I claim eros.

Kneeling, my face to the ground, speaking out the words, I pounded my palms flat against floorboards that made the circular space. This was my declaration of ownership. I woke from this dream a year ago.

She says that our vitality, life’s essence, is like a candle sitting in the pit of our stomach. Imagine how every breathing form holds this, the flame sometimes burning bright, sometimes dim, a reflection. She speaks in Māori that this is the spark of existence—mauri, the glue that joins the physical and the spiritual worlds so that we can be whole. And in order to be well, we must be whole.

5/5 Vesta, Sacred Flame

Three words on the edge of consciousness upon waking. May 5th. I wrote it down, then left it. Yesterday, lyrics were spinning around at first light as I stumbled into the morning from my bed to gaze at a waning moon, cool and blue, and a cloud bank over the west hills. I’ve been in a tune. Hoping to find my way. A song within a song, within a song, within a song is a holy fire.

One thing can lead to another and circle back.

Vesta, the brightest asteroid visible from earth, was first discovered in 1807 by an astronomer who named it after the ancient Roman goddess of hearth and home. Vestal virgins were priestesses who were chosen at a young age to tend the sacred flame in the temple of Vesta, a fire that was to be kept burning continually to represent the eternal center of a unified Rome. This was a contract, a thirty-year devotion to ceremony and ritual.

Keepers of the flame.

What does it take?

I remember how I trembled when I walked, my head a cloud of confusion, weakness that seemed to nearly swallow me. I felt I was slowly diffusing out of existence. This is where I found something invisible but visceral, by pressing my spine to the earth. Tree roots and mushrooms, moss in soil, I laid for hours.

When fatigue and hopelessness have overwhelmed the body, we must place ourselves with something so very alive.

This was gentle. It was my stillness within a presence outside of my own. And it sparked something—it spoke without words as a subtle current through my bloodstream and a sense of being held and met and seen and known by life itself. I recognized a deeply buried knowing that I was connected to all of it—and this felt like love, unconditional. I curled myself up into the softness of green and didn’t want to leave the bed I had made in the shade of the wilds.

Marion Woodman tells a story of being very ill while she was living alone in a hotel in India. She had wandered down into the lobby and sat on a couch, delirious with fever, feeling the nearness of death in her body when a big dark woman squeezed herself between her and the edge of the sofa. The woman did not say a word as she intentionally pressed her warm skin up against Marion’s, arm to arm, thigh to thigh, repeatedly pushing her into awareness. “Every place she touched me, I was alive again.”

As I write this, I am suddenly crying—because so often, we have to break apart into near nothingness to be remade into a body that can hold a steady fire. And this process of going dim, the flickering out, is terrifying for the way it can wake us up into recognition of how deeply we want to feel alive and in a way maybe we never have before. This is where we can choose to hold the last remaining hot coals within a pile of ash and begin to feed and breathe into what still burns.

How miraculous, the flame in another when it is strong. The life force that sits and ripples up and out, and carries on the wind lighting fires in the dark. I tell you, we need each other’s light.

This is energy moving from the roots. This is the universe traveling from the core of the earth through the bottoms of the feet, up the trunk of the legs and into the pelvis. Spiraling along the spine, filling the belly, immersing the heart, opening the throat, expanding the mind, connecting the crown, and back down again. What a fuel—this source that is coaxed by breath and focus. We have access.

If we consider eros to mean love and desire, we are touching something much deeper. Love as a cosmic force through friction and chaos, creating expanding energy, a burning flame of longing reaching, and here, life is being made. Eros is the seat and the seed of creativity; it is the well and the water. It is the primal nature of sexuality; it is to be alive. Aliveness is wholeness, oneness with spirit and matter, no separation. Eros is our candle sitting in the pelvic bowl stoked by sensation, emotion, pleasure, connection and nurture. I see this in imagery as a beachside bonfire, waves lapping the shore under an orange sky.

There are many ways we can direct our attention. There are many things we can commit to.

My devotion is to eros. To tending the sacred flame of my being. In this priestessing position, the spiritual is physical; the divine is found in the temple of the body. A raw and real grit of mess and complexity, pain and pleasure felt. To feel is the fuel.

The erotic life is a liberated life.

The paradox is in the dismantling of the hearth to remake it. We are vessels of holding, and I am finding that my capacity to contain a fire is growing, as I become more committed to this calling. It takes intention and attention to be, Keeper of the Sacred Flame.

I could share more stories about the winding, wayward-seeming pathways of mystery and magic and unexpected events and angel humans that meet me on the way to reflect and reveal what already exists that couldn’t yet be seen without them. All of what I have experienced this far in my devotional journey affirms our interconnection.

A woman stopped to tell me how beautiful my red hair was, quickly glanced me up and down, and began gushing compliments. She then apologized for the awkwardness of it and questioned whether it made me feel uncomfortable. I laughed with delight. Once we’re channeling eros, beauty can be seen everywhere and the essence of another is radiant and colored. Empowered people empower people. The less we hide what rises up, the stronger power grows. I said this to her.

Don’t hold back. Let it burn. In fact, let’s stoke it.

Like stars, we are some sort of fire, sparked and coaxed to burning, in the dark void of endless time, we shine. All we have is now.

References:

A Holistic Approach to Healing Through Rongoā Māori | Something Beautiful for the World

Trevor Hall and The Great In-Between - i've been in a tune (Official Lyric Video)

Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames - 'Two Marions'

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This season, my life is focused on the physicality of matter. Words are fewer, emotions are steady, and if I could conjure imagery, it would be that I am walking a path on solid earth paying attention to my feet, feeling the way the breeze shifts and the sun makes shadows dance and how my weight is heavier, my mind lighter. The traveler is moving, but grounded as she takes each step forward.

A water gal finds home on a mountain under the luminosity of planetary play.

Moon notes. This has become a favorite way to journal in poem without forethought. It’s intuitive, it’s documentation, there’s an ease about this practice using the moon as a frame— for what I am witnessing in that present moment musing with the phases, as she too walks her path.

Creativity lives in the body. We most readily make something from being as we are.

I often try really hard.

I went dancing this week and found myself casually walking around the room in figure eights, loosely waving my arms like I had no care in the world. No big deal, here I am just going somewhere, I don’t know where, and that’s a-okay, I’ll just let these limbs dangle as they do and I’ll keep moving. I wasn’t inspired to shake my ass or get into some flow state of sensual movement. Rather, I let go of what I thought I wanted to feel, and allowed myself time to discover a different way to be. To try less and be more.

Here’s to the mutability of moonlight and the permeability of earthen clay. May we find ourselves held within the form and the formlessness and be at home here, in the body, and all the change within and around us.

