Precipice Truths

Be ready for inevitable talons
that grip you up through hot green summer grass
and carry your flailing little mouse self
into a sunblinded sky.

If you would be food for gods
if you would offer up your spirit
to the Source
then let go of all that pitying nonsense
let go your cherubic candy visions
of any enlightenment less fierce
less absolute
than the hawk's blazing yellow eye.

- Miriam Dyak

 

Julius Shulman

You saw yourself as something small, didn't you?

Something insignificant and unworthy of... 

"______________"

you fill in the blank, as only you can. 

"It" was too big, too bright, to good to be true. 

Waiting for the bottom to fall out, haven't you now? 

Too much, too far, too easy, too pleasurable to be... 

real? 

Attainable? 

Get-attable? 

Sustainable?

So.

And now here you are, Beauty.

Seated on prickles and butterfly wings at the edge of a cliff;

a strong wind at your back.

And your longing is to

just.

lean.

forward. 

What happened?

Why the change?

Did something crack open suddenly?

Did you finally awaken in the middle of the night 

to your power, your promise, your path?

What spirit beckoned to you at dusk, 

in the clapping leaves of evening breezes, 

reciting the destiny of the ages into your ear?

What lightning strike has singed your soul?

What gods burned the sacred bush in the cavernous reaches of your heart?

No, no... 

this was the trickle of erosion, I know.

A gradual gracing that touched you in the private and public spaces of life, 

reaching into you and pulling you out...

of yourself;

long enough to see the bigger picture, 

the larger circle, 

the deeper well waiting for you and your work.

And now you come to it -

Your passion, your words, your colors, your thunderstruck voice.

It is only now, 

alone in the market 

or surrounded by strangers on the train,

you are recognizing what you have known 

to be your truth for many a moon now.

It was a thousand little cuts that brought you to your fearlessless,

and a million small pleasures that catalyzed your call to action.

This minute, yet requisite process that moved through you 

drip by solitary drip,

until the accumulation of every tear 

and every shrug 

and every single word heard or spoken

became the herald whose foreign voice you somehow knew

without understanding why 

or when it came to be.

To lean forward into the wind, 

Inside the container of perfect trust... 

this small but powerful movement that becomes 

a disruption of gratitudes, 

push, push, pushing their way 

through the crowded room of discontent and self-doubt 

that holds you back from the gift 

of freefalling grace;

of such sweet wind in your face.

This beauty way, 

these wisdom paths that open slowly, 

These are precipice truths,

revealing treasures through mist and the unfurling petals of pain;

there in the open air of possibility,

fed by those who are unafraid to be bruised. 

Your bravery, my love, has appeared 

inside the daily practice of presence;

that ritual ennobled 

by a saturation of holy waters, 

inside tears that washed you free of binding fears

and the holier dirt of struggle, 

that covered you utterly in the fresh sacred soil of rooted knowing.

.

Your ambivalence: a gift

that pulled you back to a safer distance, 

wrapped in stronger arms than yours

as eruptions intensified around you – 

those volcanic messengers that screamed you awake 

to your purpose moment to moment….

The blessed reprieves,

the poetry of unasked for pleasures,

the hundred songs of suffering

and the wetness of frustrated weeping

that streaked your hidden face;

unaccustomed as you've been to the nakedness of honesty...

These all brought you to a 'now' moment of wings,

Of wildness

Of wind 

and the choice to lean in.

There is a surprise yet waiting, though.

Purpose-full falls into empty air signal cellular shifts,

and it's a new being you will become.

Losing so much mass,

trading toes for talons

and a bird's wing rises from the place where arms used to hide 

that soft underbelly you were afraid to show others.

She is clawing and cawing her way free inside you

pushing out of your chest, your eyes, your mouth

until all that is left of you is feathers and a fierce need to hunt 

for all the promises left behind

in the years abandoned to fear,

just waiting to be reclaimed.

