I’m here again. Sitting in the deeply human fog of internal struggle made manifest, after having watched Bone Temple (this time in theatres).

Memento Mori.

My own life has brought this truth into stark relief which some part of me set aside and forgot, prior to sitting down and watching this second installation of what is so clearly a mediation on existence, by way of the most challenging parts of what that means. Life. Death. Love. And evil. How we are shaped by and respond in kind, to what can neither be controlled, nor fully known. What can just barely, under the thick veil of fantasy mistaken as reality, or truth, be anticipated and called out to.

This film so obviously, is the work of someone who is in a very different stage of life than when this series first began. Shed are the cynical trappings of someone tussling with the proclivities and shortcomings of flesh and blood, but instead weighed down and wrestling in a barren land with the principalities of the transpersonal, and metaphysical. And yet still somehow the soul remains buoyant.

Much of the violence in this installation is man-made. A zombie movie where the terror comes primarily not from those who have become hyper-sensitive to external stimuli and enslaved by a parasitic virus which perhaps, in some interpretations, lends a more accurate representation of what the world (and man) truly is when stripped of its decorum and platitudes. But from conscious, uninfected human beings who cooly, stoically, face down death in ecstatic, devotional fervor that trembles before the only god that can exist in a world such as the one found in this movie. It is neither really god, nor the devil. It is fear, and all its accoutrements. It is pretending to be braver than you actually are. It is striking, before you are struck. It is aligning yourself with what feels like power, real power, even as your faith falters and the stage you have built around you begins to collapse, opening up to a blackness that is indifferent on whether it devours you, or spits you out. And isn’t that the real terror after all. A meaninglessness that is as indifferent as it is cruel. That will not spare you, and will not favor you. That cannot be coaxed into loving you even as you enlist yourself into its service, spreading its message and heeding a call you are not brave enough to question, or ignore. Allowing yourself to be transmogrified into the only type of creature believed able to survive such profound pressure such as this. To become the only thing that can stand against a monster. An even greater devourer.

In contrast, juxtaposed next to this man-made horror is another. An Alpha. A zombie who embodies an amplification of the most rugged qualities of the bewitched shambler. The wanderer who has forgotten himself, and instead exists as a near-constant volatile reaction to all things, as though experiencing the terror of pain afresh, for the first time, each time. This is hell. A perpetual now that leaves you sentenced to an eternity of forgetting even as you linger at the fringes of your black-holed memory. There is only the far-off impression of a hallucination of a distortion, of the idea of a memory, recalling a state of existence outside of this confinement of ever-repeating suffering. But that is a far-off reality that need not exist at all for how out-of-reach it protracts itself to be each time you reach out for it.

Somewhere in the middle of this story, is a boy. Lost to the terror of himself, and the world around him. There is, once again, the Feminine, but it has contorted itself in such a way as to become the shadow of itself. Tenderness cannot survive here. So it must only know the part of itself which destroys in an effort to protect. And then there is the Doctor. Painted in red hues, mistaken as the devil in a realm that pays homage to death in equal measures as it does to life. This solitary figure who bears the heavy burden, of hope, in these endless times of despair.

What more can a man do against the tides of the inevitable. In the wake of chaos and immeasurable odds of life ever returning “back” to whatever might have existed before. He can hope. He can do. He can be recklessly brave, defiantly virtuous. He can not waver when faced by the incarnation of evil that he does not stand a chance of surviving, if confronted. He can remain measured in doling out evil’s due, recognizing that mercy can extend to the end of the knifepoint, just as it might to the tip of a needle. And he can know when to stay his hand at either.

What does it take to remember one’s self? What does it take to remember that one must—will—die?

You have to engage in the staying with it, of it all. Following the breath, and seeing where it leads. Go about it, lightly. Cheerfully, playfully, exuberantly. Recklessly, relentlessly, faithfully. Prostrate yourself before what is and what ever will be, and defy the aberration of power by becoming still before it. You must know which parts of yourself to abandon, and which to take up and adorn yourself with. What parts of you are you, and which parts you only pretended to be in order to survive up until this moment. There is no other moment that exists save for this moment right now. There are powerful dissociates which can entrance you and cause you to become lost to yourself. There are powerful dissociates which can cause you to be lost to the illusory world around you, and bring you back to the beginning of yourself. Back to the you that is now, to the world that is. To a choice where you can destroy in a rageful fit of fear as an avatar of Vengeance, or you can submit, as an incarnation of Divine Love.

