I love the green of spring, especially after rain. Yesterday, to escape the density of energy trapped inside walls, I went outside between rain showers and walked in the woods (see also yesterday’s photos). There is nothing quite like the energy of the forest, especially in spring when everything is waking up. I took my camera along and tried to capture the energy in green. I went to bed last night thinking about kitchens back-splashed in ferns.
I am remembering the energy of places. The dark corner where the walls met under the threshold of my bedroom door. A place where I had to force my eyes to look three times before I buried them under blankets, a fortress of stuffed animals around me. The pull of the wells. The first on the path between our home and our neighbors, down the slight slope of earth under the hemlocks and many steps past the circles of white flowers that hid my fairies. The second on the hill in Canterbury, beside the stone remains of a structure long abandoned. There was the skeleton of a child, I was sure, underneath that heavy gray slab of granite.
I am remembering the patches of light. The field of wildflowers and long grasses above the shop where my stepfather worked. The large rock in front of my neighbor’s home where I would sit and watch the dragonflies dance above the earth. The way the heavy brown seat of our home-made couch would pulse with the light energy of my body when my mother would brush my long brown hair into braids.
Yesterday I tried to explain the news I had received about my thyroid to a friend, and later my husband, listing each spiritually balancing activity that came to mind that I had engaged in over the past year or more. I realized, only later, that it is all a mater of energy. The only thing that really exists.
“You might fix that issue with your throat,” she had told me on the phone. Not the doctor who read the lab results, but the psychic I had spoken to six months before. Even though the energy around my throat had been spinning in a tight circle the size of an eraser, she knew it was already starting to heal.
“You have to want to heal,” I told someone else today, “so that your body and spirit understand your intention.” When you make that choice, the Universe will allow the energy to come back into balance. Inside of that desire you will find your truth and you will begin to sing it in whatever form it needs to manifest.
Today the universe reminded me to heal. To listen and receive the signs it is sending. I spent last week in a heavy fog of judgement, the energy I was raised in. Today, while listening to Rikka Zimmerman, I am reminded that this heavy energy is not mine. That it is within my power to dissipate it for myself, and in the process, there is the hope that I will also dissipate it in others. As a parent I am reminded that to judge your children is to suffocate their individual power and truth. Their divine lights. When I was a child I knew from the time of memory, that I was incarnated in this life to write beauty, to participate in the healing of the earth and humanity and to raise a family structured on love. It’s taken me many years to begin to step into my power. Judgement is a limiting force. When someone judges you, they judge themselves. It’s a ripple effect of destruction.
A way to remove oneself from judgement is to step back and to let go of emotional attachments/reactions to a the scene or situation. To watch it as an unbiased observer and say, “this is as it should be.” It may seem strange and foreign to do this, but if you let yourself it will feel right to you. A big weight lifts. For when we judge we feel heavy, awful.
Two days ago, while my children were in karate class, I was attempting to read Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Relin, when two well-intended parents saw my copy of the book and proceeded to remark on the unfortunate findings that came out after the book was published. Suddenly the book was tainted for me, until I returned to it later in the solitude of my home. As I opened the book again and read its words, I realized it did not matter to me if the rumors of corruption were true, what mattered was the gift inside the cover. The reminder that within each of us is the capacity for living from the heart in a place of truth and love. That when one does this, the universe opens to all possibilities and miraculous things happen. Living through a place of love, in the heart, transcends fear and ignorance. It shatters terror(ism). This is the gift of the book.
My own book, which is waiting to be received by the world, I know in my heart, is also a gift for our time. A gift of the ability of the body and soul to heal from an environment permeated by fear and judgement. It reminds us that we as humans can transcend past this heavy energy that resides within our cells, carried down from our ancestors and our past lives, and multiplied and reactivated in this life. It is our choice to change this program to one of truth and love.
I acknowledge today that doubt and fear, and specifically that cord of energy that ties me to my childhood family, has held this book back from publication. There is an energy of resistance and fear surrounding the publication of my words that is not mine. I cut the cord. I give it to the universe to dissipate. The world needs my words. There are many, like me, who need to understand that we each have the capacity to heal. The universe, I accept and acknowledge with infinite gratitude, has given me this gift of truth to heal. I accept and acknowledge that it is, and will continue to ripple through our collective beings with the vibration of truth and love.
