Born into Loss #grief

Years ago, I walked into the office of a healer, and before she placed her hands on me she looked into my eyes and asked, “Why are you so sad?”

I recall being offended. I had not felt sadness that day, but rather excitement for this new experience I was about to try. But she was right. Sadness lives inside of me. It always has. This sadness, I am realizing, more and more, is something I need to address rather than ignore. Grief made a home inside of my cell before birth. Some of us are born into loss before we realize we have lost anything. And, so I need to begin at the beginning. I need to begin at the origin of cells finding union before separation.

It was never a secret that I was an unwanted pregnancy. My parents were too young and unprepared to have a family. Yet, first my sister was born, and then I. Sometimes, I find myself wondering what words and emotions my body molded into being as my cells became tissues, organs, and bones. A human molded into form without the tightly woven threads of love to support her came into the world as a girl named “truth.”

Rejection did not take the form of abortion, but of unwanted birth. And in those days before sonograms warned us of sexual organs, I was expected to be a boy. But love found me in a complicated way, and I was not given up. Instead, I was wrapped tightly inside the wants of my mother, who never seemed to understand that I had wants of my own.

And so I made her my everything, as all babies do who have the privilege of a mother-bond. I followed her through the leavings that became losses as grief began to make an uncomfortable home in my growing body.

The first leaving left everyone I knew behind except my mother and sister when I was two-years-old. That was the spring and summer we went into hiding with the Hare Krishnas. I never knew what it was like to wear PTSD in the body until four decades later when I was in a mantra class for yoga teacher certification. That day, while practicing the “Guru Mantra,” the traumas of the two-year-old girl living inside of me cried for release as my body shook and my mind swirled into the past.

“Why are you so sad?”

The words haunt me with their call for recognition, and so I follow their story and watch a two-year-old girl leave behind her father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. I watch her struggle to unravel the structure of DNA until her genes float unmoored inside of her wondering where they came from. Wondering why there is nothing to tether them home. And, I see her longing grow into a wave that she swallows over and over again until she can no longer swallow it because it has become her.

Grief is the manifestation of lost love, and I now realize how much it has become a part of my cells. It is the ripping apart of connection. A boat unmoored from its anchor, floating alone on the sea. Yet it is a human condition, and not a metaphor.

And, so I return to the two-year-old girl and watch her cling to her mother and the tangle of her wants. I watch her follow the only bond she feels she can cling to as they travel across the country to form a new extended family. Here she finds friendships. Some of which become the untethered loss named grief. Here she also finds new grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, yet their love is complicated, conditional, and not woven tightly with the strands of DNA.

But it is this DNA that complicates their union. Her mother has chosen to love a man that is her cousin’s son. The cousin is her father’s nephew, but they are of the close age that they lived together as unhappy brothers for many years. I have been brought into a family that is not wholly welcoming because of the strains that can be imposed upon DNA. It is a tethering without want.

Yet, love finds me. I grow to love my stepfather who has made himself the sun in our small system of orbiting planets. I dutifully cross out the name of origin that belongs to my father, and learn to separate the strands of DNA inside of me without realizing those strands are beginning to tie knots of ache inside of my belly.

And I learn to love my new cousins that come into being, and their grandparents. Even the one who has a hard time looking at my face, as well as the faces of my mother and sister. I call them my own. All of them. I have a new father. I have a new large, extended family through which I share birthdays, holidays and the long weekend of Labor Day on a tiny island in Maine. But I will lose all of those connections. Another choice made by my mother.

“Why are you so sad?” The words tangle with my grandmother’s “Why did she give you up? Why did she choose him over you, and your sister, and her grandchildren?”

Because she made him our sun.

But I tried to stay in his orbit. Oh, how I tried, even when I watched unhealthy patterns that I experienced as a child take form in the grandparent-grandchild connection. I tried until I could try no more, but long before I let the orbit, my mother decided to disconnect from the family she married into, and so, by this law of attraction I have with her, so did I.

When I left the orbit, my mother stayed.

I have come to realize that reconnection after separation of these genetic bonds we carry inside of us in the form of family is like trying to reattach a limb with nerve damage. But I am trying. The loss of my mother, stepfather, and step-family has come with a re-connection with my birthfather, and some of my paternal cousins, aunts, and uncles. The love we share has deep roots, yet its unearthing exposes the grief of all the losses. All those birthdays, holidays, and celebrations not shared. All the words never uttered, the hugs never felt.

