Day of Venus (XIV)

This is the 14th Friday of my Day of Venus Posts, where I let wash up what is present in the undercurrents of my mind, heart and spirit. I am honored and deeply grateful for your readership as I cultivate my writer voice blindfolded—vertebrae by vertebrae, all chrysalis and soil.

In my hips is the storage of what is to come, what has been soaking, what is. Now is the only thing that is real and I carefully select the visions I allow to repeat themselves in my mind. I know my body is also a brain. I know my body is both a highly intelligent master and an obedient servant. My voice exposes the waves that I’ve allowed to break, the prayers I’ve whispered, the justice I crave, the love that I’ve given, and all of the moments spent alone and unseen and burning.

I walk onto a stage where the lights in my face keep me from seeing anyone’s faces. I adjust the microphone and learn to be slow and steady and inside of me more than outside of me. I do it again and again and again until I die. –A decision my whole body agrees to.

This week I sang at an open mic and learned about myself. The songs of others moved me to tears. The room itself almost made me cry–disco ball in the center and sunlight after it had been gray and cold all day sitting itself on the linen covered cushions all over the ground around the stage, shiny and life-giving people placing their beautiful instruments along the pretty wood of the walls, the window beside the stage showing the tops of trees and a sky changing from yellow to purple to black as the night played on. Hearing my voice sound out through the room, singing lines I conjured in moments of being in-between worlds, put a new color into my palette of existence. I felt naked, seen, exposed, both elegant and awkward, angelic and childlike.

Things that are soul spotlights: money, power, influence, microphones, speakers. They reveal what is collecting in corners, what is underneath, what has been beneath a tarp, the photographs and letters you keep in your shoebox. And I love the exposure. I reach into my throat and all that is nested learns how to fly.

I am singing at vineyards, among dahlias and tulips. I sing on benches under the sun and on top of mountains for the greens and ambers. I sing to children and they sing with me, back to me, for me. “Ms. A, I made a song–do you want to hear it?” and I listen close and close my eyes to listen like it is the most precious thing I have ever heard and I say “Please keep singing ok? Never ever stop singing.” “Ms. Alix I sang the song to my grandma?” “Ms. Alix I brought my piano book to school–look!” And I give and I give and I give, and I receive and I receive and I receive. I am singing in rose gardens and you stop mid-sentence to allow yourself to feel. I sing for lovers, and fighters and for people searching for a resting place to retreat to. I sing with harps and violins and drums that will you to dance. I close my eyes and am just as taken aback as you are by what flows through me. I am not even it itself, but the vessel the “it” dives into and out of. I choose to be more instrument than human. I know that a prolonged state of connection and mystery, of deep peace, and a joy so giving it hurts, is not a myth or impossibility. It is something in me so real and true and inviting. I give in more and more each day. It is for me. It is for me. It is for me because it is in me and always has been. So natural and so easy to surrender to. I create a place for this by both surrendering and redirecting my body, by accepting the call and staying on the line, by showing up as `I am and speaking, singing, moving from the inside out. I allow my love to bewilder if it must. I allow my love to be felt. I allow my love. I have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, nothing to be nervous about. Nothing Is Lost. All of the time spent wondering if this could be true… “Could this really be for me?” Every time I’ve attracted and stumbled into the dwellings of musicians and poets and painters and those with affection gleaming from their eyes–not by chance or mere coincidence, but by the sound living in me leading me to harmonization, equilibrium. All stiffness in me dissolves into a pool of water. My antennas receive and I transmit what creates a stillness, a revitalization, a state of bliss.

This week I felt many times both a drowning and a winning in the fight to keep my light alive and burning. I am still unable to pin down the cause, but I do have leads. My nose and my mouth were barely above the surface, yet above the surface–my hand above the water clenching the love letters of my light for the sun to hold for me while I figured out how to float. I felt like a slimy hatched chick, all awkward and gooey eyed, slumped and heavy and knowing nothing except that the sunlight feels good. I suppose this a great starting place–from nothing, from limited senses, from only the ability to know I am a thing that exists. I kept throwing up what I once thought of as me, and every time I saw it on the floor outside of me a tantrum took place, an exasperated voice said “What then? What now? What do I have that is worth anything?” and passing winged shadows beneath the sun’s light said “this, this, this right here and just this.”

