On Unfolding into Ash

It is Sunday night, I'm still aware that tomorrow is Monday morning. Something inside me urges me to tend to the words I share. I still have all these chores. What am I to do next? 

Where are you when my blog is a meandering unfolding?

My mind is full of flowers and logs, and this blog is a campfire that keeps me warm. What I publish is my ash.

What's different in Guatemala is the judge is quieter here. Fear no longer moves me, I grow stagnant and complacent, listening for other forces of movement. Space to listen for the muse to call me forward. Whatever urges me to action is more gentle now. When I get stuck on a task, instead of pushing through, I step back, I breathe, nap, sit outside until my stillness shudders me into movement.

My work is in marketing, building relationship that touches and moves the ecology of us. Worlds like "Branding" and "Offerings" and "Consistency," and "Marketing Niche" swirl around my head, I think about a focus, an intention. Questions continue to emerge. How do I sell myself while I am being myself?

A breath, let's start by being messy, mumbling and rumbling. Chores, chores, chores.

What's the sweet undercurrent tying all these blogs together so you can stay with me? So I can invite more people to listen and glean the gifts of my work? To be touched with resonance and moved to action? And to feel safe simply witnessing?

I'm shoveling through old posts and holding them up next to each other so I can hear myself, hear what still resonates, and speak from that place. A nature walk through the trees and forests of thoughts!

A theme that seems to be important among successful blogs is some manner of focus.

So, let's take a meandering path through questions about focus.

Let's think about focus as a supportive structure of Knowing in the wilderness of Unknown. 

I am wandering through the wilderness unknown, my ears trained for inspiration, epiphany, Truth. The relief of confession, forgiveness, integration of my fullness in every step. No longer cinched up to fit into others hopes and expectations for me, I am allowed to step away from relationships that do not see, celebrate, or are warmed and nourished by my light, my truth, and my full humanity.

So my wandering-blog becomes the gentle unfolding of fullness into my integrity, gently brushing up against the influence of your awareness, as you choose to give me attention. As I write, I tune into wrapping my light and my bloom with language.

My light and my plumage extend beyond my words, and my words are all that can be seen of me by some. My values, my beliefs, my reality alongside the values and beliefs and reality of others.

Maybe that's what is here to strive for, is a clarity of values. Yes, values formed outside the institution, so as to return to the institution with new ways of seeing and name what I see as it is put back together.

My addiction to external validation has led me into relationships that I don't want to be in, that don't nourish me, and have led me to the kind of self-abandonment that makes me "loved" by all.

IN MY TRUTH, I am not for everyone.

I have long been compelled by the question of how to be Myself WHILE in relationship? There's a value, a focus, my fullness, and connection with me, myself, my heart, my truth, my light, this bright plumage of my nature. Attachment theory suggests that as a child, I abandoned my full self to be certain of my connection with my parents, to be worthy of their nurturing. That self-abandonment continues into all my relationships until I am conscious and can name what is happening, so I can make new choices. 

Awareness begets choicefulness. 

Awareness of unconscious limiting beliefs of old ways the world was, awareness of conditioning and coping mechanisms beget questions to bring me back to this moment now. 

The more full my expression, the more fully I can receive love, because I know you see me, and when I know you can see me and you love me, I know I am loved, and so I open up to both giving and receiving, a full conduit of interconnectedness. 

So I am called to loving myself, to be impeccable with my word and choose to live into my full expression, then I can practice allowing myself to be sloppy instead of feeling like I should be more regimented. My sloppiness is divine! There is medicine in my messiness. 

(I share the words of my wandering feet for those who are also lost and want to be lost with me)

My focal point for my attention and awareness is to know my fullness.To bathe and clothe myself in that fullness with this quilt of my language.

What do I do to move toward fullness? Where do I look? The answers are WITHIN me, that they are called "Intuition."

What is Intuition? What is advice and conditioning? What is my values and what is yours? 

I've lived as if the framework for deciding what to do is outside of me. Parents, teachers, peers, who could see what I could not see. Maximizing my connections, the goodness of my connections, the pleasure of my connections, at the cost of me and my love of myself so I could have their eyes, their approval, their guidance.

And now I'm pressuring myself to abandon the external and reside only within my "intuition" and that I must be willing to follow that against all other advice, and even under direct and forceful disapproval. How can I know my values if I am always bowing to the stronger external will?

I value my full expression. I value relationship with others.

Now I am pressuring myself to see that it is only inside of me and that I must grow to follow something nobody else sees. And to do that is to be in relationship with isolation, be it one of gentle loneliness or fear-rooted condemnation.

