Outrage is a part of healing

 Outrage is part of our healing. 

Don't let anyone try to shuffle you away from your anger.
Anger is a wise, cleansing force alerting you to the truth of your worth and to the truth within you.
It's a necessary step in recovering from being violated, personally and collectively.

Don't rush out of your outrage, listen to it and harness it as fuel for wise, informed action on your own behalf. Your anger is part of your power.
Do what so few dare to do: Give your anger a safe, empathic space to be fully, completely felt. Harness it, listen to it. To the degree that you allow yourself to do so, is the degree to which you can increasingly own your power without apology. Anger has so many gifts. Not indiscriminate, projected anger, but the energy of outrage, felt and placed where it truly belongs. Anger has an inner alchemy that heals and isn't contingent on external validation.
Collective female outrage is a nectar that this world needs.

~ Healing the Mother Wound with Bethany Webster

I have felt this. Many times recently. I need to SCREAM!!! Where can I go to just YELL as LOUD as I CAN? Deep into the forest - I do not dare. The edge of a cliff - someone would hear me. Where can I go to TEAR my skin and Bleed? There is no where. They would lock me up or at least worry for the rest of their lives. These strangers who came upon me. There is no where I can be this RAW. SO I cry and I shake and I grind my teeth at night. I want to form a fist, but I am new to expressed anger. I don't know if I  have ever done it well. I feel guilty if I even speak strongly to someone else. And this is not even anger towards anyone, but a feeling of being completely undone. That everything is all messed up and anything I had is gone. 

I am trying. It is good this small raft. It is keeping me afloat. Without this small raft, I would drown and so I love my small raft desperately and all the things that I can carry on it. But it is not the boat and it is certainly not the shore. I am FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR from those places. The great boat with it's string of bright lights and it's music and champagne.. and the shore where I am home, where I can name each tree and feel the cold wind on my face. 

This small raft. 

Is keeping my afloat. I am grateful, I can smile.

And compared with drowning, that smile can somedays feel like laughter and that laughter can sometimes feel like hope and that hope can sometimes feel like love, and I can say I am wonderful here.

Because I am not under water.

watching the last of my breath bubble up as my heart fills with panic.

Yes. I am doing well.

Thanks for asking.

But on the days when I remember and want to smash something - the only thing I can destroy is the only thing I have. And that is the one thing that needs to stay intact. So I punch the water and it ripples and returns to normal and I feel insignificant once again.

Even my rage makes no difference.

Nov. 1st 2018

Tonight was beautiful. I finally felt that Port Hardy was truly still Vancouver Island. There was an immense bonfire and live music under a glowing tent. The sparks from the fire soared up into the dark night sky and a pumpkin walk that lead me there glowed gently with fierce faces and sweet ones as the sounds of the waves made us all one. In the heat of the fire i glanced at a friend and found I was a welcome face to someone again. xo

My heart is healing in the most unexpected way.. and now it is the only way that i can imagine finding healing.

I've always been more at home in other cultures.
Somehow, I found everything i missed about the world of the comox valley and waldorf reverence and festival life, a deeper understanding of the people i know who live here, and a definite intense remembrance of the first place i fell for, Japan.

So after connecting with my own history - German. And accepting that I am Canadian, after all, my childhood was full of farms and lakes and being tucked in with parashut blankets. It was snow and maple syrup forests. It was friends, the best and only i would ever want. It was good and sweet - (until i grew up and was hit with the loss of what i thought it all would be) and so, yes. The land I loved, the people I loved, my mother and father and sister and brother and grandpa and grandma and cousins and aunties and uncles, and parents friends. All of my firsts in life and much of what grounds me to myself, happened between the two oceans. In a place called, Canada - although it has so many other names.

Still, something burst open and I belonged. Once again, in a place where I was a visitor - where I do not know the language or the dances. Where I have not eater what they have eaten or been where they have been. Where I do not even know where to sit or how to speak.

I belong.

Where I only have new aquaintances. 
Where I sit with sorrow and feel content.
Where the sounds made are the screams that I identify with 
and though I do not know the story I feel it's truth.

I am deeply grateful (forever and always) to the Fort Rupert Band and all the Families that welcomed me to their Potlatch, this weekend Oct 12-13 2018

It hit me like never before, that this transporting by drummers and dancers and artists and storytellers - was unwanted, interrupted, and forbidden. The treasures taken and the people completely overlooked, imprisoned, misrepresented, and unseen.

this weekend, i heard the very songs that were silenced. that is not lost on me and i can barely keep the tears away as i type this.

i love this photo. Where the light floods in and through the very heart of the totem giving the eagle or firebird the gentle touch of being seen and calling it to fly again.

