Being 31 - Another Way to Be

Dear Beloved:

Coming back to the states has been like pressing my foot on the accelerator and bringing all my focus to the road of driving my life towards stability, while diving into the first deepest most committed relationship I’ve ever had. As a consequence, I’ve fallen away from blogging and reaching out to some of my most precious connections. 

So here I thought would be a nice moment to offer up how things are going:

In Guatemala, I woke up without an alarm, sat over caffeine and a book, had a poop, and spent 2 hours working on my business or old journals. I would then have lunch, and spend another 2 hours working on something before an evening walk to get fresh vegetables and cook a dinner with my partner watching a laptop for our dinner show. 

While we didn’t follow a strict weekend schedule, the weekend tended to be when lunch, the morning 2 hours and afternoon 2 hours got bundled up together into a trip to town or something off the beaten trail. We’d also “whiteboard” together where we would review last week adjust plans for the upcoming week.
In Portland, I have two rhythms, the weekday and the weekend:

On the weekday, I rise and sit and stretch, go to my job in middle-management engineering job at a company that was just purchased by Private Equity Investment firm, sit and work in my cerebral role with lots of small wrist movements for 4 hours. I take an hour lunch to read or sort notes on my phone or have a conversation with somebody. Then I sit for another 4 hours, usually taking a walk at 3 at work and a walk at 6 in the neighborhood when I get home. 

On the weekend, I wake up and caffeinate over a book. I think of my life in terms of daily rhythms, weekly, monthly, seasonally, and annually. This looks a lot like overlapping Venn diagrams in my head and the image of the seed of life comes up, so I usually sort my categories into 6 or 7 different overlapping circles. Oftentimes, my partner reads out loud to me whatever book I’m reading and we pour over all the nuances in a deeply gratifying conversation. 

Right now, my growth edge in my life is around embodiment. I’ve been unearthing old coping mechanisms around different challenging emotions that are now manifesting as physical symptoms. I am very purposefully choosing new ways of coping and managing that emotional energy in a dance with physical discomfort. Being 31 has come with new aches and pains that have attuned my ear towards understanding my body’s needs at an emotional and even physiological level, that I could ignore and bypass in my younger days. Being with a partner who is 8 years my senior has come with it a resistance to being “the young one” and the gratitude of somebody who is available to provide perspective and presence through my shifting out of “invincible 20’s” and into the next phase of new limitations opening up new ways to be. 

In pursuit of that embodiment, I’m very excited about the relationship between language and “systems thinking,” which is a way of understanding the world that focuses on how different parts of a system interact with each other. How one categorizes and names a part in a system (and how they name the system itself) seems to be a meta-system itself!

Everything I’m excited about lands somewhere between the books “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van der Kolk, “The Myth of Normal” by Dr. Gabor Mate, “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows and “No Bad Parts” by Richard Schwartz.

“The Body Keeps the Score” tells a compelling story of how psychoanalysis has evolved from the study of “shell-shocked” soldiers coming back from World War I, all the way to the very nuanced understanding of Complex PTSD, and how our relationship with our parents unconsciously ripples into every relationship in our lives. I first learned of this underlying through “Attachment Theory”, that people can be divided into “Anxious” attachers, who are uneasy in the absence of connection, and “Avoidant” attachers who are uneasy in the presence of connection, and the all-seeking “Secure” attachers who have mastered the balance point between the two.

“The Myth of Normal,” so far as I understand it as I read it now, deepens the research of the Body keeps the Score into the collective. If a society is not healthy, it may label otherwise healthy and unique individuals as defective, when those individuals symptoms are pointing to the lack of health in the overall environment. Compelling narrative for collective change.

“Thinking in Systems” is the epitaph of systems thinking researcher Donella Meadows. My main takeaway is the impact of understanding how different elements in a system (say, how a heater functions to regulate the temperature of a room on a cold day) impact one another through feedback loops, and why focusing on removing a symptom is less effective rather than understanding the context of its root cause. The book goes into various concrete thinking tools that have opened my eyes to many new ways of interpreting the world around me.

“No Bad Parts” brings it all together, how each individual is a multiplicity of parts and how that fractal ripples out into the collective.

If my mom were alive today, I’d be talking to her about these books. In her dying days, she told me about “The Body Keeps the Score” and the works of Dr. Gabor Mate and his lectures on “when the body says no.”

