The Aftermath of Forced Surrender

Lordy, there have been some excruciating moments arising from within me these days.  I mean if you put my situation “on paper”, it would be fully justified.  Single mom in the midst of healing cancer, in almost perpetual pain, and going through a separation from an abusive, loveless relationship in a foreign country.  To the eyes of the world, this scenario would incite pity.  To the eyes of the eternal soul, this would indicate a rich opportunity for awakening; a true return to the experience of Wholeness, Holiness.    

Though I manage to often retain the later perspective, I must confess that my ego often despises the decimating discomfort that I mostly live in.  Worse than the incessant hip pain, is the searing pain of loneliness and isolation.  These have been my life-long crucible… but these days seem to be their crescendo.  If only words could convey how deeply I ACHE to be held.  To be comforted and adored by a Great Force of Love.  Perhaps the Mother of ALL.  The Lover of ALL.  I often feel like I am trapped in an emotionally glacial echo chamber.  Crying out into an indifferent abyss.  

I believe that is the farthest thing from the Truth.  I know Life looooves me.  I see it manifest in so many ways, in so many moments… when I am just willing to open my inner eyes; unconditionally receive the Grace.  But sometimes I just can’t, because I am sucked down by an excruciating undertow of desperation.  A desperation that feels unquenchable.  I have harbored a hope that Life’s love for me would equate to an experience of being comfortable.  But I can’t seem to get comfortable… and hence I feel abandoned by the Mother of ALL.  But I am coming to accept that it is precisely the discomfort that is the Gift.  (YUCK!)  

And let me pause from my riveting narrative to say that I see others great souls on the periphery of my life mirroring similar sentiments of raw desperation.  Navigating life circumstances that are rendering them Undone.  Confused.  Helpless.  Not to mention global situations that are similarly rocking us as a Whole.  I sympathize… and simultaneously, this gives me faith in a larger and deeply intelligent movement.  These are symptoms of the creative destruction required to rebirth our world.  To bring about the great peace and harmony we seek.  The emergence of unity consciousness felt and lived by All.  

Now back to meeeee.  A couple of days ago, I was navigating a rogue wave of crushing desperation… Limping around, caring for the kids, who were demanding, quarreling, making messes…  all of their finest displays… And that feeling of WHERE ARE MY FRIENDS???  It felt so terrible and I saw no way out.  I dug deeeeep.  I felt myself in a “forced surrender”.  Like there was really NOTHING I could do… except accept.  This is my life.  I can either fight it and destroy myself… or humble myself like never before… fall to my knees and meet it in the way of sacred service.  Inverse my perspective… stop trying to “get” from Life… and learn to derive joy and fulfillment from GIVING to Life.  Not serving in the ways my ego wishes to serve.  But serving what is actually here and now.  With as much lightness in my heart as I can muster.  A lightness born of true acceptance.  

CAN I GET AN AMEN????

I’m wondering if this resonates for any of you “out there”…. Or am I just on a completely insane, kamikaze spiritual journey?  Some of you MUST understand… or my InnerMostBeing would not be ordering me to write these words.

To sum it up, I feel this slow-cooking process of dissolution of the false self.  Excruciatingly slow.  But profoundly valuable.  Like actually an answer to a prayer prayed many times over, perhaps in many lives.

Then, yesterday the Patron Saint Rosa (the babysitter of my kids, who has become family by now) took Forest all day and all night.  I felt soooo relaxed.  So relieved and quiet inside.  It’s a jagged paradox, because I LOVE BEING WITH FOREST.  He is a stunningly bright light.  A blazing ray of genius and love.  His innocence, intelligence, capability, creativity, innovation, articulate-ness and purity… are such a Gift to witness and foster.  And.  It is a full-throttle, non-stop ride.  

When Serena came home from school, I felt nourished and calm.  And she was her true, sweet, engaged self… as she often is when Forest is not around.  She was fully willing to do her homework with me. (This is not always the case!  Too often it is a colossal drama that destroys us both.) It was a nourishing bonding experience.  And then we watched a super fun animation movie on netflix.  “Vivo”; about this Cuban man who rescues a monkey and they make fabulous, joyful music together in the plaza until the man dies and the monkey makes a hero’s journey to Miami to deliver a heart-wrenching love song to his long-lost beloved who left Cuba to become a star… It was colorful and laden with uplifting latin beats.  Our orange tiger, Ra, lay on “memory foam island” with us, belly up, purring in sheer content.  