I extend immense gratitude and love to the Universe and all divine beings, in particular, my higher self, Rikka Zimmerman and Jennifer McLean and the Healing with the Master’s team for reminding me of this reality.
The greatest gift we can give ourselves and others is to see our truths, and through this allow ourselves to be the beings of love we are.
Namaste
I thought I would feel the return of home when I landed in Portland after a six hour flight from Boston on the evening of April 19th. But, halfway through the trip, I began to question the idea of home when all I could think about was the moment I would step into the woods alone with my two dogs in New Hampshire.
What happened to the euphoria I felt two years ago when I had returned to Oregon with my own family of four, after having been away for over a decade? It had clearly left me. The jolt of excitement of recognizing a park I hadn’t visited since I was three or four, quickly dissipated into the idea that I no longer belonged in this state. Portland was nearly impossible for me to navigate with its crowded buildings and thick ropes of traffic. The wind at the ocean bit through my fleece with teeth of ice, and never let up its grasp. Why could I not find peace inside this place of my birth?
I could easily blame it on my grandma, in fact I find myself doing just that when I speak of my trip. By the end of the week, after five days together at the seacoast, I nearly pushed her out of the car door when we dropped her off at her condo. I could no longer endure the heaviness of her energy. She was caught inside a pain I no longer wanted to hold onto.
But, I couldn’t avoid it. My reactivated pain body clung to hers, as I my spirit struggled to breathe. I could not escape this ghost that connected us together, filling the air around us with a suffocating weight that I found impossible to lift in her presence. Two years ago, when I last saw her, we had spent a late night talking about my life. It was the first time in my 36 years in this body that I had shared any of my pain and childhood “secrets” with my grandmother. An opening of voice that would ripple across the ocean into a tidal wave of wrath, deteriorating the already tenuous relationship she held onto with her daughter, my mother.
This “ghost” hovered around me and my grandmother, its density affecting my children and husband as well, as we tried to enjoy our time together. My grandmother was the willing medium, speaking its words of pain whenever it found a the space to be heard. I could not, despite my efforts, lighten the energy that permeated my grandmother’s body.
Was there, I wonder, a way for me to reach through the density? What does one do for someone who chooses to wallow in darkness? Is it our place to try to lift them? How do we shield ourselves and others from its effects?
This morning, after a night dreaming about wearing yellow and talking to a lollipop; after a weekend trying to neutralize my daughter’s emotions while we were at a hotel for a conference of my husband’s, I finished the manuscript for my memoir. At least, that is, to the point where I am ready to start sending it out to agents/publishers. I had finished my last round of revisions last week, but had one more poem to write. This morning I allowed it to appear. I called it “Truth” and felt satisfied with the simplicity of the lyrics that took form on the page.
Now, as I sit here, there is the part of me pulling for action. That restless ego that doesn’t like to sit still and let the universe string together the pattern that will shape the outcome I want to manifest. But, I have learned, and am still learning, that in the quiet space of allowing we are given the gifts we desire. That everything we need comes to us when we release the pull.
Yesterday, I came home exhausted and irritable, and found a package waiting for me from a dear friend. I put the house in order enough for the anxieties inside of me to settle down, and then opened. For the second time this year, a friend had given me exactly what I needed, at the perfect moment. This friend (a different one than the other instance), had sent to me her medicine cards not knowing how perfect her timing was. I didn’t tell her that today I would be working with animal totems in class, but her heart knew that I would use this gift. She didn’t know that I had been wanting my own set, only that I was learning the language of animal messengers.
And, of course, her gift, which came at just the right time, saved me just that. Time. I had no idea what “animal” I was going to bring to class before the gift arrived. Yet, something inside of me knew to wait. So now, I feel the struggle to let go of the rope, to trust that those spiders in the last post will burst out of their orbs and spin their webs. It’s not that I don’t want to work at getting my manuscript published, but there is the understanding that often when we try too hard at something we fail, or at least do not achieve what we could. The idea of “paddling upstream,” as Ester Hicks would say, when we can just let go the oars and allow the current to carry us where it will. I am not sure yet how this will happen in what is normally perceived to be such a cut-throat, competitive industry, but I am willing to trust that the act of letting go of the “struggle,” even just a little bit, will make the journey easier. Will make the destination more fulfilling. It has, after all, happened this way for others.
So, here’s to allowing with the intention that my words will soon heal so many more souls than just my own.