Now there's a layer of me wanting to tie this all up in a bow, but something quieter tells me this exercise is already worth itself, it is its own answer. Something quieter says no matter what I write and discover, I am already in my fullness. What life would most honor my fullness? What is the next choice to make to show up to loving myself and leaving a wake of who I am?

So I return to listening to the existential buzz. The philosophical hum of "write and read and revise." Calling my intuition, calling in my inner-knowing to guide my hands through all the words that I could write, honoring the campfire warmth of writing anything at all, and honoring the ash of whatever letters are published.

I was told by my archaeology teacher the secret to happiness, and maybe to peace-of-mind. He told us that the secret was, "expect less than you are thankful for". In my spiritual journey and personal experience, I've felt the weight and seen the power of thanks, and as such, I plan to focus the tone of this blog on just that: unpacking gratitude through narrative.

So gratitude takes on a weighty role in my value system. By focusing on gratitude and reverence, values, focuses, and questions begin to emerge.

This is where my idea starts to take light. It comes from the famous singer/songwriter, Leonard Cohen, who once said: 

 "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."

I believe that blogging can be the same way. I'll just take the ashes of my well-burnt life and paint them up on the wall in a wild celebration of experiencing the warmth of experiences. The ash and charcoal that I'll draw with will be something to remind other cavemen like myself that life is in fact good, amidst the mastodons, tigers, and cave bears.

 

So I call on the fire to hear my supposings, with gratitude for the practice and the weaving and knitting of this quilt.

 

Burn, burn, burn, may these blogs be the ash of the days gone by! 

May poems of my gratitude be left in the wake of the life I've lived. May my gratitude and reverence for this life permeate all of my writings, my actions, my choices.

Vivid Dreams of Arrival

My last meal before leaving the country was an Eggs Benedict.

I chose to not have the coffee because I was already so nervous.




We had a four hour layover in LAX after flying out of PDX.



The overall hum of my travel experience was a caffeine headache fuzzybuzzyssswirl.

Sitting on the plane, arms wrapped around all my games, books, journals, ways to pass the time and anchor in the change, but I just fell asleep in our anxious octopus-arm-embrace.

I can hear my friend’s voice playing in the back of my mind, “This lake we’re going to be living on is a really spiritually intense place. Everyone who I know that comes here has had this really intense adjustment period, just be fair warned, it would be good to budget for a breakdown.”

There’s Guatemala.



Landed.

“There’s the bathroom. Remember to put your toilet paper in the trash, not the toilet. Also, I wouldn’t drink from that water fountain.”

Noticing my empty water bottle, wondering where the next drink would come from, I took a deep breath and felt a flush of thirst wash through me.

“We should stay in the airport until our driver arrives because if we go outside we’ll get swarmed by drivers.”

We sat in the airport lobby, comfortable chairs near the “Explore Guatemala” sign.



“Our driver is here, let’s go.”

Walking to the car and loading all these bags and boxes into the car. Every pound of it is the kindling to keep my homesick heart warm in this faraway place. We’re driving and I’m in shock. I’m a child, a little brother, suckling on the perception of my guide and her driver who is holding both of us.

It’s important to have a good driver.

The air is musky with the sweat of drivers and gasoline, we round the corner to a road full of cars threading lanes like a broken loom.

“Welcome to the mess”

We’re driving on a pretty typical four-lane highway at first, but the cars are weaving in and out chaotically. There’s motorcycles humming down the lane divider. There’s two lanes going each direction. That is, until we see some cones and jolt into the next lane. Sometimes we’re on the left side of the road, sometimes the right, most of the time both lanes are going both directions. The only rules of the road seem to be get where you’re going as quickly as possible, and don’t clip anybody else with your car and send the whole river of commuters into a death spiral.

I feel my wobbling belly held in a glass jar of shock in the smog, dismayed, awkward, tensed up. My heart yearning for beauty, arrival, a sigh of relief, my home-to-be, what I came to see:

[We’re going to the lake, el lago, Atitlan]



Finally out of the rush-hour in town (I'm told that isn’t even the worst of traffic) and at speed, the mudslides along the roads make the road treacherous to traverse on its own. Where there isn’t fallen debris, there are potholes in the concrete, primed for consuming the souls of tires which are unskilled enough to be kissed by their undercarriage-rending maw.

As we dodge, duck, dip, dive, dodge through the Trans-Panama highway, our driver muses on the names of places, the history, the trips and plans to make and take, all in his skillful dance between traffic and the road. The road itself seems to be a living being, an extension of the land tended to not by the government, but by neighbors with enough heart and strength and immediate benefit to tend the lanes themselves.

