Category: Uncategorized

Clearing the Ghosts from the Closet

On By Alethea KehasIn Dreams, Memoir, Uncategorized2 Comments

It was a one of those nights when sleep arrives slowly and is interrupted mid-dream, ensuring that you will recall the scenes upon waking. One of my children was worried about ghosts in the bedroom. “You clear them, don’t you?” I was asked. The room felt unoccupied to me, but some protective measures where taken none-the-less. Turns out a scary YouTube video that was supposed to be comedic had been watched.

As a result, the lights went on several times during the night, and each time I woke from a new dream that seemed unrelated from the one to follow it until I rewinded the night during daylight.

My dreams began in that popular place where magic is contrived. I was eating lunch with my mother at one of the park’s restaurants. She had ordered the double hotdog special because it also came with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for later. I munched the fries, uninterested in eating the hotdog, while we sat at a booth. Then, suddenly, I found myself asleep, and when I woke my mother was gone. It had all been a ruse, a trick, a way to leave her child behind. Still groggy  from the drug that had been placed in my drink, I searched the streets, knowing she would not be found.

The next flick of the light found me on a park bench, reaching out to hold an infant that belonged to someone else. The child was a harmony of light and dark, with symbols covering his or her head (there was, fittingly, no sense of gender). The mother generously allowed me to enfold her baby in my arms. They followed me home, and while the child’s mother and I sat on the quilt I had made long ago with my own mother, she told me that the bedroom closet was too small for what it held inside.

“I’m a builder,” she assured me, and I watched as she threw open the doors and let loose that which was contained. Shoes and clothes piled out. “There is too much stuff in here,” She told me. “And the location is all wrong. Suddenly my closet was being lifted in her strong arms until it found a new home. A complete reconstruction and expansion was in order.

As I moved outside of the bedroom to watch, I discovered a house under construction. Some rooms were finished, others held the frame of potential. My home, though, was vast. Limitless rooms unfolded before me as I traveled (actually I believe I was flying through) the upstairs hallways.

Once again, a light went on, and I found myself inside of another dream. This time, I thought I was someone else who was not me. A beautiful boy who wanted to be a girl (this is significant on many levels, one being that in this life, I as expected to be born a boy by my parents, but was born a girl instead). Here I was, inside this child, being told that my father wanted me outside by the pond with him. I felt resistance build within me, and the struggle to be free erupt into wings.

I was the child of Pan, running gloriously wild, racing up the trunks of enormous trees and into a house held within the boughs. I was weightless with wings. There was nothing to stop me from being pure joy, except my own fears. Before I woke, I found myself in one of those upper rooms, looking outside at nebula exploding into being. Suddenly, I tasted fear. Could I, I wondered, leave it all behind? The Universe was calling…was I ready to follow that birthing of light?

orion-nebula-space-galaxy
Orion Nebula, Source: copyright-free-images.com

 

 

 

The illusion of power

On By Alethea KehasIn Uncategorized2 Comments

This brief passage contains so much. It’s worth a read, and Sue’s book The Osiriad is a wonderful text.

Source: The illusion of power

When I close my eyes (in meditation)…

On By Alethea KehasIn A New Earth, Gaia & Elementals, Memoir, UncategorizedLeave a comment

IMG_0990

I see eyes open to awareness

restrictions letting go

as a patriarch’s staff is laid down

I see golden wombs growing light

and wings emerging out of clouds

I see the vast body of the ocean folding into self

Volcanos erupt secrets

as a mighty oak grows strength

A queen with red hair waits underground

Above, the sky fills with ships ready to be seen

while Hathor holds the moon

On Earth, the rainbow goddess resurrects Truth

 and a Green Man becomes me Home

My Names…A Stream of Consciousness

On By Alethea KehasIn Memoir, Uncategorized2 Comments
IMG_2845
A Conscious Stream

