On Getting Broken

Sure, I have childhood trauma that opened me up as an empath to hear out and excuse a whole lot from others, but I was not on the trajectory of being broken. To the contrary, I was nearing my own self-generated upgraded healing. I understand why coherence and grounding was both not wanted and also in frequency calling forths wanted for someone of my sensitivities. Indigenous peoples certainly grappled with their own spectrums of emotions and complexities in simply having through synchronicities of their own crossed paths with me.

There is a great difference between solitude of one’s choosing and isolation. For much of my life I chose extended bouts and embracing dances with solitude. All spent in nature of course. Years sometimes. Beginning too, since as young as I can remember.

Alienating followed by abandonment sensations. Now that I’m learning to alchemize previously unknown depths of grief, grief being indicative of how much one truly loved, getting broken was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I can say this now in full release. It taught me to see my own beauty. Grief can teach us to see beauty in our own flaws even. It got me to slow down and just sit with all the feelings. To look back and see all the humans along the way that did see me. To have to process rage for those that were too hurt for caring for me.

Finding teachers always steps right after I’d walked through such teachings mostly alone. Learning to cherish all the variations of hues and light. Seeing landscapes as palette and mood experiences.

Cherishing how different lands shape differing peoples, heritages, and cultures. How differing peoples shape lands the same. All of it in time and across time. Truthfully, I can sense the moods and degrees of my inner stirrings and landscape, shadowy parts and light, in but a short foray outdoors. Sometimes simply stepping outside or driving to work.

Even in London and New York City does it work this way, showing it has nothing to do with any purity of space. Like dogs as intention readers and character monitors, I trust nature a wee bit more than many a human reflection.

Something I think I already was well underway in standing on my own in awareness with. It taught me the laughable nature of mere bioregional consciousness. The many pitfalls and shortcomings of local community building. All delivered right to my immediacy.

I’ve lost friends because their friends would never accept me. Mostly based on only their own unmet assumptions of me. I’ve learned just how extensively ideologies govern near all identities in this era we’ve all inherited. I’ve witnessed how these effects are breaking cultures everywhere and it used to make me want to fucking scream. Even healing and love and consciousness being near weaponized as ideology terrains themselves not dissimilarly.

While my life falling apart led me to feel entirely alienated from my local community, bioregion, and America at large, the latter being something I’ve always grappled with, taking a step back from everyone I knew then as a result, including family, it brought me into a resonance that knew it was right for me to feel it all as such. There’s something that happens when you try to hold space across disparaging polarities. Not uncommonly, if you don’t choose a side, you’re an enemy then, even if you aren’t.

I remember getting shut down, watching friend by friend getting shut down trying to envision a way to return to Europe. I am far from an anomaly of sensing such importance. It’s not rooted in running away, guilt, nor shame. Rather empowerment of facing everything one’s intergenerationally for so long been forced to run from.

Those not of the native tribes from here. Those that have too been here a long time, or brand new. Deep down everyone knows a little bit that where we come from has some sense of sacred relevance. How much of humanity’s impulse for healing humans and humanity has subconscious resonance and drunkenness in the multitudes of underlying tensions for healing each’s own severings?

After everything I’ve been through, having been gutted of the simple life I was building out, the thought of participating in rebuilding community where I am feels humbly outgrown now. The burdens, the traumas here, the opportunities, the relational parameters, they are not severings or openings that feel relational as mine to mend or bear.

I appreciate humans and I meet great humans everyday as I go about making a living as a waitress and raising a wee child, but there is a distance because of differences in presence as it pertains to heritage and wonder in explicitness that isn’t really meetable through in the mundane world around me. I find moments regardless, which only reinvigorate the joy and clarity it is for me.

While so many were busy studying and building relationships of different kinds, communities of varying kinds, networking for power and influence, prioritizing learning from hustle culture, academia, right wing or left wing religiosity and meme cultures, I had spent the prior decade prioritizing learning from indigenous experiences and knowledge keepers and learning to trust my own intuitive landscape that had attracted so many as teachers into my life to begin with.