Guatemala is an agricultural country. Guatemala is the land.

I am an engineer, I work -?used to work?- in land development.

“How do the roads break down and who pays for them?”

We talk about politics and history of the country and its infrastructure.

“Tell the people you meet who you are and what you do” our driver says to me.

After he says that, our driver turns through a gap in the highway median to cross the oncoming lanes and we pull into a beautiful restaurant, a clearing, an escape. Perhaps the most thoughtfully cultivated spot I have ever seen.



This place sprung from a woman-run co-op on this side of the internal conflict (a conflict spanning 50 years, regarding control of land and agriculture).



Full bellies and more sudden lane changes later, I was caught reaching for a good photo out the window. Laughing at my feeble attempts, our driver pulls onto an overlook adorned with a darling set of swings peering over a valley.

“How about this for a photo?”



Perfect. Here’s my sigh of relief, my first peek at Lake Atitlán. (you can see it on the top left of that photo above). I’m only now beginning to arrive.

Traffic, potholes, debris, road, road, road, we pull into another town, so we can take a boat.

I see my first street dogs.

“Look! A dog.”

“Ha! Yes, it is Guatemala, there are so many dogs here.”



The next steps are a blur

We stopped in town at the bank to get cash.



We hauled our stuff down to a private boat, we crossed the lake and landed at the dock of our final destination. We fire-bucket carried our heavy bags up the street, we heaved our stuff into my travel companion’s house so we could take a load off our shoulders to walk around time and start up my wi-fi, pick up my keys.

We stopped by a fruit stand and I’m handed a new fruit I don’t recognize, I peeled nervously and my hands are sticky.



Mind spinning from the whole day, suddenly having arrived at my destination, nowhere to wash my hands, my whole system is stiff just getting from one place to the next. I must be with my sticky hands until I can return home. My first lesson from the welcome wagon.

“I can smell the rain coming. I’m going to get us some soup before the rain comes.”

As soon as she left, the sky wept for my arrival, a greeting, lamenting, grieving what was to clear space for what is here for me right now. The rain really came down hard.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

...budget for a breakdown.

“They we’re out of soup”
She returned, soaked, I’m just sitting in shock, waiting in the dry house.

“I think it would be good for us to take some of our own space to settle in. You want to go get some burgers together first?”

We walked to the burger place, just a couple minutes down the road. We walk onto a sizable patio with a number of tables and a large white sofa for lounging.

Inside it’s poker night, on a big round table to my left. Ahead there’s a long bar with stools, more tables to choose from, also. There’s a lot of wood and dark coloring, a speaker, we sit at the bar to order.

The man serving us is from Texas, he’s perfected his burger, he leans into me: “listen, I’m going to level with you. This place is an energy vortex. After some time here, you’ll feel your emotions more, all of them, heightened. At some point, you’ll be on the floor crying like a baby. I did. Either you make it through that and come through the other side, or you say enough and go home. I’ve seen it both ways.”

We step back out onto the patio. My shock eases to arrival slowly, rattled by his warning, almost identical to what I’ve been told. Ghost stories. I’m watching the most vast lightning storm I’ve ever seen, one after the other, a massive lighting lamp unto itself. My friend with her head on my lap, speaking softly about the day, both our voices rattled by all the movement, aching for stillness, safety, to spread out and set myself down.

—

I came home for the first time to this new place that evening.

Upstairs I was met at home by a grandmother spider, with long legs and a sprinting gait. I sink into this freeze experience with the spider. One last hurdle, a wave of panic ripples through me, Okay, I just need to take a deep breath, come back home to myself, I’m home, this is home now, now where are the cups so I can take this spider out? Where in this house is a place that I can sleep without thinking about spiders?

-deep breath-

Helping grandmother spider find her way to the yard, I toured the rest of the house, sensing into where a safe, settled feeling was, and decided to set my roots into the main floor room. It’s cozier, quieter, darker. I unpack and nest as much as I need to in order to fall asleep and it’s only moments after I wrap around a pillow that I sink into vivid dreams of arrival.

"So, what's in Guatemala?"

Leap!

 

I am in Guatemala.

 

Blinkspinblinkspin

{context context context}

Listen:

So: 

It starts here:

I am an                 engineer because

My father is an     engineer because

His uncle is an     engineer because

There wasn’t         enough food otherwise.

So, I get my degree

So I can have         enough food otherwise.

