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An Unconditional Love Story: Take Flight, Sisterhood

Issue 5: June 25, 2021

I hit the ground running June 2019. I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes again. I had unconsciously walked into a gunfight between two alpha males, survived, and sorted through the large wake of trauma left behind. I had incurred the tragic and spontaneous passing of my father-in-law, supported my husband and his family through their loss, and led a memorial service for the first time. I had been verbally and emotionally beaten down by my family who couldn’t hear me or be bothered with the generational pain I was cycling through, and all of this occurring within a two week time period. I was left with three women who understood what I was going through: my sister-in-law, my Yoga Therapist, and Fernanda. All of them were Intuitives but Fernanda didn’t know that about herself, yet, but she was always there for me, unconditionally.

Back out on the road, the backpackers’ voices from Mount Weather started ringing in my head again saying they were headed for Harpers Ferry, WV. That seemed as good a place as any to begin my journey back to me. It wasn’t far in case an emergency happened calling me back to help the kids, but worlds away from the pain - a place where I could feel free again and depend on the strength of the Universe to ferry me out of this difficult terrain.

After some effort, I touched down in a little boutique bed and breakfast, the Harpers Ferry Guest House on Washington Street, caddy-corner to the headquarters for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. I brought my bags inside but dropped them immediately and headed down to the river. There was so much I needed to get out. I found a sandy pathway along the banks of the Shenandoah River, one of two rivers converging in that area. I climbed out to stand on boulders lodged within the river bed that had found their way there eons ago, water rushing around me while I stared at the mouth where the two rivers met, the Shenandoah and Potomac. I just yelled. I yelled and yelled and yelled merging my noise with the sounds of the rivers and overpowered it in some instances to feel my breadth. The bridge nearby with road warriors driving from Virginia to West Virginia, and likewise in reverse, was busy with traffic. I was in eyesight but I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care who saw me in my pain. My yelling turned into dancing and it felt like I was now putting on a show for anyone looking. I got a few honks from truck drivers going by and I took a bow in my mind. That first release was out at least.

Afterwards, I just walked trying to pick up any positivity wherever I looked, and which was looking for me, too. Through simple pleasures and sequenced signs coming through, I walked down Washington Street from the guest house to a little restaurant I picked out in the historic old town of Harpers Ferry. There was a small box I saw sitting outside about halfway on my walk with a hurriedly scribbled sign that read “Free Books.” It caught my eye. I thumbed through the small collection mostly consisting of child rearing books but inside I found the widely known book I hadn’t read, yet, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” along with another that brought a startling buzz.

The title caught me first, “The Setting Sun and the Rolling World,” by Charles Mungoshi. As I flipped the book over, my last name appeared right before me. “Heinemann: African Writers Series,” which was the publishing company. Heinemann wasn’t a name you saw everyday. It was a collection of short stories written by a young man growing up in Zimbabwe in the 1950s & 60s when “the old, traditional values of rural life were contrasted with the chaos and moral corruption of the city and generations clash as the past vies with the future.” I couldn’t have asked for a more poetically scripted read over a sunset dinner alone. I texted a picture of the book to my husband I was intermittently connecting with to offer whatever I could. He thought the book was very cool and that made me happy connecting with a little something though we were physically distant.

The next morning I joined the older couple running the guest house for breakfast as their only guest in the house. As I waited, the woman said I could walk around the living area which had an expansive library with thought-provoking artwork on the walls. Artisan work by quiltmakers from a little Tennessee county I wasn’t familiar with along with posters of festivals and newspaper articles were hung. I ran my fingers over the racks of books on the top shelf and was surprised to see a copy of Marianne Williamson’s book, “Return to Love,” a book recommended to me by my Yoga Therapist. I pulled it off the shelf and asked the woman, Ruth, almost done with her food preparations, if she had ever read this book. She said dryly, “Yeah, a long time ago.” I smiled back, understanding from her response she might have been a little under-watered in love herself for a little too long, too. I could relate.

The two of us sat down at the table. I wasn’t sure how the conversation was going to go. I started asking about the artwork and posters on the wall. Her face lit up to about a 40 watt bulb. “Those are from the county I come from originally, just over the Virginia border in Tennessee. Johnson City.” I could see her admiration for the place. Without asking Ruth another question she offered, “Those posters are from the Summer festival they have every year. I ran the newspaper there.” Our conversation was now off and running.

Ruth told me later after breakfast she was going to leave for a doctor’s appointment and wasn’t sure how long she’d be gone in case I needed anything. “I think I’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ll probably go hiking the Appalachian Trail for a little while, but I hope your doctor’s appointment goes well.” “Thank you,” Ruth said back. “I’m on my third round of chemo,” answering my unasked question about the head wrap she had been wearing. My heart went out to the brave-faced warrior who stood before me and all the dreams she might have left behind including that little newspaper back in Johnson City. Just then, her partner came walking from the garage into the kitchen briskly. He was wearing a gray t-shirt with big, black, bold lettering that spelled out, “Apathy,” answering another unasked question why Ruth had been so under-watered. But it also felt like a message for me, a little more of something I could practice so untrained in my gifts as an Empath. Here I was taking on Ruth’s pain when I was trying to let go of mine.

“So you’re heading over to the AT this morning?,” the man asked, not catching his name. “Yeah, I’m taking some time away and thought that’d be a good place to start,” I responded back. “Well, the AT headquarters is just right across the street, so head there first. They’ll give you all the information you need,” the man said. Ruth followed seamlessly behind saying, “You can take one of our walking sticks,” and waved her hand directing my eyes to the corner where there were three hand-carved walking sticks leaning against the wall, handles worn to an almost polished look. I felt each of the different walking sticks and chose the one that fit the palm of my hand the best and most easily. I felt ready to take my first steps into the wilderness.

“Thank you so much!,” smiling back at Ruth who was blinded by the beam of light I was shining at her. She averted her gaze and said, “Okay,” and we awkwardly parted ways. I headed back upstairs to throw on some hiking pants, tank top, sunscreen, packed up my backpack with a journal and a scribbling notebook I called “first drafts,” some pens, the books I’d gotten from the free book box, a couple granola bars nabbed from home, and a bottle of water. I was ready to adventure and see where the trail would take me.

I picked up a map from the AT headquarters across Washington Street with no real plans of using it, more for safety, but I asked a couple questions using buzzwords I picked up from the backpackers, and headed up the hill to find where the trail started, right behind Storer College. I couldn’t even start the trail without a wealth of emotion coming over me from the history I was steeping deep within. I read bronze, patinated placards along the main walkway leading to a large building, the library, that told me the story. Founded in 1865 upon the heels of the Emancipation Proclamation to begin educating the formerly enslaved, Storer College was unique because it wasn’t considered a “historically black college.” While predominantly black, the college accepted all races, as well as both genders, males and females, which was, in the words of Frederick Douglas, particularly unique because it was still taboo to educate females. I stopped to breathe in all the life and hope Storer College might have begun to bring in, hoping for even more, but I now saw the place as more of a mausoleum rather than ground ready to be sown.

“I stood, pushing up with my walking stick. I was finally headed over the walking bridge crossing the Potomac River into Maryland as the sun was beginning its call to set. I felt at peace now walking over that bridge leaving something good behind me while the torrent of water rushed underneath. All of a sudden, I thought I heard my name being yelled out but quickly thought I was mistaken. I heard it again. I looked back and standing on the river bank was Katarina waving her arms yelling for me. I started running back thinking that something was wrong with the kids again.”

I found my way to the trailhead just behind the main building and saw signs for Jefferson’s Rock. Always having been a fan of Thomas Jefferson, I was immediately attracted and started winding myself along the trail less than a foot wide, already seeing a mother deer with her fawn at the steps of an old cemetery. I stopped to read a few of the headstones, and paid my respects to the fallen a century ago. I headed on and finally got to the clearing that was Jefferson’s Rock and understood why the signs were pointing me there. There were four large slab stones piled one on top of the other approximately eight feet by twenty feet in dimension and each weighing several hundred tons. It was a feat of nature I was looking at as if a cairn, a man-made stack of stones, had been created by a cosmic traveler the size of the Empire State Building and it was this rock that Thomas Jefferson sat on making his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” his first publication. From that position he wrote, “The passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge is perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in Nature. You stand on a very high point of land. On your right comes up the Shenandoah, having ranged along the foot of the mountain a hundred miles to seek a vent. On your left approaches the Potomac in quest of a passage also. In the moment of their junction they rush together against the mountain, rend it asunder and pass off to the sea… This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic.” I had to agree.

After taking in the full breadth of the dynamic scenery, I made some small talk with a couple traveling down from Pennsylvania while I nibbled on one of my granola bars and took swigs from my water bottle. I then took the trail down to the main part to find the little town teaming with life from tourists learning more on the infamous John Brown slavery rebellion and people walking along the banks of the rivers. Looking to get back into a more natural setting, I set my sights on crossing the walking bridge to the Maryland side but was stopped again by the vision of a beautiful, mostly blonde-headed family playing a lawn game I’d never seen before. I watched from a distance but still couldn’t make out the game they were playing and saw an older woman that appeared to be the matriarch sitting on a pink checkered blanket. She was wearing pink and many of the children were wearing pink, too.

I walked up to the warmly weathered face watching a smile grace hers as it graced mine and I asked, “What is this game you’re playing? I’ve never seen it before.” In an indistinguishable, lilted accent she said, “It’s an old traditional game from Sweden where I come from called Kubb.” I turned to watch the kids having fun playing a game that looked like a cross between lawn chess and croquet and my thought went to my own three littles boys and missed them more than I had been consciously aware of. “I’ll have to find this game online,” I said. “My kids would love it.” She smiled and I felt naturally inclined to kneel down and engage further with this woman using my walking stick to keep myself propped up with knees off the ground.

Minutes later, another very blonde woman also wearing pink walked up. It was her daughter named Katarina, named for her mother I was speaking with, like a Swedish carbon copy of me and my mother named Kathryn. I quickly learned that Katarina also had a twin just like me who was still back at the hotel getting dressed for the day. The synchronicity of these similarities aligning was a clear sign I was in the right place at the right time. I asked, “Did you guys put out a memo for everyone to wear pink?” They started looking at themselves and at each other and the kids and were amazed. “No, we hadn’t,” the two Katarinas said almost in unison. I said back, “Even your picnic blanket is pink.” They had no idea how much of a family unit they had created. It was beautiful to me.

We all started talking about everything, all different parts of a woman’s journey. I learned from older Katarina about her hardships back in the old country, the hardship of losing an infant child, and how her other daughter, younger Katarina’s twin, was in remission from cancer. She went on to say that after and through it all, she and her husband had received so many blessings which I could see in abundance all around me with four children and thirteen grandchildren running around exuberantly. They were all there for a family reunion. It had been years. I felt like I was intruding but they insisted on continuing our conversation. The other sister hadn’t arrived yet, so I finally put my knees to the ground. It had already been an hour of talking at that point.