//

waxing moon of questions

high winds and wild rose moon

moon of a lone vulture soaring

ribcage cloud moon

trees bending moon

moon of rushes and gusts

blackberry blossoms moon

midnight blue mountain moon

no answers will be found by the mind moon

the body speaks moon

moon of two words

trust this moon

//

revealing moon

hide and seek moon

moon of weight and pressing

contraction moon

moon of pathways to follow

who’s got your back moon

holding hurt moon

moon of secrets festered

what is seen in the dark moon

tears moon

hugs like home moon

moon of mystery and messages

alignment moon

moon of muscle and bone

hands are tools moon

pelvis moon

moon of split and upright oaks

how love shows up moon

//

cotton candy moon

golden light on last night’s

hawthorn blooms windswept

voice in my ear

across distances we spoke

untethered moon of depth appearing

on the surface this is a continuation

of heaviness and aching

moon of a longing body

under an invisible weight

I wait by the river and whisper

water, water, wash me free

my belly moon of lifting light

//

warm milk and honey moon

at dawn it shines moon

two crows sitting on tips of cedars moon

moon of war

birds in flight with grass beaks moon

sun is liquid moon

all we have is now moon

moon of peace making

//

unseen moon behind veils of water

moon of rivers from the sky

heart beating moon

moon of everything is green

quietly moon

children stirring in sleep moon

moon of invisible knowing

feel it moon

no more second guesses moon

the shift needed moon

moon of value and worth

sacred rhythms moon

my life is a ritual moon

moon of trust

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The real truth of existence is sealed,

until after many twists and turns of the road.

Then the seeker says,

“If I had known the real way it was,

I would have stopped all the looking around.”

But that knowing depends

on the time spent looking!

-Rumi

I keep seeing circles intersecting circles. The sacred geometry of how individual paths meet in motion, in continual orbit. Allowing the movement of our lives, to trust in a process that is not linear but circumferential. We imagine a path to be something grounded and formed—a structured idea of distance in span, something to follow. What if the path was a body of water?

Three years tossed me from the boat I seafared and left me clinging to its sides. Two apparent choices: stay in the safety of the container or be taken by the current. Hold on white-knuckled, or probable death. Between this contrast lives a range of feelings and possibilities, unpredictable and unseen. We are vulnerable creatures at the mercy of the elements, and it takes a face-off with the underworld to let ourselves be embraced by the wildness of something we cannot control.

I could drown.

Keep clinging or fall into the deep—but what throws me out, and how long do I fight the natural force pushing me into this wide open water? Is death actually the end? The unknown beckons, pulling me in. Where once I was bound to wooden plank and steel, I am held in the vastness of another body, one that moves in tides, in the rhythmic cycles of the moon.

We like to move upright in straight lines, with direction and sight. We seek consciousness and the light, grasping tightly to the edges of what is solid. And here I am—a woman detangling her fingers from the boat’s woven rope, letting go, falling into a knowing that can only be found in the depths of a journey guided by what is hidden in the deep.

What is my pivot point, my north star?

Here, mystery leads.

Breath in, breath out—lifting, resting, cycling. Source energy spins, traveling through me. I am a compass made by divinity. My inner fire glows like a torch in the night, my path dissolves into infinite form and hearing the beat of a drum, the heartbeat’s thrum, I am guided.

“The water of life is here.

I’m drinking it. But I had to come

this long way to know it!”

-Rumi, In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo: In Cairo, Dreaming of Baghdad

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From across the serving station in the buzzing chaos of the commercial kitchen at noon lunch service—she looks at me through the stainless steel racks and says, I love you, Hannah.

My tender heart turned into a pool of tears, and I trembled instantly, unable to keep what was inside of me. Being met with softness when one is trying so hard to remain upright—is life support.

She saw me and met me.

This keeps happening—the same morning I walked the farm road breathing deeply, filling my belly full of light and the air of spring, repeatedly releasing by exhale the hurt of deep disappointment and conflict, and she, another glorious creature, found me at the corner of the back door, embraced me in her warm, soft skin. I was swaddled in strength, a spine and heart that you could feel press through you, and I wept in her arms, finally uttering my buried doubt in honesty—I don’t know if I can do this.

There are many mothers, and each one of us is mothering both our own precious child within and the world around us. We are the keepers of the bones, the womb waters that make the heavy things float. We are the sacred flames, burning in the darkness, expanding the constriction of the heart into hearths that keep the heat in radiance.

I keep coming back to an excerpt of a poem by Shayla Paradeis, called Crazy Heart:

Calling all Freaks: Let’s walk! It’s time. Come out and love yourself. I’ve got your back. I always have. I’m here loving you like water. Like sunlight. Like photosynthesis. I’m out there loving my bones because they’re like yours. Laughing at my crazy heart because it’s capable of such unparalleled foolishness.

Run parallel to me. Let’s hit this wall so hard that we break through it!

I’m committed—I promise to be that fool.

Come with me.

I have been considering devotion and getting more clear, on just where this energy wants to go, and it wants to go around in circles, dancing and laughing and weeping and splitting open with rage and being held in the midst of such blasphemous behavior by the interconnection of women who can hold this space because they are this space.

We are the circle, the boundaries of safety, the belly for conception and growth and birth, we are the portals of death and resurrection.

I honor you as I honor myself.

"Precious" by The Emmitt Sisters

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“If you don’t let the body teach you, you’ll get lost inside your mind.”

-Joel P. West, Like A Wave

It is Taurus season, and every year at this time, I find myself deepening into the roots and density of matter. This is when what is earthly speaks the loudest, in ways that hum and thrum—a vibration of stability. I am noticing rocks. Stones protruding up from under layers of fir needles of the forest floor and along pathways of well-worn trails, boulders appearing where I have never seen them, where they have alway been. When all is leafing out to green, what is dark and sheened shows. The elements share messages, how I listen and perceive is up to me. I never thought I would identify with such unmoving solidity, water has been my medium, but as time works its evolutionary processes, it is apparent, that when I first cried out for sovereignty and peace no matter the chaos around me—I was intending to become a rock.

My grandfather was a rockhound—digging thundereggs and agates from the deserts of Eastern Oregon, hauling truck beds home to cut and polish, drawn to the mystery of what could be contained within such a hard, dull, outer surface—the hidden worlds inside. Pictures, landscapes, memory stored and displayed in colors, textures, patterns.

This is all connected—seeing stones and my relationship with the father. For so many years I have lived my life for the biological father, father-husband, father-god, a patriarchal strength for safety, but the foundation I need now—I am finding is my own inner being, and the outer structure of my body.