Years go by,

Work, work, work, 

Dull, dull, dull, 

but there's food,

Grind, grind, grind,

but there's a roof, 

Hump day, hump day, hump day,

and I write poems

Chug, chug, chSNAG?

s

n

AHHH

GARONAVIRUS?

snag? (covid) wait     COVID

I peek my head outside 

the cave (the grind - the dream - the real world)

I’ve been inside this cave,

Grinding away in this cave, 

Keep the fire lit,

(what if it goes out?)

wait,   

~ S U N B E A M  ~ 

~ S  P  E  A  K  S ~

Seek out the Light

Follow the Energy 

Speak your Truth

 

 ~~~~~~~>

 ~~~~~~~>

 ~~~~~~~>

 ~~~~~~~>

 ~~~~~~~>   

 

CRACKwaggleSHKKKKK

My mother is dead

My mother is dead

MY MOTHER IS DEAD

MY MOTHER IS DEAD 

M Y M O T H E R I S D E A D

work

M  Y   M  O  T  H  E  R   I  S   D  E  A  D

work

MY MOTHER IS DEAD 

work

WmOyRmKoWtOhReKrWiOsRdKeWaOdRk

I am home

working

I am back at work 

my mother is dead

I am in love again!

This is my Soul Mate! 

This is life!

I am okay, I can start a Family, 

My soulmate, She's perfect, She's just who I need her to be

This is my s!o!u!l m!a!t!e !

[F$%& YOU, RILEY!]

 

 

my soul mate is Dead,

Dead, like, I mean, 

I'm more than this:

 a wife, 2.5 kids, a dog, picket fence,

a hatchback station wagon with a car seat,

is dead 

I'm more than 

my mother is dead, she's more than,

Everything I (she) thought I (she) would be,

Everything I (she) thought I (she) needed to be,

in order to be considered enough.

I can't. won't. 

Because I am Enough Already.

My heart is broken,

I am Already Enough.

(I have Always been Good Enough)

I grieve all the reaching I've done to be

considered Good Enough

I have always been good enough

the dream of being good enough to be good enough,

the dream I was given is dead,

mymotherisdead

(((I stop working)))

h i b e r n a t i o n

    chrysalis

 

 ~

 

 ~

 

 ~

 

  chrysalis

I am adrift, asleep (sleeping?)

I am in Missoula, 

broken hearted, 

floating down the river,

my mother is holding my hand,

she is here with me,

My mother is dead, 

I am writing her eulogy, 

I am writing my mother's eulogy

I am at the pulpit,

my mother is dead

Reading her (my mother's) eulogy (eulogy, because she's dead):

(it's been a year since her death, did you know?)

Listen: 

My mother is dead

(the dream is dead)

I am (finally) living

I am (finally) in the wilderness                     

                               listening

 

. . . 

Halloween party visit to Portland:

"What are you dressed up as?"

mymotherisdeadyouknow

"I'm a wizard?"

shediedaroundhalloweenlastyear

"Who's your favorite wizard?" 

I'm moving to Seattle.

"Well there's lots of types of wizards like Harry Potter or Gandalf. And then there's Merlin!"

Life keeps going after death, you know?

"Ha! That's funny. You're funny. We can be friends."

I have to keep going. Keep working?

"We can be friends."

we call, (we talk on the phone)

my job, my mom, my job, my job, my job

she lives in Guatemala

I have to 

Work work work 

work work

work

L-I-F-E-G-O-E-S-O-N

Wake up! WAKE UP! WWAAKKEE UUPP!

T H I S  I S  R E A L  L I F E

I'm Moving to Seattle! for work work work

This is the way things are!!!

work work work

(phone calls: this work isn't working)

work work

(phone calls: I think I could build something else)

work 

(phone calls: I'm just getting by? I'm pent up? I'm so lucky. One of the lucky ones.)

work work

(phone calls: I'm comfortable, but...)

work work work

(phone calls: there has to be more?)

work work

(phone calls: I'm okay, fine, I'm fine, I'll be alright, this will get better)

work 

“I think you'd like it in Guatemala”

Work work work 

work work

work

work work

work {{My boss quits?}} work

Stomach work

d

r

o

p

s

 

My boss quit!

 

Abandon ship!

Back to Portland

Seattle was too far upstream 

Take me back, take me back,

"I think you'd like it in Guatemala" 

I'm back in Portland and I can breathe, I can finally

 

) ) ) b ~ r ~ e ~ a ~ t ~ h ~ e ( ( (

So,

it turns out I've been [u~n~d~e~r~w~a~t~e~r]

and    now

          now is the time to buy the tickets, 

          now is the time,
I am hanging over the edge 

I am looking over the

                            edge

                            and

                            what 

                            makes

                            me

                            JUMP

                            is

                            at

                            the

                            bottom 

                            there's THIS:

(and I am BRO/KEN open by THIS:)

 

I realize the JjOoYy I have found in the wake of my mothers passage.

My mother is dead and I can see now she is         so much more than I thought

Who I was around my mother is dead and I am    so much more than I thought 

This joy is unique to me

 

We all experience grief differently

I am broken open by the conviction to speak her death into life

With my words and my actions, 

