{peace.love.free}

I’m running.  Not fast, but I’m running.  The gravel is loose under my feet and I can feel my left ankle – the weak one – twinge a little.  My chest burns and I know my face is ridiculously bright red.  I want to stop, especially on those low slung country hills that seem to climb forever.  But I run.  There are yellow buttercups growing in clumps along the side of the road, and I pass weathered barns and rusted tractors and country homes that have stood watch by this  stretch of shoreline for well over a hundred years now.  Drivers who pass me wave and smile, even strangers do that here in the country.  The sun warms me and the breeze cools me.  Music pounds in my head, the strains of Viva La Vida giving me the perfect spirit-lift to push past the discomfort.  This is not easy, but I am smiling.

This is for me.

I’m alone in my room.  The window looks out over rose bushes and a white country church.  If I listen closely I can hear the soft glug-glug of the frogs in the pond across the street. A summer breeze blows in through the open window, bringing with it the scent of growing things.   I am naked; my body still slick with the sweat from my run.  My muscles feel well used.  I’ve connected my phone to a tiny set of speakers, and I let the music play.  I find songs that spin the innate beat of my hips, and they begin to spiral.  The rhythm lives deep in my center, right where the core of my femininity lies.  I begin to move slowly as the song snakes its way inside me and I let the music take me over.   I feel my muscles working, abs, legs, arms, back.  I watch in the mirror, a slow smirk spreading across my face.  I am a seductress, a sorcerer, my siren song sung not in words but by the movement of my body.

This is for me.

I am sitting at the computer.  My skin smells like rose essential oil serum purchased at the farmers market last weekend.  My hair is still wet from the blissfully hot shower.  My muscles are still tingling from my run and my mind is buzzing with stories that beg to be told. To my left I hear my girls giggling in the living room, to my right there is a window that looks out on a gnarly old apple tree that my childhood self has climbed times too numerous to count.  I look straight ahead, the glow of the screen holding all of my attention.   I have so many words dying to be born right now.  My fingers trip over themselves trying to let them all out in the limited time available.  The clickety click of the keyboard sooths my already calm soul as I release some of what lives inside me.  After a long hiatus, I am finally writing again.

This is for me.

I walk along the rocky beach that has known my footsteps since childhood.  A light breeze blows through hair that has not seen brush or hairdryer or styling product in days.  The tide is on the way in, but plenty of beach remains.  My hands are full – of rocks, of brightly colored bits of beach glass, of dried up crab legs.  Treasures, all of them.  My girls walk along side me, all three of us – heads down – scanning the ground for more riches.  An old medicine bottle protruding from the rust colored bank.  A small piece of lavender pottery laying on the rocks after a trip through the sea.  A jagged piece of pink colored gypsum just begging for a home.  Three more things for my hands to hold.  Presence,  for me, is one of the hardest things.  And here I am, utterly and completely in this moment, with these girls, in a place my soul knows as home.

This is for me.

I have taken a step off the roller coaster.  After a relentless spring full of pushing and crashing and endless questions, I am peaceful and centered.  I am breathing again.   I am making choices now, not from fear or insecurities or a ceaseless drive to expand.  I am holding what is sacred and mine in front of me, keeping these gifts in the forefront of my mind at all times.  I chose to honor what is, what needs nurturing, what builds and sustains my heart.   There are no doubts in this space, only clarity.

I don’t need all the answers just now.  I have all that I need – the pounding of my feet on loose gravel, the rhythm of music spiraling my from my hips, the bliss of words flowing from my fingers, the gifts of the ocean held gently in my hands, and the clarity of what is sacred in my life.