Each time I follow my deepest soul desires, 

fear is there wringing her hands,

cautioning me with her litanies of what-ifs.
I do not try to counter

with reasonable arguments about acceptable risks.
I no longer try to shame myself into action

with admonishments to stop being the wimp

nor do I pretend to be unafraid.
I simply move in the direction I have chosen to go,

taking care to do the things I know will help me

 keep the fear at a level where I can continue to feel it

and still keep moving.
I put myself to bed early,

eat well, sit with friends, take long walks by the lake.
I have learned that doing things the hardest way

 provides no currency to be traded for greater future rewards.

- Oriah Mountain Dreamer

The Water Wisdom of Retreat

The waves know what to do,

They make their way to the shore,

Then retreat.

- Cecelia LaPointe

Forest Rogers

Water moves to her own womb sourced rhythm, measuring time in the ebb and flow of waves. 

We are carried in those currents, whether or not we cooperate with them, acknowledge them, or even if we are unaware of them. 

Our longing for the Wild Mother begins in water, is nurtured there, and it is that same longing that bears us away on twilight tides at the end of all our days.

We learn the language of release in tides that pull the shore further from our grasp, and all our reasons and plans along with the million grains of sand that littered our path just a moment before. 

Let go,  they croon, Shhhhhh…it’s not yours… let go. This is step one in shapeshifting.

I have passed countless hours staring out to sea, wondering at the great rush of waves that raced back out to the vast openness. Tumbling over themselves in their flurry to escape the shore, churning spirals of salt, sand and shell.

But now I see another truth of Things That Are, and Things As They Are Seen. 

This is not merely a race back to the center, where all things debris are deposited and roiled into new sea-made fragments. 

The sea retreats to her homeland, weary of the journey to the hard dirt-packed lands of the east and west surrounding her always. Only in the blue-black fathomless depths are those waves and native deep sea creatures truly renewed in the undisturbed waters of their own moveable motherland.

This letting go of the land and all things solid, stable and certain is the calling of sea and all water-made creatures. 

We are pulled by these tides into retreat. 

Out to the open bowl of the sea we are sung; a return and reminder of where we began, and where we must come home to for healing, for rest, and the next steps of wisdom that fund our transformation as soul selves, mermaids, women.

Women and water are magical containers of fluid truths, and the ingredients of creation in all its forms. In a constant state of gestation, labor and birth of things creative and critical, we run the risk of drying up and out - a condition that can become terminal if left untreated long enough.

To retreat is both wise and necessary to the creative life. 

Resist it though we may, the soul will have her way with our body and mind, and the sea song will grow louder in the rush of our blood, reminding us that we are always, ever, water first, and that must be honored. 

To move away, to move back into, to back away from... 

these intentional and purposeful movements away from our solid substantial commitments are medicine that the selkie soul requires.

Given the right time and space, this intentional retreat both soothes and saves the heart from terminal despair, and reminds us of our true name - the one lost in the waves so long ago we nearly forgot it.

So I press intentionally into retreat. 

The waves sing the song of promise to me, and there is something infinitely comforting in the idea of breathing water for a time, away from the heaviness of so much air and more gravity. 

Water has been rushing in my own ears, flooding my senses with the scent of salt and the sound of selkies. 

Dark satin bodies move effortlessly above and below those currents. 

They are miles off the shore, barely visible to my eyes, but I can see them waving a familiar sealskin that reminds me that I misplaced mine somewhere. 

It beckons to me…Come Home, Come Home…

The skin is marked and gouged with scars, so I know it must be mine.

Reclamation

So what is the point of this reclamation and focus,

this calling back of what has been lost,

this running with the wolves?

...

It is into this world that women come

to claim their own voices, their own values,

their imaginations, their clairvoyance, 

their clear-seeing, their stories,

and the ancient memories of women.

-Clarissa Pinkola Estes

She will find her voice.

-Isha Lerner 

photographer unknown 

It's just too damn easy to be captured, stolen away and lost inside a vision and role we don't truly belong to. In the days, months and years that follow, we usually discover an erosion of our power in a million large and small obediences to Should and Have-to and You'd-better-or-else. 