Too often I have heard myself lament, “WHERE IS THE SWEETNESS???”  Most days feel so brittle, so stark.  Even with the slow explosion of flowers and birdsong; the return of heat and light that is the resurrection of springtime.  But last night, sweetness rushed in like the welcome release of a touricate.  I felt palpably happy.  In a mellow streaming sunlight fashion.  Gentle.  Peaceful. Enlivened.  The aftermath of Forced Surrender.  

Even if I too often struggle to enjoy this alchemy of the soul… I TRUST IT. 

May this testimony inspire you to forever KEEP THE FAITH.  

Claiming Unassailable Enough-ness

I’ve never written one of those Christmas letters… you know the kind that creatively elucidates the highlights of the previous year and gets nestled into the annual christmas card… All my years seemed to melt together like skittles in a hot bath.  A sickeningly sweet puddle of bleeding color.  Not that my life is sickeningly sweet… But it certainly bleeds with unruly colors.  Anyway, 2021 was definitely a year to “write home about”.  The transformation has descended in lightning jolts.

A year ago Christmas Eve, the resident oncologist at the local hospital, Dr. Gunnalini (or “Dr. Kundalini”, as I enjoy referring to him) gazed into my eyes, unblinking and void of decipherable emotion and announced in his broken english that I had “lung disease”.  Usually I loooove broken english.  But in that moment, with my heart flailing about in my left shoe… I did not.  I never did understand why Dr. Kundalini looked at me that way.  I honestly couldn’t tell if the blood pumping through his veins was warm or cold.  

The amount of fear I have had to navigate this year.  Wow.  Sleepless, sweaty nights, curled up between my kids, contemplating my mortality.  Not sexy.  Not at all.  But so many people rose to my occasion, supporting our family in every way imaginable.  Somewhere along this journey I heard someone say that cancer doesn’t kill people, FEAR DOES.  Maybe that sounds far fetched… but from the inside, I’ll say it’s NOT.  I have met myriad moments in this past year, where the snake-esque fear has succeeded to paralyze me and then eat me alive.  Meanwhile, I have endeavored to act like everything is “normal” so that my kids don’t have to grope and fondle the melting walls of hell along with me.  

Adriano the naturopath often tells me that my healing journey is the transcendence of fear.  I used to hear this and feel to be scaling Mount Impossible.  But slowly, over time I am witnessing my heart lighten and my faith in the eternal nature of Life strengthen.  Sure I still get scared.  I’m human.  But I don’t panic at every strange body sensation.  Seriously.  This is a thing.  Once they slap a “cancer label” on you, every sensation becomes a potential source of threat, of death.  At some point, you’ve gotta just let go.  Or eat your own face off.  

I am beginning to accept what I AM.  I am beginning to accept that Life never ends but merely shifts shape.  I am beginning to accept that Life, in Her infinite perfection, makes no mistakes.  I can only do my best to make Life affirming choices and leave the rest to Eternal Ultimacy.  

Life is showing me that gaining control over thoughts and feelings is the key to wellness.  Disease cannot manifest in an elevated energy field.  Did I tell you about my Osteopath?  Usually osteopaths work with the physical body… but this guy is super “alterna”.  We meet online.  He feels into me and then opens his Osho book.  He told me that I need to make love.  He says that my course of healing is to exercise the “gorilla” (conditioning) from inside me.  He assigned me to write out all my desires as if they have already been fulfilled.  He is intuitive.  He recommended a book to me called Love Yourself Into Life; The Magic Book.  It’s a channeled book- my favorite!  I’ve gotten so much out of it, just opening to random pages.  In one segment, the entity “Ramtha” said that our purpose here on earth is to BE.  We have no other grand purpose as we love to imagine.  

Simply to BE.