Younger Katarina then told me how she, her husband, and three kids were living on the West Coast but were looking to move East. I could feel she needed to deepen her roots beyond what the Los Angeles crowd was offering and how her anxiety was taking the brunt of it. Then she said, “What about you? What brings you here?” “Here we go again,” I thought, deciding on which part of the truth to bring up first. I brought up enough of the hellride I’d been on for them to get the picture. I could feel the mother’s heart of older Katarina reach out. “You’re so strong and wise. I can’t believe what you’ve gone through,” younger Katarina spoke out, holding back tears. I appreciated her thoughts while simultaneously wishing none of it had ever really happened and wishing I could tell more of a story about peace.

Older Katarina seemed to have been building up some key points of wisdom in her mind as a small kindness so I didn’t have to feel like being strong meant being alone. She was a woman of a different generation and knew what women had had to go through and the struggle. She said, “My husband and I used to teach Sunday school. I don’t know what your beliefs are, but we’re Mormon and we believe that everyone not only has a guardian angel but an army of angels surrounding them.” I could feel the walls holding back my tears begin to come down now. I believed her. I could see them in my mind’s eye infinitely extending from me and beyond like the reflection of many mirrors I was holding up to the great mirror in the sky. All these angels had me.

Just then, the twin sister who had been back at the hotel came running up to the pink picnic blanket. I was excited to meet her finally but she was a little frantic. She was yelling, “Have you seen..?,” trailing off with a name I couldn’t catch. I could tell it was one of her children and she couldn’t find them. The two Katarinas jumped into action as her fierce protectors. I went looking, too. It took less than five minutes for one of the brothers to mention that her child was just below the line of sight on the other side of the rivers’ retaining wall. It was clear the family’s tolerance for any anxious moments were pushing a maximum.

Once the energy settled, I could feel it was my time to move on. I had been there for four hours and had essentially become a major player in their family reunion. Katarina was a little sad to see me go, happy to have someone there to bring in a different tone. She didn’t want to disconnect so she asked if it’d be okay to get my email. I took another minute there for her to program it into her phone. I stood, pushing up with my walking stick. I was finally headed over the walking bridge crossing the Potomac River into Maryland as the sun was beginning its call to set. I felt at peace now walking over that bridge leaving something good behind me while the torrent of water rushed underneath. All of a sudden, I thought I heard my name being yelled out but quickly thought I was mistaken. I heard it again. I looked back and standing on the river bank was Katarina waving her arms yelling for me. I started running back thinking that something was wrong with the kids again. Halfway through my sprint, getting closer to shore, I could finally make out what she was saying. “I wanted to take your picture!” I was a little confused hearing that. “Something to remember you by! Is that okay?” Never being asked that question before, a split second went by for me to answer, “Sure.” So I stood on the bridge in my hiking pants, tank top, backpack and walking stick while Katarina clicked from the shore. “Ill send it to you!” she said. I thought that was cool and it’d be an interesting connection if she did.

I never did get that email. I was glad Katarina felt like she could let me go, too.

[wildstrandsblog]

An Unconditional Love Story: Take Flight Sisterhood

Issue 4: June 11, 2021

It was the day of Bampa’s memorial service. More than fifty people were gathering in my home. My sister-in-law with her husband and four daughters were staying with us, too. It was as if I was walking in a daydream, still within a bubble but now floating. There was a surrealness to have walked the roads I’d just been on, torn down by my own family but being built up by the family I married into, a spiritual family. I knew however things would go for me on this Hail Mary spirit quest completely surrendered, I just had to keep going like I had always done, one foot in front of the other, for myself and for my children. It’s what I had been training myself to do since I was twenty-five, an untrained Empath taken in by the full breadth of Unconscious almost reaching totality and surviving.

I spent four hours writing the service for Bampa. It came so fluidly. I cried reliving Bampa’s story with his wife, just as I do now. They met each other in high school. He was a football player. She was not a cheerleader. They were from two different social circles but there was something magnetic about her green eyes that pulled him into her conversations. Magically, Sugarloaf’s “Green Eyed Lady” would always play whenever he drove her home from their smalltown diner only to find out later he had been the one playing it. They would remain written on each other’s hearts over decades, each of them creating families of their own, losing family, and moving forward in their own contained lives.

They reconnected over social media after both living years on their own post-divorce and death of spouses. They met up for a simple lunch. She couldn’t believe she was meeting with “Bama” after all these years. He never knew he’d have the chance to see his green-eyed lady again after fighting off cancer. After that lunch, they remained locked in friendship, happy they were even being given a second chance at that. The love they found in friendship slowly turned into something more as they began to understand the road to more they were on, something unique, something special and precious, and maybe something the world had never seen before.

She boiled over in love for Bama and did the hard work no woman in my opinion should have to do, keeping that emotion bottled up and waiting. They drove back to their small town after a year of dating where they walked up to the lighthouse which guided boats back to safety from the treacherous waters of Lake Erie. They stood there at the top as Bama finally felt free enough to speak the words she had been longing to hear. It must’ve felt like eons. “I love you,” he simply said. Without any hesitation, the levees of her heart were finally able to break free. She said, “Oh my god, I love you, too! I’ve held that in for so long.” A year later he would propose to her in the same spot, in that same lighthouse on Lake Erie.

They married and lived happily on top of a mountain for three more years. His death came just days before their third anniversary. On the day their anniversary came with Bama no longer there, his wife received a gift from him in the mail. After all these years, he had finally planned something for her but wasn’t there to give it. It was a framed copy of Sugarloaf’s sheet music of “Green Eyed Lady.” She, as well as all of us, were brought to tears in an instant seeing this eternal sentiment. It felt like an absolute unfairness to have something so beautiful become so devastating not even Shakespeare would have written something so tragic. That on the last day of the school year with plans to celebrate, Bampa’s wife would come home to find his body laying cold on his office floor on Father’s Day weekend. Here I was trying to guide all of us through this horrendous and tremendous loss. If there was any mercy, any feelings I had from the recent trauma were easily pushed aside with the bigger picture in place.

“She understood. She had been there. It was hard. It was a process, but she was there for it. She was there for me. I didn’t know how I was going to get through it. She promised me it would all get better and it’d all be worth it. I believed her in my soul. I could feel it.”

With a group of fifty or more people there for Bampa’s service, we congregated in the front yard holding nine red balloons for all the grandchildren in Bampa’s legacy. We headed to the park I had found with my husband down the road with a large canopied tree and two large stones positioned at the base. I had led my husband there days before in our first moments after the news, contemplating and processing the loss. Those two large stones felt like thrones to me made for a king and queen. The larger stone covered the smaller boulder from the outside elements and the smaller one supported the weight of the larger boulder leaning on its side. As the group of fifty or so of us walked down the road dressed in our finest with a grouping of red balloons floating above our heads, I heard the voice of my neighbor's daughter ring out, “Mommy! Come look! There’s a parade!”

I delivered a message that day that came straight from a heart that still cries for my father-in-law and the great loss of a present love. Upon my final words, I asked the group to move to the large field just beyond where we would have a balloon release. Before releasing the balloons, I asked that we place our hands over our hearts and in unison speak out, “We love you Bama because!,” leaving our last words to silently float into the air. As we watched the final balloons float away, my oldest son was inconsolably crying. I cradled him in my lap while having Bampa’s sister come tell me the catharsis she received from the service. Followed closerly behind was my husband’s boss and Chief Operating Officer, a man known for pivoting small businesses into Fortune 500, say my delivery was “ambitious, well-executed, and hit all the points.” I felt like I had done the job I came to do.

After everyone left, I finally felt for the first time the speeds I had needed to travel at to get me through. I sat down loosening my hair a bit to enjoy the Bear Chase beer I’d come down off the mountain with for my husband and now others to share. We sat outside on our patio with my sister-in-law and her husband and all our seven kids running around. We had thrown a couple of pizzas into the oven to make for an easy dinner. When the kids kept asking where the pizza was, I thought I’d take a look. They were in the oven still, frozen. The oven had never been turned on. I became frustrated feeling like I had done everything, assumed every responsibility for all, and I couldn’t even get help to make sure the oven was turned on to feed the kids. I was breaking again.

I asked my husband what had happened. He felt the immediate pressure to defend himself again. It didn’t get better. We began fighting in front of family and the kids. I asked him to step outside so we could try to clear things up. I asked for some empathy, even just a simple hug. It had been a long and strenuous day for me, let alone the week. He still couldn’t find it within himself to reach out. Being the Empath, the one who was feeling everyone’s pain and delivering the catharsis everyone needed, receiving nothing for herself, after having done and gone through everything, I still remained alone. All I could do was walk, crying, being forced out again because no one could or would feel my pain. It felt like there was no place for me even though I could immerse myself in every place, every time, with everyone.

I found myself underneath the large canopied tree from the service reflecting longingly on the two stones. It felt like the kind of love they held within them was not only rare and nearly impossible, but in the event of that miracle happening, it would still just be taken away in an instant. I cried. I cried for the loss of such a superior love taken and I cried for myself. The man I was married to wasn’t covering me from the outside elements I was experiencing even though I was there supporting him. Just then I felt a light touch on my left shoulder. It was my sister-in-law. She had come to find me and just sit with me. She laid her hand on my thigh and listened. She listened to me even when it was pain I was experiencing through the relationship with her brother. She understood. She had been there. It was hard. It was a process but she was there for it. She was there for me. I didn’t know how I was going to get through it. She promised me it would all get better and it’d all be worth it. I believed her in my soul. I could feel it. Having someone, another female, see me, well, I knew then there wasn’t anything more I could do. Everything, now, became about myself.

A couple of days later after my sister-in-law left, my husband and I were back in another fight. I told him I would no longer stick around for it. He’d have Fernanda to help with the kids. I was going to leave. I didn’t know for how long or even to where. This time I wasn’t going to point my sights on anyone taking me in either. The Universe had me. I trusted Her. I was in Her hands. As I hit the road, the voices of the backpackers on top of Mount Weather came back and rang out with clarity. I was heading to Harpers Ferry, WV, the middle point of the Appalachian Trail, where two rivers converge and three states meet. This is where I would start my journey back to me.