28 Years Later

I was firmly on the “hate it, why did they bother waiting so long to make a cash-grab movie,” when I was initially watching it. I felt disconnected, to the point of it feeling gimmicky, with what would be the first half of the story being told between father and son in what felt like a very pointless and crudely masculine expedition that seemed to invite unnecessary risk and didn’t feel at all celebratory or rational. The intercut scenes felt disjointed and maniac, and I felt guarded about how it felt as though the series (yes, even the second movie) had been insulted by these modern-day impulses to destroy media by capitalizing on formulaic money schemes and churning out a new iteration of old IP.

But the psychedelic influences bled through in this movie early on, and it kept me watching (and waiting) for something…bigger, I think, to happen.

And eventually it did.

Someone likened this movie to a fairytale, and having a tender spot for both the psychedelic and fantastical, it became quite easy to see how this was quite deliberately, the story of individuation told in the penetrating manner of the archetypal. It wasn’t until the second half of the story—when the feminine archetype was able to manifest and present itself unrestricted in its fever-dream state, that I could allow the story to begin to envelop and mesmerize me. Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes were delicately hypnotic, both embodying something deeply, reverently Feminine in its most sacred and mystical. And the cinematography unveiled this in as straight-forward a way as the metaphysical can be unveiled. I keep going back and forth on if Aaron Taylor-Johnson was miscast or not. I think a (better) another male actor would have maybe offered too much nuance and instead would not have done justice to the kind of masculine archetype that was being portrayed. But I’m glad that he was only in the first half of the movie.

There are some things in the movie I wish had been less overt—but this may be the fault of the “modern-day” movie-goer who expects a certain kind of movie to be told, in a certain kind of way, and that allows for only so much patience and curiosity and ability to witness. I cannot stop thinking about this movie. I did not expect to be moved as I was when Fiennes took the stage, or really expect it at all. If one can remain as sensitive and close to the existential, to what is true, and what is hard, how much more should we be able to do the same in our own iterations of the world? I found myself faltering to expand the limitations of my own humanity, but it didn’t feel as though the aim was to judge, but rather present. This movie is more like the novel “I Am Legend” by Richard Matheson, in the sort of philosophical questions it frames and begins to question. I think especially in light of the current and ongoing events of the world, it creates new conditions in which one might think of a “Rage virus” and the manner in which it might evolve. And how frightfully human that actually is. Like any good story, it makes one question who, or what the “monster” is, and this expression of some shadow aspect of humanity in which we are in perhaps dire need of confronting and contending with.

I’m looking forward to Bone Temple. I’m curious as to what story will be told, and how. Being neither European or British, I’m sure there are particular idiosyncrasies that I miss, but the story is still quite human, and I suspect, will become ever more maddeningly fantastical, where all manner of trickery and darkness will emerge, and some simple truth will keep trying to remain beating in a steady overwhelming cacophony crafted for the simple aim to tear one from oneself, and one’s heart. It is the natural sequence, the natural order, of one’s journey after all.

I have been listening, on repeat, to a mythically-rooted podcast episode that focuses on and elevates the “small powers” as a way to try to buoy and remind myself. It is the small powers which withstand, and understand, the test of time. It is the seemingly small, forgotten powers, which restrain the greatest of threats. It is the power of being still, of holding one’s tongue, of going “high when they go low”. It is an ever softening softness. Whispers. It is steady, and enduring. It is song, poetry, laughter. Relentless in its patience and persistence. The Mother/Female archetype is the most complicated to me, and it is also harder to understand as I grow older, ever more difficult to understand where I might begin to integrate it. How it feels so offensively shaped by Masculinity, while also having everything and nothing at all to do with it. It feels mysterious, cruel, indifferent, overbearing, weak, too slow. Powerful, but not powerful enough. Submissive, too optimistic, too caring, too sacrificial. Too quiet. Dangerous. My contending with it reflects my own wrestlings with myself, and re-writings and re-shapings of my philosophies and beliefs about the world, existence and reality. I feel buried by my own perceived weakness, not-enoughness. Biting back my own power—righteous rage—because there has to be another way.