Alethea, Greek for truth. When I was a child I imagined I was Aphrodite when I wanted to be beautiful. Athena when I wanted to be strong. Once, my friend told me I looked like a Greek goddess in profile and I’ll never forget that. Lethe is a river where one goes to forget. I tried to dip my thoughts in its current to wash them clear of the pain. Too many memories fog my brain, most of them not mine. Grammy called me Leethie, which is only one e away from the river of forgetting, reminding me how we tried our best to forget each other, but she is still with me know. When I smell roses in winter, I know she is beside me. She whispers I love you into the cells of my heart, filling it with the grace of forgiveness. I have been called a lot of names and my life is not over yet. Alethea is not really Alethea, but Aletha according to my family, but not according to one of my best friends who refuses to drop the e that is there. I have no preference for either name, it’s the others I won’t own. Althea sounds like sandpaper. Ah-leth-ia, like a lisp. Then there are the others that are so far off I have to laugh. I’ve been called Bitch, Moody and Too Sensitive. I’ve been called Fish because my last name was Fischer, but I used to wonder if I also smelled like fish, which I might have once a month when I was too afraid to go to the bathroom. There were also the nice nicknames. Eeesh from my family when I was young, and then not so young, spelt Ish by my stepfather who sang me the song about sunshine when he was happy with me. When I smiled everything was okay. Now, my daughter calls me the master healer to tease me, and lots of other whoowhoo names that make me laugh because I know she loves me and in her 12-year-old way, she is proud of her mother. My husband calls me the Love of My Life, and sometimes that sounds too big. I am now Honey by my birthfather when he hangs up the phone and inside the warmth of the word I feel Love.

“Eamon” v. “Elizabeth”

On By Alethea KehasIn Memoir, Uncategorized2 Comments

Second in the series about the power of names and what we can learn from them.

IMG_2382.jpg
Where I was born

On August 30, 1973 a child was born inside the bedroom of a tiny house that looks like a milk carton. She was supposed to be a boy.

“Dave [my father] always wanted you to be a boy,” my mother often told me.

“I thought you were going to be a boy,” my father tells me now.

IMG_2383
All wrapped up its hard to tell the truth

She was given the name Alethea Eamon Fischer. Alethea for the truth that cannot be agreed upon.

My mother tells me she found the name in a book. My father, that it was from the 1973 episode of Kung Fu with Jodi Foster called “Alethea,” which aired months before my birth.

My mother tells me it was a typical rainy day in Portland on the afternoon of my birth, my father remembers sun. He’s the one who gave me my middle name. Eamon became my demon. As I grew this name fueled the fire in my belly and the hatred I tried to harbor against my father.

“He never really cared about you girls,” my mother would tell us. How could he, I would think, if he gave me this name?

When I was a child I longed for an ordinary middle name, like Ann or Marie. Like the middle names my friends had. When they would ask me what my middle name was, I would refuse to tell them.

I tried to hide my middle name until it was shared without my permission, on the graduation program at the end of the 6th grade. There it was for everyone to see, beside my misspelt first name. “Eamon.”

No one said anything until the 8th grade, when I heard it sung down the hallways from the voices of boys becoming men. Each splintered note stabbed my heart and flared the fire in my cheeks.

It was a tool of hatred, of shame, of regret. My father’s gift to remind me I was the boy he didn’t get.  It was the demon I held inside of me, reminding me why I shouldn’t love him. And it was the knife that stabbed through my thinning layer of self-esteem wielded by my former best-friends’ boyfriends.

I couldn’t wait for the day to come when I could get rid of it.

When I was 18, my mother, sister and I booked the appointment and spent a pleasant afternoon debating our choices. We settled on Elizabeth for me. My maternal grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s name. Elizabeth, one of those names that any girl might have.

When  I signed the paper with my new name I thought I was erasing the boy that was never born. I thought I was one step closer to erasing the man who I thought never wanted me. A father who never could have loved me.

I was wrong.

 

“Leethie”

On By Alethea KehasIn Memoir, Uncategorized6 Comments

I believe strongly in the cathartic power of writing. The energy of our words can free the trapped energy of our emotions, providing us with a pathway to our Light and truth. I am starting to offer workshops on spiritual writing that will focus on understanding the self through the written word. In the first series, we’ll be exploring who we are through the names we are given by others and the names we give ourselves. In this blog, I will be sharing my own written words around the stories of my names. Here is one:

“Leethie”

alethea1
“Grammy” & “Leethie”

It’s just three months into my first year at Bowdoin when the phone rings beside my roommate’s desk. I watch her pick it up, listen, then hand it over to me. It’s my mother.

“Dave [my birthfather] called. He wanted me to tell you his mother died.”

While my mother talks, I stand beside my roommate’s desk, emotionless. I can feel her eyes on me, questioning, but I ignore them.

“How’d she die?” I ask.

“I don’t know. He didn’t share.”