We may not see things for what they truly are, until we begin to sense that perhaps it's too late. And in that desperate and panicked state of realization, we may flail about in what used to be our deepest and wisest river as we attempt a hasty escape and retreat back to the soul lands. 

Only by this time, the riverbed has turned to muck, bereft of living waters, if not completely dried up.

We begin to understand, painfully, the work of reclamation that lies before us. 

We must repair our vessel. 

We must call forth the rains. 

The river must be restored so we can navigate those waters once more. 

Know this: reclamation is not the same as reclaiming. 

They are sisters, these two. One speaks her truth, she initiates, she determines and decides. The other goes about the work of restoring what-was-lost, and remakes it into what-will-be-again. 

But one does not live without the other, and their work is symbiotic at the soul level.

We speak our truth even as we sort through the dirt for our lost treasures, our misused belongings and our discarded dreams.

Where Reclaiming stands inside her Wild Woman skin at the center of the room and declares, " This is mine, and I am taking it back!", Reclamation silently gathers the pieces left in every corner, sharp and jagged, with the intention of sewing them back together for use.

Reclaiming  snarls wolfishly at intruders, re-establishing her wildish boundaries, while reclamation digs in the smelly recesses of caverns, sifting and purifying everything that was used up, hollowed out, chewed and digested for somebody else's gain, now left as waste and refuse. 

Reclaiming throws her arms up to a lightning struck sky and howls at the moon and goes for the jugular. Reclamation hammers and weeps and looks intently at her salvaged ruins. Abused as they've been, she can see a second life in their shape, and she will love them back to life if she has to cry an ocean's worth of tears to mend them. For tears and weeping are magic salves that soften and sooth the torn edges. They act as antiseptic, disinfecting with their salty wetness. Tears are sacred, and highly useful in the work of reclamation.

We reclaim garbage. Items we (or others) have used up, tossed away, discarded. Elements previously useful, valued, now defiled - toxic even, in their current state. Waste waters are reclaimed, marshlands and riverbeds are restored, 'returning disturbed lands to an improved state.'*

We can return our own disturbed, ailing lands to healed, whole territories through the ditch-digging work of reclamation. If it is unlovely, if it stinks of decay, if it is ignored, and left to rot until it is unrecognizable even to our own eyes - this is where the work of reclamation must begin.

It is not enough to declare, to decide, to stand up and plant ourselves at the boundary line of our true home. There is the dredging of the river, the clearing out, the way-making that must be done.
Things will never return to their original state of being. That time and those shapes are past.
There must be a new form, a different sort of wholeness that did not exist before the reclamation began.

It is often in the midst of our deepest despair, that feeling that all is lost and we've done it 'for good this time', that the skilled hands of reclamation begin their secret work along a narrow, winding way deep within us. We may feel we are crying, all the time.
But it is the weeping that clears the film from our eyes.

It is the weeping, though we wonder if it will ever cease, that calls to the holy rains.

Beauty, we are equipped for this necessary and sacred work. 

Julie Peters writes,

So now is the time, this time of confusion and brokenness and fear and sadness, to get up on that fear, ride it down to the river, dip into the waves, and let yourself break. Become a prism.
All the places where you’ve shattered can now reflect light and colour where there was none. Now is the time to become something new, to choose a new whole.

Though we may have been captured, and parts of us sold off bit by bit, 

our treasures are not lost forever. Reclamation is the work of seeking out and repairing those stolen parts of our self, and through patience and diligent labor we can piece ourselves back together again.

The river waits for us, for our tears and our tempests.

And when the voice feels drowned out in the flood of own tears, we can remember that it is our weeping that fills the empty riverbed. 

This is the moment where our soul waters rise to carry us home. 

Our shattered self has become a prism, and a new kind of whole is emerging.

From waste waters will flow something new, something fresh, something glorious. 

The voice you once thought lost will return to you. 

Do not be surprised when you realize that her tone is deeper, richer, and a bit wilder than the voice you remembered. She has traveled through the belly of the underworld and, while you spent your nights plotting escape from captivity, she seasoned in the dark recesses of the earth. 

* Description/definition of reclamation