The very first psychedelic trip I had, I was the embodiment of Kali, sitting beside her Lover who was recounting for her a story she had forgotten, in which she had destroyed the world in a fit of sorrow and rage. Rescued by her companion, and her animal familiar, from the hell of her own despair. A barren, lifeless desert that went on and on. That I was glad to have destroyed. That I did not know how it might be rebuilt in a better form, and image. And being visited, and reminded, of the nourishment and tending of the Cosmic Mother, held in the protective womb and brought close when fear threatened to paralyze and infect. Distract. I feel that distraction now. But it is so hard to remind—to dream, imagine—that a power so great, can bend and not lose itself, forget itself, in a world where “great” powers reign supreme. I cannot reconcile the power of steady hands, when I want the power of a fist, the power of a battle cry, when my heart aches with the power of lament.

You once were brought to tall mountains
to remind you that you knew how to climb
That you understood, innately
that if you reached forth your hand, a crack would appear in which you might be able to slip your fingers into the grip of a mountain that stood more still than you ever might
and pull you up a little higher, thrusting you beyond the veil of clouds which miraged the only ending you could imagine
which was cresting a mountaintop and standing a little higher
blessed as an untouchable
who took every shit-slung slight pitched out by man, and expelled by god as a reason to bow lower and affix thine eyes
higher
towards mountains that might deter and turn away anyone else
but you
who had somehow become inborn with a tenacious desire to escape by proving you could do what no one else could do
you found new ways to breathe
that did not require the steady rise and fall of your already beaten-in chest
to hunger after satiation that relied on a precarious dance between man and nature
take in no more than could be offered back in reciprocation of an age-old cycle that kept the world
in motion
because nothing stands more still than the mountain you have found yourself once again upon
climbing, higher
to remind yourself this time not of your ascending capacity
or that every crevice appears to hold tight your hand and urge you on higher journeys of personal reflection
that make no difference if you are ascending or moving with the crosswinds towards yet another unending horizon
but you are here instead, atop this mountain again, because you are damned in your reaching
and another cloudless mirage has appeared before your wind-battered eyes
tears, and
this time you mean to slip fall
tumble back down to the earth
and trust that some crosswind bears you up
or pulls you down, finally
so that you never have to rise again
but I am here to tell you your leap of faith remains here
with your softunderbelly naked against the stillest thing you could ever cling to
this great earth which has borne up this great mountain which you have determined you must climb
but my love, this is the earth rising up to meet the sky so that you do not have to go up to come back down
but can touch me, and know that through me, we are touching the sky
together.

At the beginning of this year I half-joked with anyone who would listen, that this year—my 33^rd year—would be my “Jesus” year. I thought it a light-hearted way to approach an otherwise “uneventful” age milestone. I thought it might merely be a year of sacrifice and back-burnered ambitions, no different than the previous year had been for me when I moved clear across the country to, at the time, finish my last semester of grad school and begin chipping away at the looming 3,000 hrs needed in order to become a licensed psychotherapist, opting to stay in the area post-graduation for the hands-on psychedelic work someone in my still-wet-behind-the-ears position could scarcely dream of securing. It would be no different than what I had already endured. What I had already told myself I would race to complete in an impossibly breakneck timeline. This was what I did. What I was used to. I was not afraid of effort—not afraid of shouldering the entire world if I had to—in order to accomplish whatever it was that I had set out to complete. I could be a villain, a shut-in, a workaholic. I could permanently silence any fizzling hopes of making this new place…tolerable. I could guard my heart in all the ways needed in a place, and with a people, that offered me no warmth. I could be as strong as I needed to be. As clear-eyed as was required to maintain visual on what my mission had always been.