I am finally ready to accept this.  My conditioning has had me contorting into all sorts of strange shapes to feel “enough”… but always falling short.  I’m officially exhausted.  I’m ready to be enough as I am.  He says that we are never obligated to return to the earth plane.  We come here because of Desire.  But once we can just flow with the purity of nature within and without, we will remember our divine wholeness and there will be no need to return.  

I used to laugh at my Mama, feverishly doing her kriyas so that she could be free-ya from this place-a.  I felt so big in my little britches as I touted that I personally didn’t care where I incarnated, as long as I could be useful.  But after this past “transformational” year… I actually wouldn’t mind being done here.  So flow with nature, I shall.  

Do you understand the potency of this fundamental shift?  Given my inner tangle, it is EPIC.  To claim my unassailable enoughness, and LIVE BY IT.  That’s unprecedented.  I have always felt that I needed to prove myself to the world.  Really to my dad, I guess.  Gotta luv that jewish programming- the compulsive scramble to “be somebody”.  He was always pestering me about going to college.  But not from a place of love or empowerment… more of a rigid denial of the possibility of dying a Nobody; poor, legacy-less and alone.  

As my eyes danced across the page of this spiritually weighty book, melting and mingling my mind with its insides, I felt my readiness to surrender gather and swell.  After being held in compromising pretzel positions of the soul for the past year, my resistance is fatigued and I’m truly ready to accept that Life is THIS MOMENT, which actually IS whole and complete as I AM.  

Gosh, I wanted to tell you so much.  About our Christmas.  About the fine strings of melted cheese, like spider threads, dancing about the post-christmas lunch table as Giordano’s mama spooned round pasta onto plates.  Rafaella’s well-worn hands, so intimate with the sponge and the warm, soapy water as she tended to the dirtied lunch dishes… and how that felt like an expression of cosmic intimacy.  About our distorted family dynamics…. So much life material burning my seams undone… I guess I’ll have to write a book!  Stay tuned.

For now, I’ll sign off by wishing you deep abiding peace.  May the innocence of the Baby Jesus pervade your mind, heart and Life.  It’s always right here within… we just have to WANT to see and feel it.  I hope you do! 

An Intelligent Emptiness…

Drip, drip, drip… the snow melts slowly outside.  Ten minutes ago I was about to spread open my laptop and nestle into a comfy writing space… when I smelled poop.  After a brief investigation, I discovered that it was smeared all over Fluffy Cute’s fluffy little “boodle”.  Fluffy Cute is Serena’s very fluffy and very very cute cat.  Boodle is one of my favorite terms of endearment for butts.  I love hearing Forest matter-of-factly refer to his anatomy as “boodle”.  At this point, on this rigorous and bitter path I tread, I’m all about cheap thrills and micro delights.  

So I washed her fluffy boodle in the kitchen sink with tea tree oil shampoo, changed the duvet cover, swept up all the stupid little feathers that cascaded out of the comforter when I unsheathed it, and now I am here!  This is the way it has been.  So many disruptions as I navigate my daily way.  On one hand, it’s frustrating.  On the other hand, it’s good practice in the under-rated art of letting go.   It has felt so bloody hard to move forward.  At least by the will of my conditioning…. 

The River of Life is always moving…  perhaps even “forward”, at that…

I always feel a little extra creaky in the joints as I attempt to write again after a too-long silence.  But I have so much to say. 

So naturally, I’ll start with the most crucial material.  I need you to know that Forest has a proclivity for sleeping with his toys.  No, not cute, fluffy stufties… Like plastic trucks and helicopters and leggos.  Sometimes he has a whole arm-load of accessories accompanying him to bed.  Then he’s all restless under the covers and perpetually preoccupied with organizing all the hard, clunky parts.  Sometimes they get lost and we have to pause the story, so he can pull back the comforter and recover the estranged toys.  This little dance of his never ceases to tickle me… even as I simmer with annoyance because I just want to read the danged book and make him sleep already.  He is currently obsessed with his truck book.  It just has pictures of trucks and construction and emergency vehicles.  We read it before nap AND bedtime.  Really I’m so sick of by now… but each time he chooses it, I challenge myself to encounter it new.  Insert dramatic, crying emoji face here______.