There is an oldness in me that I have felt my whole life–old enough to know the pointlessness of competition, the meaninglessness of cuffed jeans and white shoes in photographs. Bored by teams, my attention never held in conversations with invisible score-boards. A keen knowing and understanding of when something is said from a place of rivalry vs. from a place of building connection. The noise of what our man-made systems have deemed as note-worthy, popular, standard and “the best” becomes a background static hum I check out of, and I nod my head and say “mmhm” and try to find a clever escape without becoming a rival. I have often pretended to not know, or have chosen to give praise and accolades in order to dodge a part in someone’s play. Action-packed movies have always put me to sleep, and then a film about the life of a single petal has me on the edge of my seat enraptured. It is an oldness that takes refuge in what is not asking to be seen. An oldness that easily deletes all traces of who I claim to be in the world, satisfied with only being where I am at. You met the queen and made 10 grand and I got the same surge of satisfaction from the conversation I had at the busstop with a 19-year old who bought her best friend a gift at the mall. ~

I write a lot about busstops and I guess that is because of how much I learned about myself and the world, and who `I am in the world, during the formative years of my life as a writer, taking poetry classes, attending slams on Queen street and in nooks and crannies of Chinatown, and immersing myself in literature without knowing how on earth anything I was doing with my scholarship, my time and my place in college was going to make me money in the world. I just kind of always followed breadcrumbs that felt good or were interesting to me at the time. This was before social media had such a strong presence in our lives. I had a facebook account I’d get caught up in scrolling, writing, expressing myself, but also kept careful watch of my data usage, using it mainly for the bus app or for academic emails and assignments, then sometimes the games like Words-With-Friends, Tetris and then a My Cafe game where you had to bus tables and take orders as fast as you can (why I played this stressful game while also working at such places I have no idea). At busstops and on busses I befriended all walks of life–the houseless, children, elders, criminals, the lonely, the popular, the forgotten, the tourists, healers (I met my dear friend Sylvia who later became my Reiki Master at a busstop in Honolulu), mothers, and people who never learned and never cared to learn English and so spoke to me in poetry and spoke to me via humor and loving mannerisms and gestures. So naturally my subconscious pulls from and I even have dreams of various bus stations where I spent a lot of time. I especially learned that I was an elder in a young girl’s body during those years. Observant and soft-spoken and journal-scribbling and attentive. I pretended to care about things peers my age and then society in general cared about, but at heart I never invested time or was curious enough to watch the shows, pay attention to the celebrities, understand what is socially acceptable and not socially acceptable.

I also have always had great surges of flight, a rush of emotion I couldn’t make sense of or name, and this happens all the time still to today, but `I get better and better at knowing what to do in those times. I remember once when it happened I was in the parking lot of the Polynesian Culture Center, about 16, and it was after all of the tourist busses left the lot one by one, back to the hotels, to Waikiki, to the resorts on the westside. It was about 11-midnight. I will always remember this particular surge because of how overwhelming and unexplainable it was, and how the people around me looked at me like I was crazy, another person, like I had flew off the handle and was possessed. And the truth is, I felt possessed, and during these moments that come I do feel a certain beast in me. I often wonder if I could go back in time with the understandings and awareness I have now, if I could pinpoint what triggered or caused it. What had been sitting and building up? What provoked the desire to run? I was with 3-4 people, one of them being my first relationship of my life, whom I had lived with in high school and crushed on beginning in the 5th grade. We were scheming to venture somewhere, do something, hangout somewhere–probably deciding on who to call for a ride or where we would be at for the night–whose house, whose yard, whose town to roam in. All of a sudden I felt like running, and I was angry and wanted to fight. I didn’t want to fight anyone around me–I just wanted to use my body in a way that now `I would translate as needing to push and pull heavy weight, or literally go for a run, or put music on loud and shake and dance my body through the air until the beast in me is satiated. So I remember saying things that caught everyone completely off guard, and I cannot remember what I said. I remember they were not words that hurt their feelings or served as demolitions to anyone’s spirit, just words and sentences I felt gushing out of me–maybe about my surroundings, myself, my “self”, our “selves”, the sky, the waves? I wish I could replay and witness and hear. And so I darted off running across the empty parking lot, passed my house just across the McDonalds I worked at which was across the street next to PCC, through the yard with pokey sharp blades of Japanese grass that grew in round tufts and bundles, onto the sand, blue Portuguese man o’ wars under the moonlight with tails I dodged over and around. I sat in a concave part of the tree roots of a yard where an artist lived, my body breathing rapidly and heavily after the maddening sprint. I never saw the artist or met the person who lived in that house, but my mom had. In their window facing the ocean were two manikins clothed and drinking tea. Their outfits often changed. In the yard there were statues, shapes of bright colors hanging from tree branches, gnomes and trolls and figurines that were moved, replaced or gone from time to time. And I instinctually knew that this spot was my hiding place. Everywhere we lived `I had a hiding place to run to, and it was during the years of my poetry classes and English major happenings that I realized this. I can sit and recall every hiding place I ever ran to. We moved about 5-8 times between the ages of, (well, probably birth, but when it comes to Hawai’i recollections), 4-17. I have lived in Waialua, Haleiwa, Mokuleia beach in a tent, Sunset (across the street from V-land, where they eventually built a bunch of celebrity’s houses and a big gate/fence everyone has to walk around now to get to the beach), then on the “Big Island” or the island of Hawai’i where my mom was a caretaker of a property in exchange for housing, then Hau’ula, Ka’a’awa, Punalu’u, Laie. And for every single place we lived I can recall the colors of the rocks and creatures that inhabited my hiding places. I sat and pet snails, touched water with my feet, leaned my back against roots, imagined I was a menehune and used the leaves as blankets. I spoke to God and acted out scenarios in my mind. I held bugs between my fingers and looked at their faces close-up until I scared myself and threw the bugs into the air away from me.