What more could this place take from me that it hadn’t already? I’d be in paradise soon enough anyway—this place was never meant to ever really be my home. I had resigned myself to giving up any hopes of making this place “work”. Of it being a place where I might look at myself—at the world—differently. That I might tap into the roots of the pioneering generations that came before me, devoted to radical causes of perseverance, and love. I was not wanted here. I felt that from the moment I had touched down. The land was hostile towards me. To it, I was no different than the entrepreneurial opportunists who greedily carved up the land, and ripped it apart to plunder it of the gold it had buried and tucked away. Felt akin to the transplant workers who were obscenely financed by out-of-touch “innovators” to further widen a divide between man and his ownself. Man and his poorer fellow. To come into historic districts, working class neighborhoods, and terraform them into trendy shared spaces of artificial connection. As genuine as people were “nice” here. I had spent my first week here unable to stop from crying the moment I ventured outside to walk around, overwhelmed by the apathetic looking away it seemed everyone was accustomed to. People just wanted to be looked at—smiled at, acknowledged—so that they knew that someone else, knew that they existed. That they took up space, and that their life, however cruel a fate it had suffered…mattered. But I felt all the worse for refusing to avert my eyes. Embroiled in a kind of sensitivity I hadn’t felt since college as I began to realize how transfixed people were on becoming what the world around them insisted they become, rather than being who their souls ached and strained for them to be. I felt my resolve fading, and this was a last-ditch effort of me creating a darkened callous around my heart to survive what time remained of my sentence here. To my closest confidantes I confessed that I felt as though I were in my own Hell. If this were to be a personalized realm of suffering, it was adorned with all the elements that made me cry out for salvation that never came, that had me roaming as a spectre myself, in the land of hungry ghosts. I needed this to be my Jesus year, because in so many unspoken ways, I felt like a Judas to my own self. I had both tricked, and betrayed myself into coming here—into thinking that in seeking the alchemical ingredients for change, that I would not be changed myself. That I could venture into the wilderness and not only not become lost…but not find myself afraid of the encroaching darkness which in my heart, I knew, sought to devour me.

For at least a year, I was stalked by a shadowy presence that laid wait in my dreams, and shook me awake with terror. And I did everything I could, to outpace it. To outrun its snaky tendrils and just get back home...just do whatever I had to do, in order to get back home as fast as I could.

I think people just saw me as being ambitious. Saw my supposed workaholism as characteristic of a personality trait. My guardedness as a personality flaw. Early on in the year, I realized that I did not trust myself, to make the best choices for myself. Somehow the tireless effort I put in, was not reflected. Somehow, instead, the obstacles became bigger, the pitfalls greater, the edges razored. Every choice I heavily weighed, that I sought counsel from people I love and respect and have known for years, that I held within my heart and carried for weeks, sometimes months at a time, slashed back at me, viciously. I could make no right choice. I could settle on no position that did not leave me feeling cornered, did not have me questioning if I instead had within me, deeply buried, that was now only coming forth, a badness about me in which I were finally receiving punishment for. I could do no right, no good, and so began to slowly, gradually, convince myself that I were in all actuality, a bad person, and eventually felt a kind of terrified paranoia that I were, perhaps in some “past life”, an evil person warranting the slow drip, frustrating suffering I was now living as each day of my life.

I could have no straight-forward conversation that was not met with the dodgy passive-aggressiveness and slippery “spiritual bypassing”, distinct to this hellscape I had found myself pulled down into. I had moved beyond the realm of questioning myself, to not knowing who at all I was, or why I remained here. What had brought me all this way from home again? How could I have thought my drives noble? My intentions pure? How could I not see myself as the problem?

Before I had left home I had a noticeable, but manageable driving anxiety, that had, in my “Jesus year”, become a nearly debilitating phobia. I had never been afraid of death before, and in fact had an idyllic imagery of what my afterlife might look and feel like—and with imperceptible cunning, I had somehow, as if overnight, developed a paralyzing, nightmarish fear I could not wake myself from.

Every concept, every idea, every reality I had spent my entire life shaping and creating and forming, about myself, about people, about the world—completely dissolved around me. There was nothing left. I felt instantly reverted back to the mindset and power, of a child. I felt vulnerable in a way I have never felt in my life before, and I felt all the more terrified because I was 33 that I could somehow be like this, again, and so far from the place, and the people who could hold me and speak to me in a way that might remind me of myself—and of the protection and divine calling over my life I once innately knew I had. I felt alone and scared—and also as though my life were not my own. As though the very things which I had struggled and fought so hard to keep soft, and mold in the image of tender, resilient courage, were not mine. That they would be swept up, swept away, and churned back into an endless suffering of Samsara. I felt as though I had been doing this all my life. All of existence, for an endless eternity. Forgetting, and remembering. Remembering, and forgetting. And I could find no solace in either. I was, in many ways, having a psychotic break. I was losing my mind, my identity. All bearings I once had that told me I was a good person, with a good heart, with good intentions. I could only hear voices of rebuke and damnation. All the things I did wrong. All the ways in which I was not enough. Had never been enough. Only the ways in which I had allowed myself to be tricked. By others, and by my own self.

