A patchwork quilt for you, today.
Letting thoughts be here as they flow, like in the early internet days of blogging.
Remember: All life is sacred.
[First, a freewrite shared with my intimate story+somatics group two days after the election. There is so much shared understanding in that group–which I won’t be able to name here–but one important piece is respect for and knowing that each person’s system responds differently. Everyone can be in their own experience. Our shares are not prescriptive. We are sharing our lived experience.]
I had a restful night’s sleep on Tuesday, and woke up Wednesday to get ready for a day of outdoor shed organizing for my housekeeping client. I did a news search to see the election results. I had a split-second “damn” feeling, and then, “well, okay.” Shoes on, let’s go breathe some new life into this shed on perhaps the last warm day of the season.
My body was able to accept what was. Challenging emotions didn’t arise. I stayed in my tactile life, and my daily purpose remained the same. This was very different from the me in 2016. I wonder if some part of me knew this would be the result, if that’s why I was pulled to read Melania’s memoir in October, why I wrote a public 3,400-word reflection about what she and I have in common–when I hadn’t written online since 2019.
The me who has emerged from these last 5 years, that dark night of the soul, is now deeply rooted in the unseen. In Truth. In divinity. In the Great Mother. In the knowing that we are all connected. I now know that waking life is only a fraction of the experience, and it’s unfolding in each and every moment, each breath. Most of what appears to be is illusion, or was built without loving intention.
I’ll never forget my shock and naivety the first time I worked at a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Refuge my first term in a conservation corps in 2017. Nevermind that we were spraying poison onto the plants, into the ground, into our food/water, our home. Killing plants which were simply being, living, adapting to changing environments as they always do, growing where they are needed, where the environment is right for them to grow. I couldn’t see that clearly yet. What shocked me was hearing gunshots, and subsequently learning that this was open hunting season. In a place called a “wildlife refuge,” people are allowed to come here with guns and murder the wildlife? I was confused. I’d thought “refuge” meant something, and had trusted that meaning. Until I learned otherwise. At the time I still believed thin-binary-narratives of words like “conservation” (good) and “invasive species” (bad). Language is powerful. The narratives that are crafted can last generations, keeping folks from asking deeper questions, from taking a second look. Read more