It’s cool to have one girl and one boy.  I am making a deep study of masculine and feminine energy.  Serena… with her deep, brooding emotional life.  Her incessant need for love and approval.  Her prudent movement through moments.  And Forest who just wants to know how everything works and is fierce to do it (whatever it is) by himself.  Individually, they are both delightful.  Together….  

Together they are a kick in the guts.  

These days my life feels like being bound and gagged in a glacial, stony torture chamber, made to endure too frequent deluges of infantile conflict, whining, crying, demands, needs (other than my own)… Thankfully this is interspersed with way too fleeting sunny moments of delicious harmony.  But seriously, if you want to torture someone to the point of madness, give them two (or more) children to care for without a supportive partner, without a satisfying (or even unsatisfying) sex life, without adequate social interaction.  Heck, just plunk them down in the countryside somewhere, ideally where they don’t speak the language.  

Oh Athena BASTA!!!  

Let’s stay positive my Love…  

Listen, I know I tend to dive and frolic in dramatic embellishment… and maybe that’s not the most nutritive course for us… but… If I pretend to be all tidy and positive, nobody wins either, because such hyper-positivity has little to do with real life.  I need to walk in the middle.  I need to inform you of the struggle.  Speaking of struggle, I remember Matt Kahn (my favorite spiritual teacher) once saying that success was waaay more surreal for him than the struggle ever was.  That really got my attention, because I thirst for the type of success that he has acquired:  spreading his love ministry far and wide, writing books, rolling in cash, praising the Lord every step of the Way.  

So in regards to my struggle…  I confess that I can feel it’s implicit rightness.  It is cultivating something within me that I deeply desire.  An intelligent emptiness.  

If “intelligent emptiness” sounds too vague to you, here is a concrete sketch of such a recent experience:  Giordano spent the night at our house because it was raining and he could not pick olives, nor press them by moonlight.  All four of us were packed into our “matrimonial” bed.  Ha!  Yeah, they don’t have the same names for mattress sizes here… so ours is probably equivalent to a “queen”… but it’s called “matrimoniale”.  Serena was snoring away, Forest was finally quiet after an unusual display of spunk and jubilance (I think because he was so happy to be with both parents at once) and Giordano was fading fast.  I was awake.  Listening.  Feeling.

Listening to the choir of breath.  Feeling the warmth of bodies and soft blankets.  My thoughts were slow and drifting, yet poignant.  I asked myself how would I experience this moment without a notion of past or future.  Love.  Love was the answer.  It was a perfect and beautiful moment.  Four creatures who care for one another, all nestled together in a confined, safe and soft venue.  

These days, the focus of my healing is in the emotional realm.  I have a team of healing allies who are offering me practices to illuminate, dissolve and refine my emotional life.  I believe that this experience of pure love is the fruit of the work I am doing.  Palpable love is always present…  that’s why Rumi said it is not our task to seek for love, but to seek and destroy the barriers to love within.  

Why do we pretend anything else is important?  

“Important”….

I remember writing a blog about wanting to be “important” back in the day.  You know, before… “cancer”.  I hate that word.  It only invokes unwieldy fear which too easily blocks the deeper implications of healing being summoned by the experience.  Words…  I often wonder why I am a disciple of words… when they can be such a corral to the spirit.  Being tethered to the word “cancer” feels like being crammed into a small, dark closet, and waiting to die.  That’s not the journey I am on.   I am digging deep to find…. my Self.  The ageless, deathless and true me.  I am seeking to make amends with the past, with my relationship to Life Herself.  

But anyway, ain’t nuttin like a healing crisis to refine your definition of “important”.  

What is important to me NOW?  Breaking stinky, life-negating habits.  Learning how to hear, feel and trust my innermost self.  Helping my kids be healthy and happy.  Helping myself be healthy and happy.  Learning to trust Life and follow Her lead.  Family.

Yes, you heard right.  I said “Family”.  Isn’t that funny?  Maybe it isn’t to you.  But up until a few moments ago, I would have sworn I was allergic to “Family”.  But then I took a year to be by myself and naturally there were perks to that, but overall it sucked.  I’d like to write a whole blog on this topic… but I can’t make promises at this point, because the undertow of Life is waaay too fierce these days.  Instead of half-empty promises, I will make a light yet fervent request of the universe, to shepherd me back to the blazing white pastures of Athena Graceland ASAP, so that I can sing you my fond song of fractured yet essential Family.  