I didn’t have the words to articulate the torment I was experiencing, and so reached out to the local communities which I had spent well over a year, pouring my heart and spirit into. Here is where I should have been received, should have been cared for. Where I was told my spiritual malaise was expected for such a time as this, and most importantly, understood. Instead, I was set apart, pathologized. Cast out.

Whatever splinterings my mind and soul experienced, was completed with my heart, irrevocably breaking with the passing of my dog, of 13 years, on his 13^th birthday…

There are many people who will tell you that they are familiar with the dark descent of grief. Many people who will whisper to you that they understand the markers of one’s losing of self. Others who will say they are kin to the metaphysical which holds, and covers us all. That they know the designs of unfolding trauma. There are people who will look on you, and see, and convince you of their knowing, as they make a spectacle of your not-knowing, your, not being able to articulate, and cast you out—replace you—I know you not…when you show how human you are, and how feral that vulnerability of being human, has left you.

I spent so much of 2024 being stripped of what light about me, remained. I did not protect the tenderest parts of me, because these were the parts I had always given away, that I lived my life in offering up. I wanted to remain soft, in a place hell-bent on making everyone within it, hard, anxious. Subconsciously afraid of their own destitution. Where I thought if I sacrificed enough of myself, in honest, devoted love and care…others would come to their own softening, their own courage, their own steadfastness, and match the genuineness I had started this whole journey out with long before I stepped foot in this place. I kept reaching for other people, to hold what I could not. And myself, to hold onto potential where I could not reconcile with reality. I deteriorated in such open-palmed ways. I was trying to gain the love, and respect, and loyalty of so many people, who in the end, I did not really matter to. I was a fading tapestry in which new projections could be superimposed upon. I could be spectacle, sexual object, mother, dedicated worker. I thought that if I might set aside my own needs, pluck out my own eyes and become blind to my own visions—if I instead became slave to the needs of others, to coddling, and fussing over, and building up, to shaping myself into an instrument that might make manifest the dreams of others…there might be, at the end, time for me, room for me, hands enough to help shape me. I had been so guarded, so protective of myself initially, and received such a mortally wounding injury in standing up for myself. I was tired. I had already spent nearly 3 years prior defending myself at every turn in an academic environment that, on the surface, protested to crusade against historic disparities in academia and the field I was entering, but who, in the quiet rooms of courses where nigger was uttered and no student came to my side, or where, the professor and TA who are both licensed in my field, spent upwards of 30 mins in experiential therapeutic dyad in front of an entire class of my peers, equating me to said professor’s abusive father… I was tired. And my time here, in this new place, clear across the country, was to be my victory lap. Was to be a jog around the wilderness of my becoming that had asked all it would of me…of which I exceeded expectations—and could not possibly ask any more of me…because what else of me was there left to take?

I think about the allegory of Jesus’ life—of his final year on this Earth—and how he gave all that he had, even with knowing what great sorrow he would suffer. How alone he felt. Abandoned. Cast-off. Forsaken. I think of the terror of feeling so alone, of beginning to question things which you once knew to be, unshakable. How utterly human he was. And to then be cast off into an eternally burning pit where you are always on fire, always alight, and never allowed to transform into something that does not hurt, that does not remind you that you are easily sparked tinder.

I spent over a year running away from darkness that culminated into a confusing amalgamation of death as metaphor, and the literal. I knew it was coming, even as I could not speak it. I felt it every day. I didn’t think I would survive it, so took no comfort in its blanketing presence. I journaled about it, and there, in hastily scrawled script could affix a name to it, only to dissociate and forget I had ever written such foreboding prophecies in pages and pages of journals and hastily recorded notes of dreams to myself. I had so little of me left, how could I not cling in terror to scraps that lay stuck beneath my nails? If I fell into this existential black hole, this supernatural miasma, how could I ever trust that I could survive it? I could not forfeit up what sliver of me remained. This Love, and this Light which were the only things I had the strength to bring up from the depths of Hell itself. My own body which somehow, miraculously, still retained the purest core of me. Love, and Light, the things I whispered to myself in prayer as I struggled against night terrors, barricading myself in my bedroom until day began to break and burn off the tendrils of darkness which had gathered at the threshold of my door. Left so empty, so barren, I found myself bombarded by all the things which would have me rebuild myself in a likeness that would promise to return me to the reality of before. A slumber where I would be allowed to forget, and forget, and never remember again. I have been telling myself for a long time now, “courage, dear heart,” I could not now abandon those words.