A desperately important part of my life is the evolution of grieving my mother’s sudden death in 2020. Her fourth death anniversary will be at the end of October, and I wonder what words to write about it, even now. I am well aware that I’ve so far posted about her on Mother’s day, her birthday, and her death anniversary. This was the first year I missed my first round of social media posts celebrating her.

And so, to celebrate Mother’s day, her birthday, and coming anniversary of her death, I’m reaching out to check in and ask who in my world is thinking about things like this, or what your typical daily rhythms are, what you’re thinking about at all. 

All my love along the way, and hope to hear from you, 

Riley

Seeing Lake Ontario for the first time on a trip to my partner's hometown

 

On Expansive Growth and Boundaries

 

Dear Beloved,

I’m learning something that has to do with Expansive Growth and Boundaries:

My boundaries are an old story, a wubby-wide-growth-arc. I was reading a blog post from my college days about spending a weekend cramming on a term paper while my friends all went on a road trip. That weekend, I remember thinking I “lacked discipline” around writing my paper over the whole term, and if I had been more disciplined, I could have gone on that road trip with my friends.

Nearly 10 years later, I can't help but see my “lack of discipline” as a lack of boundaries, and how that shows up in my relationships today. My early boundaries were founded on the swampy ground of a lack of conviction, a lack of belief, a lack of vision, (fear of conflict and fear of being intolerant) all while walking around with a heavy pack laden with a need to be accepted by adults and peers.

Other adults who never knew how to create space for me to cultivate my own vision in the way I now know I need. Other adults who were carrying the visions of their own grandparents without realizing it.

How can I have discipline without conviction and ownership? I’m responsible for choosing what environments I put myself in and when. What I will and will not allow into my awareness. Attention. Intention. Knowing my Needs. Holding my Boundaries to support those needs getting met in easeful, joyful ways.

And that’s just really new for me.

—---

Expansive growth is in contrast to Adaptive growth.

Adaptive growth is a tree growing around a barbed-wire fence.

Expansive growth is a tree rooting deep into the ground and wide up to the sky. 

It had been two weeks since I arrived in Guatemala when I had these thoughts around intention, discipline, and boundaries as they relate to progress, growth, and mastery:

I’ve been waking up each day and my mind is aware of one big task at a time. Today I’m writing a blog (why? to let people know I've landed and am enriched by this land), the other day I spent a couple hours figuring out how to post my tickets for sale to a concert I can’t make it to back in the states.

Tying up loose ends from a time before this life in Guatemala.

Sleeping a lot, too. Is my sleep a need being met or softness and complacency eroding my disciplined self? Regulating the overwhelm by numbing with my nintendo game Animal Crossing. I can’t help but wonder how I’m doing with my intentions. What are they? Am I following my intentions? Do my intentions have to be conscious to "count"?

Am I holding my boundaries to support my intentions to get my needs met, so I can set new intentions from a really richly-resourced place within myself?

What are my intentions? Where do those intentions come from? Why did I choose to be here? What can I do here that I can’t do anywhere else?

We grow in the direction of the questions we ask. 

What about my current beliefs distract me from realizing I am loved and that my full self is needed in the world?

When I'm feeling formless and lost, I read my gratitudes and intentions from my journal I wrote in Seattle, breathing into some structure, routine, discipline. That became “too rigid” and I relaxed into more nintendo. If I am too disciplined, am I just perpetuating the wounding that I'm trying to distance myself from? 

I decided I wasn't disciplined enough and so I pressed myself into more “desk work”. Produce, without any specific outcome, let producing be its own joy. Share whatever comes.

There’s something comfortable about my nose against a screen, with a couple tasks to put off while I dawdle and muse on a keyboard until I have enough fear to return to action. This is a familiar cycle, I’ve been told it’s a common strategy to get by.

Progress?

—--------------

Progress. Growth. Change. Mastery. Awareness. Transformation. Intention. 

Catching myself looking for something to drive my day around. Noticing I pull away from activities like feeding myself or getting what I need to feed myself. The state I’m in when I’m doing my work is important to me.

Round and round and round.

Leaving my corporate job and venturing out, I feel the expansive sea of things around me. I cling to my raft of Google Docs and joy of sifting and sorting through words and documents to digest, process, distill my stream-of-consciousness to a whiskey-dense syrup of wisdom.

It’s been five months and I’m just coming back to really dedicating myself to this publishing-work. I've been writing in my journal, doodling, now it's time to look back and distill, and share with you my treasured sap!

