Reprise

Crushed

Broken

Sorrow

I'm sorry

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and I don't know what to do... 

Maelstrom

This year held tough times for me. My ongoing difficulties became snagged on the many branches of external circumstance, and thus tangled, they began to concentrate and crystallise. Over several weeks and months, they became encapsulated, solidifying into more thorny snares.  

But life didn’t stop rushing by, and as the weeks passed I found myself entangled in flotsam and stained with dirty foam, increasingly obstructed until soon I was washed against an impassable barricade while the rising tide became a torrent. And despite my sustained efforts to extricate myself, the water continued to crash around me, louder and louder until I realised I was clinging at the edge of a growing whirlpool.

The edge of the maelstrom is relentless. It never lets up. The danger is constant, and you can not relax your vigilance, not for a moment. But the only way out of a storm is through it. With the gale whipping around me, I barely had to energy to keep afloat, and not enough to propel myself to safety. So the only way I could escape was to let go completely, and allow myself to be washed into the vortex.

And in that moment of release I discovered that the thing I had been holding onto the hardest was my most tightly gripped secret – my disability.

To surrender, I had to make a stand, tell my story, speak my truth. And at the right moments, and in my own unconventional ways, I did. I did, with my intuition, and my presence, and my words. It was risky, and confronting. For a while the storm howled even louder, and the water kept rising. But the truth locked inside my body had its own power, and the kinetic force of its release ignited a fierce alchemical heat in me. For weeks my skin burned with it, and my hands shook with it, and my words grew stronger, and they did not stop flowing until that truth was heard and acknowledged.

I am so damn proud of the way I conducted myself in the middle of such a deep and all-consuming crisis. So, so proud.

Even in that storm-gouged space, with danger close and my strength failing, I responded from a place of integrity, and with compassion. When backed into an impenetrable corner, I reached first for my core values. And in that moment, in that clear space, I was blessed with support from people who met my truth and integrity and compassion with their own, and who helped me to higher ground. My impossible, impassable situation became navigable again. 

So, regardless what I’ve forgotten this year, what I’ve failed at, what I’ve been criticised for, or what people think they know about me that’s weird or embarrassing or hilarious, I have this: knowing that I brought my best self and acted from my highest values in deeply difficult circumstances. And by taking a stand for my own integrity, I’ve challenged other people to do the same. 

The buzz

Do you feel it?

I can feel it in the air

Six

On this anniversary, I have a profound sense of the distance I've travelled over the last six years.

Then, I was stumbling around weakly, without understanding which fractured part of me had gone missing. Now, I feel whole, not sheared in half. Regardless of my lost breast, my lost memory, my fatigue, I feel whole. It's as if the intact part of my spirit needed to battle it out with the most broken parts of my life, to reclaim my essential strength and energy. In the cataclysm that ensued, in the long, slow healing that followed, I was remade. Incrementally, my own truest Self was restored. 

Now, I feel whole. 
I am whole. 
I am awake. 
I am alive.

Clarity

I have so many layers of love for this ~

So converse me with that steady tone of where you've been
The Paper Kites 

Tangled

Somewhere

in

the

middle

is

a

luminous

thread

of

truth

The question

Do you know the answer?