In so many ways, I feel as though I should not have come out of this year. I should not have come out with my mind, my heart, and my soul intact. I should have fell into an impossible madness, should have died from a broken heart, should have found my soul shattered into a million pieces that not even the elapsing of an eternity would be time enough to fit back together. I had been terrified for such a long time, that I would not be allowed to make it back home, safely and alive. How much of this year had been like that? Doing all that I could, and all that I could never once being enough? Every last bit of me that I carried, eroded. The last of me was dirt stains and smudges, and even that paltry bit I nearly did not escape with. It was a baptism of fire, and I spent the entire year broiling.

I don’t know what kept me moving despite my agony. I had so many reasons to give up—wanted so badly to give up—and never could. It was beyond stubbornness. I had no trace of faith or some such, left. I was being dragged out, by being brought through. I was terrified of dying, but paralyzed from living. I got up, I ate, I slept, I worked, I walked. I performed all the functions I was supposed to, because what else was I going to do? Giving up meant giving into an unreality where I believed someone else’s story about who I was, and what I could be. Where I would always be afraid. Where I saw every dark corner as a shadow waiting to rise up, and drag me into a violating darkness where I was some younger version of myself who had been made a victim. Where I would accept being sexually harassed while doing my job because what else have I been but an object to be used as healing balm, and then discarded when I dared become a three dimensional being rejecting ill-fitted projections. Never seen. Never allowed to take up space in a way in which I was not simultaneously apologizing for my boldness, as I was dehumanizing my own manner of being because being “robotic” or “standoffish”, or “arrogant” were the only ways in which I could protect myself from the hungry hands that reached for me and stole the things that were mine, that I never learned to value.

I thought this year, that my realization was that I didn’t really like myself. But that wasn’t true. Over these past two years—and this year especially—I lost myself in a way I hadn’t realized, until the end. If I were more patient, more kind. If I just tried harder… Things would work out, I’d fit in, I could finally start seeing the life I wanted so badly for myself, that I wanted so badly to bring back to my family, my community, and offer desperately needed healing. I could just stop working so hard, and rest. I wanted my life to matter. I wanted my struggles to mean something. Because what was the point otherwise? If I can love and experience loss. If I can fail and never know success. If I could feel so much grief, and not shape it into something that was worthy of the life I was living. Of the hope that still persisted within me even as I cursed it.

I spent a year Becoming. Fire, is Becoming. It is a flaring up, a scorching. Eyes seared opened, so that you can do nothing but see. It is a complete burning away. Of the earth, of the sky, of all structures within and around you. It suffocates. Sucking up all the air, so that you must learn some other way to breathe, so sing. To be heard. But it is not too hot to burn away the bones. And bones are the only thing a Woman has ever needed, to knit herself back into Being.

I am thankful for the strong women, who surrounded me during an impossible season of Becoming. Who innately, intuitively, understand the threshold of Initiation I was being baptized into. And who gathered around me, when so many others abandoned and ostracized me, transforming this solitary Dying process, into a (re) Birthing. I was allowed to fall apart, in the way Women are not allowed to, but desperately need to, from time-to-time. I was allowed to go sane, in a crazy-making world, that would sooner kill me, than let me be free. That would sooner medicate me, than believe that my synchronizing to the seasons and tides and push and pull of the natural world around me, to my own body and cycles of shedding, seeding, rest, and rise, is enough to settle my heart and relax my thoughts. I needed to slow down, in the way only a Woman knows, but is not allowed to do. I had carried so much alone, that I did not at first, know how to trust that I did not have to carry it all any further. But not all womenfolk (or skinfolk), are kinfolk—and that was the most devastating lesson of them all. The first act in letting go, the first step, in moving towards myself. Forgiving myself. And only grieving that which was mine to grieve.

Returning home, after nearly two years of being away, I hadn’t realized how lost I had become—or how much of myself I actually retained in the battles to keep myself—until I found the craft I flew upon, gently coasting down towards the land that gave birth to me. It had been a long night of tears, and terror, and somehow, there was the sun beginning its ascent. I was reminded in that moment of something I had forgot. I was a daughter of swamps. I saw a mirage of the skyline I had just fled, melt and transform in the dense fog into trees and wilderness. I had awoken from a long dream, with more of my self intact than I had been led to believe. My baggage, like me, arrived split open, and like me, somehow, impossibly so, nothing had become lost in the journey, from there, to here.