I can tell she’s already annoyed, she always is when my birthfather is a (rare) topic of conversation, so I don’t press it. Instead, I let her move on to other topics, half-listening as she shares stories about what has been happening in town during my absence.

 While my mother talks, I think about the grandmother who, when I was very young and she was happy to be with me, used to call me “Leethie.” I feel the warm wrap of a name that was only hers to give me, until I remember the grandmother who seemed to have forgotten she had two granddaughters across the country. I recall how quickly the gifts sent from Oregon on my birthday and Christmas disappeared after I said goodbye to her when I was thirteen. I think about how soon she became just “Grammy” in quotes signed on a card, then nothing at all.

While my mother talks, I realize I cannot remember the last time I heard my grandmother’s voice, or if she ever told me she loved me.

My roommate looks at me when I hang up the phone, her face a mask of concern. “Are you okay?”

In response, I tell her I’m fine. I tell her that my grandmother has recently died, but that I’m okay because we were not close.

My roommate looks at me like I’m a freak, and I realize if she had just lost her grandmother, she would be devastated. The emotionless words that have left my mouth mirror my truth on the surface. I honestly don’t know what I feel after hearing the news that Grammy is dead. Tears do not grace my face, nor do they simmer near the surface, waiting for a private moment to erupt.

I can almost ignore the loss that hides deep within me. I have gotten used to its heavy weight. In that unreachable place, I realize there will never be a chance for reunion.  Grammy will never hear my side of the story, and I will never be able to show her that young girl, barely a teenager, signing the papers to make her mother and stepfather happy. But, I don’t know if I care. Loyalty, on that day when I am 19, is still heavily weighted on the side of my mother’s truths.

The Memory of Home

On By Alethea KehasIn Poems, UncategorizedLeave a comment

IMG_1875

In the pause between thoughts

silence whispers the language

of the forgotten self

I’ve been dreaming of home

the land outside walls

offers the great hope of peace

Inside the body

mind chatters fear

while the memory of love

hides in the fragmented soul

I’ve been dreaming of the womb

I thought I was created

from a legacy of cells

I thought home was a structure

subject to decay

until I remembered light

crumbles the illusion of Truth

returning home to the opened heart

Coming of Age

On By Alethea KehasIn Poems, Uncategorized2 Comments

This poem is based upon a past life memory of my daughter’s. It is not easy to put into words the sacred experience of witnessing the resurfacing of this Coming of Age moment, but I felt moved to try.

IMG_4802

She remembers standing

on a mountain open to wind

Her face painted in the 4 directions

like a compass pointing her home

red, white, blue and yellow

lines with dashes leading to the center

A neck draped in stones of water

5 triangles tipped to her womb

and the Mother she was leaving behind

There is nothing below me

she reveals open space

 her hands holding what she will take

the feather of a hawk and another stone

flat, cold and smooth

The ceremony held without her

as she becomes a bird

flying into the Light

The Words We Use

On By Alethea KehasIn A New Earth, Reflections, UncategorizedLeave a comment

IMG_5376

The words we use carry an energetic intent. A vibration that is evoked in the saying or thinking of them. This is why words are so powerful, and are used in magic, but that is not the subject of this blog. As a writer, I think a lot about the words I use and the words I read and hear around me. As an empath, I feel the vibration of these words and the intention of energy evoked with their use.

You can tell when a word speaks of love or fear, even when the two are subverted. For example, I receive a lot of mailings from various groups with noble causes, yet they use words that speak of fear. Words like “fight” and “war.” These words speak of passion, but also of fear. Of anger and frustration. I understand these words, I use them to from time to time, and when I do I question my motive. I look into the manifestation of my own fears that are evoking them.

We can get so caught up in a cause that is premised upon love, that is meant to grow and spread love, but sometimes this passion stems from a fear. A fear of loss. Loss of beauty, loss of resources, loss of life and loss of hope. A loss of connection from Source that is Love. We fear the fear, so to speak, and we forget that beneath and around that fear is always love.

What we feed grows, and when we send out words, when we think and speak them, we grow the energy behind them. I understand fear, but I also know love. We all do. It’s a conscious choice to evoke the one over the other. It can take great strength and trust, or the simple act of surrendering to give away fear and tune into the vibration of love.

Feel the difference. When you speak. When you think. When you send out your words into the Universe to connect with the energy you have evoked.What is your intent? What do you wish to grow? The choice is always yours.