Zombie Apocalypse Wedding Anniversary

For halloween I shall be a Zombie Apocalypse Bride.  Torn, blood stained white lace caressing dead flesh, wide and vaccuous sunken eyes, stiff, unrelenting swagger and the faint smirk of one who will not be deterred from her Mission….

Her Mission… Chasing love that cannot be.

Today is my third wedding anniversary.  Last year on this day I was partying down in my hospital bed after an abrasive brush with death.  Today I am in MY bed.  Pink walls all around, gay streams of pale autumn sunlight dripping and mingling with fleeting rainbow smears.  How much do you want to bet me that Hubby Dearest doesn’t remember?  I’ll bet you anything aside from my precious Life or Children.

And why SHOULD he remember?  We are mostly finished with our semi-erotic struggle, aren’t we?  I imagined so until last week when he “threatened” to move in downstairs.  He came around (after a long stretch of anonymity and segregation) and chopped wood for me and the kids, as the cold was upon us.  And he wasn’t even mean!  I was swooning.  Ha!  I find that mostly amusing (with a side of tragedy), that that’s all it takes to get my motor purring.  A man chopping wood for me and not attacking me!  Guess I still have some inner work to do…

Anyway I was enjoying the thrill… of dipping back into the choppy waters of “Family”.  Believe it or not 😉 I was growing weary being an isolated single mom of two in the less-than-romantic italian countryside.  

Serena and I got really into the TV series “Merlin”… the epic tale of Camelot.  We watched all five seasons.  Morgana, the evil yet stunningly gorgeous witch of the “Old Religion” had her favorite go-to torture device– a little wooden box with a cobra-esque snake inside.  Maybe it even had a few heads…  She used it when she needed someone to “talk”, as the pain it could inflict was unbearable, yet never fatal.  It could torture someone for eternity if they could stand it.  Numerous times I have derived self-contained amusement, imagining that MY personal torture snake is LONELINESS.  And isolation…

Lately it has been seering inside me.  The ungodly roar has become more fierce since we moved back to “The Family Home” (Giordano’s family home).  Here there is no neighborhood or shops nearby.  Taking a simple walk with the kids requires driving to a less busy road… which means I end up housebound often because it seems like too much trouble to get out.  I’m not complaining… just articulating the terrain for you.  Entering the glorious season of death, darkness and cold amplifies the situation.  When I was in the heart of my journey through illness, I was surrounded by caring, helpful people.  But as soon as I turned the corner back into the oft under-valued paradise that is Wellness, the glitter and dust cleared and I was alone with two littles in the lush throes of Nowhere.  

Are you following me?  Or is my devotion to the art of saying it beautifully obstructing your vista?  I’m telling you that the experience of hosting a loneliness who sprawls on for days, and weeks and years…. Starts to become unbearable.  It is cruel acid to one’s personal will.  It waits not for the anonymity of darkness to pillage and destroy one’s inner sanctum.  

Ok, that was dramatic.  I’m looking at my relationship to drama at this point, because I have noticed that She is a costly guest to entertain!  Creating little dramatic scenarios just so I can “get off”…  STOP THE MUSIC.  Flip the cassette.  Let’s groove to some mellow B-side love for a while!  Let’s get down with some peace on earth and mercy mild.  

So my body and heart are starving and then G comes and cuts my wood and we have a relatively minor tiff and then he kisses me deep in the doorway and I’m mostly into it.  Whaaaaaat????  I didn’t know we were doing THAT anymore.  Game on.

Yeah, I’m embarrassed to admit it didn’t take but a slight breeze to flip my switch and reel me back into the dubious domain of the rancid game of wistful wishing to be seen, heard, appreciated, MET by a man who just CAN’T.  Most of the “selves” inside me KNOW the impossibility of such a longing.  But not the Zombie Apocalypse Bride.  She has no interest in charting history and predicting relational trends.  She is a diehard for Family and that’s the end of the story.  Jagged teeth bared, she was petitioning me to plunge back into the deep end of the nuclear family pool and do my best not to sink.  

