Having said that, it all fell apart for me. Near all relations in life for me. Not because of material attachment thinking or some devastation of world view fragility. I’d lived in cheap vans for near three years of my life already, and had intimately witnessed both ecological and social and class devastations prior. Rather, paralleling the perfect clashing of amalgamations of shadows costing me near everything. Interiorly and with both settler and indigenous. My lived inheritance is anything but the typical mythos or projection of what it means to be an American of European descent in this land.
Now seen, nevertheless, so too is the sharpened acuity of it all something that can never be unseen. I now walk in this world mundanely mostly alone for the time being. Gutted of the local life I thought I was working towards, however, a much richer potential slowly came into view. Sometimes where we are is truly not where we are meant to be.
As all arduous processes teach the willing, beauty of the mystery unfolded as too revealing itself within me. No longer something I simply saw as existing outside of me and that I could passionately relate to anymore.
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Though hindsight, it had been slowly building from within, so obviously, my entire life. Growing up in a landscape that ceaselessly encultured me away from it. Little did I know the sum of work and trials, depths and layers, I would traverse through, were in whole preparing me for a home coming I could never have in my life dreamed into being all on my own.
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Over a decade ago in the earlier stages of what I would now summate as my own journey towards bioregional awareness development interiorly, I heard that first deliberate call, calling me home. I had a dream of a book. Showing me in such a playful and laughable way, my way within. The sacred is always playful with me. Lovingly. My whole life has it been. It’s how I know integrity with the sacred as guardian or compass or loving from other energies that would not want well for me when it is in presence through a particular moment that we meet.
The dreaming of that book shaking my foundation regardless, in a time when I believed something very different about where it is I was from or should be relationally moving towards, or why that book was selectively even coming to me. Long before I much thought about home or heritage at all. Practically and esoterically, against all logic that had been, was being, would be, fed to me.
In all honesty, I was simply a wild child of a woman that ran around in the woods mostly unseen and unnoticed. I’d even progressed to most outdoor adventures spent wild foraging or scouting for such moments, learning intimately the watershed and ecology where it is I was through the years and seasons. Which is to say, I’d walked away from the well-trodden paths that many years of solo backpacking and then rock climbing had previously led me down.
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It took falling down and being seemingly broken, to make more room for me, however. Prior to it, doubt plagued me. Doubt that I should be pursuing even a different life than the one that presented itself right in front of me that I was in. But something slow and steady, unknowingly perhaps, broke that down for me. Helping me make room for me to see what was always becoming within me.
All the love that filled my life prior and was attracted to me through those inquiries, and my goodness was I blessed, it truly did have to burn away. I never would have made a leap in this way otherwise. Heart wide open, yet with the lived experiences for knowing the need for fierceness with protecting it. One’s own heart ecology. For even having etched out the reaches into such layers. The reasons why, I can only know my own part in the fray. Where I was, however, I can say, wasn’t where I was meant to stay. Or my life wouldn’t have fallen apart how it did, would it have?
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But deep in the shadowy depths of working through my own throes with mental health challenges, having laid it all out in plain sight via creative writing and poetry along the way, all of which landed nowhere, exacerbating the degrees of isolation and my own struggles with absolute failure and loss, somewhere there in it all, I returned to myself, in a radically different way. From out of the ashes and disintegration of too many deaths for counting, remembrance gifted me everything I could need.
Looking back over the works that got me to here, six books that all landed with endless waves of silence, they really were all confession, testimony, endurance, and prayer. As all creative works are ultimately. I see my poetry works released prior as mostly war files with my own mind coming into presence with both individuation and the collective shadow simultaneously. Little more and little less. In that nobody much resonated with my expressions throughout any of those years but revealed in that end more of me to me.
Sometimes, to seemingly lose everything, gifts us everything the same, albeit differently. To swim where madmen drown and to make it to shore and renewal mostly on one’s own, there’s a gratitude that can’t be bought or paid for. Life answered my prayers that had been arising in me, unbeknownst to me, my whole life, in ways I never could have anticipated. And I am freed to need nobody. Not even do I have at present a friend to sit with for hours on end and reflect upon all the beauty that is, with. But I no longer think that’s where my story either ends.
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