Portuguese Man o’ War (Pic Credit: TreeHugger.com)

Anyway, nobody ever mentioned that night and nobody ever mentioned any time I ever darted off and away. It’s just always been something I’ve done. I don’t even remember walking home that night or the events that followed, but because of the intensity of the surge in me, and the look on the faces staring back at me before I took off, it has always been a particular moment I reflect on with curiosity.

I feel like for me, solitude and reclusivity breeds authenticity and helps me go back into myself when I get too caught up in another person’s, or other people’s version of the world. I take comfort in periods of no contact with the outside world because it helps me be a better listener, translator and friend to myself. It also helps me get more clear on what I am wanting, and the clearer I am about what I want, the more rapidly it can come to me.

My only real desire, my ultimate goal, is to cultivate more joy. Through joy comes creation. Joy is the highest intelligence of the universe, and it lives with or without the knowledge of or a need to understand it’s mechanisms. There is no language that could ever bottle it up enough for consumption.

Joy is not the lack of or dismissal of sadness–joy is what allows great sadness to be filtered, to be moved. Being guided by joy is not to be a stranger to the dark–but to be able to fly through it, like a bird at dusk and dawn, close enough to the dark to know better than to be consumed, and so welcoming of the light that it becomes your daughter.

I am in the middle of training myself, once again, to cultivate and allow joy to become my being. Dr. Dispenza says “your personality creates your personal reality” and it is a reminder to me. I am training myself to wake up and dwell on the beautiful visions in my heart. I am training myself to take my life into my hands be responsible for myself. I am training my “self” to participate in what brings melody to my life and allows it to come out of me.

I speak life into. I surround myself with others who speak life into. I give energy to what I want to see grow.

With every passing moment I become more loose. My hips remember an expanding, like it is in the blood I am made of and the blood that came before. It is older than grandfather time. It is a memory in my body that my mind doesn’t know as well. I interrupt and redirect the lineage into song, dance, spell, invocation. There are stories to be told now. And my grandmothers know and they cry tears of liberation. “Rest. Play. Sing. Dance.” To see that I am free now is to be free now.

Day of Venus (XIII)

This is the 13th Friday of my Day of Venus Posts, where I let wash up what is present in the undercurrents of my mind, heart and spirit. I am honored and deeply grateful for your readership as I cultivate my writer voice blindfolded—vertebrae by vertebrae, all chrysalis and soil.

There is an anger-shaken girl inside who says “You tricked me! They tricked me! He tricked me! She tricked me!” and screams into the sky for justice. There is a sadness I mother into joy time and time again like it is my sole responsibility. I offer my hand and she reaches to hold on, be comforted, be guided. We walk around the lake looking at emerald green-headed ducks and the tiny indents on the water under the rain. I let her sob into into my shoulder, never asking her to stop or hurry, never uncomfortable or burdened by her anguish, until her eyes catch the tail of a lizard on a stem, it’s spine reaching up and around the early bud of a flower I don’t know the name of, and although it is an unconscious transaction, she decides in her distraction that she is As Complete as The Wonder of the World Is. The more I show up for her, the more content she is to be alive.