Brittle

#unresolved  #assumptions  #anger  #brittle 

Liminal

I awoke this morning with the dancing golden light of the dreamspace still clear in my mind. 

~~~

Trust

Trust your instinct to the end, 

though you can render no reason. 

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson  

It isn't easy

expression / repression 

tightly-sprung suppression / heavy cutting beat

Antidote

It's not all bad news.

There's a simple, but potent, antidote: empathy.

And there's that word again: connection.

Hangover

What's better than my all time favourite TED talk?  

Finding out there's a sequel. And it's just as powerful as the first - or maybe more so, because it probes the uncomfortable reality of the 'vulnerability hangover' that followed its delivery. 

It goes to the heart of the paradox of vulnerability: that it's not weakness. That it's our most accurate measurement of courage. That it's the birth place of innovation, creativity, and change. 

And that we can't unlock any of that unless we examine its paralysing flipside: shame. 

All things

Sun Through Overcast Cirrocumulus Stratiformis Clouds

All things appear or disappear like the sound of an echo:

the clouds in the sky,

the moon on the water,

the lightning, the sea foam,

the trail of a bird as it flies,

or the visions of dreams after waking.

~ Master Taisen Deshimaru

This

This lumpen misshapen silence

This ample ponderous shame

This molten balloon of discomfort

This sharp-faced boiling pause

Is every day   week   month   

Is every voice-locked question

Is every suspended uncertainty

Of this shamefast frozen abeyance

Fragments

I think you told me something – – –

Unresolved

The woman is

Two of Swords - Sacred Isle Tarot

... CENTERED.

On falling

Never regret thy fall,

O Icarus of the fearless flight

For the greatest tragedy of them all

Is never to feel the burning light

~ Oscar Wilde

Forgetting is this

Forgetting is this:

It’s waking to the chilling nausea of realising you have forgotten.

It’s standing in a fog, with the dimly-lit shape of a fragmented memory so close that you know it’s important, but tantalisingly out of reach.

It’s a swirling mist that churns and eddies each time you grasp uselessly for what eludes.

Forgetting is this:

It’s failing, without realising, the good people who share your life, by not holding on to the truths they gave you.

It’s the flicker of disappointment you catch in their eyes.  Or worse, the silent kindness of the reaction they conceal.

It’s reaching out to them through your heart-space because you sense the hurt you have caused, without knowing what slipped away.

Forgetting is this:

It’s the clever details that leak away, so that you learn and lose, and have to learn again, always.

It’s the sudden flash of recollection that occurs slow eons after the critical moment you needed it.

It’s the surge of shame that burns hotly in the swift oxygen of recognition and understanding.

Sometimes, forgetting is this: 

It’s remembering clearly, just as well as you always did, while someone spoon-feeds you the revisions and half-truths they think you’ll swallow down meekly.

And sometimes you call them out on it, and sometimes you don’t.

But it stays with you, and burrows into the deepest part of your consciousness.

And, always, it’s this:

A loss that, unlike the memories, always returns in vivid detail.

But, forgetting is also this:

It’s seeing the world, again, with fresh eyes.

It’s relinquishing ten thousand tiny details that don’t matter, and never did.

It’s learning to accept kindness, and trust in goodness.

It’s placing your ego to one side, and surrendering to the wisdom of intuition.

It’s letting go of time, and dropping mindfully into the spaciousness of Now.

It’s understanding that everything is energy, and energy is never lost.

Lucid

I dream. I dream a lot.

It’s ironic, really, that someone whose sleep is so broken is rewarded by such a sumptuous palette of dream-story every night. (#narcolepsy)

But there you have it. I’m a dreamer.

Being partially asleep in your waking life is one thing, but being partially awake within your sleeping life is something altogether different.

~~~

I've got answers, but I don't have truth

Can you tell me not to worry

Can you tell me I'll be fine

Can you tell me everything's alright,

It's alright, it's alright?

(untitled)

It’s the part of me that didn’t break.

It’s a place inside of me that receives the world, and finds its meaning.

It’s a true compass, that sets a sure path for my hesitating foot.

It’s my infallible sentry, which warns in danger, and stills in safety.

It reads energy and places, not faces. It feels out the shape of their intent even while untrue words are washing over me.

It grasps the whole story, even when the disassembled parts tumble uncaught through my hands.

It whispers the wordless language of dreams in the waking world, and is never wrong.

It’s as essential as the blood that pulses within my body.

It’s not a sixth sense. It’s my primary sensation.

It doesn’t need to remember. It knows.

It has never let me down.

It’s the part of me that didn’t break.  

Overcome

Nothing in the world is softer and weaker than water.

However, when attacking that which is hard and strong,

nothing can surpass it and no one can equal it.

Weakness may overcome strength,

softness may overcome hardness,

everyone knows it,

but no one puts this knowledge into practice.

Lao-Tzu

Forty-four

Life is strange. 

Make/do/be art.

#44

Out of my hands

Current earworm:

Guess then these troubles are out of my hands
Guess then I'm free to use them to clap and dance

Dreaming / Not Dreaming

Sorry / Not Sorry

 Crazy / Not Crazy 

Clue-less / Not Clueless 

     Waving / Not Drowning 

Dreaming / Not Dreaming / Dreaming 

An illustration to showcase the brainactivity during REM-sleep by Lorenza Walker

A single word

Greater than a thousand meaningless words is a single reasonable word that brings calm to those who are listening.

~ Buddha

Zen Garden by Patrick

Answer

A:  Week nights

My rhyme is not done as she continues her flight

To hear the song of the stars on a cold, starless night

To continue her search and there find some meaning

Of things that are real and not of her dreaming