The self in me who has been holding out for ideal love was like “WHAAAAAAAAT????!!!  Are you out of your MIND???”  But the Zombie Bride tried to smooth talk her into crushing compromise…. “It’s no biggie that he never acknowledges you when you speak.  Only babies need to be acknowledged.  Heavyweight champions are far beyond such pettiness.”

Her argument was compelling.  In the name of seeing Forest happier.  In the name of maybe being slightly less tortured by the awful snake in the box… In the name of having slightly more help maybe.  In the name of having a man and his cornucopia of tools around to save a day now and again.  Maybe even in the name of a bit of decent sex.

If I had’ve written a blog last week (as I wanted to), the tone would have been completely different.  I would have been building a fortress of words to house my hefty hope, and inviting you to climb inside and enjoy a cold one with me.  I’ve been riding this slightly deranged spiral merry-go-round (Life) for forty one years now (let’s not even pop the top on the whole past life can of worms) and I’m starting to be privvy to my cyclic waves of delusion and sensationalism.  

But hoping feels good.  And so does the possibility of sacred compromise.  Giving up ideals in order to be more fully engaged and intimate with what (and whom) is actually here on this vivid stage with me.  

The actual experience of being close to Giordano rarely feels good.  Nor does the notion of relinquishing me heart’s desire- to be fully met in deliciously erotic love.  To attract a partner who adores me and is not afraid to show it; who lives for “doing the work”.  Not for ME, but for himself.  WITH me.  But yikes, can I please be done with relationships that feel like WORK???  Can “the work” feel gentle and respectful and sexy and FUN???  

I came too close to tossing my dream in the dumpster and diving back into the constricting pool of dissonance and distance in “love”.  But thankfully Giordano broke his word a few more times and then dissolved into olive picking oblivion.  And I’ve had some time for all the king’s horsemen and all the king’s men to put me back together again. 

Maybe he still will come back home…. But I will not be a gelatinous puddle of hope and willingness to settle.  What I am coming to see about myself (after too much suffering) is that the voices inside which represent extremes are not my TRUE Voice.  They are conditioned responses.  My True Voice lives in the middle; unattached to outcomes.  Only interested in presence, honesty, integrity and loving with ever-increasing purity and refinement.  She cares not for sensationalism, chasing highs, steamy make-outs and dramatic scenarios.  Her quiet passion is to meet Life, breath by breath with sobriety and friendliness.  

(And for the Record, I was NOT renouncing steamy make-outs.  Just saying that I won’t chase them down or sacrifice a single drop of my gorgeous Totality in their name.)

Salutations from the edge of the Cosmic Void

I once heard that we are always living “inside of questions”.  Questions that inform our choices, actions, words, inner terrain.  I like this notion because it’s a key to navigating Life.  Since the whole cancer extravaganza, the question that often surfaces in me is, “Am I dying or healing or ascending?”

I feel things I’ve never felt before.  They snag my attention.  I dig in… deep inside… flushing with desperation that seems to lift me like a helium balloon, far from the earth and my ea​​rthen body.  The not-to-be-missed experience of being out of control.  I am determined to make peace with this experience.  Actually, come to think of it, I’d love to make peace with every experience.  I’d love to value peace enough to choose it in every circumstance.  The only reason we are without peace, is because we don’t value it enough to choose it over the habits forged by a rigid and sniveling ego structure.  

Here is a perfect example!  My lion-hearted Russian housekeeper just dropped by to pick up some collagen our mutual friend is selling her so that she can be eternally young and perfect.  I was hunkered down on the sofa, bating in the cozy glow of my laptop screen and she asked me how I was.  I told her (in broken italian!) that these days are “pessante” (heavy).  I told her that I was writing down il mio mondo interiore (my inner world)  and she said why don’t I write a book.  Instead of smiling ear to ear and saying “Yeah Baby you can bet your stylish britches I WILL,” I got all teary and said how hard it is to write with the current circumstances of my life.  I said I wanted to write a book that was potent and valuable and she said I was strong and what’s inside me IS potent and valuable.  