[wildstrandsblog]

An Unconditional Love Story: Take Flight, Sisterhood

Issue 3 - May 28, 2021

It was June 2019 and I was going through that metaphorical, misty fog in my mind alone from a set of experiences I had just lived through. Nothing was making any sense to me. I didn’t know why when I left my home for my best friend, Lauren’s, home to find a little peace I would find a combustible horror show as if it was lurking in my shadow. I didn’t know why a wife and mother of three children would be the one selected for some kind of mission saving four others from annihilation. I didn’t know why I couldn’t find simple help from a neverending cycle of emotional and spiritual neglect, abandonment, and not being heard in my own home and family. Someone to sit down with me and give me love that didn’t feel painful would’ve been enough. I didn’t know why when I still searched for help from my father-in-law, he died almost instantly. His funeral was approaching and having taken the duties of leading his memorial service, I needed to find the words, an entire story, that could capture his quiet spirit. Fernanda was scheduled to show up for work soon so it meant it was time to put my game face on again. I walked down the stairs, saw her, and asked humbly if it would be okay if I took the day off and just drive. She said, “Of course.” I don’t know why I felt like I needed to ask her even seen in Fernanda’s eyes, but I had no idea where I was going. I just knew I needed to go. I thought I would find myself near a water source where I usually go for clarity. But that morning, feeling a little clearer than days previously, I let the road direct me. It called me as soon as I felt the road beneath the rumbling tires on the highway. It was calling me to the nearby mountains, toward Mount Weather specifically.

You see, backtracking a bit, when I left my home for Lauren’s house Memorial Day weekend, I asked my husband to call his father to help with the children before I felt comfortable leaving. My husband hesitated to call. I pushed. I needed to know my children would be well cared for and not a burden I was pushing off on others. My husband conceded and he called his father as if standing in the corner I put him in. Bampa and his wife dropped everything they had planned for their Memorial Day weekend, packed up overnight bags and started heading in our direction. I left my home without seeing them arrive. Hours later, they would overhear the phone call I had with my husband when I was finally able to get to my phone about the near bloodbath and violent turbulence I was thrust in to. My husband had also had plans to find a hotel that night and let the grandparents take over watching the kids for a while. But by the time he and I were done talking, my husband a witness to Tom’s belligerence, lack of awareness about his verbal abuse towards me, and toxic karma, no hotels were left. My husband would have to sleep on the couch in his own home that night.

In the golden hours of the next morning, my husband woke under the same roof as his father unlike any moment the two of them had had in my husband’s 41 years of being his son. My husband didn’t grow up with his father in the home as a child. There was no real anger, resentment, or noticeable pain for either of them due to the separation, perhaps a feeling of loss on his father’s side, but there had been no time planned by either of them to entertain the connection. Somehow in the midst of it all, my voice was shoving the two of them together from a need for my own sake that began the fall of the first domino. After I got home from one night away in hell, torn up emotionally and spiritually which included conversations with family that made it clear their lack of understanding of my pain and ultimately their own. unpacking more than just my luggage, I universally apologized to my husband that he wasn’t able to get away for an evening. It was something we had both deserved and we still hadn’t been given. He said it was actually okay. It was actually better than okay. Having his father at our house had been the gift of opporunity to have the unexpected “talk,” that golden morning, that feeling of actual connection, that sense of belonging from a place of no expectation, something they hadn’t explored before. His father had said he was beginning to make plans, lots of them, something he’d never done before. His father said he had found a new brewery, Bear Chase, that he wanted to take his son to for more times like this. Both men, father and son, simple and honest, happy. It felt right and days were going to be brighter.

“I took a breath and went in as gently as I could about the violence I had just experienced, how my father-in-law had just passed suddenly days later, and I was there to gain some perspective leading his memorial service. Jaws dropped. I tried dressing up the drama in sheep’s clothing but the initial impact was already created. They looked at me in wonder like a mystic woman on a quest from an infinitely curious and confusing scenario and I had to admit to myself that, yes, it was and, I guess, I was all of that.”

Only days later after that great morning, after the shock and trauma of Bampa’s loss in an almost-instant, I was headed nowhere in particular, just to the mountains and Mount Weather to begin the road of building Bampa’s story in my own words. It felt monumental. I got to the base of the mountain and there was a dense mist making it barely visible twenty yards ahead of me mimicking the feeling in my mind. I could feel a small thrill rush inside me, venturing into the unknowable and unforeseable beyond, that told me to notice the synchronicity I’d be witnessing in real life right before my eyes, leading me along a path of illuminations. Just a little ways up the road, I was passing Bear Chase Brewery on the left, the place Bampa was going to take my husband the following week if he were still living. The irony of seeing the place didn’t elude me, it secured me that I was following the way, but I knew I was to drive further beyond the brewery continuing up the mountain. Weaving upward into the canopy of dense trees and mist reminding me of the cloud rainforests in Monteverde, Costa Rica, I was gaining altitude into the ether I needed to breathe. I reached the top of the mountain where FEMA’s Emergency Operations Center sits, prepared at all times for presidential arrival in case of serious threat. I was still without any clarity, submerged, trying to get answers and only seeing two ways — down the other side of the mountain or back the way I came. Suddenly, there was a break in the mist clearing just a bit to my right for me to see there was a small dirt road rutted out with potholes. My sense of adventure always taking over the best parts of me, I decided to take my minivan off-roading down this third way I wasn’t seeing.

I was seeing beautiful vistas from the top of this side of the mountain where the fog opened up just enough. I could hear Bampa’s conversations play out in my mind with visions of buying the perfect property to build a home with his wife on top of Mount Weather. I continued further down the mountain and drove by a home decorated with lawn art using statues, that free-spirited, almost-too-crazy-to-make-a-social-connection person’s home with the freedom to express, and never too scared to build a house however they chose it. I slammed on the brakes and went to take a look. There was a mixture of Catholic and Americana statues, relics from different places creating a poor man’s sanctuary like a patterned quilt made up of old stones from different times and reasons. I walked up to a statue of the Virgin Mary and could feel how she was the embodiment of the woman I needed to show me the love I was missing this whole time. I honored the statue with my tears and decided to take a stone from the road and place it at her feet, leaving a trace of myself while I still journeyed down the path while she stay in place where I could find her if I needed it.

I made it to the bottom of the mountain and I kept looking for that thing, that vision that would give me the reason why I came to this place but I still couldn’t find it still. I continued further making a left to circle the base of the mountain. I saw a sign for Victory Farms. That gave me a small joy, although I quickly remembered that the feeling of victory can give us this false sense of completion like a roadblock from true meaning. So I decided to see what was further down the road after seeing the sign for victory. I kept winding and weaving through the back roads at the base of Mount Weather still trying to find what it was I was looking for but not forgetting to take in the simple pleasures of those country roads I was traveling.

The winding roads ended and I was back at the main one. That wasn’t the sense of adventure I was feeling and anticipating at all. I was still so lost and confused and no closer to understanding the bigger picture. I thought to myself that the quickest way back home now would be to take the main road leading me back up to the top of Mount Weather again. It felt like I was backtracking and that I had lost the trail toward my illuminating adventure but it didn’t feel like I had any other choice. So back up to the top I went with a course headed for home. It’s all I knew. I let the feeling of driving wash over me and let the expectation go of finding anything and appreciated the beautiful moments I had just experienced. And then like a flash when one gets to the end of a movie that doesn’t have the standard Hollywood ending all tied up and, instead, leaves you with a sense of wonder, I could see the tracks I was making this whole time. I was traveling the same roads that would have brought father and son back to each other at Bear Chase Brewery traveling up each side of the mountain, the whole point of everything, anyway. I just had to travel the long way to see it. I was in awe and tears began springing from eyes bringing these two together spiritually as they should have been even if it couldn’t be done physically. I felt complete.

In that sense of completion, I decided to stop off at Bear Chase before heading home so I could bring back the beer that would be my boon for my husband and I to enjoy. As I parked my van, there was a man about my age walking by. He had just come off the Appalachian Trail and was looking for the front door. He asked if I knew where it was. I told him, “Well, I haven’t been here before but the sign your standing next to says it’s thatta way.” I smiled and interiorly laughed at the slight oversight especially since he was coming off a trail where there were no signs posted. We walked in together but I took a quick turn to head to the bathroom. It was early, the brewery had just opened and there were a handful of people sitting at one end of a long table. I chatted a bit with the server who was getting me a pint so I could enjoy the time away from the house a little longer. All of a sudden, I could feel myself switch into a gear I had been in as a backpacker on the open road swinging from situation to situation on a vine. I decided it couldn’t hurt to walk up to these people I’m sure with a similar mind and ask if it was okay to sit down. They were happy to oblige.

I sat in the experience like nothing I had just gone through even existed, no direction charted because it really wasn’t. The guy I had walked in with also decided to sit down at the same table and we all began sharing stories from the road. It was a joy listening as it has always has been for me to hear other people's stories. They engaged and I peppered in with a few of my experiences to let them know some of the similar paths we had walked at different times. It was like old friends meeting at a reunion none had planned for or knew was coming. The guy I walked in with was a dominant figure. He had dealt with some relationship issues in the past and was using his experience hiking the AT to come to grips with all of it. He mentioned he had been using the time to journal and how cathartic he was finding it. Having kept my own journals and later finding a lot of meaning from reading the thoughts I had decades earlier, I encouraged him to keep up the front after the trail. He bluntly responded back saying how he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to have time once he got back to the real world to write things down anymore. I interiorly sighed and thought, it’s really the only world that leaves any remains but please take your time.

The guy left for a refill on his beer so without his presence at the table, it allowed for others to ask questions. They soon realized I hadn’t spoken about my journey and what brought me there that day. “This should be fun,” I thought. I took a deep breath and went in as gently as I could about the violence I had just experienced, how my father-in-law had just passed suddenly days later, and I was there to gain some perspective leading his memorial service. Jaws dropped. I tried dressing up the drama in sheep’s clothing but the initial impact had already been created. They looked at me in wonder like a mystic woman on a quest from an infinitely curious and confusing scenario and I had to admit to myself that, yes, it was and, I guess, I was all of that.

The dominant figure who had walked away from the table was now back with his energy stuck in oblivion, not aware of the story I had just told. His presence didn’t break the magic spell of communion between me and the others but it did distract the trance of knowing anything deeper and the experience was over. I could feel it was my time to go and I walked away hearing how all the backpackers were on their way to Harper’s Ferry, WV, the middle point along the trail extending from Georgia to Maine. A part of me wished I could join them on their magic journeys but there were obligations of my own that needed tending to and I had a growler of beer to deliver to my husband who was hurting from the loss of his dad. But I could feel how everything was going to be good in the end even in the incomplete state it was all in. There was still so much more journey to hoe before getting there.