I feel a need to have enough time to really understand how I operate within a business, AS WELL AS have enough time to do the work based on that understanding. There’s the organism itself and the awareness of what surrounds the organism.

Just following my whimsy today, doing both of those at once. 

Remembering my intentions. 

What are my business intentions? Creation of Connections, Generation of Gratitude, Protection and Reclamation of The Commons.

What is my personal intention? To more skillfully live into the fullness of my relationship with myself and others at once. 

In typing all this, am I just stroking my own whimsical musing without a focal point? Is this getting me closer to where I want to be? Farther from where I was? Or perhaps I’m descending deeper into the formless wilderness.

Noticing also I’m following my old way of working by setting a deadline and letting that bring focus. Focus on ineffable and formless fullness, keep writing, revise, publish what gets written.

What is my ideal outcome? What happens right before that? Is there some kind of milestone that gently emerges into my ideal outcome? 

Focus on fullness and keep writing, let whatever comes be enough. Listen to whatever comes. Set boundaries to maintain a curious, compassionate, slow-and-steady state of being and keep writing. Let a publishing schedule bring your focus to a point. Keep writing, keep revising. 

Next I want a study buddy, a practice ground, a playspace to fuss with all the big pieces and notice emergent patterns together and play with those.

It’s been five months.

I’m learning something.

And it has to do with boundaries.

It has to do with how I get triggered and what to do relationally to navigate that trigger while I stay in connection.

(I seem to want to avoid being triggered to focus on keeping the connection with others, at the cost of my connection with myself. Why am I triggered? Thank you for triggering me.)

Avoiding getting triggered seems to keep happening and I get silently triggered in less conscious ways, looking for ways to

To this point in my life I’ve relied on using shame to change somebody else’s behavior or inhibit my own behavior.

Shame is a clumsy tool. Skillful use of boundaries are the next cool thing. Holding my boundaries so I only get just triggered enough to keep growing. Skillful use of boundaries keeps me in the sweet spot. 

Balance. 

Now I’m asking questions like, what if I’m triggered because I’m choosing to step into situations to break down my rigid edges and re-cast them in the heat. 

Gentleness.

I’m responsible for choosing what environments I put myself in and when and to what end, and something about Boundaries seems to be the solution.

And that’s just really new for me.

On Unfolding in the SunLight

I yearn to be known. 

My writing is confessional and carefully textured to both share myself and to hide in plain sight. You cannot see me in this writing, even though I am showing myself! I am here and I am not here, these are only the ashes and the wake of myself.

Below is a wandering thought I wrote in April of 2020. My mother was not yet sick. The world was still in shock to the COVID-19 pandemic. I had just read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", thinking about society, conditioning of rationalism, and the imperceptible truth of ineffable inner-wisdom. I was a year into really dedicated healing work, reckoning with who I am and who I want to be as a person in the world, and who the real me is in relationship. Therapy, journaling, integration, challenging my family norms and discovering the medicine of myself. 

I wrote this from a place of transition, a place of lockdown, and I enjoy reading it as it is today, feeling for the little cracks and crevices of change since that time.

April 19, 2020

I value experiencing a sense of Awe
and so Gratitude in my life
And so I devote myself to nurturing and fostering Awe and Gratitude
In this pursuit, so I unpack and repack my beliefs to more easily recognize the bliss of Reverence.
I call awareness of reverence in each of my steps.
To more deeply know the Gift of Being.

This I pray in the name of The God of All Things, Yahweh, The Breath of All, The Great I Am.
Amen

---

I'm reading this book. "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". It has provoked the following process out of me. My experience of it has been an exploration of "Rationalism".

I'm going to pause here and say my understanding of Rationalism tells me it is an even deeper bucket than I can begin to convey, the meaning for me for the purposes of this article reside in popular science, logic, in the institution of publicly funded education, their influence on me and my field of paid work, the principles by which I live my social/professional/bills-paying/secular life.

This year I have been finding my "light" and becoming aware of all the ways I hide my "light" to sustain relationships I depend on, whether or not those relationships celebrate my light. The idea that work and rest in balance is a more "worthy" life than the noble suffering of "hard work" rooted in "effort" has been unsettling the whole structure on which my life is built.

In this time of quieted schedule of COVID-19 and permission to be quiet, I am continuing to lovingly observe the unfolding of a relationship between my light and the means by which I receive or am given access to warmth and nourishment. The paycheck as the gateway to food, shelter, water, survival. Any threat to my paycheck being equated with my SURVIVAL. And so inspiring SURVIVAL instincts to defend the structures I have INHERITED.