A few weeks ago, I experienced an energetic cohesion. There were so many fragments—pieces that after months of swirling around, fused into formation, integrated, and where there was hollow space—I filled. Since this moment of in-fusion, I am recognizing how wholeness is not an idea, but a felt sense. We can know a thing in theory, but there is dimensionality to physicality, and much of what is tangible is also unseeable. I felt the changing, and it feels like what brings tears to bubble up from my eyes from some depth of knowing and laughter that pours out simultaneously, because this knowing is coming from within, and the closest word I can come up with to label it is love—a rearranging and merging with a force that lifts the spirit into form, stabilizes and flourishes.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes love as a deep feeling of affection and devotion. This is sensory. I assume most of us know how to work really hard for sacrificial love, the call of duty, in servitude—a kind of choice to love that is determined from our mind driving.

Is there another wheel that turns?

I’ll tell you, it’s a different kind of technology that moves a body to motion from the energy of fullness and connection, an understanding that is rippling through the system of cellular function that knows it belongs.

Belonging not because of this or that or them, but something deeper, primordial. A language that is beyond words or conditioning, but residing in the fabrication of our being, the ground we stand on, and the atmosphere that holds us.

Sinking into this earthen body like a stone in furrowed ground, I am made up of everything around me, yet solid in my own form. This is most important, coming from the cataclysmic fires of what has been and all that rose from that burning fuel, and before we enter what is coming—the incessant change from high winds. What remains when fire and air meet in unstoppable intensity?

This is the power found in being close to the core of the earth, from a baseline that rests and rises from topsoil and communicates with frequencies that speak up from deeper places. This is the body—its intelligence and intention toward becoming something stable and able to witness life in all its provocation and delight.

I find that our daily rhythms create the song we sing. And the body will whisper until it screams for what it needs our mind to know. I can no longer ignore its voice and everyday, I am practicing my listening.

The slow moving pace of consistency when it is fueled with divinity—where physical meets spiritual, the seen and unseen, we can become mountains. A singular form rising from tectonic collisions and the heat of pressure and time, holding and sustaining many other lifeforms in our stead.

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My daughter is bursting—she is pure core energy, the fire of Spring that brings what appears lifeless to sing. I watch her as she moves like wind in every direction, her water words bubbling up and out in rushes, pouring from her mouth. I am captivated by the unhindered fluidity currenting through her whole being, and I vow to protect this resource that is her life-force.

The first drench of sun after the last two days of rain, I laid myself on the hilltop that looks out toward the west valley, my spine pressed onto the soft but solid body of a mountain of earth. This has always been my favorite view: sprawled out flat on the ground, where speared tips of wild grass arch and wave in my frame, and clouds pass quickly through. I feel like a slow steeping jar of tea in the heat of the afternoon.

When I forget the most intimate parts of myself—when I misplace that sense of truth—I climb back along the edges and sink into the lap of a field grown quiet and alone, in humming and beating.

I was told that when I was a young girl, I was most theatrical and flamboyant, dressing up to be the center of attention, singing and dancing, speaking a mile a minute, often in a language only I knew fluently. I have no mental recollection of these memories. What I remember is feeling afraid and lonely and finding safety with trees and plants that bend and sway and tangle into hiding places.

The child I was, always knew she was some wild creature. She could feel the resonance with the meadows and marshes and winged ones, but no person ever told her that kind of nature lived in her—that she held the power that can raise the dead and open fields to bloom in color.

It is no one person’s fault for this. It is an inheritance carried in codes through the ages of lineages. It has been an evolution of survival, to close up the expression of such variability to maintain predictability. What we are learning now scientifically is that diversity is the key to rebalancing a well-worn-out system.

The child holds this inherently. She is the keeper of the flame. I see this in my daughter, the vividness of her laughter and the way she is effortlessly guided by curiosity and awe, sensation and emotion.

This is everything we need to carry into future generations.

Oh, love, sweet, darling, could you be any more wondrous? Let me stumble into your world and see what you see. Let me listen more closely, to hear the way your voice rises in vibration. Teach me how to sing again, to pull the fire from my heart into my hands. You know how to do this.

How do we care for the child we hold? How do we find her in the recesses of ourselves? When have you last looked a child in the eyes and seen your reflection?

I am dancing again, and opening my throat little by little like a songbird. I am remembering, as I witness the fruit of my womb bloom, that she still lives in me and is commanding my attention to her superluminosity.

She glows in the dark. She wears yellow.

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The rose vine reaches to the top of the cypress, twenty feet high.

She always wanted to be wild.

The vetch is sprawling. Like a new lawn never planted it has tendrilled its way through blackberry canes and old stocks of fennel.

This is what I miss—witnessing the way she breathes and creates matter.

Five months away from this ground, and look at it: it is bursting with plants I haven’t seen yet. It changes every season— what does not reamerge, and what appears in its stead.

This land has always been a reflection of myself.

From my first steps beside a leaning dogwood, it held a deeper magic, some kind of swirling light, voices that spoke without words, leaving impressions, sensations. I could hear her—my mother. Inviting me into a place so intrinsically linked to the home of my inner being. Here, she taught me how to listen and to yield my body to the wisdom that only softness can hear, a channel of undulating force that feels like love.

Free to be, with tended care.

She was clear from the beginning—the nature of the Feminine Earth Mother is not looking for a digging-into-to-plant-your-idea-of-what-it-should-be relationship, but an awareness-of-what-is-already-there relationship, and to ask, in witness, protection, savoring—the delight and the wonder of her.

She speaks. Listen.

She opens to this, she responds, she feeds the hungry, weary man who sits with her in his heart-of-devotion-to-her-wildness. He is not insistent on his ideas of what he thinks a field garden should be because he trusts her nature, he respects her way, and knows how much more satisfying it is to step onto some new kind of earth rug where moss and plantain are enthralled with each other and daisies and clover dance the mix.

I have been this man—there is no gender tied to the unconsciousness or intentionality of a person’s choices based on their mind’s familiar navigation. To presume and command our way can feel justifiable. And yet, what this acre of earth is teaching me is this: the ego-driven may have their way with her, but she knows how to bend and stretch and hold the depths in secret places. She may be silenced and overtaken, but her truth will come springing up through cracks in concrete, in the irrevocable struggle to grow those prized heirlooms alongside her insistent dandelion, thistles, cottonwood suckers and array of grasses.

Where the hawthorne was cut to a stump, it has grown into a well-rounded bush double the size of its former breadth and don’t try to take down the walnut tree, it too, will raise itself up from its roots.

I laugh with amusement for the ways I once cried knowing I was trying to make something unfitting from what was perfectly fit. I am beginning to see— there can be restoration when you align yourself with her.

The Wildness.

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Driving up West Hills, where the road rises under a canopy of arching oak branches, I saw Venus—incandescent, blazing. Moving clouds, strewn in dusky teal and smoky blue, parted just enough to allow the planet to appear perfectly in view. Tonight, I listen to rain gently patter on the rooftop as I witness another evening fade—the sound of an owl in a nearby evergreen, the rustling of wind through blackberry canes.