This is for me.

~~~

What are you doing – just for you – right now?

You ready to let yourself be moved?  Check out some of these…..

Kelly Diels

Damn it; girl is gooooood.  So good I consume every word she writes, usually more than once.   I’m tickled to say that we’re cooking up some seriously sweet baddassedry together, she and I – but you’ll have to wait on that, my pretties.  For now, just sit down and let her words set you on fire.

*on safe harbours, swimming demons, and facing your own stuff*

And this particular piece…. lets just say that I’m dealing with some of my own stuff right now.  And this gave me some wake-up-and-get jiggy-with-the-emotional baggage perspective I was sorely lacking on my own.

Sometimes it isn’t the external circumstances or true intentions of other people that trigger us. Sometimes our interpretation isn’t objective reality. Sometimes it is our own stuff.

Jena Strong

Beaming light, brilliant poet, with a gift to reducing life to its purest form.  Plus, she’s the cutest little thing, and when she smiles her eyes squint up so deliciously that I want to keep her with me forever and ever.

*Unbreakable, or Riding the Crocodile*

So many truths in this one.  Read again and again.

There were times last fall and winter when I felt like no expanse would be big enough for my energy, my rage, my sadness, my hunger, my love, my spirit. Now, I am beginning to land. To feel that there is enough room for me in this life. To reach my arms out around myself, painting a circle of space around my body on the very air I move through.

*Contentment*

Contentment.  Yes.

“Not straining to move mountains but letting the mountains move themselves, as they have for all time”

Dear Sugar

Dear Abby?  Puh-lease.  Sugar takes on the tired old advice column and works it into something far more wise, wonderful and heart-achingly beautiful than I ever could have imagined.  Explore the archives.  I dare you not to be moved by every single letter.

*The Truth That Lives There*

I read it and cried.  I sent it to two people who needed very much to read it.  Then I read it again and shed a few more tears.  Every now and then you come across someone who tells a bit of your own story as a part of their own.  And that, when it happens, is such a gift.

But an ethical and evolved life also entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth…..And if there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.

*That Ecstatic Parade*

If only every single person out there had a truth-teller whispering this in their ear.

There is a middle path, but it goes in only one direction: toward the light. Your light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you’re doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.

Leigh Steele

Bestest Friend + Guru + Soft Place To Fall = My Leigh-Leigh.  I have rarely known anyone in my life who is easier to love.

*On Idle*

From her am reminded, over and over again, what a wise and beautiful thing it is to learn from our children.

No, it isn’t easy.  And you won’t have all the answers.   And it will challenge your own view of yourself.  If it doesn’t, then try harder.  Go deeper.  Question everything.   Quell the voices.  Sit in silence.  Cry as often as you can.   Smile when you want to scream.   Hug when you want to lash out.  Crumple to the floor in desperation when you need to.   Ask the wind for advice;  she often replies.   Heal in warm baths and sweet slumber….

~~~~

Please do tell me, lovelies, what has been moving you lately.  I’d love links to blogs, articles, video’s songs…..or tell me a story from your own life.  Share how you’re moving and what is moving you.

Pretend I’m an ancient guru.  Yes, it’s a stretch, but humor me for a minute.  You’ve got a good imagination, and you probably owe me a favor or two.  Come on….put aside your skepticism.  I’ll even help you out.

I’m sitting high on a rugged mountain top and you just climbed the whole damn thing to see me. You are covered in sweat and your legs are all scratched from those damn @#$%^ prickly bushes that lined the trail.  Short-shorts were a bad idea.  You worked your ass off to get here, and it was one hell of a climb.

But I’m guru-fabulous like nothing you’ve ever seen before. I’m all wrinkled skin and wise eyes and radiating thousand year old wisdom.  Plus, I’m wearing a freaking insane pair of red stilettos and a dress you’d kill to get your hands on*. I’ve got a rockin’ body for an old girl.  Don’t even try to pretend you didn’t notice.

You are in awe.  It’s a damn good thing – because a healthy dose of awe is the price of admission on my mountain top, baby.  But still, you doubt.  You think, “She’d better damn well make this worthwhile”.

I gaze at you – with all my thousand year old guru-fab wisdom – and you listen.  You listen because I’m an ancient sage in drag queen stilettos, and you know I’ve gotta be speaking the truth.

I say only four words:

“Let yourself be moved.”

You want to live with a wide open heart?  Let yourself be moved. You want to break through old patterns and discover yourself anew?  Let yourself be moved. You want to fall in love? Heal a broken heart? Make right a deep injustice?  Smash through paradigms? Pick yourself up and dust yourself off? Change the freaking world?

Let yourself be moved.

We live most of our lives with our guard way up.  Well-built walls protect us from threats, both real and imagined.  We are splintered and patched and numb to the core, but we keep our game face on, always. We nurture our skepticism and our cynicism and that tiny kernel of innate distrust until they are larger and harder and more powerful than we ever wanted them to be.

We give the bad more power than the good.  Even when we don’t intend to.

This life?  It can be hard. On your knees, sobbing for mercy, crazy-fucking-hard.  But we all have moments of brilliance.   Experiences that wake us up to the sheer beauty of the universe and chip away at our cynicism and distrust.  Interactions that feed our souls, open our hearts and convince us that just possibly-maybe-perhaps life really is inherently good.   And those moments, my sweet friends, only occur under certain circumstances.   When we are safe, or brave, or distracted, or bad-ass-crazy-enough to lower the veils, dismantle the walls, and blast the hell through that numbness into a place of deep feeling.