And so we mother ourselves and yet mothers still come from outside of ourselves too because this is the way of existence. From my own mother, to the earth’s endless gifts, to the phone call I received from a friend, who always sees in my eyes, my words, my creations what I am harboring. Behind words and visuals themselves rests an energy, and she is a seer as I am. She called me last week to remind me of what my soul knows. It was a conversation she had been having with me before the call, signals without words that weren’t making their way through, at least not as easily as other times. I was not actively creating or tending to the channels. I was filling them with debris, with too much noise. So she called me directly and told me to protect myself from becoming an instrument of what does not resonate with me on a deep level. Even my body now wills me to be still, slow and a student of the moment. “Feel your way through” she said and it reminded me of my centipede dreams. We receive signals and expect to get another one right away, but sometimes We Have More Leaning In To Do with the ones we have already received. “What do you want to feel?” she asked, neither looking nor waiting for an answer. “What is in you that you want to grow more of?” (but that one is from me to me), and as a result, to you. Navigate by the answers of these questions.

Ultimately my only goal is to stay aligned with my soul, and everything else is secondary, a just-for-fun-while-I-am-human kind of game, but even those are stemmed from The Aligning itself. I trust that being aligned with my soul’s language is the only ingredient worth stocking up on. Like seasons bring harvest and then hands need to get into the webs of brush and sap and dirt–tending to the nurturing of what my soul beckons for is my only ever-unfolding duty.

The Tending-To both outweighs and stands apart from any outcome, aftermath or consequence of alignment. What follows is never the point. The point is that you are aligning, the point is that there is no point to it except to do it. It is not a means-to-an-end kind of process–it is Thee Process.

Sometimes your power is in your perspective of the world, and it is treasure to be protected, nurtured and shared. May nothing stop you from parading hope, speaking of and believing in the divinity of the damned, speaking life into, leaving love notes on subway seats, locating the lesson in the pressure. Voices may say “there is no such thing”, “the world is a thing to be feared”, “be scared of that, of them, of this” or the biggest lie, “you should stop pretending to be so much magic” and your response should always be to catch the fish and let Your Rounded Popping Yelp of Joy out into the sky, just because it feels good. Roll down the windows and breathe in the smell of rain on grass, just because it feels good. Declare Yourself a Truly Magical Being, just because it feels good (and because it’s true). Hope for goodness to be amplified within all of us, more and more everyday, Just Because It Feels Good, and know that by hoping you are making it so.

We are constantly trying to be sold something. We are beckoned to leave ourselves for a part in a play. How much more impactful, how much more meaning is felt, for all of us to just be where we are, wherever we are, and everywhere we are. Presence creates satchels of seeds, instruments of peace, nourishment promoting vibrancy, voices speaking life into, a blindfolded soul-navigation of sorts. We are future-oriented and then we are hypnotized by yesterdays, and Today Is a Calling Cradle. The urge to be elsewhere, to be someone else, have ownership of, and control over is to forget the acres of seeds under your feet and in your hands. The potential for life, connection, and great peace is in the words you are saying now, the ground you stand on today. Paradise is created–not bought, sold, or out of our reach.

Choose Your Avatar. Social media can be used to our advantage and as a Tool of Change, a vehicle to express beauty, and it is also meant to be given up from time to time too–managed and set down for hours, days, months and sometimes years on end if necessary. And it is necessary–well, I guess it feels very true for me anyway. I know that anything to be ever be created which promotes consumerism, with the ability to spread fear, division or the mockery of the sacred feminine, will ultimately Bow Down to Love–a formula worth memorizing, a reminder of hope.

There is power in saying “this isn’t me” and leaving it where it is at. No need to explain or justify or prove or make sense of it if it just feels “off”, as if a deep part of you does not want to resonate with what is being exuded. Move yourself according to what moves you, to what speaks to the soul of you. You will not always be able to rationalize or explain everything away, and you’re not meant to either. All that matters is that you listen to the voice and trust.