I have been cocooned in heavy humidity like a blanket of comfort and care. A softness which has gently roused me back to tending a fire that could never be put out. That could never consume me, because it was made for me. To gather round and warm my hands, and heat every cold and deadened part of me. I know what Home feels like. Around me, but also, always, within me as well. I am gathering my Strength, my, “courage, dear heart,” and wading into just-right waters to rinse off the ashes from my year-long burning. Fire, is Becoming.

Water, is Being.

And when I am thoroughly baptized. When every last part of me that was never me, is washed away, and this thirst of not-knowing is satiated by the cool waters of ancient Mothers, I will alight back to where unfinished work waits, and my own heart beckons me onward. Where I can finally, rise, and I can finally, begin, to Be.

July 31st 2011

There are absolutes in life which I had carelessly—childishly—up ‘til now, left ill-considered. I thought haphazardly about Death, and fleetingly about Grief. These were things I had, somehow, dedicated my life’s work to, but didn’t know what true awakenings—rites of passage—around these things awaited me.

My greatest ministry in life has been the Ministry of Love. This too was a work I did not truly understand, until the end.

I had to euthanize my dog—my companion, my love, my Shadow, my soulmate—Jackson, on his 13th birthday. I knew, three days before, that I would lose him. He looked me in the eye as we were both struggling to stay awake throughout the night, afraid of what sleep might bring to the other, and I knew. He hid immeasurable pain from me, as I struggled to quickly complete a mission I started a year and a half ago, but felt that, with each triumph a harbinger of sorrow and bad luck lay just ahead of me. It was a pain, at the end, I realized, I had, myself, been feeling all along that had been entangled and entwined within my own pain. Connected in a way I hadn’t realized, until the context of that connection began to fade away. In a world of absolutes, it is hard to tell myself, that I did not kill my dog. It is hard to say that Love of that measure—of that impossibly compassionate, loving measure—is not the greatest marker of what Perfect Love is. To be looked deeply in the eyes of the one who has carried you for so long, and who, you too, have somehow, been so divinely, graciously, chosen, to also carry and care for—and have them say without words, “Now…please, now.” There are two halves of knowing of which my broken heart now carries, struggling to integrate, make sense of, forgive. That Jackson’s death, was on our own terms—that he did not want me to awaken to his cooled body and departed soul, and I did not want him to have to continue being a mirror of strength for burdens too great—and that within him still remained a vivacity of life, a courage, an audacity, to keep continuing on, in spite of himself. He knew that I loved him unfailingly though, and that this ask—this final desperate request—would be honored. We howled together that final night. Wept, and held the other. And in our own ways, said, “I love you…I love you…I love you…” How could I not love you? This patient creature who taught me the beauty of Stillness. Who beckoned me, each time, back into the Sun. Who traveled alongside at the tender, grueling, sweet beginnings of the greatest adventure of my life. Who taught me Love. The measure of Love. The connection of Love. The oneness that can happen in Love. Where the pain felt, is the pain shared. And that the greatest ask of Love—to let me go…to let me die…to let me know peace, once again—would be honored.

We are, each of us, living on borrowed time. It is a dissonance we carry with us, consciously or not, all our lives. I thought—like a child—I had forever, and when the end neared, I fretted, because I realized, I did not know what happened at the “end”, and I felt consumed by an immeasurable guilt and grief, and shame. How could I ask him to go forward, before me, without me. How could I release him to a great unknowing. How could my love be enough to cover and penetrate that fear. The greatest fear. It has been a year of Faith. 33. Of illusions igniting like cigarette burns and curling in over themselves. And yet, there was so much beauty, intermixed with pain, at the end. And even in the depths and hollows of my grief, I know, as I knew then in those final moments, and in the quiet hum that followed too soon after as I told him it was OK to go…that I would be OK when he left…

Jackson—my love, my sweet boy, my companion and soulmate, my shadow—is everything that is good and sweet, and perfect in this world. He is tenderness, and gentle reminders. He is laughter, and sunlight. He is prisms of color which forever adorn my world in rainbows. He is the sweet figurine I found waiting for me, perched in an Olive tree, immediately upon leaving Sage—his final resting place. He is with me, he has always been with me, and he will always be with me.