When I was a teenager I was obsessive about making lists. I would put everything I needed to do for the day or the week on my lists, outside of the ordinary sort-of things like brushing teeth and making my bed. I even had a scrap of paper that I would pull out every couple of days and tack to the bulletin board above my desk that said, “Shave Legs” in curly cue letters. Yep, I had a bit of OCD.
By the time I went to college I had stopped making lists. Instead, I secretly laughed at my over-organized classmates who would pull out their planners with every minute of their day scheduled. I figured, if I couldn’t remember what I needed, than it either wasn’t important, or I was on an early road to senility.
Of course there is something to be said about those list-makers. The one peer in particular who comes to mind, although a bit uptight, was an excellent student. Someone she managed to graduate from Bowdoin with a triple major. I thought I was doing well with a double!
Last week I started a list and fixed it to the side of my fridge. No, it’s not a grocery list, although I discovered the advantages to having a regular log of “foods needed” once I moved out of my parents’ home. The list on the side of my fridge is a list to the universe. Yep, the universe.
If you’ve read or watched The Secret you probably have a good idea already about what is on my list. Instead of items I plan to get though, I have statements such as “Alethea has a published manuscript of her memoir and a great agent;” “Alethea’s chakras are open and she no longer needs thyroid medication;” “Alethea no longer grinds her teeth at night,” etc. You get the picture?
Actually it’s all about pictures. The idea behind my list (which is currently 13 items long), is to state desires and goals as though they have have already been achieved. I was spurred to make the list, not by The Secret, but my psychic dev. instructor. I had heard about this concept through several sources, and thought okay, time to give it a try. Apparently within days of stating on her list that she had a set of “four almost-new tires,” for her mini van, my instructor’s neighbor had set out four tires on his front lawn with a “Free” sign attached to them. They were in great condition, and they happened to fit her van.
A coincidence, or was it the universe working to make her dream a reality? Think about how easily things come to some people, in particular people who don’t worry excessively and always seem to have a sunny outlook on life. Kids are a great example. Within months of deciding she wanted to have an American Girl doll, my daughter suddenly had five. Yep, five (only one is new). It’s called the Law of Attraction. The universe gives to us what we send out. If we worry obsessively about money, we’ll be over-whelmed with financial challenges.
I have an obsession with being late, just ask anyone who knows me. I worried so much about being late for my first psychic dev. class, that I was late. Hours before the class I thought obsessively about the weather and if it was going to turn to freezing rain and delay my journey. I worried about my husband making it to our meeting place on time to pick up the kids and whether we would find parking places near each other. I worried about finding the classroom and the right entrance to the building.
The rain had stopped freezing by the time I was on my way to meet my husband. (A small sigh of relief.) I got to Main Street and searched for a place to park near the restaurant where we were to meet up. None opened up. Panicking, I ended up parking in a fire lane, while I called my husband. The call went through, then it cut out. I called again, same. And again. Yep, his phone happened to break on this night. To make a long story shorter, I finally found his car, gave him the kids and cursed my way to class. I went in the wrong entrance and found a kind man who helped me navigate the maze of hallways. I was ten minutes late. Could have been worse, I know, but my obsessive worry had manifested into reality.
So, I’m going to give this list thing another go. Jean Houston, http://www.jeanhouston.org/, is one of the many spiritual leaders of our time who talks about this concept. Not only does she recommended putting that statement out there, but imagining, living and breathing it. If you want a new car for example, in your mind paint it the shade of blue you desire, visualize the model and year. Step inside of it and inhale that new upholstery. Turn the key and shift it into drive. Feel the rhythm of the tires on the pavement. Hear their hum. Taste that glass of wine (or beer, or soda, or water…) you’ll drink in celebration after you’ve signed the paper. Cheers!
…will my heart condense to a room without a door? It’s the question I asked my higher- self before the New Year.
What happens to the writer when she does not give voice to the words within her? Her soul’s song becomes trapped inside a room of increasing darkness. The door gets harder to find with each word that’s denied a voice.
Words bring in the light. They open up our third chakras (and, of course, our fifth):
With pen you pull the sun in/dissolve shadows into life
In my effort to keep the sun shining within my solar plexus, I have decided to start this blog. I opened the door three years ago and I’m determined to not let it close.
We all come into the world with our own voice of truth, whether that voice finds expression through a poem, a painting or a pie. The point is to let it sing in whatever form it seeks.
The Light Behind the Story 