[wildstrandsblog]

An Unconditional Love Story: Take Flight, Sisterhood

Issue 2 - May 7, 2021

(Suggested listening)

My original plan after hiring Fernanda to help around the home was for her to work twenty hours a week in the morning time for the first four months after having our third baby, but that idea changed as we approached the end date. I was neither physically or mentally prepared to take on the full breadth of childcare for my three young children, ages three years old and under, and all the homecare, too. Life, however, was offering up a different set of plans for us. After giving Fernanda the greenlight she could stay on indefinitely, she said that may be all the time she had. Her visa was running out and she was having to fly back to Brazil with hopes of getting it renewed. She explained how it was a very rigorous process. She was scared it wouldn’t go through and wasn’t ready to let go of her dream of coming to America fighting back the tears. I wasn't ready to let her go, either. Her love and her light were the best thing keeping my little family afloat. We had no choice, though. She had to go. So in my Christmas shopping I found something that caught my eye, something I thought might be the perfect gift to tell Fernanda how much I thought of her, perhaps something we both needed. It was a necklace with an engraving that read, “Be Brave” on it. She was in tears receiving it with feelings even a little misplaced, unsure of what to do with that kind of encouragement from a near perfect stranger. I’m sure it wasn’t common. I remained stoic, putting all my energy back into the hope that the little message in the necklace would somehow bring Fernanda back to us.

Those four weeks she was gone for me were long and brutal to be without her. It was a hellish Christmas working through my husband’s depression and anxiety which were in need of unhealthy attention and me not strong enough for all of it still. Fernanda, however, got through all her tests with flying colors at the Brazilian Embassy like doors suddenly opened. She even had enough time to go run into the ocean, their summertime, wearing white, the custom for the Brazilian New Year starting things off brand new. I received her back in Virginia with exhalation and praise for getting through all the tough parts. I suppose I silently praised myself, too. I was hopeful for the dawning of new days with my newborn son beginning to sleep through the nights. But the pressure of supporting everyone as the family’s lone caregiver had gotten too much for me. My forearms and hands were feeling like hot irons stuck in a fire. I was barely able to hold a glass of water to my lips, holding on to too much psychological debris like many Empaths. I had no one to pour it into.

“She was holding up the part of the sky I couldn’t, not coming into my space, as I called on the mountains, seas, skies, and all the galaxies combined to support me. It was all I had left getting me through, getting the worst from too many loved ones I had once considered home.”

I poured as much as I could silently into my art and writing but it could only support so much. I went in search of help again, this time through an energy healer and found a woman fifteen years my senior. She was a Yoga Therapist who was the most intuitively-gifted person I’ve ever met and had three children of her own. Through her conversation and massage therapy work to dislodge some of the emotional trauma, I began to see many of the cycles I had been missing. Having written about some of these illuminations in a previous post (see “Pulling The String”), I’ll progress [quickly] through what happened next once I made the choice to surrender and got sent full throttle like a rocket crashing into the sky inside - a three fold process.

With the internal pressure of everything I carried getting greater - caring for three very young children, supporting a depressed and anxious husband with childhood trauma, supporting my own severe childhood trauma, large psychological upheavals within the worlds of loved ones, and even larger unknowns still left for myself from an invisible world continuing to open up my heart and mind and wary not to repeat the same “almost-death” part - by May 2019, I was left with only two choices to release it. It was a pressure so great it had me crying for a full hour and half in the hands of the Yoga Therapist and I could’ve probably cried longer. I kept thinking, “How is she tolerating this?” It was that kind of cry only an unconditionally loving mother could love, moaning, gut-wrenching, curled-up-in-a-ball, body-practically-seizing kind of cry. I was unable to speak though encouraged. The only words I could get out by the end of the session were, “My husband is hurting me.” It was that kind of hurt that can’t be touched, far deeper than any physical wounding. It was wounding from abandonment in my greatest hour of need, a care I had long needed, for me to be loved and to be heard unconditionally, not with questions just expansive listening that only requires a nod to know the person is still engaged. I had loved myself fully and unconditionally already. It was what ferried me through my opening processes and completed my individuation during my spiritual awakenings. I needed more, though. I needed to be seen for how human I was, and am, without feeling I needed to use any superpower to make anyone love my human self, that part of me that has always been drawn to a person and their pain, even a stranger, and never running away. It is the human and the ether in those tears that they have manifested from I have always loved.

My spirit was cracking and I couldn’t put the pieces of a fragmented self and family back together even though I had been trying. Nothing I was doing was helping. Even asking for help from others went disregarded or downplayed, and I was reminded of the voice of my mother who told me as a young child after telling me the story of her assault and rape in a public mall parking lot as well as her own home in front of her two young sons, “It is better to yell ‘fire’ than to call out for help. People run away when you ask for help. They come running when you yell ‘fire.’” Undeniably, I was getting myself to a similar place where my pain had nowhere to go, nowhere to be heard, and I was scared for my safety. My two choices were to go nuclear or get some space. I chose space and called one of my best girlfriends who was happy to put me up for an extended visit over the Memorial Day weekend. I couldn’t have known, though, that even in choosing the more sustainable approach, the Universe only had one set of plans for me and wouldn’t let me go until I saw the entire picture way beyond myself. It needed me to be a witness to the fact that I wasn’t the only human suffering, in desperate need of a universal culture shift and it was calling me up on my best girlfriend’s phone.

I left my home in haste, though clear conscious, kissing my children’s heads and waving goodbye to everyone. A few hours later, I was received into my girlfriend’s home, who I’ll call Lauren, leaving a pool party she had been at with her husband and two friends, another couple, to come be with me. After a long vent-fest and both of us feeling clearer about each of our troubles, no sips even needed from the wine we broke out, Lauren and I headed from her home to go see our alma mater, get some ice cream, and were making plans to head to the beach the following day to play some volleyball with friends. I was in love, totally in the space I was needing. We got diverted almost instantly on our drive with a text from her friend, the other woman from the pool party Lauren had left to be with me, who I’ll call Crystal. Crystal asked Lauren to come back to the townhouse to come pick up her husband, who I’ll call Tom, in a vague text where Crystal wrote how her boyfriend had hit her and Tom was beside himself. When Lauren and I got there, Tom said, “Kayt! Sing me something! You used to be a singer!,” to help get his mind off things. With care, I obliged and began singing the first thing from the library of recent songs I had just been listening to. I pulled out Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust,” like an omen. Tom soon equalized and we all went inside the townhouse to collect the shoes Tom was missing - myself, Lauren, Tom, and Crystal - but something told me not to stray too far from the front door.

It was like a Hollywood film where all three white girls go inside the townhouse with the belligerent, drunk white guy without any reason, but the one thing different was than I had some. The unseen boyfriend off camera, who I’ll call Greg, was back on the scene within ten minutes. Greg walked back into his townhouse hitting me hard on my left shoulder with the front door I was standing in front of. The hit triggered something, remembering how I had just avoided a cataclysmic car collision on the drive down because of a surge of pain coming through my left shoulder that told me veer right, and right then a little sports car peeled out. I jolted as this unknown guy walked by with a strange feeling that said, “He’s got a gun.” I then saw him lunge for the door, his hand swiftly going for the lock. I reacted quickly by putting my left foot in between the door and the door jamb and had it slammed on looking the man square in the eyes. He left me to have it out again with Tom, a continuation from earlier, who was two sheets to the wind. Lauren, myself, and Crystal watched as two alpha males were facing off, ready to finish each other off this time in a drunken rage. I ran out of the townhouse and watched the rest of them stay inside. I was screaming for Lauren to get out of there but she wasn’t going to leave Tom behind. I looked down at my purse and had nothing to help me, no car keys, not even my phone. Do I just watch? I could already see what was going to happen next. I was going to hear and see more fighting, then a flash from gunfire, and a woman screaming. I couldn’t just stand there. I ran back inside the townhouse summoning up my big voice to tell Tom to back down. I was starting to get a response and he began to back away. The other guy, Greg, though, with shadows not keen on stopping, leaned in to raise the fight back up.

I turned to him, a black man with a white girlfriend who he had cruelly thrown down the stairs just hours earlier, was now aiming his sights at me. This was one of the unknowns not given in Crystal’s vague text while Lauren and I were off living carefree. Standing there, now, in the den of an unknown townhouse, I could feel how Greg wanted to believe I was there to help him. He was desperately hurting, fueled with anger as a mistreated black man and military veteran with mental illness whose mother, as well as his best friend, had just died a cruel death from cancer months before and he wasn’t coping. He had nowhere to go, just like me. Nowhere to be heard. He had made a choice that weekend, too, but he was going with nuclear. With racism, domestic violence, mental illness, gun violence, and a ceaseless cycle of blame and denial rampant, it was the inevitability I could no longer elude, darker than dark and beyond twisted. I found myself at the center of the Labyrinth, drawn to the Minotaur that looked more like a human to me with tears he hid.

I could feel how broken Greg was as I was yelling at him to back down. I was now standing inside his pain because he had let me in. He may have even loved me in that moment because someone was finally showing up to be with him in his great hour of need and he wanted to show his appreciation in the same way he had been shown love all these years. With me working to save Tom from annihilation, Greg decided he would now point the intended gun at my head and said “You’re a fucking racist!” and my life flashed. Bang. Episode 1. I felt my mind shift in that moment, in surprise I was able to walk away. It was a flashlight Greg was holding to scare me with his gun was too far away, although none of it I truly knew, it was all still just a feeling. Reality struck on my drive home with Tom while escorting him away from the scene he kept racing back into even after the police were called and Lauren stayed behind with Crystal to give testimony. Tom in anguish revealed to me Greg had pressed a gun against his head, repeating, “Oh my God!,” multiple times in his storytelling, after he had tried to stop Greg from brutally beating his girlfriend in front of him and almost died. Tom continued saying how the world was fucked and we might as well blow it all up. In the end, both men were eventually arrested. And in the alternative ending where my presence wasn’t there taking Lauren away from the pool party, I imagine things may have happened so quickly they might’ve even made it just in time for the 6 o’clock news.

After an explosive first part to the trilogy crashing me into the sky inside, Episode 2 began with the swirling mind of an Empath that got sent through the imaginal realm of time and space of personal traumas, ones I had experienced and further back that were not my own. None of the original pain I was carrying before I left my home that weekend got disposed off. They were all now amplified, carrying Lauren’s, Tom’s, Crystal’s, and Greg’s pain. Lauren, who I had hugged leaving her home the next day, both of us promising not to disconnect, was now avoiding me. I was struggling with the fact she was banging on her bubble, too, but in too much denial about her abuse from her husband’s alcoholism. I wanted to help her. I was also sad she wasn’t loving me the way I needed to be loved, too, even having gone through a shared traumatic experience. I was beginning to attract more negative energy at this point including my husband’s, direct from his childhood trauma. The psychological levies were broken and spilling. I called my husband’s father in a desperate plea for help again to talk his son out of his anger aimed at me. His father handed the phone over and I got told, once more, how I was the one spiraling out of control. I couldn’t deal with hearing it again. I threw the phone down. Not again.