But, how grateful I am to have this reweaving.

I have learned, through grief, to love from afar, even those I have lost forever, because I know forever loss does not exist. In each loss that has led in a death of the body, I have found the reunion of the soul-connection. Each of these soul reunions have felt blessed as they do not carry with them the burdens of hurt. They carry only the light of love.

“Grief” in spoken words by Alethea Kehas, video credit attributed to Danilo Riba of Pixabay

Itching For Unity and a Poem about Coming Home #connection #nature #poetry

A place of close connection in Iceland.

Here in New England we have one more month of winter ahead of us. The landscape around me is mostly exposed. Our snow has arrived in spurts this year. We’ve had a few good dumps of precipitation, but mostly in the form of rain. When it snows, it lasts for maybe a week before we move into a warm spell. It’s become a disturbing cycle. A cycle indicative of the changes in our climate.

I fell asleep last night thinking about longing for a different world. A world returned to the wild, mostly. It’s a persistent itch inside of me. It’s deep, nearly too deep to satisfy. These days it almost seems impossible. And, it is a longing wrapped in guilt.

I find myself struggling with the desire to leave the house and the place I have called home for 15 years. To break away from the confines of developed normalcy to run to the wild places on Earth. To find home again, in the land.

It is not the same to walk into the woods here. It wears too many footprints. The weight of the past feels mostly too heavy. We are haunted by the ghosts of the past here in this land stolen with force and bloodshed. Now, I look outside and see the imprints of competitions. The striving for more. To be better. To be the best.

I see a blind race to nowhere.

Perhaps I will feel differently, when the green takes over again, softening the bones of the past. Bringing renewal, for at least a few months, but right now, I seek the magic of the land in other places. I long to press my body into the wind and feel the song of Earth bringing my dormant cells back to life. The call of the Mother’s heartbeat itches until I am rubbed raw with frustration.

I wonder if this is what we all suffer from?

Yet, we continue to build and erect our walls. We fill our water with toxins and our air with forgetting. We eat the refuge of our waste as though it were nourishment, forgetting why we are here and where we came from.

We’ve created a precipice upon which we have staggered for too long. It’s become almost impossible to find balance again. To return to the wild places I long to visit, I must consume resources that damage what I seek most. Hope seems to wait outside my lifetime. The sides that divide struggle with our collective future. One embracing more destruction, the other renewal. I do not know if I will live long enough to see one or the other win, but I hold onto the hope that one day we will find that unity again and there will be no longer be an itch inside of us. No longing with conflict. That one day not even doors will keep us from feeling the pulse that drums through all life and know it as home.

Hidden in Childhood #poetry #childhood

I am going to share a spoken poem with you. This is a first for me. Recording my voice to share my poetry in a public way. Why did I choose this particular poem to share? It was recently published in an anthology called Hidden in Childhood, which is a collection of more than 100 poems by different authors compiled and edited by Gabriela Marie Milton.

A few days ago, I discovered that Boz Bozeman had chosen my poem, “The Girl Who Should Have Been a Boy” to read aloud during a poetry event. Thank you, Boz. I’m not sure I can express how much this impacted me. If someone else can speak my words, I realized, so can I. If you’d like to hear my recording, you can listen to it here:

If you are curious how the poem came about, I will give you a brief history. To put it succinctly, I was supposed to be a boy. My birthfather made this clear before I was born, and my mother shared it with me often when I was a child as an example of his rejection. When I was became a child of my stepfather’s, my being a girl became his disappointment. He did not shy away from sharing it with our family, or people we met.

Thus, I adopted the rejection of not being a boy, and never quite feeling like I could be loved by my two fathers because I was born into the body of a girl. I became convinced this was a primary reason my birthfather gave us up, and why my stepfather gave us conditional love. My sister and I spent many hours trying to pretend we were the boys he wanted, pushing toy trucks in the dirt, watching him working at his workshop…but they were not happy hours.

I imagine this poem has a more universal truth to it. Many, if not most, of us have experienced rejection for not being the way someone else, or society, would like us to be.

