman in this painting, looking out at the ocean.  Only I feel that I have been standing there not for moments or hours, but for eons…looking out over the waves of the cosmic ocean, watching the worlds rise and fall, and rise again…

I have always adored the ocean, and kept it close to me.  I believe I have loved it most because it is the only thing that I feel mirrors the depth and intensity of my heart.  Yes, the universe is more vast…but the ocean is both vast and contained.  Both contained and uncontainable.  It is both wild and fierce, and soft and gentle.  It both adapts to its environments and changes them.  It is pulled by great gravitational forces, and can pull almost anything into it.  It surrenders, and it rocks.  But most of all, in passionate waves, it rolls…

It had been twelve years since I’d been to Hawai’i when I went last month.  That previous time had been my first, after a long, hard winter.  I remember waking the first morning to the sun, stumbling out my door and down the hill and plucking a ripe papaya.  I opened it with my pocket knife and had my breakfast there, in the clothes I slept in.  And I knew then that everything was finally going to be okay.

This time in Hawai’i I swam every day that the surf would let me in the water (it was a time of wildly high surf).  I would swim out to the place just where the waves crested…and wait for them.  I’d get so exited when a big one came, and I would swim rapidly toward it, until I was face to face with the wall of it, and then turn quickly to ride it blissfully in.  Then I’d turn right around quickly in hopes of another big one.  I did this endlessly.  It was all I wanted to do and it brought me the most amazing joy.

There were only a couple of times when I knew, instinctually, that I had missed the moment and the crest was going to pull me under and smash me into the beach as I’d watched it do to so many others.  So I dove into and through it, in those moments, just in time.

And I thought a lot about all of us, and how bravely we try to face the waves that come every day, and every night.  They have always come, these waves of life, and feeling, for all humans.  But now we live in a time where there are more of these waves of transformational energy than ever, and they are more potent than ever.  I know we find ourselves being crashed into rocky shores and it may feel that it is too often.  I know we may sometimes feel beaten.

I know, among other reasons, because when I arrived in Hawai’i I felt broken myself.  Not unfixable by any means, but it would be a lie to say that I didn’t feel broken.  For the last three years I have been remedying a serious adrenal depletion, brought on by a series of stressors to my body including reactions to food, and exposure to toxins (mostly in my travels.)  My levels of the crucial hormones and substances the adrenals make were so low that it would have taken down the mightiest creature.  They needed to be…for I am a might creature indeed, and I needed, to finally…go down.

Not because I was too mighty, no.  Because I had been too strong for too long.  I had been on my mission as an Oracle, carrying the memory and being brave and bold and passionate enough for every battle.  I had put everything I had on the line, including my life, over and over.  And I was always strong enough for more, if it meant completing what I had sworn to in my deepest soul, out of pure commitment and coming from deepest love.

And it has been, my friends, so very many lifetimes.  Now, in this time when the Great Remembering is finally underway, I can let go and let all the pain and exhaustion of my lifetimes as a “spiritual warrior” be felt.  So when friends asked why I didn’t just “tune in” and get the answers about why things were happening the way they were with my health and what I should do, I told them…

I know why this is happening.  I am finally letting go now and all of this suffering needs to be felt, because it wasn’t before.  If I had the answer about the perfect “fix” right now I wouldn’t allow myself to complete this release.  There is also much I am meant to learn in the meantime, by putting one foot in front of the other and learning as I go.  By not having answers.  My beings had talked to me about the central issue being one of the nervous system, so I knew which way to look.  But it was clear within me I neither wanted nor needed any further information.  I knew all along I could heal myself whenever I was ready to, but I was determined, finally in this lifetime, to not cut the experience short so I could move onto whatever was next.  I was determined, this time, to get every last bit of the poison out, no matter what it took.

After all, I told them, being an Oracle is not just about getting answers, even when you can.  It is about not having answers too, when that is right.  It is about trusting in the known and the unknown.  It is about following that voice within, of the deep heart, whether it gives you answers or just one feeling at a time to go on.

And so, though no one I didn’t tell ever knew about it or could tell, I went through a really hard time in my body.  Chronically inflamed, so stiff it was hard to turn over in bed in the night, waking up as if I’d just been in a train wreck, reacting to so many foods it was hard to find something to eat, losing mental focus and stamina, terrible muscle weakness and pain, reactions to toxins…all of it.  It was textbook adrenal insufficiency, (though these symptoms can come with other conditions as well, my test results corroborated this) which I discovered on my own.  In fact, though eventually I found practitioners who could help, a great deal of my healing and discovery has come by way of my reading and study.  And oh, how much I have learned…

I have learned things that are going to make me healthy for the rest of my life.  I feel incredibly grateful and gifted by all of this.  And though it brought me to tears (and to my knees) so many times, it has given me so much courage and wisdom.  Now, as I finally turn things around, every little gaining of strength feels like the most amazing miracle.  I go to the gym and every time the exercise energizes instead of drains me…every time I can do a little tiny bit more without pushing myself, I am so proud.  I press one foot after the other on the elliptical machine, listening to the pounding, juicy beats in my ears from my ipod, and move with my own rhythm exactly.  This experience has made me better than ever at finding it.  And that is a golden gift indeed.  And when it comes into my mind that, “I am a strong and beautiful woman,” I know it is true.  I can feel it pumping in my blood and moving through my muscles…the beauty and the strength that radiates from my pure heart.  And now I will move forward not just more beautiful and more strong, but more healed and whole than ever.

I don’t take a moment of it for granted.

So when I swam into the waves it was a special moment.  It was happening at the time when I had just crested and I knew I was finally rolling in.  It happened at the time when, however broken I was, I knew I was starting to regain my strength.  In order to reduce stress at every level to support the healing of my adrenals, I had made an even deeper commitment to fearlessness, and it has freed me at even more profound levels.  (To me fearlessness is not the absence of fear, but the refusal to let it lead us.)  So when I was facing the wall of the wave and swimming toward, rather than away from it, I felt not afraid but absolutely thrilled and alive.  It doesn’t mean I didn’t trust myself when I knew the right moment had passed and I needed to dive through it instead, in fact it meant that I was entirely in sync and aligned with my instincts and intuition.  I was completely one with their motion, and from that came my bliss.

This is indeed how we can walk through the world…even as we embrace the painful crashings as well, we can find that we are more often, rather than trying to avoid the waves…the waves of what we fear will consume us…we are heading right into them, and therefore we are in the best position to be fearless, to make an empowered choice about riding or diving through them, to be situated to do either, and to hear and trust the deepest voice within us.  The voice of our vast, oceanic hearts…rolling in on the shore of who we are becoming next…

And when we do get rocked too hard, and we’ve swallowed water and sand and we can’t even breathe at first, we can take ourselves gently to a place on the beach where the surf sounds soft, and the sun is electric and gentle at the same time, and let ourselves be nurtured…and rest deeply…until the time comes again that we are called by the waves and we are ready to have them free us, and to ride them as the waves of bliss they truly are.  To let them carry us home, again and again.

Love, Jennifer