Then out of nowhere we got a call from my father-in-law’s wife who was screaming over a voice message I could hear even through the standard audio of my husband’s phone. My father-in-law was dead, his wife finding him on the floor when she got home just a day and half later after the last words I spoke saying, “I need your help,” not even a week after having the Universal gun pointed at me. We were all in shock. It was an aneurysm with no symptom leading up that would’ve alerted us that took him. I lead my husband through each step of shock turned trauma and stepped up to lead the last rites of passage for my husband’s family through our completely unexpected loss. I had never done anything like that before. I felt called and my husband’s family believed I was the one to do it. Things were moving so fast there were only glimmers of Fernanda during this time. I imagine her watching a fallen woman, gray in skin color, pushing through severe episodes of apathy, still directing like she knew to do, unable to feel anything besides a rollercoaster of sensation, waking up in agony, and being thrown curve balls left and right. My reputation was now up for debate by my family and Lauren who had been talking behind the scenes during all of this. My family, with negative projections of my mother now placed on me, all thought I had gone crazy and were hell bent on fixing the situation. They believed I was out of control. In the midst of it all, Fernanda was there doing exactly what I needed her to be doing. She was holding up the part of the sky I couldn’t, not coming into my space, as I called on the mountains, seas, skies, and all the galaxies combined to support me. It was all I left to get me through, getting the worst from too many loved ones I had once considered home.

[Issue 3 coming May 14th!...]

SNEAK PEEK:

“One could believe that would be the end to the merciless saga, just like I did, but that was just the eye of the storm. Episode 3 still held a second wall to break through which opened up a month later while I lay on my front lawn and police showed up.”

[wildstrandsblog]

An Unconditional Love Story: Take Flight, Sisterhood

Issue: 1 - April 30, 2021

(Suggested Listening)

It was just over a year ago, March 2020. I was standing in my kitchen with Fernanda, the young Brazilian woman I had hired as our nanny a year and half earlier. The two of us were keeping to our routine, taking care of and teaching the children, cooking and cleaning, and connecting as human beings, but the charm of our circumstance had been waning for a few months by then. There was a lot happening in the world although I remained turned off from the news at large. The voice of energy from people around me said enough. It wasn’t good. Fernanda was scheduled to have some time off over her Spring Break. She had bought a ticket to Japan back in November on a whim and I was proud of her for taking a chance. God knows, I had taken flight on her with less notice. And I loved living vicariously through a young woman almost-thirty willing to explore a part of the world she hadn't seen and how that spontaneity had been some of the best times of my life.

Plans changed for the world wholly and completely, however, and I had seen it coming in a dream at the beginning of the new year in January. In the twilight hours, I had been woken up by a larger than normal ringing in my right ear. It was long and sustained. I lay still allowing my ear and mind to be open to it. It was big. Falling back asleep into a dream state: I lay in bed early in the morning and asked my husband to stay home from work. Having said, “No,” to previous requests, I was surprised when he granted me my wish. We lay there and I had him look out a large picture window in front of us and said, “Watch this,” to look at the beauty outside. As soon as I spoke those words, we watched an energy blast, like one coming off an atomic bomb, heavily shake the trees. There was a second wave bending the trees like I had never seen before, surprised they didn’t snap in half. And then there was a third strike that blew through the walls of our home without breaking them down, hitting me hard on the left side of my head. I thought I had died, too scared to open my eyes. When I eventually rid myself of the fear, I opened them to look outside and see many people, many of them people of color, fleeing for an undesignated border. They were being directed by a woman pointing her finger wearing an oversized, Revolutionary-era redcoat. I knew the people shouldn’t be following her; they were being led to their deaths. I asked my husband to get more information from the outside and to contact Fernanda so she wouldn’t run with the others. I would check on the kids to make sure they were okay from the blasts although I already knew they had slept right through. I woke up from this dream state to the conscious world and wrote down my very emotionally-driven dream in my journal and finished the entry with the word, “STAY.”

Fernanda came to us in the Summer of 2018 when I was pregnant with my third son. I hired her to start a month before my expected delivery date to give me some time to train her and provide a little time to get off my feet. I closed out that second Thursday happy with where we were at, ahead of schedule, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel where I could have my feet kicked up for a little bit. But the divine plan had things organized differently, changing around 10:15pm while our two and three year old sons were sleeping. My body was changing. Contractions had started and were sustained, getting quicker and stronger by the minute. This was it. We were going to have a baby.

My husband, in his deep care, started mildly hyper-ventilating having another baby three weeks early. I stepped in with my usual calm in high-risk situations and asked him to call his father to drive the hour-long trip in the middle of the night to be with our boys while they slept without his wife present, the real caregiver to our kids. The window for mine and the baby's safety got cut very close. We rushed to the hospital and I was admitted immediately. In my late night delirium fading in and out of consciousness from the pain, barely receiving an epidural, I saw my husband’s eyes telepathically communicate to me, “Do we tell them that you’re open?” I looked back at him and shook my head, “No,” partly out of a fear in knowing that the medical community would have no more answers for me, and probably more questions, and we didn’t have time to explain it. I also knew in my Heart of hearts that I shouldn’t be treated any differently. I simply had to trust myself that I could do it. I simply needed to keep my mind connected to the moment. Having my doctor and a midwife I had never met before stare at places few had ever seen, telling me how impressed they were with my delivery, we had our third son by 3am. I held off on texting my new nanny until later that morning. No need to disrupt her sleep, too. When I reached out to Fernanda before her scheduled morning arrival, I asked with tears welling up in my eyes if she could step in where I couldn’t, appreciating she take on the roll of caregiver she had just trained for. Simply and happily, she wrote back saying, “Of course! Congratulations!” It was a relief beyond what she could’ve known having my two children still at home in caring hands, gravity pulling tears down my cheeks while I held my newborn, thankful Bampa could get there when he did. I exhaled to let go of the inner momentum that had kept me going through it all, inundated with the emotion that carried me through each hurdling moment. I would later see how this moment would set the tone for the rest of Fernanda’s and my journey still to come.

“They couldn’t see I was banging on the inside of a bubble filling up with water and I wasn’t prepared to be the only one to break my little family out of it.”

Fernanda and I started out with bumps like stories of growth usually do. Fernanda was less than confident in her ability to speak English although I had no problem understanding her. I was having a hard time letting go of my previous routine but knew enough that I needed to step back and allow her to have the space to lead. I mentioned to Fernanda we were different from each other. She smiled in respectful agreement. We kept quiet most days, talking about the weather to fill up awkward silences. Things began to change in a car ride running errands with the kids. In between her keeping the kids entertained in the back of the minivan from the passenger seat, Fernanda opened up with some stories about herself. She started small. She was a twin. I was a twin. She was living far away from home catching a second wind in life at the same age I had done. She came to the United States dreaming of becoming a nurse having left a career behind back in Brazil. That said a lot to me. She played volleyball. I played volleyball. In these small moments, we began to form a trust and got into a gravity groove like two doubles volleyball players do, born to play.

Fernanda soon began to feel more confident in her work around the home and speaking English. She started sharing more and I soon learned how hilarious and fun she was, and how much she loved her family. She connected sharing colorful moments from Brazil, trusting me to guide her through the more difficult terrain in a foreign language with few stumbles. She told me the story of how her grandfather, with bad eyesight, was still driving his car and how her grandmother would risk life and limb to ride with him, telling him where to turn and when the traffic lights changed. She said it was a public service for the community with a big smile across her face. She also shared how every time the Pope was scheduled to give a public address, her grandmother would make it a single event, put on lipstick, close the door, and turn on the only television her grandparents owned. She’d yell at her husband anytime he tried to come into the room. Nothing was going to come between her and her love of the Pope. And Fernanda shared how her father, every time while driving, would have to sneeze so loudly with super force, much like my husband, but wouldn’t feel complete until he had slapped the car’s dashboard. In my mind’s eye, I could see his big Brazilian hand slapping it—dust flying, completing transmission. I was in utter hysterics from Fernanda’s stories, slapping my own knees, in love with the pictures she was painting for me about her days back in Brazil. It felt so good to laugh with her.

Fernanda was a beautiful escape that brought life and energy to my mornings when my nights were taken by the wakings of a newborn. To have a child, let alone a third in the span of three years, is an exhaustion beyond what I’ve experienced cramming for college exams, prepping lesson plans, or procrastinating on the next morning’s slideshow presentation. The feeling is more like having the Skeksis from the 1982 film, Dark Crystal, drain your living essence repeatedly throughout the day and night. It took every ounce of me to give, still recovering as a poorly educated and unaware Empath with fully activated Kundalini energy coursing from a second, harrowing, spiritual awakening that almost took my life in 2017, just a year before Fernanda’s arrival. For those more versed in the psychological and spiritual world, it can be described as achieving Oneness, Christ Consciousness, or totality. At a point in the very arduous, psychonautical journey over multiple days, which is an underwhelming description at best when being brought to your knees, I saw the veiled faces of God radiating light, Man and Woman, King and Queen, Father and Mother. He was Magnificent. She was the Most Beautiful. And like anyone getting struck by lightening on top of the tower, not expecting to be struck and surviving, the momentous surge of energy exited in a nutshell of overwhelming and spontaneous bliss that few women have achieved. Four months later, still in a state of disbelief over the whole of the experience, I unexpectedly got pregnant with my third son, failing at the duty to remember to take my daily birth control. The whole thing, in fact, was a hard pill to swallow. The act of giving to my children wasn’t what was stretching my capacity to recover from the typical day-to-day in my world, in fact giving to my children was what kept me grounded. It was the everything-else that never stopped around me to consider what women move through being a wife and mother, let alone achieving unexpected and unintended Christ Consciousness without drugs or alcohol, the emotional expense, the psychological expansion, expecting the same output, only concerned with the bottom line, not concerned when the bottom drops out. The world continues to move without affect due to the lack of empathic awareness, and me just as guilty.

There was another undercurrent that was building in my home, as well. My husband and I were back at struggling taking on three children while battling an often invisible disease to everyone outside the home, my husband’s severe depression and debilitating anxiety. It was steadily getting the best of him (written with my husband's full consent and beautiful blessing to share our story as I’ve experienced it). His workdays in the den of destruction, i.e. the modern day workforce, were more than brutal, constantly chastised over failure and never authentically lifted up from the company’s actual achievements. He would come home from hell everyday and I would drown in the negative fervor and constant complaining getting passed down in the trickle down effect. Taking on the typical wife-turned-counselor role, because women have believed ourselves to be the “more emotional beings,’ I encouraged him to get help. He saw someone for a few months and touched the surface for a short while, but after meeting the proverbial quota, learning enough buzzwords to pass the emotional descriptors test, the time seeing a counselor was over. It was eating into a lunchtime he wasn’t taking anyway.