{And I mean deep people.  Brilliance never settles for superficial}.

Brilliance only happens when we let overselves be moved.

But there is a catch.  One little guru-fab caveat that I’ll let you in on, because I totally think you’re ready:

Brilliance rarely feels entirely gentle.  Yes, it can be transcendent and awe-inspiring and all kinds of fabulous.  But it can also be utterly terrifying.

Brilliance exists so far outside of our everyday detachment that it can rock our world.  Talk about being moved – brilliance of the life altering variety can feel like a whirlwind around-the-world-in-80-days mind trip.  It can bring up all sort of baggage we didn’t know we were lugging around and test us in ways we never anticipated.

Insecurity?  Scarcity?   Limiting beliefs?  Debilitating jealousy?

Yes, yes and yes-yes-yes.  How about all of the above + a dose of paranoia, all wrapped up in a two-for-one order of heart pounding fear?  Hells yeah.  Sign me up.

And the only way through that whole mess?  Let yourself be moved some more.

Caveat Number Two:  Sir Newton was on to something when he formulated that pesky little law of inertia.  Dear ole’ Newty scored major points on his science quiz with this little gem:

If you ain’t been a-movin’- you ain’t so likely to be moved.

It’s going to take a little practice at first; a nudge in the right direction or a giant push toward your desire.  You want change?  Start seeking out change-makers and soak up their intensity.  You want to get over a broken heart?  Start by actively falling in love with yourself.  You need to stop standing still?  Polish up your dancing shoes and start with a slow shimmy.

You want to be moved?  Get off your ass and get moving.

Refuse to remain stagnant.  Stop accepting the status quo.  Don’t let society dictate how you feel or live or love.  Not one more day of allowing your past or your family or your community to choose your life for you.   Reject the idea that you must settle for ‘breathing just a little, and calling it a life’.   No longer feel limited by protective walls or numbness or that tiny voice that tells you to play-it-cool-don’t-hope-too-much-feel-too-much-want-too-much-love-too-much*.

That nagging little voice?  It’s gotta go.

Just let yourself be moved, dammit.

Read poetry until your body tingles.  Go to an art gallery and stare at a painting until you can feel the artist’s brush strokes on your body.  Gather your girlfriends and laugh until you cry.  Then cry until you laugh again.  March in a protest and be swept away by the power of the crowd and the madness of inequality.  Give till it makes you uncomfortable.  Listen to a symphony and let your heart swell to bursting with the power of the music. Lock eyes with someone who makes you feel that ZING. TUG. WHOOSH in your gut and just go with it; to hell with taking it slow.

Watch your kiddos play or fight or dream or make art and feel your own inner child break free.  Jump out of a plane and contemplate your own mortality.  Read your poetry for a crowd even if your whole body is shaking.  Look a homeless woman in the eye and ask her how she is doing; feel her answer deep in your bones.  Take a giant leap outside your comfort zone and experience every last bit of the panic that greets you.  Let the abundance of life penetrate you deep, until you lose count of the infinite number of ways the universe can move you.

Sit with your fear and your insecurity and your jealousy and your paranoia and let them push you past that place that holds you back.  Past the numbness.  Past the complacency.  Past truths fed to you by people who hold you with a limited view.   Nurture your genius, your beauty, your inherently trusting nature.  Feel your own courage.  Fall in love.   Create a safe space for someone marvelous to fall in love with you.  Dance with fire.  Get loud during sex.  Shake your fabulous booty while you do the dishes.  Make friends with your roaring goddess power.

Above all else? Stop. Holding. Back.

Let yourself be moved until you catch a glimpse of your limitless, full of potential soul. Hold it within you like the priceless thing that it is and bring it forth as your gift to the world.  Dust off your divine spirit and get down with your groovy self.   Make friends with your heart, and go down on your knees to thank it for serving you well.

Fuck inhibitions.  If your body wants to make love in the rain; do it.  If your spirit wants to sing Beyoncé in the grocery store; let her.  If your soul tells you to body paint a giant canvas in rainbow colors; go and make some supersized art.   If your heart wants to fall in love every single day; give it the freedom to run free and seduce the world.  Get juicy, get wild, get wanton and lusty.  Get turned on by life.   Really turned on.

Feel everything. Deeply.
Let yourself be moved.