I have to sing about who she IS NOW,

This living void carved by the Love of her Life Force in me, 

This void is magnetic, it takes an entire COMMUNITY to fill my heart again

(I am humbled by my community, thank you)

With my words and my actions,

Leap, leap, leap 

I have to (I am compelled) LIVE into what this LOVE is

 

I am in Guatemala.

Grief Part 3

October 5th, 2021. 

It's almost like I don't want to be okay again.

---

I have lived a year without my mother. One year becomes two. And before too long, you just can't believe how it's been so many years. 

One year holding a gong in one hand and a mallet in the other. The gong is heavy and sometimes I ring it, sometimes people look toward me and I feel seen, and then people look away and I feel alone, I am the only one carrying this specific weight.

Can I put this weight down and resume the pace from before? No, I can't shake the feeling that there's going to always be the ringing in my ears, that whenever the noise dims down I'll be left with the hum of the gong of the grief and nobody else will so I will strike the gong again with a mallet because it is there.

Here I strike my gong! My mother is dead! My mother is dead! Look and see! Know I am bereaved.

I invite my writing pattern to change a little bit, if I feel like it. I am grieving the old pattern of family gathering. My whole calendar year used to pivot around me working and living out "my life" until embarking on a pilgrimage back home, but now I am home, but it's not really here anymore. I am living with my dad and it is not really home, he and I are in the wilderness. We might as well be living in a jungle, comfortably mind you, but still just as far away and unsure of where to go next as the woods.

Perhaps this is enough, perhaps this is what my dad has been working for all his life and I get to sit atop his stoop with him and gaze on the horizon.

I do not wander much. I stick to my regular haunt. I am still shaking from 2020, the wildfires looming over Portland, the death of my mother, the collapse of my family into a new configuration, stopping work, and returning to work. Still, I am anxious to still feel the heat of my youth, and eager to make sure my young body has a chance to speak and express and dance and explore before even the rowdiest of songs cannot bring a rise out of me.

I am resting, recovering, and curious to know when I can reach out and touch the world around me again.

---

I stopped working for three months. Bereavement Leave. The whole time I asked myself the guiding question of "what am I doing with this time?" What will I look back on and say about these three months? What am I creating in myself by giving myself permission to rest in a busy world that's on fire? What seeds am I planting and what will I harvest? What will be harvested in me, if I am the soil? 

I entered into my time away from my job with the word "Alignment, Congruence, Integrity" inscribed above my door. I set an intent to enter into a chrysalis in Montana, to dissolve in Tacoma, and emerge in Seattle. 

I thought I would emerge in Seattle in September, but perhaps I am still simply dissolving for a later emergence. Spring, maybe.

One of the strange treasures I took away from this time was that perhaps there is a different kind of belief than I was taught about. Can the belief in science and belief in God be different SORTS of beliefs? Maybe there is a faith at the root of us which is always unshakable because it is always alive as long as we are. Does noticing different KINDS of belief supports a different WAY of being? A different way of relating to each other who believe things differently?

 When I think about my life today, after all I've worked through in my time off, I ask questions like:

• Instead of a favorable outcome, can I adjust my ambitions to the purpose of setting a pace?
• What are the elements of my "pace"?
•  What are the knobs and throttles which are in my control?
• What is the measure of "too fast" or "too slow"?
• How much of my measure of "too fast" or "too slow" is rooted in beliefs formed around experiences I have in my body?
• IF beliefs are related to values, how many of my beliefs are anchored to values I believe I SHOULD have, as opposed to beliefs that I have chosen because they align with my values?
• What beliefs can I change?
  

All of this flitters and floats around me as I re-enter "the grind". I care about my work, I care that the clients come to our company with energy to build infrastructure that their clients and stakeholders will benefit from. I appreciate that I am entrusted with their livelihood in their process to the development of land. 

What is my intention? To wake, to snack, to love, to work, to grow, to hold space for those around me to grow, too. 

 On my walk today I consider this sentence:

"To close with integrity, to open with curiosity, and to boldly hold space for the integration of self-inquiry."