True

I’ve heard it said that a writer loses the muse if they do not speak the truth; that a poet serves the world by honoring what endures, especially in times when everything seems relative, transient, disintegrating. And isn’t that how the world seems today? How do we tell our stories – the stories of our individual lives and the stories of humanity in a way that sparks a desire to go on not just to survive but to serve something beautiful. And so I ask myself, with the blessing of your time and attention, what is it that I want to say? What is true – for me, for us, for life?

What comes to me is a precious memory from my most recent weekend of apprenticeship. The cool, damp mid-summer coastal morning had lifted and we three women had departed on our solo wanders up into the hills to warm our bones and follow our muse and embody what it would be like to hold space for others in untamed places. I was drawn up the slope to find the spot where the bobcat had been stalking in the brush, all of us watching breathless, riveted near the baby bobcat skull nestled on our altar. Synchronicities like that have become simple nods of knowing among our group, like the piercing coyote howl in broad daylight from the thicket nearby when I spoke of my recent insight. Of course we are being heard and witnessed. Of course the larger world has a vested interest in how we live.

I didn’t find any traces of the hunt, but I did find a flat spot on a precarious out-cropping to survey the valley, our gathering site, and my wider place. In times like these, my mind wants to label the longings that move through me. It wants to tuck them into known cubbies and tracks my culture would condone. I ache with a mammal’s longing to have that sense of comfort and acceptance. But a part of me still hesitates, the part of me that prowls through darkness, that sees animate shapes in the trees and whispers to me of stories stretching beyond my lifetime. I thirst more than anything for more time and space to allow that conversation to expand; to pull a strand of it through the veil so you can see it shimmering in my palm and be filled with wonder.

And so I descended back into our community with a handful of stalks – some blooming and some gone to seed; some lushly fragrant and some covered with thorns and burs. I planted them between two stones and mounded around them gopher dirt, deer and coyote scat. I wanted to show that I offer all of myself – my softness, my bristles, my shit – so that there is room for whoever comes to offer the wholeness of themselves. And as we shared our journeys and mirrored each other with words, and tender eyes, and snaps, and interpretive dances, and hands placed on our hearts and on the ground, my foundation shifted with deep grief and gratitude.

What a blessing to have soul friends in this world – to look deeply into someone’s eyes as they reveal their wound and their genius; their pain and their persistence – and to not flinch, to not look away. To see and be seen. To know without a doubt that they honor and ache over this land, this life – theirs and mine – just as I do. That they each struggle in their own way with what it means to breathe life onto these embers in a world that makes everything – not just material products but even the most intimate personal process – about earning our place, about winners and losers, about getting somewhere besides here. And what grief there is to see how these beliefs live on in me in increasingly subtle and internalized layers. We need to embody it on some level to survive while knowing it compromises the birthright of all beings: to be loved, accepted, welcomed, and nurtured into our own unfolding. And that that unfolding lives in service of all things.

I am wandering, and the burrows I explore lead to so many unexpected places, like worm holes between dimensions formed by all the different people I have been in my relatively short life. Sometimes I wander physically – climbing wild hills to see whats on the other side, lying in rivers to feel the rush of the water rippling my flesh against smooth stones, driving until fatigue and darkness come and I pull over to rest until dawn. Mostly I wander inside myself. The smell of leaves crushed between my fingers transporting me to my mother’s garden and the sweet and sticky juice of fresh plums running down my wrists. The angle of the light taking me back to a warm night at Laurelwood with the sun dropping, swifts swooping, and the sense of the world coming to a slow stop. A song opening up that place in me that holds its breath between a sob and a laugh and feeling my hips dip and sway, my arms flow outward like willow limbs, my knees flex and the soles of my feet burrow deep. A meditation or dream bringing fragments of translucent eggs and leathery dragon wings and crowded buses and pubs. Some weeks, beautiful feathers appear in the grass whenever a strong emotion comes to me. Some weeks, everyone is reaching out to me and other weeks I am surrounded by strangers. Some days my skin is too tight for me to breath and some days I am as limber as the wind. And all of this weaves between ordering labs and running invoices, stocking supplements and emailing instructions, adjusting the schedule and moving the mini fridge, paying the IRS and demoing a new software system.

Our lives are shadowy and full-color; yielding and hardening; linear and spiraling; a longing and a bucking up; a dreamy sigh and a staff plunged into the earth to mark where we stand. I bring to you all of me; especially the part of me that wells up when it hears the staccato speech of one without enough time, the darting eyes of one with no one to trust, the weary, absence of too much to carry and the bristling at a battalion of enemies. I don’t know how we’re going to do this, but I know we’re not alone. We are the sizable minority who just can’t live in this world as if everything’s okay, because doing so would mean abandoning the most precious thing we have – the part of us that knows the truth. The part of us that remembers how to lie in a meadow all day long gazing at milkweed and moths and needing nothing else. The part of us that can see a cloud and imagine the epic story of a drop of mist soaking through sheep’s wool down through the peat, distilling into whisky peed out into the sewers, finding its ways into the ocean crashing over the deck of a Viking ship and ascending near a tropical island into a thunderhead over the plains. The part of us that remembers how to tell someone we love them without words; how to sob until we split down the middle and all we can feel is the pristine emptiness of sunrise; how to let go, let go completely of each and every thing because each and every thing that will rush in to take its is so full of wonder and each moment we spend with it lasts forever.

I dance my anger until I wind up laughing. I let the pressure of these shames and insecurities suffocate me until there is nothing left to defend. I let myself dream so big and far outside of my body that I end up right back here and now breathing and watching – the only place I’ll ever be. And I let myself love so fully I pierce right through the object into the field of shimmering stars that tickle me inside. I tell you there is so much more I want from myself and from this life and from you. I tell you I’m sorry. I tell you I’m grateful. I tell you you are free to do and be whatever you need to do and be. I tell myself I’ll be okay no matter what. And increasingly I experience moments when I know it’s all true.

Nancy

“You don’t have to be good. You don’t have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You just have to let the soft animal of you body love what it loves.” – Mary Oliver