It all became an impenetrable forcefield made from a mix of male ego and superego, consumerism, lack of good care within the psychological community, and lack of self-love. And all of it was severely impacting my Empathic side, absorbing it like a black hole. When I found myself sobbing one afternoon after Fernanda left, crying to Stevie Wonder’s, “Love’s In Need of Love Today,” I knew there was trouble. I was crying for myself. I was crying for my husband. I was crying for everyone in the world who needed to cry because of the lack of love we were all experiencing. No one was ready to cry out loud, yet, because they weren’t ready to see they were in the same place as me. Nobody could see my pain or wanted to, a woman, a wife, a mother, an Empath, struggling even though I spoke of the struggle with professionals, as well as women and men close to me and found females to be the most resistant to it. They couldn’t see I was banging on the inside of a bubble filling up with water and I wasn’t prepared to be the only one to break my little family out of it. The illusory image of perfection we held as a white, heterosexual family with three healthy boys, built on strong love with a predictable income and an occasional vacation was too strong. Or maybe it was the inability for those I spoke with to admit they were struggling themselves, not trusting I could understand them and love them in return unconditionally having told my story to them, and me not understanding how different I was to them from practically everyone they had ever met. And like any “good” mother and employer, I kept Fernanda in the dark about all of it.

[second issue coming Friday, May 7th]

[wildstrandsblog]

Why I Had To Go

2.8.21

My family of guys and I have been going through the exciting, yet arduous, process of relocating to a new area - Charlottesville, VA - a new pace of life, a new system of order, and a time in our lives to love more, live more, and give more. Moving is easy said no one ever. I’ve had a few back-of-my-car-full-of-all-priceless-possessions moments, but none so huge as this, and none so blessed as this when my four and five year old boys are holding hands between the car seats, swinging arms and singing, and helping me throw granola bars to the littlest one in the back. It’s been a whirlwind that started in October when, after months of asking my husband to get our realtor in to give us an idea on what it’d take to sell our home, for “shits and giggles,” it only took a last-minute cross-country trip alone for my fortieth birthday and a time-out for myself bound for Alaska to get him calling. I mean, miracles do happen.

Once I was back, the ball was in my court and I was throwing up 1.000 stats. I got my neighborhood contractor in to do work while away on our family beach vacation. We even found, virtually-toured, & put in an offer on our dream house that same week while sitting in the sand, taking a huge leap of faith before selling our own. I was in the zone. It was all happening. The first day we saw our new home in real life was the first day our old house was going on the market.

The sale of our old home would get played out with the same precision, too. I could see the young couple in my mind’s eye who needed it. They were the couple whom I had meticulously redesigned our 1970s Brady Bunch home for with form and function. I brought my best in those nine years of living and by the end of our first listing day, having multiple offers come through, none felt right to me. There were none with whom I wanted to take the leap. I was getting a little worried for my imaginary couple. So on the drive back to Hopeland from Charlottesville, I reached out in my mind and said, “If you want this, take it. And you better be quick... & bring your best.” No doubt, when I spoke to the Universe, the Universe spoke back sending me all the energy-feels around the crown of my head and body. The young couple was going to come through, and boy, did they! They came through on Day 2 and helped us put up the highest sale in our neighborhood in the last fifteen years. Miracles do happen, again and again.

Everything and more has magically fallen into place like riding the gravity wave right down to the time and place we needed to be. It has all been so serendipitous which I say from the most grateful of places, but there’s one thing that never changes for anyone in the process of moving. All must go through every single item they still carry, actually and metaphorically, and the process of loving and hating all of the feelings that are attached. While I have lead a more-than-charming life and have only two regrets (I have counted), I have not reached that place of wisdom, yet, where I can look at every single speck of dust and feel only the joy come through. There’s still plenty of sadness from pathways I’ve walked turned dead ends & roadblocks even when choosing the path of openness & clarity for myself. So I suppose, then, the only thing that is left for me to say to myself is what I would say to anyone else in the same position. I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry. I’m so so sorry for the sadness. And I would leave the conversation with Albert Huffstickler’s great words from “The Edge of Doubt” saying - There is always that edge of doubt. Trust it. That's where the new things come from. If you can't live with it, get out because, when it's gone you're on automatic, repeating something you've learned. Let your prayer be: save me from that tempting certainty that leads me back from the edge, that dark edge where the first light breaks.

So while I get my desk back in working order and thumb through old journals that tell a far deeper story than I thought I recorded, I will share an old poem I wrote ten years ago now which eventually became a song. I had big plans of including it on an EP under my artist’s moniker - Kayt Adorian - titled, “The Playground.” That, like many things, never materialized when I fell head over heels in love with my future husband whom I had been looking at in the eyes, by then, for a decade and almost missed. I’m glad I didn’t. So here is my poem, “Why I Had To Go,” and have included the Youtube recording performed at an open mic night on an ancient 2011 cellular phone in my previous post.

“Why I Had To Go”

It’s important you should know

It was the wind that told me so.

The autumn leaves,

The changing scenes,

The open-ended diaries.

A love affair from the beginning

On a search to be forgiven.

Can barely end a sentence with a period,

Much too scared of permanence.

The only structure comes from singing

I’m not living in the present

Because the past, there lies the future.

It’s the best predictor.

What may have come then won’t be now,

But at least you’ll have some answers.

Nieces - when people ask you where I’ve gone

Tell them I’m an Adventurer.

Nephews - always know that

It’s the future men in you that I adore.

To my lover knocking at my door,

I’ve loved our children still to come.

I’ll cook your food,

Turn down our bed,

And be there to take you

To places very soon… very soon

Tailor-made and ready suits

Up-done hairdos and mini-skirts

Wagging tails leaving shit to clean

The city air, the city means

Inflated egos, deflated dreams

The confidence but no feeling.

Don’t know where to go

Or how to see.

All praying for a transfiguration.

Land of the long white cloud like Heaven

Yet still bruised and beaten

Wearing bloodied Rugby shirts.

The time is now to toughen up

Cause we’re all apart

Of this big ol’ adopted heart.

Nieces - when they ask you where I’ve gone

Tell them I’m an Adventurer.

Nephews - always know

It’s the future men in you that I adore.

To my lover knocking at my door,

I buried treasure beneath the kitchen floor.

It’s not that I needed more

I needed to be more

So I can take you to places never seen before

Very soon… very soon

[wildstrandsblog]

Why I Had To Go - Kayt Adorian

[wildstrandsblog]

When time is not my own & I’m in the middle of making moves, I start mix-making...

“In Unison Universe” - fluid, dense, colorful, & strong. A growing change into sustainable dynamism.

created: November 2020

[wildstrandsblog]

When time is not my own & I’m in the middle of making moves, I start mix-making...

“The One That Has No Name” - psychedelic sound to break through to a better You.

created: February 2020

[wildstrandsblog]

When time is not my own & I’m in the middle of making moves, I start mix-making...

“A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Making Time Stand Still” - some sobering sounds to stop the spinning world on a dime.

created: May 2019

[wildstrandsblog]

This is the 1st time I’ve done anything like this. I’ve backpacked alone but this time was different. On the flight to AK I could see myself dancing all over Alaska. So when I was stopped in my tracks by all the beauty, I pulled over & got a slo-mo. One turned into many turned into this! Music by @iksonmusic . This was the 1st time I was filming, editing & directing a #shortfilm solo.

I hope this video encourages other moms & women to get out there and dance like their lives & others depended on it. We deserve it.

(More pictures to come)

[wildstrandsblog]

Thunder, The Perfect Mind

7.16.20

I couldn’t know the story I’d set out writing almost two years ago just by letting the force of my heart dance across my desk and settle into my voice and art. After two chapters of a memoir, a clear vision came to my mind peering into a part of my story I hadn’t seen, yet. It was that of an unconscious man being carried out by a valiant horse, mane blazing, through a valley filled with poison and shadows. It was so powerful that I pressed pause on my writing to paint the picture I saw in my mind.

Little did I know a painting I started in March 2019 and later titled, “Though I Walk,” would become a prophetic telling by June into July getting expressed into life. It was a frightening time. The sky felt like it was falling. I had unconsciously entered a war zone. There were new troubles every day. Voices of loved ones rang out in terrifying discord that spelled betrayal. There was only one way out of the propelling hell, toward a light I could make out in the distance—a magnetic thunderstorm. I knew I couldn’t turn back on my journey. The place from where I came only held more treachery and could only cause more pain for me. It’d be insane. However, the uncertainty of moving forward was so great, being funneled toward a storm through a valley of snakes and shadows.

I’m so glad I survived those days that are now a year behind me, recently pulling out the sutures still wincing from the pain. Every day within this year I have been chewing on a source of spiritual food found in books, movies, art, sacred texts, music, and more. Only since a recent trip I took with my husband and three boys to the Northern Neck of Virginia along the Potomac River have things become more clear. I find when the fragments of ideas begin to coalesce into a bigger picture, I’ve gotten myself back onto a better path, picking up my confidence a little to know a truth I hold inside is not confusing me. And when a full moon lights up the night sky perfectly aligned with the water source you’re pulling from, I’ve got to tell you—it’s telling you something.

Putting the kids to bed on our last night of vacation, my husband and I watched as a thick blanket of storm clouds stretched out across the West, blacker than night, blocking out the radiant sunset that greeted us our first night. To the East, the sky remained clear aside from a dusting of clouds surrounding the perfectly, full moon with lunar eclipse like one might find on an All Hallow’s Eve when the Seven Virtues are at their highest. The lightning struck like I had never seen before, rather than branched, it looked like a tree trunk hit by Thor’s hammer, thick and dense. We heard the echo of thunder from our neighbor’s voices the next night when we returned home. They told us how they had never experienced a storm like that before. I hadn’t either. Not from that perspective. It was electric.

It was just a week later when I finished reading Elaine Pagel’s recent autobiography, “Why Religion?,” and was thunderstruck one more time. The seventy-seven year old Harvard PhD and professor of religion at Princeton opened up to tell her story of grief, losing her young son and husband a year apart from each other, decades earlier, and how she survived the tragedy. She ended her story with a passage from one of the Gnostic Gospels uncovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1947 titled, “Thunder, the Perfect Mind.” It was a sacred text believed to be buried by a gnostic order protecting it from the overarching power of the early Catholic Church devouring texts portraying a different version of God. The passage deeply touched the abyss of my feminine heart in the same way reading the heart magic held in the Song of Solomon did for me the first time many years ago. That teenage feeling with a life of its own came back to me after not knowing it could be achieved again after all these years. Reading “Thunder,” my heart leapt from my chest like a ballerina with both legs splayed, arms back, chest faced upward painting the sky. It was palpable.