I have paid dearly for this. On all spectrums of not belonging.

It is in an earthly sense, yes, but so too is there some notion of cosmic relevance that all time immemorial heritages once too sensed or knew to varying degrees. Like Lakota recollections more widely known, meaning I’m not recounting anything not widely accessible that is not mine to share, of all of humanity sitting around the fire with Creator in the moment before the last great cycle of time was set into motion.

There is severing in pretending these things don’t or mustn’t matter. Or in pretending they do for some or mustn’t for others. Just as toxic as pretending they are toxic chains.

Grounding it if one is only in proximal locality, or outright forgetting. In that here we are thousands of years later, and still these very same awakenings are right there at the edges knocking. A door I walked through and threw away the return route and fees for. I would die alone before I go back to that kind of amnesia now.

It’s no ignorance I think there is some all going back. But I do see it as ignorance to pretend that humans can heal wholly and holy so without this presence, reciprocation, and consciousness.

From out of my slowness and looking around, too much looking around really, I learned from my experience and that of others to see how one can get sucked into moreso looking around too. But hell, I had a whole lot of grief to work through. Yet, for the first time in my life I also needed to sit that still with the scope of emotional intelligence and intuitive capacities I’d developed in light of all I’d been through.

In doing so, I came to see, however, many I’d have never gifted my time to come to see. Not because of who any were, but because my time was too submersed in nature. Just like falling leaves dancing around me in response to my thoughts and coming to sense me own light through confessions in poetry near twenty years ago now nearly broke me, beauty I saw in looking around near broke me differently.

More than just beauty, but outright synchronistic movements happening between so many. Each with varying degrees of presence and consciousness as to the scopes of it. Somewhere, somehow, removed from any engineering sense, as Iain McGilchrist frames it, though those smoke screens for power plays too present a plenty, God dare I say, visible in it. How crazy is it that I still somewhat hate saying it because of all the dogmas, baggage, and reaches for control all around the world over the ways it is weaponized past and present? There’s a cringe in the word God for me still. But it means not I deny something obviously so challenge to put to words.

Like fucking Limerick. An important ancestral place for me for a particular displacement in my family tree. While I am old enough to have listened to the Cranberries growing up, I didn’t. They were far too main stream for my younger self wanting to get away from everything. But it means more the precise moment I found it, right before they were brought into my field of awareness as reinvigorated traction in the present. I simply thought of them and looked them up, and shortly thereafter, I saw them more, winning awards. With Dolores’s mental health struggles, death back in 2018, and connection to Limerick of course. Learning about her life and story all swirling around me. As I worked through certain lyrics, my mind was blown. In ways it wouldn’t have been if I had listened when I was younger.

Even in total isolation, something of the sacred keeps moving us along. There is as much importance to learn between humans and art the language beyond words as there is with nature. Albeit not entirely transferable.

Not just where, but the why and ways they inform and move through and with me. Though only a few will I ever reveal more openly. I wonder how many more seemingly stolen, displaced, or exiled find themselves similarly more through God and mystery than they do pure traceable reasoning or aversion as impossibility? In all honesty, the specifics matter less to me. I’ve ancestors from other parts of Ireland as well. Though certainly I am not only Irish.

Having said that, when it comes to wonder and awe and integrity with it all, I’ve somewhat transcended them. The specifics. There are ways specifics can over emphasize importance of a locality too closely, just as the lack of specifics can result in too much premature detachment. Specifics becomes a wee lighthearted and laughable too when scaled out to the celestial or Godhead with it.

I wish more people felt that sense of ease and grounding with such terribly constructed tensions so laden in our time.

I wish the inherentness of what humans are now coming to see as mattering, had never been negated through the interjections of Abrahamic nightmare makings all throughout the world.

But I too know that I grieved because the love was never wrong hearted. It was simply misunderstood. Sort of like me. What if we don’t have to fear these things anymore? What if I don’t either?