Here We Go!
The Lost Coast, CA solo backpacking vision quest Feb 2015
The Beginning
I can’t promise you research or advanced degrees, but I can promise you truth. Maybe that’s part of why I am here in this body at this time: to offer my willingness to say out loud those things “you’re not supposed to say out loud.”
I have been having a massive attack of doubt about doing this, putting my Voice and my Stories out there on public display. Maaaaybe I would feel differently if I was lucky enough to do it in book form, but on the Internet?!?! It just feels so…in the realm of the ethers.
Fortunately, I listened to enough Massive Attack in the mid 90’s to find the zen chill I need to do it anyway. And, as my Dad summed up about my life-view in his choice of song for our father-daughter dance at my wedding, things might go awry and you might feel uncertain but Do It Anyway!
That viewing point lets me listen to the tap-tap-tap on my Spirit door and determine to give it what I can give. I can give my heart, and I can cut attachment to how you might perceive the words that come through my fingertips. So it goes and here we go!
Let’s be heart-piercingly honest, who am I really? The truth is I am nobody. (And the truth is that question can go way deeper, but that is an investigation for another time.) The truth is also that every nobody is somebody to someone.
I can’t promise you research or advanced degrees or canonization by some obscure entity, but I can promise you truth. I can promise you honesty. Maybe that’s part of why I am here in this body at this time: to offer my willingness to say out loud those things “you’re not supposed to say out loud.” I can promise you my commitment to steadfastly unzip again and again all these layers on top of myself to get somewhere closer and closer to Truth. We live in cycles, and we live in seasons. When we come back to that same piece of something all over again, it’s not because the healing never happened, it’s because we have entered another season of healing. I am diving back through my past so that I may actually live here, now.
If you happen to see yourself here and it feels as if I am talking about you in an uncomfortable way, I assure you this is not done as provocation or finger-pointing. For perhaps the first time, I am finding the space inside to review myself and my life without blaming anyone for any of it. It simply is. This is me, telling my own story, without anyone else’s interposing voice or viewpoint. That is the whole point. To be my whole self, for my own self, in ways I never could growing up.
Perhaps you will see yourself in these writings because, unbeknownst to me, I am writing of you and for you. Perhaps you have a story waiting to be told as well and, in telling mine, those unspeakable parts in you, at last, too, get a voice. If somebody out there sees themselves in these writings and feels even a little bit less alone, then that is certainly worth something.
This much, right now, I know to be true. I am worthy. You are worthy. I am worthwhile, and so are you. We are, both of us, so, so loved. We are lightness and we are darkness. We are exactly as we came here to be.
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