I do not carry my grief—I carry him, in my heart, always.

July 31st 2024

I never read “The Catcher in the Rye” in school. It was never assigned to me, and I never had any desire, until recently, to pick it up. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to get from it—I deliberately avoided any summaries or reflections on it, had a vague understanding of who the main character might be and modern “controversy” around it, but went in pretty blind to anything substantial about it. It was brought up, off-handedly, in conversation, forgotten later on by the one who mentioned it. But it stuck with me.

The story was off-putting. Low on conflict, or plot. A character study of a young man who felt deliberately hard to connect to. I found myself bored, and confused as to what made this book one of the “classics”. It didn’t feel compelling, and I was confused about what its “purpose” was. The story it was trying to tell.

I had a friend a few weeks back talk about “the audacity to hope” that humans have. The constant struggle we have of convincing ourselves, that tomorrow, will be better, even if it’s not true. But how we lean on this anyway—devote ourselves to this belief. How it becomes the sustaining mantra we lie ourselves into. And we do this again, and again. Each day, for the rest of our lives. That stuck with me too.

It wasn’t until the end, that the story began to form itself for me. That I began to see Holden. I could feel where the tension within him arose. Where it remained rearing its head, struggling to be seen, to understand its own self. A clash of traditional masculinity that could not articulate the non-traditional emotional intelligence he was plagued by. An earnestness of hope, which struggled against a cruel reality that invited in and encouraged an inauthenticity of being. Where he did not have the words, but he had the feelings, and he had his own internal conflict which was squeezed tight by the assumptions of everyone else. Of who Holden was supposed to be, needed to be. And how this deeply troubled, and sweet boy, was wilting beneath it. Had wilted beneath it. Been crushed by this audacity of hope that could not stand up to every bullhorned message he received from the world around him.

I wonder if this was inevitable. If this is, more or less, the same wilting we all, at some point in time, will be faced with. This existential struggle where it seems as though we are perhaps struggling against the forces of life itself, challenging its assumptions that a striving for more—for an almost coveted realness—means being mistaken as odd, or not quite right, and ostracized away from ourselves. The purity of ourselves. Of our hope.

I think about the weight of burdens which we force ourselves to carry. The difficulty in putting some of that down. The seeming impossibility of it. The urgency in holding and containing, and understanding it all. Molding our sensitivities around it, and how this shaping so often breaks us where we only meant to remain soft, pliable. How it is so hard, finding a line between the two. A hardness, and a softness. A clear-eyed sharpness towards reality…and an ethereal, ever-lasting hope which can sustain us through the embittering, devastating realities that can leave one at war with themselves. When did hope mean picking up? Why is it so hard to set down? Why is there a seeming obligation to continue moving forward, to persist, to ache after? Can the ache ever die down, or does it remain compelling, because it is the only force that can truly bring us to the place where we were shaped and created to be…

Memorial Day is traditionally observed to recognize the sacrifices of the men and women in uniform who sacrificed the ultimate price, in order to ensure the continued existence of a free nation.

This Memorial Day I hope we can extend that to the men and women, right here, who wear no such uniforms, but have given their own lives in order to see that Life, Liberty, and a Pursuit of Happiness are forever granted to ALL persons who reside in our borders. Who have given up their own lives because they believed no man should be allowed freedom of his hatreds against another because of skin color, the god they serve, or the person they love.

I hope during your time today as you celebrate in your own ways the sobering sacrifices of the truly best amongst us, that you remember too, those who wore no badge of honor, save their own incorruptible good wills and integrity, and died in their own noble and peaceful service to all mankind. Our own president won’t thank them, or acknowledge the domestic war being fought on our own soil, but I will. And I hope you will say their names proudly — Ricky John Best, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, Richard Collins III — and add any others who have gone unrecognized.

Let us all hope to achieve such fearlessness in the face of threats, whether home or abroad. To be buoyed by immeasurable courage and anchored by the steadfastness of our moral integrity. Let our moral compasses always point True North. And let us each be willing to sacrifice all, in order to protect the most vulnerable and targeted amongst us. And may these men, like their brothers and sisters in uniform, be protected in death, as they sought to protect in life.