I wanted to be held—absolutely and indefinitely taken into the arms of care and kept so tightly I would know that nothing else could touch me. And so I ran to the forest, climbed into the lap of two madrones joined together at their base—marriage trees, they’re called—pressed my face into moss while rain filtered down to the floor, washing my tears into bark skin, and I wept until I did not.

She is singing about the sun in a shaky vibrato from behind the closed stall door in the public restroom of the library. I cannot seem to move my hands from beneath the running faucet. My lips curve upward—I am listening closely, trying to catch her words. Most are uninterpretable, but I feel them— warm, golden light bursting through the subtle gray of the space we are in. When she quiets, I thank her as I walk out. She begins to sing again. I keep smiling.

There is a man who rides his bicycle around town, always smiling. I have never seen him not smiling. He is tall and beautiful as he rides, like a summer breeze through the streets of Southtown in the colder seasons.

How do you define romance?

I ask him, on our walk together to the magical circle of tree stump thrones—an altar at the center adorned with offerings and sacred writings of many who wander and find themselves here. He speaks of connection, of emotional understanding. He tells me there is no real line he can discern, because what stirs the heart to open brings affection and adoration most naturally. Romance is not something contrived, but existential.

If this is true—and I know it is—I am living the romance. I am it. Over and over, swept off my feet and enthralled by the simplest of moments—grace found in the sparks of light through her eyes and the reverberations of his laughter. The way my body hums when I move it unapologetically. How softly the air touches skin, an atmospheric hug of heat and humidity in mid-March.

I am tired of pretending—closing my heart out of fear. There is so much to be afraid of, and yet, what makes life the evolving mystery that it is? Where does that flame burn from? The core of the earth that keeps its center and holds us into being is awake! There is more to existence than what is obviously confronting. Can we see it? Can we feel it? The threads of fueled connection are ever reaching out, running underground, beyond the veil and into the palms of our hands—the oracle of our eyes.

Falling in love is fuel—energizing, strengthening the body and spirit. I say to myself, you need this. After decades of being fueled by crisis, how do I move in love?

I walk the tracks to find out. What is here that meets you? What opens your heart wider in this moment, allowing yourself to fall into love?

Four turkey vultures soar overhead. You have my attention. I see one flying solo over the neighboring field, with a gap of missing wing feathers—hello, I know you, you fly over me every day. I move a little farther north along the railroad ties and see one perched at the top of a stumped sequoia, stretching its wide wings to face the morning sun, glistening coppered feathers etched with dark—and I am in love with a buzzard, one who feasts on death.

My boot kicks something, clanging against the rails. Looking down, I see a thick circular band of rusted metal, the same browns and golds as the bird’s sun-drenched back. I instinctively pull it over my ring finger—it fits. What am I vowing on this new blue Saturday?

My chest is radiant, and it feels like a spring of water bursting from rock when I see my love reflected back to me in a slow, feathered stretch. Just two wild creatures, aware of each other, knowing how to warm their bodies by the light of a burning star.

There’s a veil covering the unseen world

which not the strongest man that ever lived

could tear apart.

Only faith, poetry, love, romance

can push that curtain aside and reveal

the supernatural beauties and glory beyond.

Is it real?

Ah, Virginia, in all this world

There is nothing else so real.

-Henry Jamison “Yes, Virginia”

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It’s not enough to know anymore, she sings.

The clouds look like frosting spooned

over the mountain, pillowed lavender.

My hand drapes down my leg, tenderly

I kiss each knee, then where wrist

meets palm, lips touch soft skin.

This is enough.

Water jewels like eyes turning red

to gold in light where the trees were

cut. Hawk cries, over and over.

Wind sweeps, my fingers tangle with fir

needles, why hello,

I say to each branch waving.

Mist kissed

on the hillside, eyes closed, spine

curved along the bend of the earth.

This is enough.

Walking down the path

I begin to think—I am alone—

Be still! Listen.

Arms tingle, heart beats,

face flushed, breath. Sky

the color of peaches, mourning doves fly.

This is enough.

If poetry is perception, what is my body but a poetic language all its own?

When the mind has tired of concepts, unable to string together conclusions—

Is this happening to you, too?

I find myself in a familiar space, but everything seems unrecognizable. The mind cannot grasp the changes taking place, in between thought and formation—floating but stationary, standing on ground alone in a field, wind sweeping all around me. And the horizon—it appears endless without the solid body of a mountain in view.

Infinite possibility—

He asks what excites me about this new season. I see nothing in my sight, which leaves a blank space to fill. I ask him if he too is moving blindly—

How do you know?

Lead. Signs will not make decisions for you. I choose in alignment with myself while being receptive and discerning.

I remember a woman who spoke of a net that appears only after you jump from the ledge of the rock.

The mind loves frameworks of verbiage to catch it.

Last night she read a poem likening the language of words to some unfuckable lover. Words can only do so much for a person; they are figurative.

So what is real?

I left my car for a walk in the rain, scrambling up the edge of a hillside, switchbacks carved through rock and soil. My thoughts turned just as sharply with each step until it stopped me—the other one who speaks for me—

Be here.

I am still. I breathe. I feel the pounding of my heart.

Listen.

I begin to tune in—to here—and like a slow, drawn-out stretch, my attention realigns into some new synchronous spacing, and I walk the ground in a way I did not before. My hand involuntarily touches bracken fern. I look up at the spotted towhee when it makes its prehistoric squawk. There is an effortlessness in how my arms reach out, head turns, eyes close, inhale deepens, exhale releases. I feel I am in the current of a gentle breeze, veering off trail, eyes drawn to a clump of snowdrops tucked under blackberry canes and a hidden swale of pooled moss, velvety as carpet. Daffodils call me down to kneel. I stand up again, keep moving. I am no longer thinking about then or there, only this—here.

There is another way to move through the world, and its motion is derived from instinctual direction. Like the child who wanders with curiosity and amusement, everything appears before them as some new wondrous kind of now. Hands reach out, little fingers widen, face smashes into flower heads, body curls up beside the hot belly of a canine. This is what it feels like to be here.

To pull yourself from the mind’s future, from its past, from each side of yourself, and gather all parts back into your center. No more fragments.

This is wholeness.

A bevy of doves appeared in my front yard last week at a moment when I was distressed. Grief and fear took hold of my mind to a low I thought I could no longer access, but there I was, deeply entrenched. The quick, muffled clapping of wings caught my attention, and the soft white and gray bodies of these delicate, lamenting birds—I felt it reverberate through me—

Peace.

The more I embody my experience, rather than analyze it, I find the right words come after, and a path forms more clearly. People meet around the corner unexpectedly, a message arrives, time bends, and somehow we find a way without an outline, without prediction or projection. We can synchronize with an unseen current that guides us into a net of holding. These are momentary, split-second movements, unrehearsed.

It is not enough to know by thought. We must feel our way forward as sensate beings, kept by this tangible, physical body—to relearn how to move with energy. Like the stumbling kind of embodied children, like the nature of an animal.