It made me think...big...like things of that nature usually do for me. My mind began playing with the idea of what the future would look like if “Thunder” were adopted into all major religions, having no spiritual home to call Her own just yet. I understood that feeling. Why would it matter if “Thunder” were adopted into religious order? And why would it matter these days when we have the ability to uncover truth through science? Channeling my best John Lennon, my lucid mind began saying, imagine if all the world religions agreed on an understanding and centered themselves on one document, adopting it, making it one universal canon. Imagine the bridges that might be built and crossed eventually in the hearts and minds of all those people. Imagine how collective our psychology might be and the real possibility for healing from the illusory walls we’ve built between us. Imagine if we found a place where we could all cross into the invisible plane together, safely, where science can never go when humans are deeper and more vast than the seven oceans that are really just one. Just imagine. Earth might feel like the magical place it is in the not-so distant future, gently raining from the heavens rather than a sky that’s perpetually falling all around us.

My idea may never materialize into much but there’s always the possibility of starting a fire. However, I think it’s cool to see how other storytellers are working on a similar psychedelic wavelength these days without a need for drugs or alcohol, just the spirit of feeling high from being Me and feeling the We. I think it’s something humans have wanted to express for a really long time but have been too scared to do it fully, fearing the hate, pain, and isolation you get from disrupting the flow of the status quo. It takes some getting used to, believe me, but I know I’m not the only one feeling it. And I like seeing the developing fact that we’re entering a new way of how to head home and it’s super, super groovy.

A big thank you to my husband and children, as always, for traveling into the dark with me and keeping me grounded. I’m so thankful we’ve gotten a better view of where the light is coming from and it’s beautiful. I can't leave this post without sharing a short passage of “Thunder, the Perfect Mind” and will also include a link to the full English translation for those who are interested. It is worth the meditation. Here it goes...

THUNDER, THE PERFECT MIND

I was sent out from the power and have come to you who study me and am found by you who seek me.

Look at me, you who study me, and you who hear, hear me.

You waiting for me, take me into yourselves.

Don’t banish me from your vision.

Don’t let hatred enter your voice against me or let anger enter your hearing.

In no place, in no time, be unknowing of me.

Be alert.

Don’t be ignorant of me.

I am the first and the last.

I am the honored and scorned.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin.

I am the mother and daughter.

I am the barren one with many sons.

I have had a grand wedding and have not found a husband.

I am a midwife and do not give birth.

I am the solace of my labor pains...

I am a silence incomprehensible and an idea remembered often.

I am the voice whose sound is manifold and word whose appearance is multiple.

I am the utterance of my name...

Be careful.

Don’t hate my obedience or love my self-control.

When I am weak, don’t forsake me or fear my power.

Why do you despise my fear and curse my pride?

I am a woman existing in every fear and in my strength when I tremble.

I am a woman, weak, and carefree in a pleasant place.

I am senseless and wise…

You can read more at Thunder, The Perfect Mind

[wildstrandsblog]

Shifting Towards Love

I’ve had so many thoughts flowing through my mind lately as the world has suddenly shifted into a new COVID culture, where we’re all forced to take a backseat and ride the most current wave coming in. Many are perhaps bombarded by the whirlpool of neverending news cycle and maybe even dealing with their own COVID-related problem, whether its health, finance, concern over loved ones, educating children, or simply fear of the future.

I’m no stranger to drama—an energy I’ve learned to transform into the idea of life’s adventure. Having gone through a ceaseless cycle of change since twenty-five (I’ll be 40 this year), gaining perspective has always been my key. So while I’m still working out my new work flow to bring more writing and art in a time that needs it, I thought I’d share others’ words that have been bringing meaning to me and my husband.

Last night my husband and I started a **free** virtual Ram Dass retreat that aired this past weekend April 18th - 19th. While we weren’t able to catch it live, the stream has been made public until May 1st so we’re taking every night this week (and probably into the weekend) to listen to what we can. The retreat gives a practice of Pranayama yogic breathwork, translates Ram Dass’s lectures into modern psychology, gives the case for the union of science and spirituality, and offers one of the most important actions we can do as human beings - shift towards love - offering compassion even in the face of anger.

In my own mind, I have been hearing so much anger and have been hearing that same voice around the world. If the world has ever been given the opportunity to calm the mind to honor what we’re feeling, why we’re angry, lonely, sad, and a whole host of feelings, now’s the time. From that perspective, I am excited and look forward to carving out time to focus my voice into the collective catharsis that is happening, leaving my guilty pleasures of Real Housewives and Love is Blind behind.

I hope you find some peace, comfort, and the time to listen to this resource that has been offering me and my husband the same opportunity. I also look forward to dusting off some of my other writing projects. The next piece I’ll be focusing on and publishing will be a short mythological story I wrote almost two years ago titled “The Forgiving Tree,” which may feel like a big hug to other women, especially those who held Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree close to the heart like me. I’m hopeful to spread joy every chance I get in this uncertain but opportunistic time! Thanks for reading anything and everything here! It’s always appreciated!

[wildstrandsblog]

Inherit the Earth

3.4.20

In a mythological time told to be the Golden Age, there was a critical point in every person’s life when an inner voice would come calling to them, to be heard or even seen. This calling from within guided a human being toward their individual purpose, how that purpose was to be enacted, and how it would support the whole of the Earth. Tens of thousands of years later, most had grown deaf to that inner call but there were still some during the Age of Heroes who were courageous enough to feel the strong desire to connect back to a lost purpose. These stories of heroic men tell of how they left their homes and families in search of it. Unknowingly, in search of the pain it took to journey into the spiritual life. These men headed into the wilderness, some of them to the forests said to hold the mysteries of the Universe. In some of the ancient stories, these places of numinous resurrection were given a name, the Forests of Confusion.

In the Forests of Confusion, men began to feel the force of their own feelings, sometimes for the first time, observing and collecting the data their body gave them through sensations. They mapped out and got to know these sensations, first wrestling with them but ultimately coming to understand they were a part of them. From there, they began to revere these feelings as untapped intelligences in parts of themselves they could not see or touch but were consciously aware existed. Lastly, these men enacted the ultimate lesson learned in the process of becoming one with the Universe again; letting go of all emotion to feel the truth found in the nothingness that followed. They sent their emotions back into the forest so others could find them in a future time while retaining more understanding about themselves.

These men were the first yogis, shamans, spiritual leaders, Empaths, and more. They learned how to accept every aspect of their feelings, embracing the dark side of its force as well as the light. They learned how the natural world was there to support this process as they trusted the ancient dance of emotion that tied them to the world outside. The thin barrier that separated their logical, individual nature from the larger, illogical Nature outside was bridged to become partners in a spiritually, engrained cosmic dance.

Last year this time completing the first chapter of my life’s story, I found myself immersed in this drawing (showcased here) to capture the vision of my feelings. Saving some of the details for the memoir, I relayed a strong feeling I had the first time traveling solo outside of the country, caught in a spiraling fear of death. At the age of twenty-seven, I thought for sure my plane was going to plunge itself into the Atlantic Ocean and I needed to get my final thoughts out—the love I had for family. At that moment, I stopped everything to call my partner then, anxious and fearful my world was ending and inadvertently missing my flight. Pleading with the gate attendant to turn the plane around, I was gutted and internally ridiculed that an adventure I was just beginning had already ended without even stepping foot into the beyond. Little did I know that was the intended mistake my life was needing to turn my whole world around.

From that moment, I made a promise to myself I’d no longer be stopped by fear, despite the odds. Sitting in the airport watching my plane fly away to Argentina, I made the conscious decision to catch the next flight out and permanently ink my body with a symbol of an idea which had been growing inside me for years—the fleur-de-lis. I write that on my last day in Argentina after getting tattooed, I could feel how this new tattoo was going to grow on me. The fleur-de-lis was the start of a symbol that would become the seed to the Tree of Life I now have covering half of my back and torso. Where did all of this knowledge come from? How did I know the exact thing that would bring balance to an intense fear of death in a split second never having been formally taught? Prior to that, I had never wanted to get anything tattooed. I didn’t want anything permanent on my body and in my family tattoos were taboo.

As an elementary student sitting under a large tree on one of the last days of school called Field Day, sweltering and fun-filled, I found myself thinking bigger than any lesson taught to me in school. My entire class had just left the shade of the tree except for me, refreshed from Coolies and orange slices. I was caught in a daze picking up moss rooted in the damp ground. With chunks of dark earth lodged beneath my fingernails, I revealed a colony of ants just below the surface breaking down the traces left from the class picnic. I silently observed this lively moving and intricate system that had a different way of life from the one known to me, synchronized with purpose for one final outcome—life. For the first time, I was personally getting to know a system I wasn’t learning from a textbook. I lived it, breathed it, touched it and immediately knew there was something out there far bigger than me although in size I appeared larger than it, and that was exciting.

Why hadn’t I been given a lesson to observe the natural world in this way before, quietly and instinctively, living in the school’s backyard? Why wasn’t I taught about what my connection was to the world outside of the classroom? Imbued with “good” habits to study hard, get good grades, play sports, graduate, go to college, be successful and more, when did the question stop being asked why these were the only habits worth value? Where did the love of learning about a life within reach of our fingertips go rather than reading it out of books and in classrooms?

Age, children, an evolving culture, and the creation of my own space has given me the opportunity to question the methodology behind the modern classroom compared to human intuition. Going back to a time with no written history, my imagination has had to make leaps to make meaning on what caused the shift in thinking, supported by my own experience, education, and intuition. In my mind, it’s as if somewhere in time the ancient, young, evolving human consciously chose to cut itself free from a great love ending the Golden Age of humans. This disconnect, told to me by my own experience, probably came from some great, unexpressed pain experienced by the mother, child, or even both becoming an archetypal wound or pain passed down. That pain would have been explained away as something bad, even sinful, no longer valued or unpacked as a force that could give each of them meaning.

The young, adolescent mind grew up disconnected and partially orphaned. It was no longer supported or protected by that great love that had the capacity to hold pain—a love that first comes from the nature of a Great Mother. Human nature, problem-solving, developed a system of logic that comforted them and left the story of pain to the imagination. Culture evolved to protect us from that evil entity called pain. It gave us rules on how to domesticate ourselves, how to sanitize our environment, and valued the achievement we made to eradicate pain. We no longer defined the individual’s boundaries or the force it took each of the individuals to get there.

Times have changed since the first men who felt cut off from their spiritually inherited purpose. It’s women, now, too. Similarly and, yet, different to men, I have been a female traveling in a motherless world without a central figure in life or mythology to guide me as a role model. I have had to travel back to the mythological Forests of Confusion alone, connecting myself back with the Universe to find my Great Mother and how she can be retrieved to live here. I have evolved enough as a human not to leave my children behind in the process, the only hope I have of becoming the figure I wish to see in the world. I travel in time by way of creating my own space to write my story down as a legacy for my children and my children’s children. Through my writing, I walk up to and through memories of significant and multiple traumas, releasing them back into the masculine-driven world that has held a lot of confusion for me. I organize and reorganize my personal story through the science and art of storytelling using the Hero’s Journey as a cipher to understand its patterns.