How to Return to Yourself After a Period of Dissociation:

Step 1: Calibrate with the vibration of want you want to feel, with what you enjoy feeling, with what feels soul-satisfying. Find the strength–that ferocious love you have for yourself–in you to cultivate the discipline to take time to calibrate. Step 2: Ask yourself throughout the day these kinds of questions without judgment: How is this sweater making me feel? How does this food make me feel? How is this place making me feel? How does this decision to ________ feel in my body? How is this person’s voice making me feel? How is this activity making me feel inside of my body? Step 3: As the experiment of observing your environment unfolds, you become aware of the things that repel and the things that harmonize with your soul’s vibration, and you naturally find that you start to participate with life differently, speaking more from that soul place, making little and big choices from that soul place, and the world around you follows suit–everything becomes a part of the symphony you are taking the time to calibrate with, and when something does not, it is simply made aware of and by that very awareness it is alchemized, returned or resolved.

If you are in a storm right now, please know that you are on your way out just by being in it. Because of your decision to stay and figure it out, to fight for your soul’s potential of flight, You Are Already a Victor.

There is a great messiness about us humans, yet how bountifully infinite we are as spirit-bodies. There is very real potential for all that is hoped, worked and prayed for–by The Ones with Hearts As Big and As Loud As The Sky–to become actualized. That is how it has always been. That is how it is. There Is a Great Power in the way they hum softly in their houses, hold their hands up to their hearts and say thank-you. And the external circumstances may change, while the spirit-body dances with all that is given, all that arrives, all that is magnetized.

I believe in love. I believe in miracles. I believe in the beauty of this planet and in the beauty of this universe. I believe in the vast and endless beauty within myself. I believe in the vast and endless beauty within us all. I believe that everything is possible.

Alchemy is integrating the shadow–not being rid of it, ex-communicating, banishing or punishing–but using that energy for something good, something that betters yourself and ultimately as a result, the world around you.

For every moment spent ruminating over the hallucinations in our minds, we could try saying: Ok I am noticing my mind wanting to hyper-fixate on and fume over the idea that _____________, and I am going to take the energy that would be used for that drive and Use It for Fuel to go into this direction. And maybe it’s a direction that allows for the frustration to be alchemized via the splatter of paint, or the load of a plated bar on your back. Maybe you sob into your guitar and chords played cause tremors that pull it out of you for awhile.

Maybe you say to it: NO–I don’t like the way you make me feel, you know? So I am going to move my body over here and give goodness to myself even while you keep on–I’m not waiting around for you to stop, because you are not my master, and if I wait I could be waiting around for a lifetime. I am going to teach you how I like to feel with my choices, until you realize it’s good for you too and jump on the the same page.

The consequences of actions hit different when you knew better–when you say “I remember hearing the voice trying to direct, and I remember deciding not to listen”. But then again if it is a cycle returning, maybe you both knew and didn’t know enough. So you collect the effects of your stumblings as they are–the ridges of their backs nestled innocently against your palms, like they were just sent to you, just following your orders, just swimming little things meant to be catalysts, medicine, reminders–and you Form Them Into Beads, to add them to your strand. And you tie the ends again, sealing them with wax and tar. Then slipping your fingers into the figure-8 loop you form, you raise your hands to your chest to say thank-you. Even to the lesson I am grateful. Through the tension I find a way to dance again. May each returned-to cycle bring bounty, expansion, and more and more periods of prolonged peace into my life.

The Day of Venus (XII)

(If you are new here): I started doing these “The Day of Venus” pieces every Friday as a way to hold myself accountable as a writer, and really just as a person who finds immense solace in consistently expressing and putting into form the inner workings of my mind and heart. I sit down and unleash everything I’ve been noticing, carrying, working through. I let myself be surprised, amused and embarrassed by what is painted. I call upon and obey my dreamworld. I let what wants to be said, be said, and then I leave it where it is. I play with words, listen to the murmurs of my heart, reference notes I’ve scribbled during the week, on receipts and gym paper towels and the 3 notebooks I keep around me in rotation; I look up synonyms and antonyms, grammar rules and poetic techniques, and sometimes get caught in rabbit holes of research until 3am.

