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I Am

I am

I am the Sun

I can be harnessed

for your own 

but you can never 

keep me 

from radiating

I am the workhorse

I will sweat and writhe

do your bidding if you are worthy

and if you aren’t 

I will buck you

right off

I am the phoenix

I will rise 

from the ashes of my own creation

when I’ve burned 

everything

down I am the canary

I will show you the fumes 

of your own destruction

before you burn

everything

down I am the mermaid

I will twist from the grasp

you held too tight

I will vanish in the waves

gone before 

stunned eyes

I am

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Milagro de la mariposa... Mira en sus ojos...

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Cedar and Rain

Western red cedar boils on the stove, releasing her healing magic into the air.  It has been too dry here and a hacking cough has started.  Your throat is raw just from the act of breathing in and out again and again. Raw from the feelings you haven’t let yourself feel through to completion.  Raw from the words you haven’t said.

Rain begins to drip down slowly then comes in waves, pounding wildly on the roof. Splashing on the windows lulls you into a different space.  Cedar and rain are washing insides out.  They drain the resistance from you and leave you bare, vulnerable, open.

Changing, changing, building quickly into something else. Thunder releases and rain slows in awed response. Scents have transformed.  Once they carried the unrelenting burden of sadness, fear, and desolation.  Now they carry something else.  Fear is not your companion now… only an exhausted knowing that you must have brought through from your ancestors.    

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Lan Su Chinese Garden 

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Light through my brambles

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you must whisper

when shattered pieces

keep you 

from flying again 

into the calm of wild seas

they shimmer there 

languishing exposed

in each harsh sunray

when eyes can do nothing now

but watch clouds pass

from rock bottom of that well

black into azure and startling white

they blink back tears

burning with the memories

of wide open fields

 when heart suddenly dwells

on the outside 

beyond bone walls

where no harness exists

it flickers there

stuttering in exposed panic

with shallow breath

when each cell turns

twisted insides out

contents spilling

flooding swiftly away

they writhe in fearful question

quivering into the void

of empty spaces

before

flesh knits together anew

or eye sees the truth of that sky

before

heart thrums with birth-right abandon

or cells fill in with light of that love

within each breath

and into 

every 

single molecule

you must

whisper 

yes

-tyanne conner 2017

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And then I came home to this light

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The Birthday Curse

The elders told me that when I made the turn into my 40s, magical things would start to happen.  I grasped onto this idea to finally break the birthday curse.  The curse that has plagued me as far back as I can recall and perhaps even longer than that.   Last year, I was dreadfully sick for 6 weeks- gasping, coughing, rolling around sleeplessly night after night.  March 2015 found me in Australia, finally able to visit one of my best friends who had been deported back there in 2003.  Right after I touched down in Sydney, I came down with dengue fever from a mozzie bite I had gotten in Bali.  In 2014, my great auntie Lorraine died on my birthday while I was having lunch with Sunette in South Korea.  Auntie had been sick and was on her way from life to light and had gone through trauma I didn't yet know about.  But I felt her leave us at the moment she passed.   While attempting to acclimate to a new country, unknown job, new lifestyle, new adventure, my best friend's father died after a horrible accident.  The funeral was on my birthday in 2013.  The list goes on and on, back and further back.   Mom's back injury and disc rupture and emergency surgery, grandmother's heart attack, grandfather's hospitalization, my first big car accident with an undiagnosed concussion, another illness, another car accident...etc...   A long, painful history of traumas right around my birthday leaves me feeling anxious every year as my birthday approaches.  And every year I make a commitment to myself and those around me that this year the curse will be broken.  The words of wise and wonderful women in my life left me with absolute confidence that this year, the year I enter into my 40s, would be the dawn of a new era.  It has been, but not quite in the way that I was expecting. Thithter and I went on a Caribbean cruise with stops in San Juan, Grand Turk, and Nassau.  It was hysterical, and ridiculous, and perfect.  Two days before my birthday, I began to get an angry sore throat.  This was not really a surprise or a blip on my radar- on the flight over, I was stuck in a seat between two terribly sick men.  So, a sore throat.  That would not stop me from ushering in a new way of being in the world.   Dengue fever did not stop me from snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef on my birthday two years earlier, so a little sore throat would definitely not stop me. I was absolutely committed to seeing what was left of the coral beauty before it bleaches fully and dies from the warming of the waters.  While my skin erupted in a terrible rash, dizziness from dehydration and nausea took me over, while the worst headache of my life pounded through my being, I began to document symptoms. If I lost consciousness, Glenn could tell the doctors what had happened, and so with that plan in place, we carried on to witness the beauty of the wild Australian ocean.  (Breathe easy folks- I had already known the course of the illness and known from stories of others and from research that hospitalization couldn't do more fore me than hydrate, ease the symptoms of pain, and mask the nausea.  I knew that if I was going to die, I would die whether in hospital or lying in the hotel room.  Pharmacists had helped me choose the medications that would get me through if I was destined to get through.  This choice had been made with the utmost consciousness and was perfectly in line with my views and values.) So on March 9th, 2017 on Grand Turk Island, Doni and I went out on a catamaran and went snorkeling.  Some spectacular fish found us and swirled and danced with us. Then we went on to dance on a deserted beach and we danced in the ocean with rum punch in our hands.  We lived. Fully.  And so I believed the curse was over.   Silly me.  