I journal, blog, and interpret my dreams as a way to collect the data from my journey. I create art like cave paintings at the end of each quest to express my feelings. I meditate and pray, finding balance, while practicing my own personal integration of yoga and Pilates. I contemplate my own beliefs and values while incorporating wisdom that comes from old books, new books, art, music, friends, family, and podcasts. I have consciously walked away from cultural expectations of a wife, mother, daughter, sister, and traveler to create my own defining features. I have integrated a more personal, differentiated joy and happiness which naturally desires to serve my family. I have found myself becoming a Jedi in a world that unknowingly grapples with the loss of love from their Great Mother, too. And I raise future Jedis with a consciousness of love and hope to bring a greater balance back to the world that honors the Great Father and the Great Mother as partners.

All of this to say, what I have found in these moments where I have inherited back the intelligences coming from the Earth is my place and the many roles I have been made to play. Humans are the Earth’s storytellers as I observe myself and my connection to the outside world. My purpose, aside from wife, mother, daughter, sister, and traveler, is to share my story and to offer time and space for others to share theirs—to savor the healing that comes from us sharing our stories together and to feel our own individual pain collectively. Life becomes simpler, quieter, more enjoyable, and greater than any way I was taught in school as a girl. The harder work is rewiring the habits of naivete taught to work harder and faster all by myself. The simpler work is to get down in the dirt and play around for a little while, hopefully with others, and to decide for myself the meaning it holds. I never know what I might find on any given day but it has become an endlessly mysterious place to find the next thing I’m here to do.

______________________

A big thank you to my husband who has been listening to me share my big brained ideas with him for years. At times I have felt like one of the Alaskan salmon swimming against the flow of water, beating my bloodied body against the rocks, all because of an instinct and the season of time I was feeling. I haven’t always been able to get my husband to swim upstream with me. It’s hard to make sense of the illogical when Logic says, “Why am I going to beat and torture myself again? Because I’m supposed to? Because Nature is telling me to do that? Something is seriously sadistic with Nature.” But when Logic finally says, “Okay, Illogical, you’ve been telling me this for years. I’ll try it your way…once,” Illogical gets a silly grin on her face and says, “Okay. Buckle up, buddy.” And once Illogical and Logic set out to get to the top of the stream, bloodied and near death, to experience the mythological Shangri-La waiting for them, it’s soon realized this place, flowing with magic, healing waters, was the only place where the illogical could be experienced as making sense. And instantly you know how it was all worth it. All of it was so worth it. Thank you, my dear husband, for swimming upstream with me...finally. It is worth the wait. You are worth it. All of you, my dear family, are so worth it.

[wildstrandsblog]

Where I’ve Been

1.17.20

In the recent past I have found myself quoting George Carlin’s take on life—how we shouldn’t expect to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body but rather should be shouting out at life’s end, ‘holy shit, what a ride.’ This quote speaks to me and what I’ve seen of life many times so far but there is one further quote that hits me just as deeply and where I’ve been spending my time as of late. It shows the dichotomy that can exist in a single person. For those like me, picking up a copy of Thomas Merton's “No Man Is An Island” became another layer of a map that hadn’t been interpreted, yet. I had never read someone go to such lengths to speak about the importance of silence and how silence was the only thing that was real in the world.

It was profound for me. Merton writes, “Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquility of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. The silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquility of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion.”

Over the past few years, the stress and pressure transitioning from adulthood to parenthood has been more than palpable. It has been agonizing as well as spiritually transformative. Self-guided with the help of my children, I’ve learned how to become the least resistant to this next level of transformation that has been like an infinite looking glass where I see into my past and into my children's future. It is a scary feeling, uncertainty, not knowing where you’re going and not exactly sure of where you came from.

Growing up as a child of the eighties, it wasn’t common to see parents listening to their children. The norm was the opposite in fact—children were to listen to their parents. This summer was an interesting time for my husband, children, and me. During this time I was told by my four-year old, “I’m different.” In the past, I have met him with the “normal” and perhaps prescribed answer I’ve been told before, “Yes, of course you’re different. Everyone’s different,” but this summer presented a time for me to let go of my fears, in this case—of me being different, and just ask my son, “Why? Why are you ‘different’?”

Invariably, this line of questioning always led me back to the same place each time: nowhere, nothing, and a place of silence. When I responded to my son’s question with, “Why are you ‘different’?,” his response was unexpected and, in a way, miraculous. He said, “Because of you,” swooping his face into mine with a smile. From that moment, I realized I had no more idea about what made me different. Why was that? Why didn’t I know why I was different? Because I hadn’t asked myself? “Why am I ‘different’?” Each time, no matter where the question began with my children, “Why is the sky blue?,” if I asked a question back rather than working to imprint my interpretation of the world on them, I was always led back to the same place—the silence of not knowing the world within me. It became confusing, to say the least, at times but for a parent of three boys all under the age of four who are always looking for answers, my confusion finally allowed me the freedom to say, “I don’t know,” and it was like reaching the next level of bliss.

Over Thanksgiving, I felt blessed to be given what came to me like a supernatural gift of silence. My husband and I with our three small boys traveled from our Northern Virginia home to a little house located on the Potomac River where the mouth opens up to the Chesapeake Bay. It was just the five of us. On our last night, having tired the children out finally, my husband and I had a moment to find peace sitting on the dock of our little vacation home. With the expansive water and the night sky aglow on the horizon from house lights dotting the juxtaposing side of the river, we closed our eyes to find not even the faintest sound of a ripple hitting the pilings. It was perfectly silent and perfectly still. We were a little awed to have the ability to see everything around us and, yet, have the sense of hearing none of it.

For some it might’ve been a little maddening to sense the nothingness around them. For parents of young children who talk to each other as if they are sixteen year old girls concerned with finding prom dates, silence was the sweetest friend we couldn’t hear. We relished it for the moment we could sense the eternal, only for it to be broken by a commercial jetliner flying from Reagan International Airport invisible in the cloudline. The noise almost seemed deafening compared to the silence just before it. Inevitably though, the plane moved on and the silence we longed for had never disappeared. It was there waiting patiently for us to tune in again. In that brief moment, we experienced the moment Merton had penned years ago—the plane’s illusory strength compared to that of the sky’s; the bliss of the real world for which the noise from the modern world covers up, the world of silence.

In Joseph Campbell’s final interview just before his death captured in “The Power of Myth,” he says, “I try not to guess. You know, we have a tremendous amount of information about this subject [of burials], but there is a place where the information stops. And until you have writing, you don’t know what people were thinking. All you have are significant remains of one kind or another. You can extrapolate backward, but that is dangerous. However, we do know that burials always involve the idea of the continued life beyond the visible one, of a place of being that is behind the visible plane and is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate. I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible.” Broken down to its essence, what Campbell is saying becomes clear—that the world we don’t know has long been thought not just to be a window, river, or bridge to the world we know, but its whole support.

Nowhere does this plane become most visible to me than within my own children having just arrived here from there. With that thought in mind, it’s become easier for me to believe that the order of the world I was taught growing up was actually taught in reverse. The order of the world I know was not meant for me to be the support for my children, listening to me and my interpretations of the world and how I see it. Any noise I make would be teaching them the illusion of the world we already know. No, the future of the world lies in reconfiguring that paradigm. In my moments with silence I have found that I’m here to listen to my children the same way silence is here patiently listening to me. My children are here to teach me how to become the silence we all inevitably become. We become that silence by believing that there’s more inside each of us worth listening to which we don’t already know. If we’re curious enough we follow those clues that lead us to ask another question. And so the story would go, asking ourselves and each other about our own inner lives, where we’ve been, and where we all eternally go, writing down what we find on each of our roads less traveled.

[wildstrandsblog]

The Long Wind

I’m back. I’m back from a very long adventure and my most recent inner journey, never knowing when or where the winds of change would come or how fiercely they would blow. These forces, which I could only sense and never fully see as if I were one of the ancients traversing the belly of a cave to create an everlasting painting, took me on a journey that changed me completely. There’s no better story of transformation than the one where all beliefs are suspended and the unseen power of the Universe, sometimes raging, takes over.

I sketched this picture almost a year ago back in January of 2019. Frustrated from issues outside of my control, I let go onto the paper starting from what felt like a black hole. Without filtering my thoughts, feelings, or form, I found myself in a swirl of darkness partnered with complementary patterns of color and light in a mystical dance. It was a lesson I was giving myself, practicing the art of flow and learning to trust the mistakes I was making. The picture became known to me as, “The Long Wind.”

Drawn in more deeply, I tuned into the higher intelligence of my picture that was connecting with me. I saw in it the beginning of my own creation long ago, like all of us, when two great sources, a Mother and Father, came together forming the spark we now call the Big Bang. Understanding where I came from allowed me to see that the Universe had always been with me, could never be against me, and never separated even when I wasn’t a star hanging in the heavens. If I was willing to recognize myself as one of its billions of angelic descendants, I would be allowed to see everything I wanted to see. Everything was already present. I just had to push back another veil and be ready to receive the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Predicting raging sonic storms and explosions, I would have to stick tightly to the patience I could only find in Time. Time would be the only rock strong enough to withstand the waves of sonic blasts that were out of my control to clear away what wasn’t meant to stay with me. Patience would be the key, taking breaths while huge waves crashed over me. I was being asked to stand as still as I possibly could until I could hear the sound of my heartbeat amongst the quiet.

Now that I’ve found my stillness again after almost six months, I have been sharpening the three weapons of knowledge I acquired as gifts from my adventure. They will be featured in my next writing piece, telling the shorter version of my journey. These three weapons and the title of this piece will be “Forgiveness, Laughter, and Sound.” As a warrior of wisdom now, they will be sharp and ready when the next storm comes.

[wildstrandsblog]

Lost Dreams

How do we recover our lost dreams? Like many of you, I have lost so many of my own, from the loss of our first child and pregnancy, the loss of my father almost 8 years ago and my husband’s father last month, to the loss of my mind. It’s no coincidence my favorite artist, Feist, is beginning a series as beautiful and as poignant as she is, all inspired by a great loss she faced and the fear that followed to reconstruct and put it all back together. It’s one of the greatest fears humans can face other than death. How do we go on in the face of fear? One way I’ve been practicing is by simply sharing my story. Feist takes us on a journey through loss in this first podcast, “Lost Dreams: The Neutral Cruelty of Hope” through the simple act of storytelling.