Be here.

*Poem quoted and written to “No Fun” by Novo Amor, Gia Margaret

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Change rolls in
like waves in rhythm
with the moon.
This is tidal—formation
and dissolution. Endings
simultaneously create
beginnings. Is this death,
evolution? A process
of weathering. It takes
so many years to make

(What if we are bodies made
of time bending?
Circles intersecting,
and what we will be
we are now,
and what we were
hasn’t happened?)

one thing new or entirely
different—transformation
by building and stripping,
depositing and eroding.
To receive and hold—
while dissolving.

What would become of me
if all I ever did was let go?
The invitation arrives:

Let it in.

I am made by this
continuation where life merges
into one body, rising and falling.

Creation is born
from emptiness.

I cannot escape
the ocean I am.

Swallowed and moved,
spit out in an endless expanse
of water, I become the cycle,
the material, the nature.

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A rite of passage into single parenting, I thought. The kid’s high fevers, my burning lungs, then, to follow, a three-day fire through my core, still flaming. It is Imbolc, when we remember that deep in the under layers there is a power preparing to lift the death of winter and create openings for spring’s new life—and the full moon in Leo rises over eastern mountains, an illumination of the flaming heart.

This evening, I was supposed to be at a friend’s farm, reading poetry and casting the last shedding skin of our snake bodies scribbled on paper, into a bonfire. Instead, I realize I am not symbolically enacting ritual tonight—I am embodying the energy of this time through my literal skin.

Earlier this week in my geology class, I learned about volcanic eruptions—their types and their causes: water, heat, pressure, slowly building over time. At some point, this energy must be released. I had an “aha” moment in lecture, making more connections between our human bodies and experiences, with those of the earth. I understand that not everyone perceives these parallels and reflections, but seeing myself in everything else is how I belong to the greater whole. Metaphor continually allows me to see beyond the surface of knowing, into deeper layers of existence.

I recently hung a watercolor painting of a horse in the center of my living room. It was my mother’s—one of the few items I kept after her death. I also write at my bedside by the light of her horse lamp—a ceramic white horse head that makes my daughter uneasy but that I find strengthening. The horse appeared in my dreams on the eve of last New Year’s. She was a mare, her black body glistening with light as she reared on her hind legs, looking me in the eyes with untamed wildness. She was a night fire, the darkness blazing. On my knees, I bowed before her, and she knelt down to me, strong legs bent upon the earth.

The Year of the Fire Horse is initiating, it is erupting from my body. I find assurance in this timing—a symbol of something greater, an alignment with universal energy. As the final phases of sloughing off the dead occur, a new age of refined strength and power will emerge.

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“The body understands touch, it understands presence, it understands care. As you do this, notice if there is any urge to change the feeling. See if you can let that urge soften. You are not here to push the heart into lightness, you are here to sit with it in truth. Lightness comes later, on its own. The heart does not need discipline, it does not need instruction, it needs companionship. When you offer yourself as a gentle witness, the heart feels less alone. And loneliness is often the true source of heaviness.”

-Louise Hay

I woke from sleep unable to move. My chest was weighted—a feeling of compression and ache, as if the cage around my heart were bent and protruding into soft muscle and tissue. Trying to stretch increased the pain, so I sat still in the darkness, wondering how to interpret my body’s cues. What I found was my reaction: to determine what was wrong as quickly as possible, leading me smack dab into the middle of patterns I am ready to release, to shed, to leave behind. I am ready to stop trying to figure it out so that I can fix it.

I am ready.

I am ready to _______

I am ready for _______

I am ready.

Did you fill in the blank? Go ahead—take a step back and see what drops down onto that spacious line.

What do you want to be ready for, even if you don’t feel the surge of reassurance?

My personal, repeated lesson: readiness comes from facing the uncertainty that lives on the other side of fear, doubt, and insecurity, and choosing an action different from what I have habitually done before. Isn’t it the unknown that I am resisting? Not to say that stepping out of my comfort zone isn’t clunky and awkward, embarrassing or excruciating—but understanding that all of this is passing, and that with every new action that directs me out of old habits keeping me timid, fearful, silent, or reactive, change is set in motion, creating energetic ripples—new formations in the mind, body, and field around me.

This world is heavy to hold—a globe of anxiety and suffering, beauty and longing—and my heart won’t quiet. All year I have been getting to know it, a roommate I am growing to love, a separate body living beside my mind-body, and it is quite loud-mouthed lately. Maybe it has become my muse, as most of my recent writing mulls over matters of love and the language of this organ—or confidant—it is most definitely a companion.

I feel a sense of masculinity within my heart energy—the protector, warrior in me, the part of myself that will walk through the fire, the steady drumbeat of nature that continuously pulses desire into action. It is not will itself, but carries the source and moves it through.

You are not here to push the heart into lightness.

You are here to sit with it in truth.

What is your truth?

I keep seeing images of myself:

Crawling across the wooden floor like a wild cat, seething—imagining my claws and teeth sinking into its wounder.

For twenty miles I drove west, alone through the dark, screaming until I could no longer make a sound.

Digging a hole with my hands in the earth and lying in it, covering my body with leaf and stick and moss, and weeping for hours.

Vivid—the moments that change your life.

These were breakthrough experiences with rage, where I met myself inside the anger without directing it toward anyone else or resisting it through distraction or denial. They became some of the most deeply meaningful moments of my life, simply because I allowed what was most raw and real—a primal instinct—to express itself safely. When we commune with the repressed parts of ourselves, emotions we have blocked, the dam can break apart and energy can dislodge from wherever it has been stuck in the body; it can rush and swirl and lap, becoming current.

The capacity we have to hold another depends on the capacity we have to hold ourselves.

I have seen anger like a lit fuse, anger like lightning, anger like a madman with a weapon. This is a fire that destroys its path and burns out. I am much more interested in accessing the power of our relevant and honorable emotion and channeling it into a steady source of fuel that supports life beyond the immediate need for survival. The world has been burning for ages. Look through history—the colonization of every country has used brute force, threat, domination, and murder in the name of a righteous god, for the sake of progress and cleanliness. The American government was born from genocide, capitalism grew from slavery and the terror of today throughout the world has already happened, and will continue, until—

There is so much I don’t know.

What is my truth?

There is an anger derived from belief in separation—a value system that esteems itself against another, placing worth in bloodline, skin color, religion, the dollar. A systemic hate so deeply rooted in the human psyche it can go undetected and justified. Heart-bodies carrying minds that demand control and power over self and others. We hold the history, the DNA, the residue of dominant culture in the subtleties of ourselves.

Here, in my body, I find truth.

