(Scrapbooked memories from my underworld journey and beyond)
🎶“morning has broken, like the first morning. blackbird has spoken, like the first bird. praise for the singing, praise for the morning. praise for the springing fresh from the word...”🎶
this april is so full of magesty. it's only the 4th, and i've already lost count of the number of ways it has taken my breath away.
Free citizens of the United States of America should not have to beg for our rights. We must expect legislators to stand up for our rights and back down from their threats of medical tyranny. SB 277 is an outrageous, extreme act of oppression against a free people.
No Contact is removing your choking hands from your own throat. If someone offered me a million dollars to be in that relationship (or anything like it) again, I wouldn’t take it. This is the relief that No Contact and codependency recovery offer in time. I still believe she is a dear person with a good heart; I still miss her companionship, especially during times when I can't connect with friends; I still cry every time I talk about her if you let me talk deeply enough to reach the trauma I'm still releasing. But nothing could persuade me to go back into the hellhole of being in relationship with a person with complex mental illness and signs of personality disorders.
I recognize not everyone has the freedom to go No Contact, due to coparenting or other extenuating circumstances. I understand not everybody wants to. I’m grateful for this freedom and choice. I don’t take it for granted. I was able to completely and permanently walk away from an unhealthy situation. I've been able to ease, in time, back into a normal life. I'm still getting there. Narcissists don’t have the capacity to do that. For them there is no “normal” life to ease back into. There never has been. They can discard you, erase all traces of you from their lives, replace you with a new FP, partner, source of supply; but none of this will resolve their pain because they can’t leave themselves.
With the care I’ve given my body over the past few months, I see how beautiful it is, but I can’t enjoy it. My daily uniform is the pajamas I’ve worn forever and 30 pounds ago. The shirts are all stained with healing oils that haven’t worked. Most days I put my hair in a ponytail and under a hat without brushing it. In a ponytail, my hair is more silver now than amber.
I’ve become the disabled version of my dream girl, the one I met when I was 22 and then years later in another form. The former I wanted to be. You know those people who make you feel the potential in yourself. The latter I just wanted to be with. For the same reason. The potential in myself. Both times I was thwarted. Like I am now with healing. Sometimes I can’t make a thing work, no matter how hard I try.
I’ll never realize my potential in any of those ways. Sometimes life isn’t meant to be for growing old and growing into your full self. Sometimes life ends shortly after birth, with no silver in your hair and no dreams of your own realized.
I’ve had much more than that. I’ve enjoyed a lot of dreams. The ones I’ve slept with at night, and the ones long held in daylight and let go.
I’m terrified. Please pray for my back muscles to loosen and for my hypermobile vertebrae t5 to stay to the right, off of the rhomboid region. There are no words to describe my suffering. I need a miracle.
I need the highest prayers today. It’s crunch time for me and my unfolding understanding of divinity. I pray to get out of pain. Envisioning looseness and less volume in my back muscles to start. Thy will be done. Let it be. 🙏
The ability to let go of people who would cage me is a gift. I KNOW this. Still, I don’t like anticipating the letting go.
“You’re not caged,” they say with heads shaking and eyes rolling, “Your door is unlocked. Stop spewing your ignorant bullshit and just keep your dirty ass at home.” Yep, actual words I’ve been told because I dare to *gasp* go out and live what I can of my shitty life.
Here’s the thing... when people cling in fear to a cage of their own making, eventually the powers that be will come around and lock the door from the outside, knowing the clingers won’t complain, rather they’ll give thanks for their own imprisonment.
I refuse the cage. I sing from the trees and the sky. I’m done with anyone who doesn’t honor MY choice for ME. I don’t need to sing for freedom, because I’ve already chosen it. Freedom is already mine.
We’re all birds with a choice to make. Until that choice is taken. History tells us that once they’ve locked the door from the outside, it’s too late. Our hearts and guts know it too if we listen.
and dares to claim the sky.
his wings are clipped and
so he opens his throat to sing.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
Memory. Coincidentally I’ve been thinking this morning about the stream inside me. That stream the free bird floats upon to where the sky begins. Buried under all the work and pressure and pain, the stream is crystal clear as melting snow and teeming with life. It flows down my cheeks to the corners of my mouth as I write the deepest truths of connection and loneliness. My capacity to write lives within it. My connection with kindred spirits is there along with all the joyful things that effect my vitality. I KNOW the stream is there inside, underneath. And, yes, I have a fear of losing access to it. I know the words are in me; it’s just been so long since I’ve felt them truly flowing. I miss that quality of song. I miss those downy feathers catching the wind. I miss the snapping of little fingers, creating a million crickets, and filling the darkness. The bird’s dawn bright lawn becomes the fat worm’s grave of dreams I suppose. Either way is preferable to the cage. Most people just don’t get it. They’re even more batshit delusional than they were a year ago.
Memory. Does the truly free bird actually sing? I wonder. Or does she just fly and eat and mate? And where does she get the energy for all of that? In 2021 ⬆️ I wrote about losing my inspiration to *sing.* Without the pressure of the cage, the artesian well in me is still dry. I get tempted lately to fill up the emptiness with merlot and feel alive that way. Because I can do that again without feeling sick. For now. Part of me is fine with that choice, desires that even. But many (most?) parts me are unclear about what they want. I wonder how so much time can pass without more clarity. Is there really THAT much freeze in my system?… Yes. The cage is wide open, and the bird so often chooses to lie on the floor, too uninspired and frozen to do much of anything. Who knew this would be the case less than a year after really meeting the feeling of freedom and stepping into that realm? Who knew with the sky and all the trees to choose from that the floor of the cage would so often be the choice? Who knew that I’d desire again at times to drink wine in order to feel my life force, when I know where that road led for my gut and my toe and my body as a whole? 🤷♀️ Why do I not go out and find places where the other free birds gather? Why do I not improve my nest? Why do I spend what feels like so much of my days in stillness and in the absence of desire? I can view the freeze as a *son of a bitch*. Or I can view it as a survival pattern of the little one whose system capped the intensity so often in anticipation of death that she never developed authentic desires. I don’t know what to do with that young part, but I know alcohol is not what she wants and writing is likely not what she wants either, or at least she wants something more/deeper than writing. She wants connection and she wants to feel her purpose. I’m not totally clear about how to consistently give her what she needs. I keep doing the work, and I work through my resistance to doing the work. Intoxicants take me out of connectedness and presence. Alcohol, internet, tv, *book learning*, even to an extent writing and eating when those aren’t inspired by real thirst for the flow of words and real empty-gut hunger for food… those all take me out of Self energy and out of my body and away from my parts. Maybe the little one who wants connection and purpose just needs my listening hand on my body, “I’m here; I’m listening.” I could choose to stay on the floor of the cage, listening constantly and sipping water when she’s thirsty, until she guides me to do something else. Hmmm…