Let yourself be moved until you are opened wide.  Wider.  Even wider than you ever thought possible.   So wide that you’re swimming in brilliance.  So wide it does not feel safe. Because safety was never the goal (we were just tricked into believing that it was).

Let yourself be moved until you are ready to love more, feel deeper, change things.  Let yourself be moved until you radiate your own guru-fab energy.  Let yourself be moved until every day begins with a tingle of anticipation that starts in your baby toe and rolls through your body and out into the universe.  Let yourself be moved until you are ready to move mountains with the brilliance of your soul.

But not my mountain.  It stays where it is. After all, I’m a thousand-year-old-red-stiletto-wearing-guru.  And what I say, totally goes.

Let yourself be moved.

_________________________________________________________________________

* Dude, who the hell said gurus have to be frumpy?  This is my story.

**For heaven’s sake; please, please, please love too much.   At least every now and then.  Honestly, I’ll settle for every second Tuesday when the date happens to fall on an odd number and your lucky panties are clean.  Whatever it takes, as long as you agree to love too much once in a while.  It’s good for you. Trust me.

It is green here.  So very green.  I marvel at the layers and layers of emerald, chartreuse, lime, avocado, dark forest, bright apple. My eyes trace the landscape, delighted by the many forgotten shades that exist in the natural world.

I am weary of the desert by now.  My eyes grow too accustomed to the monochromatic blandness of the endless brown-beige-tan that forms the southwestern tableau.  I am not meant for there, never have been.  I’m an ocean mermaid, a deep forest nymph, a barefoot country girl.   Too many months surrounded by cactus and tumbleweed and creosote and miles upon miles of pavement and I begin to forget who I am.

My first morning I step outside; my eyes wide open.  I breathe deep and remember what the desert tries to lull me into forgetting.  There are parts of the world where trees grow thick, and deep forests surround and blankets of grass grows without assistance. Life pulses here, deep below the earth and right on the surface.  I hear it on the wind, and smell it in the air and I feel it thriving in the ground beneath my feet.

The girls lean out the window on the first day, and they breathe deep as well.  “It smells good here, Mama.  So good”.  Not exhaust fumes and valley smog and the thick scent of heat rising off asphalt. Just clean air, and soft earth, and the smell of thriving life.  They are happy. I am too.

These summers are a gift to them, my city girlies.  A reminder that the world is bigger and wider than they sometimes realize in the safe little dead-end cul de sac that shelters so many of their hours.  It is a lesson in roots, and history and family.  In the places they come from and the potential of the many places they may go.  Both adventure and simplicity packaged neatly into one six week trip.

And in giving to them, of course I receive.  My soul knows this place, in the deep way our souls know the places that hold us by means deeper than rent or mortgage or job location.  Year after year, this place finds me unchanged.  It nestles my weary heart in the curve of country roads and lifts my spirit until I soar on the open wings of Atlantic seabirds.  It coaxes me out of spaces tinged by insecurity or fear or scarcity and reminds me that I am always more than enough.

I am home.  I am happy.  I am blessed.

6.11.10 (one year ago)

The light is the color of wheat this morning.   A dull golden glow, not yet fully committed to the day.   Later, it whispers a promise to pulse and blaze with the heat of the desert.  Right now the light is present but not yet the living, breathing thing it will become as the sun hits its apex.  If light had a sound, this would tease my ears with a low hum, promising intensity to come.

The highway zips by under my wheels; my car set on a course north through city and desert toward the beating heart of a home I know well.  There are voices in the backseat.  The soft chitter-chatter of littles – not my own – quickly awakened and nestled into carseats.  This journey is an important one.

We are all focused north this morning.  I feel the others, close by and from afar   I close my eyes briefly and see us; tiny pin pricks of light in the vastness, all moving toward the energy which is our source on this morning.  We are the lower points on a five pointed star –my dear one, my mama bear, the magic maker far away and me.

Our direct north point is her.  Our soft place to fall.  She who transforms the act of listening into a sacred gift of kinetic intensity.   The asker of questions.  Maker of brownies.  Holder of space. Weaver of words. Mama to a thousand hearts.  Her.

And we arrive.  One after another.  Entering sacred ground quietly, with soft voices and soulful embrace.  We feel it to our core; this house is a living, breathing personification of love.  LOVE.  And LIFE.  It’s beating and flowing through every molecule of air.  Through every one of our cells.  A palpable experience – as real and solid as the ground under our feet.