I soften my impulse toward urgency, toward reaction, and listen for what it knows. Is the heart screaming? Attend. Be witness. Companion. You are the friend, the beloved, the lover, the savior of your internal system. This is your world—you are living in it. Dwell, with these room/body-mates. What songs will you sing together? What tears will you cry in unison?

Once we practice holding space for all parts of ourselves, we can open our arms and hearts to another. And another. And another.

Maybe this is how we meet the world in suffering and heal—

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I press my palm to each tree within reach—

Find the pulse. Find the pulse.

My mind is back on after weeks of quiet. There is chatter again, and I am dreaming at night. The subconscious is at work.

Find the pulse.

Can I feel a heartbeat?

It is dark in the understory. As I look up, I notice a subtle glow of light mid-trunk on a narrow fir. I move closer, placing both hands on its barked skin, fingertips tracing grooves and knotted protrusions. Instinctively, my face moves into the crevices of the next tree up the path—breathing in the musty body of the forest, damp with moss and the rise of mushrooms. I zig-zag toward a clearing, where I will soon be met by sun and open hillside, but for now I am still here—in the canopy’s shadow—allowing myself to meet what surrounds me with tenderness, curiosity, openness.

Love
again
and again.

Some messages arrive as whispers—subtle, elusive. Others are impossible to catch. Only in retrospect does knowing take shape. And then there is intuition which blankets the shoulders like a cloak, covering and tangible. When it falls onto me, I wear it.

Education of the heart—when you listen, do you hear the patterning of a language? I am learning the sounds of mine. The hearing is in the sensing: when it is closed, it feels physically tight, constricted, twinging with pain. Emotionally, there is numbness—feelings slide off the surface, little goes deep. Happiness and sadness become more thought than sensation. Energetically, I imagine my head and chest covered in dingy chainmail armor.

There is a weight to a heart that holds itself enclosed.

When it opens—it swings wide like a barn door at sunrise—golden streams flood in. Muscles relax, bones align, shoulders ease back. There is lightness through the sternum, around the breasts. Breathing becomes smooth, unhindered. I cry. Tears come in many ways, because I feel it all. And what does it feel like?

Compassion.
Understanding.
Gratitude.

Love is an open heart where the winds of the day billow through curtains, letting light in. This is a room, a spacious place, where one can find safety and rest when weary. The heart is a body made for loving. This is its medicine—what keeps it beating, receiving, pouring.

When it opens so generously, so unreservedly, we face inevitable loss. Because if a door does not close, it allows for coming and going. We are the keepers of this freedom, for ourselves and for others. The longer I live, the more I see myself as a rock-faced mountain, where headwaters burst—cascading, pooling, streaming onward in continual motion. Whatever comes from me flows out of me; whatever comes in also moves away. And still, I remain—solid, holding.

When something ends, what stays? What fills the void left by losing? It seems a gauge of love is what seeps into the emptied places after what was held departs. I know my love by the way gratitude enters, rather than insecurity, self-deprecation, or resentment. I know my love by the compassion that pools for what once was and what is now.

I place my hands upon what is living and listen. This is what I hear—

Love
again
and again.

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

-bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000)

“Over and over, the answer is the same, isn’t it? Love, love, love. The salve and the cure.”

-Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma (2022)

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The first freeze of the season arrived beneath a waxing gibbous moon—the eve of the calendar new year and a sky frosted blue with hazy yellow spilling in bursts. My son moves toward me in the kitchen, wraps his arms around mine, looks me in the eyes, and says, I love you, Mom. You’re the best. My daughter follows his lead in more hummingbird fashion, flitting over and buzzing her love into me. The vessel of my heart, already full, now pours over. This is what the year made of me: a cup.

A few days ago, I walked through the tangled backyard of my grandparents’ home, where most of my tenderest childhood memories lived. My uncle met me on the property, and as we wound our way through ivy-covered stumps, bare-skinned fig branches, and rosehips, we stopped at the front porch of the old house. He told me he never saw himself doing the things he’s doing now. Even just three years ago—if I could tell my future self—I wouldn’t have believed it. I am out of my comfort zone now, he said, and I keep making choices that take me there.

I nod emphatically. Yes, I get it. Oh, boy, do I get it. For all the years I thought life was about building something materially solid and predictable—a marriage, a homestead, a career, a self-made identity—these past twelve months have shown me that to be alive is to be continually transforming and to expect the unexpected. Where does that make home for a wanderer, an alchemist, a cosmic being in universal motion?

In the kitchen, of course. The hearth of the home. The heart. Where do you store your cup, and what purpose does it serve? In the cupboard near the stove—reach for it, bring it to the tap, and fill it. Spill some. Sip slowly. Drink deeply. Offer a taste to the thirsty one standing before you. And if they already hold a glass full in their grasp—cheers.

This year may have been the happiest of my life this far. It did not come without contrast. There were monumental moments of weeping, pain, and fear—but I feel I finally touched a little of the gold in the shadow Carl Jung spoke of. I have been a woman on her knees at night, digging deeper and deeper into the soil with her bare hands, until after years of unearthing the dark, a light cut up from underground and expanded through me—leading me further than I could have imagined and bringing many gifts across the seasons.

For what I have received, most I could not have predicted. Life meets us in mysterious fashion—surprise happenstance laced with synchronicity. And yet, how the compass at my center knew what was coming toward me. Not in imagery or mentality, but in essence. It was on a mountaintop with new friends when he spoke to me of this: Don’t give up on your ideas completely, but find the essence of what you want and let go of the details. We watched the moon rise fully illuminated over a valley tucked beneath a cloudbank. I tucked this glowing wisdom safely into my chest and began to discover, in everything, the finer qualities desire is made of—letting go of how, what, when, or why, and trusting instead the opening and thrumming of my own heartbeat and the spirit that dances upon it.

What could be more of a gift than another human to share with? Here lie my greatest joys: a constellation of friends who shine like stars interspersed across my sky. I travel to each and find some kind of astronomer’s dream—an astrological web of connected beings, beautifully bright people, all tending their own heart-hearths. Digging-in-the-dirt friends. Kindreds-making-waves-of-change friends. A community of light and dark, abiding between riverbanks and sky, all of us asking questions, curious and expressive—this is where my happiness lives: in the vulnerable and abundant sharing of human connection. My cup is full.

To reflect on our meetings—the way cosmic motion drifts us together in my perception—is an otherworldly miracle. Some meetings are brief and passing; others are unknowingly carried into a future we cannot see from here. And how it is all okay with me, because this is a dinner party at the table of life. And when we clink our crystal together, the moment is everything there is.

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Some people show us how to be more animal—others guide us into otherworldly beings. He eats his steak without a fork at the dinner table, and it finally dawns on me that I never needed a serrated knife to begin with. I have teeth. I feel a little more free in this—holding flesh between my fingers, cutting and tearing it apart with my mouth.