Happy Earth Birthday, Sue. We continue to miss you…#suevincent

Sue at Wayland’s Smithy on the last day we spent together.

For Sue

Sister of the wild moors

Daughter of the dragon stones

your body returned to the hills

but the winds hold the memory of you

the soft touch on the shoulder

the voice, sometimes a whisper, sometimes

a howl, never leaves. Oh winged one 

what does it feel like to fly

again, over the land you love?

How long does it take to trace the tracks

back to the stars? The world beyond wonder

opened full, no longer a yearning, but home

Wounds I Healed: The Poetry of Strong Women #newrelease #poetrycolletion

I’m honored to be a part of this collection of poems edited by Gabriela Marie Milton. The anthology is a testament to the endurance of the human spirit and our ability to heal and create from our wounds. Wounds I Healed: The Poetry of Strong Women has been release one day early and is now available on Amazon.

Unfolding #poetry #yoga

To tumble out of the unfolding draw in a breath

Remember who you are

Remember the child who knew how to dance with light

Your doorway to truth

Like Alice peering into the Looking Glass without fear

Grab ahold of wonder

Dive into the ripening

You the vine, but also the seed

Arising from the place of beginnings

Everything already coded

waiting to break open

To reach beyond the ground

draw down light and spread the tender vine

Rejoining the spiral dance

Full Moon Poem #fullmoon #moonpoetry

Image by Bessi from Pixabay

To expound upon beauty

Uniquely yours to release

Dive out of the covers

And breathe fresh

Life yours to define

Mold ripe potential

Defining the turn of lines

Washing the edges with color

Until you forget work

In favor of creation

There is no need to rise

Above or below

But inward

The extraordinary is spiral

You, reaching to discover

The ecstatic dance of joy

In your own rhythm

The steps lighten

Opening the beauty of you

Again

Lest You Doubt Who You Are…#poetry #yogapoetry #esotericpoetry

I have been missing Sue, I’m sure I always will. Some days the pull to feel her presence is stronger than others. The other day, a friend of mine asked if I had reached out to her across the veil. Deliberately parting the veil is not something I do often these days. I have grown weary of the numinous and perhaps a bit distrustful. So many conspiracies and lunacies are now attached to the spiritual communities, yet there are aspects of home that cannot be denied when one steps into the space of silence. I’d like to think I heard her voice, again, in these words who are not just for me, but for anyone who doubts who they are. I share them here with visuals from the wonderful photographers on Pexels, open to individual interpretation…

You are evergreen boughs seeking water

You are a child gliding on a silver kite into the wind, breathless in wonder

Photo by Ammar Ahmed from Pexels

You are hope letting go of despair

Photo by Lukas from Pexels

The wild window of wonder beckoning us back to life

Photo by Mohan Reddy from Pexels

You are beautiful in the essence of self

Photo by Mohan Reddy from Pexels

You are one thousand moments waiting to occur

Photo by Mikhail Nilov from Pexels

The slipstream in the current pulling into infinite possibilities

Photo by Emiliano Arano from Pexels

You are life. Precious and uniquely yours to define.

Photo by Brett Sayles from Pexels

On My Birthday #poetry #birthdays

The 12th card I drew

I’m going to imagine something different:

The beauty of the goddess unfolding

Light softening the edges of life

Years, a mold of becoming

The inner child emerging

and merging into the dance

of a perfection that is truth

This messy cohesion of unity

Something radiant called a Life

So many journeys to get to this place

Defining and refining

Breaking down to build

Whole

Like a chalice spilling over

to fill again, and again

Tireless infinity splitting open

the moment not like a wound

but like a lover seeking joy

This seed waiting to germinate

finding the sun was always there

in the full splendor of wonder

watching the budding of a radiance

thriving under the moon, night

as much a friend as day

the taste of sorrow becoming happiness

refined

I wrote this poem before drawing 12 tarot cards as a reflection upon this day. Forty-eight years ago I was born into this life. A life that seems, at times, difficult to define and accept. Birthdays have never been easy days for me, in large part because they have been days, like all the others, not wholly mine to embrace and be embraced by. I knew I would find the chalice in the cards, but I thought it would be The Queen of Cups, as this is how the “I” has reflected itself over the years, but 12 cards unfolding this journey brought The Ace. I had, after all, asked for something new...