Living the Dream

We live a life where we feel like something is missing or that something has passed by and we missed it.    We begin to scale back and simplify our lives because living it all is getting more difficult.    We want to set claim to serenity and peace but are at wits end how to bring that about.

We are frustrated, exhausted, and lonely.  We want something more but it seems to be out of our grasp.  Life has taken its toll on those of us who are sensitive to Mother.  We are authentic souls.  What you see is what you get.  Does it mean I do not get hurt by the world and those in it?  Oh, no, but of course I do.  I love.  To love is to be hurt over and over and over, out of joy and sorrow, anger and beauty.  Does loving mean we will be any less angsty, tired or alone?  No, dear hearts, for so many of us have lost our soul mates for a time and the wait is long.

But, because we have loved to such depths, it has made us know our ability to love and care.  We learn how to love and care for ourselves.  We have learned how to lean on others when we need support, without being a burden to them.  To take action in the areas we can and in the areas we truly believe in, and to celebrate our own successes, however small.  But still…a still small voice whispers, “here I am, here it is…” and we have this deep sense of needing more.

The key to all of this is learning to love ourselves into a place of peace, into evoking personal energy, and into a knowing that we are connected to The One and no one else can replace that.

From Wanda,  http://allpoetry.com/Night%20Hope:

God’s Wing

After a Yellowstone Park forest fire, forest rangers began to access the damage.  One ranger found a petrified bird in the ashes, perched statuesquely on the ground at the base of what had been a tree.  He was sickened at the eerie sight, but gently moved the carcass with a stick.  Three tiny chicks scurried from under their dead mother’s wings.

The loving mother, keenly aware of impending disaster, had led her offspring to the base of the tree and gathered them under her wings, instinctively know that that toxic smoke would rise.

She could have flown to safety but refused to abandon her babies.  The blaze and heat had scorched her body, but the mother had remained steadfast because she had been willing to die, so those under her wing could live.

“He will cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you will find refuge.” – Psalm 91:4

What a touching anecdote.  Being Loved this much should make a difference in our lives.  Remember that Creator loves us, and then we can be made different because of it.  I think what we need, what the world needs, is “touching”!  Be attune enough to feel it and know absolute peace and serenity amidst the fire storms.

Tags: Journal Blog by Shewolf
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“When you’re six feet under in solitary confinement and you’re six feet under  without light, sound, or running water;  there is no place to go but inside.  And when you go inside, you discover that everything that exists in the Universe is also within you. “
–    Rubin Carter, “The Hurricane”

Loss can be seen as a menace and a mystery.  It defines us.  It refines us.  Life is transient.  In her book, “Good Grief”, Deborah Coryell, a grief counselor, writes that grief is the experience of not having anywhere to place our love…..”  OMG, that is impacting.  What an incredible way to express profound loss.

Grief

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known,
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the checkout line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead,
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic, she says,
reading the name out loud, slowly,
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.
- Matthew Dickman

A long time ago, I read the book “Necessary Losses”, Judith Viorst.  She wrote about aging and maturing through loss of mother-child relationships and says that the act of putting a child down off one’s lap is the beginning; the break from breast.  She speaks of a succession of conscious and unconscious losses that are just a natural part of learning to relinquish people, places, situations and emotions as a natural part of life.  She also wrote that one needs a strong sense of self in order to stay positive through necessary losses, never mind the other losses, and that death is the ultimate final loss in this life.  “Loosing,” she writes, “is the price we pay for living.”

At times, we reel from a series of losses and need to find unique ways to get through them.  What do we each, uniquely, define as losses?  There are significant losses in our childhood.    We need to honor those losses and know what helped us get through them.  We need to understand how they still color our feelings about losses.  Each loss changed us.  How did it change you?

My first really significant, and I thought, unnecessary, loss was when my grandfather died.  I was then an adolescent and I thought I would die.  When I was told, my body, mind, emotions shut down and I fainted and had a seizure.  That would be the way my body would deal with being completely overwhelmed and over-stressed for forty years.  It takes a great deal of effort for me to stay conscious, I have to tell you, when something wickedly hard comes my way.

There are so many little scars that we are left with.  Some people pick at those scars and keep them festering.  There are areas in which we have coped with losses, though and we need to honor those tools we gained along the way.  They are key to our future ways of handling what this way comes.

Healing from losses requires that we honor the thing we have lost, honor ourselves for caring enough to be affected, and honoring LOVE itself.  Losses awaken us to our profound connections.  To heal from loss, we have to learn how to continue to deal with loss.  Honoring every loss, even what may seem most insignificant, is a way to build a stepping stone across life’s turbulences.  I believe, part of healing is finding a place to put that love that we gave to that which we lost.

Tags: Journal Blog by Shewolf
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My youthhood friend, I named my daughter for, has her only daughter in India, 150 miles from Mumbai.  The Canadian Government is trying to get her out, safely, but she is unable to get out of the ashram she is staying in for the time.  She was able to go once a week to shop and get email, but right now she may not be allowed to do that.  She cannot be flown out yet because Mumbai is the hub she must fly out of.  There is much danger in using public transportation and to be in public places.  Due to the elections in Indian, dangers of attack are escalating.

