Singing My Name
Sometimes my map aligns with others’, but when my compass spins in a new direction, I must be willing to walk forward alone, listening intently for the path that is singing my name.
After ecstatic dance in the park on Sunday, lighting candles with old friends and new, my beloved sister Chris reminded me about the time I said I wanted my entire life to be a ceremony. Peering back through the tunnel of misty days trailing behind me I can see that’s exactly what’s been happening.
To nurture the unfolding ceremony, I am always asking for the right medicine for the moment. Fire, water, earth, and wind. Laughing hysterically with a loving friend, a 12-step meeting, an oracle card, a walk through the woods —perhaps the most powerful of the plant medicines— changing my posture, throwing my shoulders back and my chin forward, dancing, grounding and moving energy stuck or exploding through my body, restoring myself again. The sacred heart cacao ceremony on Friday with intergalactic ancestral healing, holding and loving my infant self in her very first form, the fusion of sperm with egg in my mother's uterine lining.
Sacred boundaries and sacred no thank you’s to any person or place or thing that does not have my name penned on it in rose gold lettering. Letting myself fall all the fucking way apart, tears waterfalling through me while the tornado rages and the river floods and nature plays her Wild Symphony. When do I root into the earth, when do I wade into the water, and when do I dive all the way in?
Since writing about my separation last Friday, love and questions have poured in, an enormous amount of support and resonance, concern, and curiosity. This all makes sense as this culture tends to equate the end of a relationship with a failure instead of a transformation.
Are you still sober? What about Stan and Henry? Hard pass, one man said, about what I do not know exactly. Well sir, to each her own! I replied. Because in this sacred unfolding, the three of us are not just okay, but maybe even better than we've ever been. Will things be weird when I'm back home? Henry asked when we called him at college to tell him the news. Honestly honey, I said, it will be very much the same as it’s been. We will always be friends and family. I'm just calling our relationship by the name it has most organically grown into
About 15 years ago my soft spoken, spiritual and loving buddhist sponsor Barry told me that I had an S for sucker plastered on my forehead and that if I didn’t start focusing on my own needs and saying NO to the endless, infinite needs of others, I would end up dead.
I knew that alcoholism could kill me, but I didn’t understand the living death of co-dependency. Grasping, clawing, fixing, controlling, begging, spreading myself microscopically thin.
She explained that when I follow my heart and gut and guidance, listening deeply to my highest self for my own highest good— regardless of the outcome— it is the highest good for everyone. I have been putting this spiritual law to work for years and it is always true, even when it seems it couldn’t possibly be. How can I abandon the commitments that once drove me? It was easier to abandon myself. It nearly killed me.
Never again. Sometimes my map aligns with others’, but when my compass spins in a new direction, I must be willing to walk forward alone, listening intently for the path that is singing my name.
A poem I fell in love with by my beloved friend Debbie about her son Jake, who died last year. I feel this divine presence, this divine opening. Thank you so much for writing this poem, Debbie. We love you <3 <3
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