I live in an old bull yard, surrounded by metal fencing. The irony is how caged I have felt for years—repeatedly telling my therapist that I likened myself to a wild horse in a locked corral. All I have ever wanted was to run the fields on my own time and come back home as I please. And here I am, by choice, relocated to a literal paddock of chain-link. The cage was never external to begin with, and the longer I live, the more everything I see translates metaphorically. We abide in a house of mirrors.

Here, I see myself as some wild-maned creature who has broken free from the confines within her own psyche enough to move her body through a gate slightly ajar, feeling the freedom of her own choosing into a different structure—where I hold the key. I have spent the past five years in the shade of forest and field, where trees tangle with vines, swales flow in winter, and the ground is marshy and fertile and green. This land held me like a mother and sang in her wise-woman voice: your life is fed by this—by the water, the dark and twisted, encompassing fertility—the womb of life is in the lowlands. This nourishment is a force—and now that I have left that physical location, I find myself in the highlands, a place of rock and sky, where birds fly and views expand. What is this feeding, this power?

Stability.

I have drunk the milk of the mother, and now I rise to stand upon the precipice of the father. When was I born? What animal am I now? I have been tiger, snake, and mare. Am I parent or child or wild, unidentified? How much can one person be—and how little, nothing at all? In this new structure, I will evolve.

She calls me to ask, how does one detach from feeling so deeply?

Oh, darling—we detach from another’s ownership. We connect back to ourselves and pour our energy through us, for us. We don’t stop feeling. In fact, we welcome it, invite it, sit with it. We feel our emotions and let them through, knowing they are life-force, sensation, language. It is giving our power away to another that binds—who holds the key to your life?

I drew a circle on the floor. When you can step into the middle and stay inside those lines, you are sovereign. This circle is you.

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She says the ceramic coffee mug she holds in her hand was the first thing she bought after the divorce. You have to start doing things for you. I watch her fingers gently caress the speckled glaze of creme and pink.

Funny, I bought myself a cup too— the color of a morning sunrise, tangerines and dusky lavender, the way the sky looks precisely at this moment from my kitchen window. I woke up to a sliver of rose along the eastern horizon while the stars still shimmered high in dawn’s dissolving dark. I laughed out loud, for the absurd beauty of it all—how I can be terrified of change and crave it all the same, and how, when we leap into the abyss of our fears, terror can disappear and unfold in the falling—a net. Caught, and drawn down gently.

I cannot see what is ahead beyond this southern edge lined with trees like bones in early December light. I can not predict my future. For this reason, I settle in, to the euphoric sound of oats bubbling over flame, clouds turning pink neon, a hawk’s swoop past the window, frosted grass and my beating heart—resting in the knowing of its place here.

“Love is the vibration of a human when it witnesses beauty.” -Zach Bush

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Some visions come from afar, a long distance walk toward what we see, whether hazy or crystalline, we are drawn forward. Other visions can be quickenings—a flash, some moment of insight and we catch it, never seeing it coming. My life has been both.

Where am I now?

For the last few years, I feel I have been in a current that I could not pull myself out of—an underlying force. I remember a dream I had: I was on a wooden raft floating down a lazy river in the dark, the full moon, my only light. I have felt both the peace of such serene beauty— the essence of riding upon water, gently guided, and I have also felt the white churn of raging water, moved forward through choked-breaths and near drowning experience, doubting if I would make it through.

This, too, can be sensational—a spiralling channel of chaos and tempest winding itself back into steadiness, and the undeniable sense of reverence, when we are submerged into something beyond our control. Like the moments close to death—we sense the depth of it all, the surrender, the fall, the brightness of immense pain and struggle—because to be alive, is to be in this place of descent as much as it is to rise up to the surface, remembering how much we want to breathe again, to live.

This summer, I felt inspired to create a short, interim collection of water poems. Call it an awakening, rebirth, mid-life crisis—the process and journey I am on within myself. Whether it is a freefall into the void, or uplifted ecstatic state, and all that exists between, the literal rivers of my home in Willamette Valley, Oregon are my constant companions and always speak to me in metaphor. I write in “Body of a River,” from Be Like Water, page 32:

Centerpoint between two rivers—the meandering Marys and wide-bellied Willamette, I can reach out my arms and almost touch you—I have never lived with less distance.

Through my emotional experiences— from saturated grief, hollow emptiness, deep longing, to simple contentment and transcendent joy, I am invited over and over again to the banks and given the gift of sitting quietly or jumping in wildly.

Love can be like waves of water meeting earth, moved by air, lying under the fire of the sun.

—“The Mystery, What It Feels Like To Fall In Love,” page 24

I have spent hours amidst tangled willow and reeds, watching bird flight and sunsets, feeling the current wrap around my skin. I have seen water in its many forms and seasons and expressions as a reflection of myself. This mirror has softened me into an acceptance and understanding of my truer identity. Beyond the mind’s reasoning and analytical structuring, there is something much deeper and stronger and life-giving that we contain. To Be Like Water, is to become a channel, allowing life to move and pour through us. We are reservoirs of being, with an intricacy of tributaries. Maybe all our waterways, individually, connect to oceans collectively.

Be Like Water is an exploration of feminine nature. This is where energy and emotion, intuition and sensation become power. The way she moves is mutable, transforming, changing—she is wildly alive and renewable through cycles and seasons.

When she dives into her open heart to feel its pounding waves and taste the salt of her weeping,

—page 51, from “Reborn”

Learning how to move as she moves is surrendering to the current of feeling— sensing, knowing beyond thought and listening to the living body. It is learning how to breathe. It is practicing trust in what carries you.

This new book is an offering, an honoring of my own experience in the waters within and around me. It is a quick dive into my personal exploration of this theme. I am simultaneously writing a full-length collection that will be released at a later date. That upcoming book will explore the meeting of all elements within awakening and embodiment, a creation story—where feminine meets masculine in union.

For now, let us feel into the depths, the complexities, the thirst-quenching nature, of being like water.

How to order Be Like Water:

This is a first edition special release, purchase direct from your author! Second edition will be available on most online book retailers at a later date.

Specifications:

• Soft felt weave cover

• Pocketbook size 4.25 x 6.87

• 53 pages

• Cover art by local artist Vida Rachel Brinker www.wildbranchstudios.com

$17 + shipping ($5)

Send $22 through the selected app, leave me your shipping address in a direct message or note on Venmo.

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For love,

Hannah

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Floating through the dark

A sky of black stretches over the body of water reflecting the night’s shimmering star jewels. We glide, invisible to each other, while I listen for the smooth cut of oar, the drip and lap. To be afloat something that carries an unseen world and to allow the vessel that holds me above the deep to move without sight, is trust. As we paddle through narrow channels into an open lake under the new moon’s midnight, I begin to understand how the dark is a teacher, opening up our navigation to see through the eyes of the body’s other senses. Rustling leaves. A brief splash. Cool air, tepid water touching fingertips. Every movement once made in the light of the sun becomes a different kind of dance, where the mind must let go of reason and one must feel their way forward, relying on sensation as their guide.