We know the honor and privilege and intimate responsibility of this space well.  We have been with woman. We have held and rocked and sung harmony for countless birth songs.   Our bodies hold the memories of birth from both sides. We know the acrid scent of blood and the salty tang of sweat.  Our ears wait for that shift in sounds at the top of a contraction that lets us know pushing is close.  Our thighs have ached from supporting a woman for hours as she works her baby closer to this earth.  Our own bodies have stretched and open and bled to bring life.  Over and over again, we have been here.

But today is different. I catch the eyes of the others, and know we all feel it.  We enter the room where she is, in the water.  She is a goddess.  So beautiful she steals the breath from my chest, and I close my eyes in silent gratitude for this moment.  This one.  Right here.

She is bathed in light reflected in the water from the turquoise wall behind her.  The light is blue and pure and crystalline clear.  It is her light.  She is there with him, her love.  And together they dance that ancient dance together, choreographed by the source and witnessed by the universe and by all of us.  Heads together, voices murmuring, bodies shifting, hands grasping.   His hands cup her face and his eyes lock with hers as he lifts and grounds her through this.   And she lifts and grounds him as well.  There is smiling, and laughter and a red lollipop for a dash of sugary strength in a quiet moment.

I am there to document, to record.  This is supposed to be my gift to her, but I know that this is really her gift to me.   I am awed by the power of my response, by the sacred energy swirling around me, by the LOVE that fills every second.  I have rarely been this present.  I give thanks.

And the intensity builds quickly now.  Her voice rises, her head drops back, her energy shifts.  She is doing the work now, the work only she can do.   Her mouth opens and she is singing this baby out, singing her third child to earth.

Her song. Her aria.  Oh, if only I could tell you how it was to hear this.  If only I could encapsulate just a fragment of this into words on this page.  For whatever skill or power I may have with words, I am wholly inadequate to the task of capturing the holiness of this. Her song rises and falls.  Her voice pleads and promises and welcomes.  Words and sounds flow from her from so deep within and so far beyond.

Before this day there have been two experiences that I, even in my cynically agnostic state, recognize as fully and completely divine.  Now there is a third.   I am humbled, and awed.

My body tingles with the magnificence of this.  My eyes are filled with tears.  I am holding my camera but my hands are shaking, my heart full to exploding.  Even I did not know it could be this beautiful.  Tears are rolling down my face; my breath is coming in quiet, ragged gasps.  I try to still myself to click the shutter, over and over again – so conscious of how that noise seems to echo intrusively in this sacred chamber.  I am overcome.  Love. Love. Love – it is all I can see, or hear or feel.  It is all there is.

And he is here.  Her son.  Their son.   She clasps him to her chest and sings his welcome.  The littles look on, their voices mingle with hers, and his and all of ours.   Two sisters with red lollipops and sticky faces.  Naked bodies and sleep-matted hair.  Just hours before they were nestled in bed in my house and now we are all here.  They witnessed this with the rest of us, and though they don’t know it yet, they are changed.  We are all forever changed.

I turn to my two closest hearts and we hug as we cry and give thanks and welcome him.

Lyric Hawthorne.

Breakfast is made by loving hands, nourishment for bodies and souls.  A family nestles in bed, needs met by those that love them.  Only a few short hours have passed, and the world has welcomed a new soul.  A family has welcomed a brother and son.  We have welcomed and witnessed LOVE.

And we soon leave them to soak in this new life.

And this would be enough.  More than enough.   But because of the strength of this love, of the spirit of this boy, of the depth of this experience, we gather again in the evening.  Our entire families.  Mothers and fathers and children and partners.  Friends and midwives and family.   A communal meal is prepared.  Music is played. It is a birth-day celebration unlike any other.  It is a reminder of a time and place where birth was at the center of community and the family was the center of birth.  It is a gift to each of us present. A reminder of what is possible, of what can be.

Now the light is low and ebbing fast, golden and glimmering inward.  It is the glow of hearth and home and family.  It is soft and warm and tender.  It encircles us and draws us closer until we have formed our own circle.  Mother, Father, daughters and precious new son.  All those that love them.  And as the last hint of light slips beyond the desert horizon we give our blessings, to Lyric and Leigh and Jason.  To Kaia and Indigo.  To life and love and family. Each one of us in turn welcoming this new being to our world.

And as the sun has fully set, and night falls upon the desert, we leave this space of love and returned to our homes, filled with our own light.  Grateful, changed, blessed beyond measure.

Happy Birthday Lyric Haythorn.  Happy Birthing-Day Mama Leigh-Leigh.

You forever have my heart.