Forty by Forty

It hasn't happened yet, i am still a few months away.
I thought I would be old at 40. I think because while I was a child, my mother was in her thirties and so a Parent to a child was Old.
Then I met a whole bunch of incredible woman who truly made me see 40 as the new 20.
By this I mean, rather than looking back at all that they had lived - they were LIVING - and more so, had as much to look forward to as one who had just left home - bags packed & full of dreams.

Maybe it was because they had found Vancouver Island, which if you spend too much time living in, too many walks in the Mountains and too many mornings by the rolling waves of the blue wild ocean, you too begin to dream again and somehow travel backwards into all that the world still thinks is kept for youth.

It is not so. The Soul restless or quiet, is timeless and true.

Yet still, 40 means something. It is no longer a time to have a house - a child or a few- a career for life. It is a time to stand on my own two feet, with my head held steady and a warm gentle knowing look in my eyes.

It is a time to begin to live out of my heart.
To listen to all the things I've always wanted to do. Even if I am the only one who knows or sees these things. There is always the Moon that knows at least a little, when I open my window or run outside and spread my arms wide under her glow!

So what is my list.
Well, most of it is my own, because I am finally learning to wait to share the wishes and wonders, because the pressure closes in too fast and the desperation that I will let the whole world down crashes against me once again.

But, I'll tell you that it's just (shrug) really little things. Things like Less is Less. And Who is Really on your Mind and in Your Heart. And saying Goodbye's and Making Room for the New. * Even while I barely believe that there will be a new to welcome. It is keeping and losing and resting and finding.

Right now,

It is this:

#1   I will have 40 items of Clothing in my closet by the morning of my fortieth Birthday.

*Almost every item of clothing I have kept - is because it lets me touch yesterday and hold onto who I once was forever. I always dress for the world I live in. Every place I have lived has clothed me.

Who am I now. 
I am only sure when I am naked.

With my dinosaur onesie coming fairly close :)  but it's feet are warn and it's softness is gone. And while I think of the velveteen rabbits conversation with the horse, and remember that when most of you is worn away you are finally real. (sigh) It will one day be on my list of letting go.

I have 4 months to go.

Cross your fingers for me.
Whatever the heck it's gonna bring up may hurt like hell - there is a reason, the clothes have been going round and round my laundry cycle for years. unseen. unworn. but here.

If buying something new, makes me feel like I will live forever.
Admitting that it's only clothing, may make me face the fact that I am only skin and bones and flesh.
(and YES so much more!) but still. Letting go has more to do with dying then living.. you get there -but only after walking through the empty places with the shock of all that's gone.

I wouldn't be able to handle my thoughts and get through a day, except that all this over thinking passion and sensitivity makes me an interesting writer, maybe, well, i like me - even if the answer is no.

I'm scared and sad and wonderfully okay.
Writing is my most favouritist thing.

The Way It is

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

- William Stafford

Thank you to Philip Thatcher whose voice I hear when I read these words. These words that carry me through blurry thoughts and the story of the knight whose call to wake up and take one step that is truly your own, has both haunted and healed me.

home day

It has been about three weeks that I have been an outreach worker and that has been a distraction from the path of sparkling light that i was following. This golden thread (see poem) I lost it somehow and I also feel that Gods presence has dissipated too. 

I can see the trees and hear the wind as it rolls under the branches causing the leaves to be as waves.
I can see the brightening of them as the sun comes for a few moments and lifts everything.
I can hear the birds.

But i am cardboard.
My hands dry. My face flat and my heart just a messy scribble with a marker.

It is the rain beating down that awakens me.

I am tired.
I am not who I was and not yet who I will be.

Only when I am all alone can I remember my body heavily sighing out each breath. 
I breath deep but them my exhale is like a dragon puffing air. Like the smoke from dying embers just snuffed. 

Speak to me in poetry
in poetry and rainstorms

The sunshine and blue skies do nothing for me.

I read somewhere that it is healing when the outer landscape corresponds with the inner landscape.

I am acquainted with loss and grief. I have so many more tears to cry.
This is a good place to be uncertain about life. 

I am hidden away
I am close to eagles and otters

Although it is just the beginning of June. Here, it is Autumn. 
A time to curl up with a book and to be quiet with ones own thoughts.