Swimming through the dark

I wake afraid. Could I be drowning? Hidden beliefs about my own incapability, the doubt, rise like tidal waves of fear. I am about to leap—to cross a threshold of change that will rearrange everything I have known and do I remember how to swim? I find my breath and my skin. I listen. On the floor I am safe; the ground supports and steadies me. What happens next is intuitive. The body relaxes into itself. The spine sways soft. I shed tension like snake skin. Throat opens. Eyes close. I am swimming in layers of blue, a womb of water. Sound escapes my lips and grows louder, until it ripples and reverberates. My arms make circles through the air. This is expansion. I am not sinking— I am merging with what swallows me. Here, I do not fear the dark.

Walking through the dark

The sun sets and we are on a hilltop looking for a waxing crescent before it descends. No moon appears from the cloud cover and the night arrives quickly in late October. The trail down is narrow and winding; we descend in the dark. He leads. I follow. As we enter the canopy of evergreens, the space between sight and blindness closes. I cannot see at all. I reach out and grasp the corner of his backpack and let myself be pulled along blindly. Then, I begin to feel my feet, every step visible through my sole, my calves, my thighs, I become aware of the subtle undulations of earth, the firmness of a well-trodden path, the softness of undisturbed soil. I let go of my grip and walk freely, still following the cues of his steps, and occasional warnings of rock and roots. There is a rhythm in the darkness that fills me with only the song of the senses, where hearing hidden creatures in undergrowth and the buzz of insects, the scent of minerals and water, the feeling of invisible beings in grass blade and branch and spiderweb as they brush across my skin, is the only reality. There is no mental mind here, only a mind born through touch and sound, an intelligence found in the presence of the body. I notice I lose my way when I reach for thought. To walk in the dark takes an attunement to the physical, not the mental. I become animal, and soon I am leading our small pack, feeling each switchback and curve. When we break out into the open, where stars and headlights and a distant city glow, I am disappointed the journey has ended. How alive I have felt! How true!

In my mind’s eye, I keep seeing a raven sky laced with constellations, a lake of black, a winding path of night. I am suspended here in this place of unknowing, where I cannot see what is ahead. When fear rushes in, I am remembering there is another way to move through the phases of the dark. There is a guide that does not appear as the sun, but as shadow and the cavern of our own inner instinct. We find our breath. We relax into our body. We trust that we are born from this.

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I go to the river,

remove my clothes 

and fold 

into the earthen floor,

absorbed 

under rippling motion,

surrounded

I make my peace 

surrendered.

Held in the hands 

of tributaries,

brown skin embankments,

the mouth of this place

speaks in whispered rushes, 

the eyes of the sun

look upon me, 

steady.

Contained, I am 

water meeting water

moving through 

channels of soil and stone.

Here, I know

there is no 

separation,

only me

in you, 

one.

-Moon In Pisces, Virgo Sun

Cycles and patterns repeat. At this time, a year ago, I the felt the familiar contractions between emptiness and weight held within my own skin and wrote this poem. My heart was pressed, my womb open. My physicality felt like a balancing act, stretched and teetering on an axis of earth and water, body and spirt. Here I am again, early September, when fruit begins to drop under heavy ripeness and riverbeds are low, feeling the repetitive curvature of my nature held within a greater nature and how I spin within circles of matter and time.

I am recognizing my place in this. To be highly sensitive to subtlety is attunement. For so long I feared this connection, the frequency and dial that I can feel and perceive, beyond words and reason.

How do I hold the polarity of two opposite points, contradictory while complimentary? A lunar axis placed within the body of my own universe and what can be done when the south node sits in the heaviness of clay, rock and decomposition, while the north node rises, mutable and changing, the evanescence of water, always moving?

I become both.

One hand reaching down, the other reaching up to form connection, wrapping together, two tied and spiraling into a braided cord.

This is the nature of a river.

Song credit: “Voidance” by Kye Kye

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The body is a doorway.

The words come as I feel my pain, the ache that has persisted and grown and now, here I am in mountain pose reaching down slowly into a forward bend and I begin to tremble and cry out. I weep with my head hanging, dangling from a body half bent and upside down, I am reminded of the power of being with discomfort, the hurting. I know now, that when movement and sound open into tremors and tears, a door is swinging wide in the recesses of my form for something hidden and waiting, something stuck with nowhere to go, to move through.

There is such love here, in the opening.

It may be difficult to understand, unless one has softened into their pain and found their body and spirit can meet them in it. There is a deeper truth to be felt, and seen.

Bobbing on gentle ocean waves, breath a silent floating device, weightless in salt water, I rode the tide as it moved, finding my way through.

One would think that birth taught me how to surrender into the body’s process of navigating intense sensation, but I had two cesareans, highly medicated, surgical and sterile. I was strapped to a table, immobile. The only movement was in my mind and it was erratic and terrified in an environment that felt so far from nature.

But life is a teacher, and presents the lessons we need to learn. A few years after the birth of my second child, I found my breath, I found instinct. I am growing into my own kind of animal. I now crawl my big emotions and sensations, growl them, spit them, howl them, I dance and I sing, I moan and groan, roll around on the floor until something opens. I touch my skin so softly, I caress this body. This is the knocking, the turning of the knob, this is entering another room by the frame of your own entrance.

You hold the key. Open the door.

There is a stunning scene in the new series, Dying For Sex, where Molly, played by Michelle Williams, uses interpretive movement in her grief process as she moves through the stages of terminal cancer. Earlier in the episode, her palliative care therapist introduced the idea of expressing present feelings associated with memory or experience through the body. Molly was unable to perform when prompted, but later finds herself instinctively responding with this body wisdom. This moment in television split me open. Because I know this.

This is somatic integration that up-levels countless hours of talk therapy. We hold such power and direction, hidden in rooms where trauma and emotional wounds have settled into organs and tissues, muscle and bone. The body, she just wants to express herself, she wants to lay down upon the cold, damp ground with roots under spine, to be given time to fully feel her exhaustion. She wants to sigh deeply and audibly whenever she feels her suffocation, she wants to stretch gently, dance wildly, she wants to know she is safe in her feelings, to authentically show them. Again, there is so much love here. To meet yourself, without expectation, armor, desire or fear, just acceptance, to let your physicality show you how to move forward, this is love.

Stay, until you burn everything down to the truth. -Chantelle Raven

Approach the doorway, stay. Don’t leave yourself shut up and closed. Open the door. Be in it and feel, to find what resides in that room. Walk through.

“A Night Owl Speaks” from We Are Wanderers quoted. Find it here.

Here’s a short music playlist that has accompanied my week of body based practices, and has been the soundtrack to this writing.

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