I remove myself from the play. I exit the backstage, and it locks me out anyway. I bring the harmonica I bought at the thrift shop for $22 to the back of the building where it smells faintly of piss, and take refuge in having a part to play right there. At the busstop to my left is a grandfather who has been washing dishes all night. He just clocked out at a computer screen where a customer approached and tried to place an order. “Oh no, no sorry I am leaving now–errr–” and he looked around for the cashier as the customer rolled their eyes in victimization. Beside the metal rain-spotted bench nobody is sitting on, leans a Ross sack filled with the basic household needs of a 23 year-old who just broke up with her narcissistic boyfriend of 5 years, and is living on her own for the first time. She holds her umbrella at an angle above her, watching a YouTube video explaining how to change your self-concept. Next year her credit score will go up by 22 points and she will still be living in the $400 plywood make-shift room of an elderly woman she is caring for in exchange for rent, but she will meet a best friend and become known by the french patisserie down the block where she sometimes is given dessert on the house. I’m just a bald lady with her back against brick, a professional amateur playing a harmonica on the ground where her body is shielded from the rain, but her slippers act as a sponge and gutter water carries dust to the crevices of my toes which I carry home with me.

If you were to create a social media account without any previous internet presence, the algorithm will offer you a curated and intentionally designed array of options as your first choices, which would be the same offering to your neighbor, and their neighbor and theirs. Maybe across town where the houses are owned there is a slight shift, but you are offered up the most profitable clips to be exposed to, the most material-inducing of entertainment. These curations are internalized as the standard, the aim, what we should be striving for. How to talk, where you fit, and what to do with the time you spend breathing. It is in your best interest to question, analyze and reject the unspoken rules you’re given. Run into the room and clang on the xylophones, open your door and yodel absurdities into the suburban night sky. Do whatever it takes to claim your aliveness. Tell everyone and no one that you aren’t buying it. Show your teeth, your tongue, your toes. Go outside and touch the ground, the telephone pole, the rusting chainlink fence and the legs of a dead moth.

To heal is to find refuge in a cyclical art form of sorts. It is catch and release, a series of returning to that place in your mind’s eye, that room where you position yourself in objectivity to your fears. It is observing the impulses that were left to roam unchecked–and then grieving those moments you spent so far away from yourself. It is holding space for the redirection of your eyes, your voice, your hands and feet. Honor the Power to Pause. Give yourself time before you speak, make a decision, act. Give yourself the time.

I make sure to be thorough in the notes I take in my mind of the moment as I am in it–the mauve rose of your cheeks, the pressing of my inner thighs around your hips. All day I struggled to stay present, then it became easy to do. Suddenly the duration of a breath becomes a photo in my collection, a poem I want to write, a song I want to sing.

She reminds me that love is an action, energy transmitted, exchanged, released. She reminds me I am flawed and perfect and in motion. She gives to me with deliberation and she gives to me when she is not giving to me.

Companionship is spiritual work just as much as it is a retreat on Sunday. I do not have control over what I do not have control over. I want to be here while I am here.

Each day is a dismissal and an arrival, a reminder that Change Is. Hear the cliffs crumbling into sand; Feel the floors of the ocean widening. Meet the earth with acceptance as it receives your skin, your breath, your bones.

Get into the habit of asking your Dream maker to send you the medicine you need–comfort, signals, reminders of impermanence, reminders of what is infinite. Develop a line of communication with the curator. Trust in what comes and say thank you. Add all of the dream to your Palette of Existence–it’s aroma, it’s curse, it’s atmosphere, it’s language and it’s music. As much as you add your waking day this-ways-and-thats, uphold the visions that come to you while your conscious is at rest, accepting them as being closest to truth, as symbols of the energy dormant and within, unseen and fettering. If you want to live without shame, you must not be ashamed of yourself.

How to bring out the Kali in me: Make your mind up about who I am, who she is, and who they are in totality, and refuse to acknowledge the complexities and dualities of life, of us all, the little we really know, the reality of our ego’s limitations. Analyze something I said or did, or they did, or he mentioned, like it is the only evidence needed for your conclusion in a study we didn’t agree to being the examinees of. And so it is that I have come into acquaintance with what I have in secret called my “Jester Faces”. Pure affection is poured from my eyes into yours–a real and truly intended softness, an acknowledgment of your Holiness, quickly followed by the crudeness of a tongue extended and out, eyes wide. The flash of an announcement is registered by the opponent-seekers and sleeping puppeteers within you as: I SEE YOU; you have been exposed. I return to the softness just as easily as it came, just as generous as the moment before. A shapeshifting angel/beast, because both exist–the rich night of the earth, and the air of the sun-drenched sky, the wildfire and the flood, the blooming and the decaying. I have little tolerance and yet too much patience for the posturing, the prodding, the pretending that we don’t all carry the blades and matches and fungi, just as much as we carry the sky, the wings, and the nectar of the earth.