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Ocean and Sky 

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Well, this will do for my birthday celebration

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Thithterth, identical thithterth 

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Fire Inside

The catalyst caught me by surprise, as catalysts are often wont to do.  He looked one way but felt another completely and the chain reaction ignited with the first touch.  My breath caught and his eyes widened as he sensed me feeling him on the most intimate of levels.  Our connection was one of those that shakes you to your core.  The way déjà vu feels when it catches your body, twisting you around yourself, catapulting you through time. Future and past colliding right here in the present.  

The message swept across my cells and I grasped the potential our souls could reach if we were both in our bravest states.  But he wasn’t, and I was alone again on that journey.  At least that was the first story I told myself – that I’m abandoned again.  All that burgeoning potential receded back into the place of waiting and wanting.  

Losing myself in the forest was the only way I could escape the sadness and disappointment. There in the shadows, the trees whispered that this was the way.  My hands stretched out, reached for them and I was suddenly attuned to their voices.  They have always been talking but I was never on their frequency, their wisdom lost amidst the chaos of my thoughts.  Finally, the hypothetical transformed into knowing.

The forests speak quietly at first, so low that you can’t even sense the vibrations.  As you return again and again, your committed presence is recognized and they begin to gift you more.   They know to ease you in, the way the sun eases you slowly into the day.  The sun recognizes its own potential for damage if it shone down suddenly. If it never gave warning, its daggers would explode into your optic nerve, making you retreat back down toward the darkness. So the sun knows to send beacons of light past the horizon giving gentle alerts that it will be soon rising in all its devastating heat and brilliance.  Not all the elements know to go this slow.  

Without warning, his fire burned me inside out. No one else had shone that whitehot or been able to send light rays straight through me.  Maybe he couldn’t help it, couldn’t control it.  Or maybe I could simply see right into him and there was no way to look away from that flame.

Tiny, trapped seeds of the magnificent Ponderosa must meet flame in order to explode open to the elements.  They can lay there in waiting for decades, needing one simple thing.  When finally exposed to light, the wind and rain, those vulnerable seeds can’t help but to reach out and grow into everything they are meant to be. Dormant, waiting for so long, maybe I needed his fire to release me and leave me exposed.  

Among the trees I finally knew intimately this most natural of processes- that the forest relies on flames to clear and to release. To make way for what is next.  And I suddenly understood something else as well. Fire must move on or it dies. It has to go or it will run out of fuel and flicker into nothingness.  

So I watched him go on and I must admit that it still stings.  But I’m still burning.  

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