I feel I have built none of this. I have kept my feet on the path greater traveled. There is a part of me who resists "society" and romanticizes "wilderness", the scary truths of "authenticity".

What are my values? I know what I WANT them to be, but I notice my life is not aligned to my ideals. Here is an exploration:

I value liberty, autonomy, comfort, ability to both SUPPORT others and not be a BURDEN. I value access to enough resources to not draw unwanted attention (to be in a space without experiencing micro-aggression suggesting I need to change or I am wrong). I value the space in my life and the time in my day to rest. I value being seen as someone who would do the right thing. I value putting in the least effort for the greatest benefit. I value the self-respect that comes with actually doing the right thing.

I fear the discomfort of doing the right thing. The risks and pain of doing something that I feel called to do by my spirit or moral compass, or social conditioning. I fear the shame of going against social conditioning, I am afraid to be the only one who sees, I am afraid of the responsibility to speak up when my perspective is called on.

I am afraid of carrying a regret which tells me I "wasted time" or an led an "inertial life". I keep an "open tab" which considers and evaluates my life decision so I do not go so far in one direction just because it is of least resistance.

I fear the scarcity of time. Imagining something ending affects my enjoyment. "Killing time" until the "next thing" dulls my enjoyment of the opportunity for whimsy in this schedule-desert.

I am naming values because my values to this point have been formed around the shape of institutions which have in part failed. I want to clarify my values based on Spirit (which dwells within the 'irrational' and unknowable, often defined entirely by faith) and within the unspeakable reaches of Myself.

I am afraid to pursue this questioning because I feel safer within rationalism, with the inertia of my everyday, it feels more defensible, easier to hide behind, and is so feels more forgivable than the irrational.

Except! To say I feel better behaved within the scope of the rational suggests that I cannot also hide lies within rationalism. Perhaps I hide behind rationalism because I know I can get away with my shortcomings there.

"There's liars, damn liars, and statisticians!"

I fear the irrational as a guiding light/value/principle because I believe I could either misinterpret or lie to myself easier "in the name of God" and so more easily fall off the wagon. The "system" as I know it, bases punishment on the "fairness" justifiable by rational thought. Rational thought which is believed to detect lies more reasonably than the mystical.

So defending the crooked lawyers. Corrupt politicians which operate within a framework of the rational, the logical, the procedural steps of rules.

I no longer have to associate social standing (shame is the way I orient myself to my social standing) with the energy of food and warmth.

Noticing the use of shame as related to the pursuit of comfort. If I am ashamed, I am uncomfortable. I want to be comfortable and so I avoid shame. I can be influenced by others.

Describing how schools and universities reward students realizing, too, I have been treating my job the same way.

There's an urge to tune my "light" into the systems where I can receive energy. To get a paycheck cut from client bills. But that's the root of it! I tell myself the honest pursuit of truth is willing to cast away security because there is Truth in the desert. If I am unwilling to go into the desert, I am unfit to know truth. I am a sap, a fool, a hypocrite who is afraid.

To really do it is to really do it and I feel like I SHOULD be doing it.

I SHOULD be in the desert. Even though I have not been CALLED to the desert.

To say I'm doing my best is to fall short of who I think I am. Who I aspire to be.

I just observe the holy men and see they are in the desert and my ego desires to be holy because to be holy is to be pleasing to the judge. And to be always pleasing of the judge is to know nothing of grace. When the judge disregards holiness, so do I. This is the difference between the rock of me and the tide.

BUT WHY do I choose holiness? If it is not from a place of honest reverence for the holy, it is a manipulation, a mining, a commoditization of the general regard we public have towards holiness. To believe in something is to see differently to the judge, is to open myself to be judged.

Then Paul, in Romans, tells me to submit to authority. Can I bow to God in my bowing to the authority of an institution of law or commerce? If my real pursuit is to know Love, to manifest Love within the realms of humanity, then I can always be given any circumstance as a human and always be in connection to love, guided by love of God and Neighbor as Self.

I ask, with the help of God, to set down my desire to be holy, to be known as righteous. Fear of being inconvenienced, shamed, or judged by my convictions.

I lay down my ambition with confession to my weaknesses I know within me. I offer grace to the pieces within me which struggle to return to God. I offer them the same love afforded to me. So in welcoming them, so I struggle to connect with God, and so God can begin to really do work with me. I can allow Her to fix my eyes to her and through her eyes know Me.

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."