Alicia was taking her martial arts training there.

LaRae is “trying to keep her sanity,” she says, and “praying for her safe return” and asks that we do the same. “We will not rest easy until we see the whites of her eyes ..”

Please keep her in your thoughts so she can come home safely to Alberta and her family.

I will send any comments through to her mother.

Tags: Journal Blog by Shewolf
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Some changes happen slowly over time, some happen quickly, and some, we are very aware, need to be made.  But there does come a time when we think we may have lost ourselves in our changes.  Who am I?  Where am I?  At times, there will be a great sense of having lost too much of ourselves.  When this happens to me, I get all angsty and fretful, miserable…and downright bitchy.  It takes less and less time for me to get a handle on it;  to delve into the feeling and figure out where it evolves from.  A good talking to is needed.

What am I missing, what have I missed, we ask, when suddenly we realize we have been focusing on other things than our authentic self?  It is always something inside…waiting, whispering…reminding me to waken from that which is causing us not to notice changes that are happening, or need to happen.  That danged word:  Surrender.

The outside world constantly plies us from our inner world.  Our vision ends up on the horizon instead of the presence within the moment.  Our inner compassion, that ancient wisdom whispering to us, gets lost in the cacophony of voices.  Perhaps this is why we FEEL lost.    But, you see, it is not lost, it is still there whispering, cajoling, prodding and poking at us.  Sometimes I have called that voice “My Inner Crone”, and portray her as an inner witch, raking her claws on my heart and up my throat.  Once, I knew her as my inner authentic self, my self-as-mother, who rescued me.  If I could find a way to remember to stay connected to that inner presence of mind, the more I will be connected to my inner purpose and meaning.  This voice needs to be as dear and close to me as those things I love the most, like a lover, a mother, and I need to pay as much attention to that relationship as I do those relationships that are the dearest and most precious to me.

I have been guilty of walking away from people who I would die for, because I had this feeling that they would be better off without me around.  God, those were hard walks.  There have been those I have wandered away from, and found, later, that I had let something important move away or I have moved further away than I would have wanted to.  I have done this to the Inner Wisdom as well.  It is a pattern of mine.  I have had to go back and recollect those people, places and things that meant much to me in their time.

Abandonment of Self causes dire repercussions.  Losing a sense of Self is one of the most impacting things that can happen to us.  Deep within, there is a keening, a wailing, a gnashing of teeth, a poke, a prod, and sometimes an implosion.  We need to reconnect to our Inner Self.

Writing my book, “Shhhhhh:  A Creation Story”, was one of the most wounding and yet impacting reconnection to Self.  I reconnected to the many things in my life that made me ME, to the people, places and things, that should have remained dear to me, for they were and are the core of who I am and why I am at the place I find myself now.

As I wrote, I reconnected to my dreams, to my web of people and places and things that supported me, and a sense of gratitude for the changes I have made.  It reawakened my Spiritual Self.  I read spiritual writings voraciously.  I surround myself with as much spirituality and moments of spiritual awareness as my life affords.  I have always wanted to be my authentic Self – and not always was this acceptable by others.  I have meant to be my unique self.  When I got lost was when I became what others wanted me to be.  My awareness of my unique relationship between Outer Self and Inner Self is what keeps me best balanced.

What can you do, then, to regain that sense of Self and place?  Work as hard on the personal relationship with inner spirit and soul that is uniquely and authentically YOU!

Tags: Journal Blog by Shewolf
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Response to Jay Winter Nightwolf Pacifica WPFW 89.3 - November 27, 2008
Day Of Mourning

Oh where is my family?

Wave upon ocean wave, brought sorrow

and the ocean continues to sob.

Where are you my sisters, my brothers, my grandfathers?

No wonder sea birds cry so.

No wonder eagles circle and circle.

No wonder gaggles of cormorants are glued to islands of stone.

Fog attempts to erase long-forgotten prints

but the ocean remembers and heaves in its despair.

The seas remember and rock themselves for comfort.

Oh, where is my family?

Where are those who first blessed this place of Mother Earth?

Where are you my brothers and sister, my grandparents?

No wonder the guts of earth rumble.

No wonder mountains weep themselves and fall.

No wonder the slide and collide of plates.

Sky weighs heavily on slumped shoulders of Earth.

She settles into her despair.

Here you are, my family,

hidden in wombs of those who still hear,

still see, still feel the good way.

Look, Mother Earth still holds our colors:

yellow, red, white, black.

Lean to those colors First Mother’s womb spills,

to show us where our people are.

Broken shells of color, find places to grow

for those who still see, still love, the hand of Creator.

We still prevail, in hearts and minds

and movement of amniotic-memory rituals.

C. Desjarlais

Tags: Native Culture, Poems by Shewolf
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