My Journals

These are the journals that I started writing at 9 years old, directly after my mother left herself.  Without her guiding presence, her voice speaking a direction, a child carves a way forward into a horizonless desert.  These are the pages that guided me into womanhood, where I now undoubtably reside.

Here, I hold suicide in the soft palm of my heart, buoying it on the gentle trampoline of this beating organ that knows only love.  Here, I understand an experience that I sunk inside and fought against.  With my hand on my heart I answer the dreaded "What happened to your mom?", and survive the earthquake it launches, settling it with the swaying ocean of understanding that these pages' cursive writing built.  You can build an ocean, I've learned. 

If I could go back, I'd tell myself that a pain is not something to fix, a wound is not something to heal, for 'pain' and 'wound' are incorrect terms:  An experience is instead an opening, and to be curious for the many years along the way to understanding.  But we can't read a book backwards, especially the one we are writing.

I'll burn them eventually, as the fire is the only home for something that is only yours.  I hope the world takes them back as evolved energy, as a gift, as a roadmap for the next young girl who lands in these windy sands and looks up to you, the sky and the stars, for guidance.

Might we all come to understand what is hard to understand, fully and completely.

Belonging

In life, we often have ideas of what we should do, where we should go, the types of friendships and relationships that would be good for us.  I've done a lot of this... Steering my own ship; sometimes by instinct (good), and sometimes by force (less good).  This photo, this space, is a place that I don't know how I got to.  It wasn't by a road I laid out for myself, nor is it one that could be illustrated or tracked through any system I could strive to understand.  I sometimes want to ask -- who it was that made sure it happened, without effort, and so outside of my 'regular' life.  And how did it manage with all my interference, all my ideas, all my decisions.

But I think belonging unto itself has no questions, existing only as stillness, connection, and vibration.

I think instead about gratitude, that now I'll need to change how I understand it, and how I express it, because this feels too good for what I understood it to be.

Today, I think Gratitude is best expressed in being in what's available.

So I don't ask.

I belong.

Note: Two of these beautiful people I only half-met last night! The others, many moons ago.