What will always be more important is the ability to see it inside of yourself–both the beauty and the monsters. All that is pushed away and down becomes amplified in the circumstances of your life, but that can be a toxic new-age message to be sending to people too. Then, all that you fixate on when your attention is out the window also makes appearances. These are both laws of the universe and manipulation tactics, depending on who is speaking. Just as well, tend to your garden like it belongs to you, like it responds best to you and you alone. A new kind of weed has begun growing around the edges of the bed, and so you dig them up by the roots only to discover they weren’t weeds at all, just seeds you pinched into the dirt 3 months ago that you forgot about, apparently spiraling up to the surface at an angle you weren’t expecting. So you sulk and forgive yourself and take note and move on.

Forgiveness is important to practice because you bring ill to yourself when you are ill-wishing upon another, regardless of what they have done or have not done. The laws of the universe do not care about deserving-ness. It is an electrical current in your body you participate in that does what it does to your cells, your organs, your blood. If you are mad, be mad–punch the bag and run 5 miles and write until your wrist aches; sing until your voice cracks and dance until you’re dizzy. Then let it stay there. Let the salt of your sweat go down the drain, the page in your book be a tale to refer to, the song that comes out be a mode of release for another.

And it is a practice–an action, a process, an ongoing and ever-unfolding ritual incorporated into your life for as long as you live.

I promise to slip out from your grip of any understanding you think you have of me, the world, our neighbors, our perceived enemies, and our idols more human than we let ourselves believe. I promise our priorities, our reasons, our fuel sources differ. I promise I have no plan, no motive, no hidden intention or hoped-for outcome. I promise to tell you when I’ve eaten a piece of chocolate `I found on the staircase for breakfast and to include it in the highlight reel. I promise to keep the highlight reel real. I promise I am aware of how mainstream and slogan-on-a-target-shirt that sounds. I promise I am both basic bitch and weirdo. I promise I am at ease with my unpredictability. I promise to stay content. I promise I would burn everything I owned if it meant being true. I promise I am not an angel. I promise to break promises. I promise I will express myself as I am–uncool, unchosen, and callous-footed, yet still smirking at you snaggle-toothed from across the table full of love and jest. I promise that my dreams do not orbit around your approval of them; I promise they are not made more realistic because of your ability to articulate or understand them, neither do they need your support or inclusion to exist. In fact what are my dreams? I promise I live to just live and the blueprint is a vanishing rainbow in the sky. I promise my favorites change by the day, by the week, by the decade. I promise to both break your heart and enrich the soil it lives in. I promise I’ll love you while you’re here and when we’re gone. I promise I loved you before our eyes did their first dancing introductions. I promise I love you even though our eyes have not embraced. I promise I will never run out of this. I promise there are times that sometimes last for longer than I am able to admit, where I am a deserted town of brittle ground. I promise we have too little time to be wasting it on resentment or the bitter aftertaste of a fallout. I promise I can sense the mycelium under your words. I promise you can exit the scene of somebody else’s production and let your character be what it is in their tale, without it having anything to do with the story you yourself live in as the main character. I promise you that forgiveness feels better than clinging to scorn. I promise the process of forgiveness is personal–between you and you, more than between you and anyone else–and can be the greatest, most heaviest battle you’ve won. I promise we are not the same. I promise we have more in common than we dare admit. I promise to admit it. I promise I would still be doing what I am doing now if I knew it was never going to see the light of day. I promise I am A Tool of Loosening, a slouched and cheery and sometimes fumbling enchantress that doesn’t keep track of: the time, where lines are drawn between properties, or the role you’ve designated for the life that is mine. I promise I will always be a ribbon come undone. I promise you will find me when you are not looking for me–on a branch, in a song, in a poem I didn’t write.

Though I look on with admiration and respect–their crimson and bronze hues at dawn, and the unmatched effectivity of their motherhood–I am not a hen. I mind my spine when it tells me to move. My spine moves the way it moves. You have yours, and I have mine.

I am a feathered flute, and the talons that bind me. I sing away the excess of anything until I am once again light. I lean into the squalls as they come.

I am both innocent and accountable for all I am not innocent of. I walk in the center of the point of contact between scarlet and indigo, all prism and shadow and vein.

Listen to the voice that says “not yet”. Let it teem for awhile, just because.