Crying about my limitations is much more familiar to me than breaking on through to the other side.  Which history has proven, is waaaaay easier than the mind would lead one to believe.  It’s just a matter of being loose in the mind and emotions and moving forward, step by step no matter what.  Why do I looooove to feel sorry for myself and cry rather than giving myself to my Dreams and Destiny?

That is a question I do NOT love to live inside of!  

I prefer to live inside of a question like “what is the next step on the path of my heart’s greatest fulfillment?”  And “what am I grateful for today?”

Today is the five week anniversary of my most recent surgery.  It’s weird trying to compare the first one to the second one… though they were similar in that I was sliced down the middle each time, the context as well as the one experiencing the experience were quite different.  My emergency surgery was nearly a year ago… October 20th, 2020.  My own special, scintillating slice of twenty twenty vision.  Haha.  

This has been the most transformative year of my life.  And probably “Lives”…  I know that it’s easy to get hung up on the outer circumstances of this rough period of Collectively coming undone…  It’s wildly uncomfortable, out of control, unpredictable… But there are those of us who have been waiting for this moment in history for decades.  Watching the old systems groan and creak and crumble…. Wondering WHEN the real party would start.  Then covid danced down upon us like a gentle blanket of new fallen…. POOP!

(An aside- I have renounced swearing for the time being… My luminous, intuitive massage therapist suggested that this might be a healing practice for me.  If you know me, you KNOW that I have fought HARD for my right to mouth off freely.  But I value his perspectives and at this point, I’d much prefer to heal than be dumb old RIGHT.  I started to pay attention to WHEN the swear words started to flow… and saw that it was mostly from anger.  An inner response of hardening to Life.  Swinging my fists at this eternally unwieldy Game.  I do NOT need to hold onto THAT behavior.  Though I am ashamed to admit that I still haven’t tapped into the depth of self-discipline required to stop the cascade of fucks and dicks and asses that pour forth when I am upset with my kids.  I am working on it.  I publicly admit (to them) that this is not right.  “Mama is not doing right, but she is working on it.  I’m sorry.  That’s the best I’ve got in this moment…. But aiming to improve.”)

So the old systems are swaying in the bitter, bone-rattling winds of change… And over here, there’s a lot of letting go of The Old… but not a lot of generating The New… yet.  It takes courage to trust this molten, searing in-between.  

When I was in the hospital, I felt as though my hard drive was being erased.  I felt like a vegetable.  Totally debilitated, naked, empty.  I didn’t feel like reading books or having video chats.  I just layed there, gazing at a crucified Christ on the adjacent wall, or the invalid woman in the bed who rested below him…  She seemed to be hovering on the edge of life and death, without a lot of love and kindness to chaperone her from one world to the next.  It was heart breaking.  

My room in the “Pital” (hospital) was shared with three other rotating women patients.  It quickly became clear that there was an unspoken culture which decreed that the patient who was the most physically capable became a mother hen to the others in the room.  When I first awoke from my “intervento”, there was now way in heck (haha I’m soooo clean now!) that I could fill the role of Mother Hen to the others.  I couldn’t even take a full breath, due to the intensity and pain in my abdomen…

But toward the end of my hospital holy-day, I was hobbling around attending to the needs of the others.  (The nurses were really not so illuminated as I expected them to be at the PADRE PIO HOSPITAL!  Their personalities grated on us, metal on metal.)  One day, said old lady was having a difficult moment and the staff was not answering the service bell.  I came to her bedside and took her hand.  She held it as though her life depended on it.  I was deeply moved by the raw humanity revealed in such an act.  Don’t you think we all need such a compassionate hand?  But when we are “well”… we have enough defense mechanisms to pretend otherwise.  To pretend we can do it alone; that we don’t need a helping hand, or the love therein.  

It was a humbling moment of truth for me.  Maybe one of the most meaningful of my life.  

So I was emptied…

And now I’m home…

People are telling me that I am free from that old life of pain and disonance, and it’s time for me to write my new life into Existence.  Sounds like a no-brainer, right?  But I still feel so raw and undone that when I hold my poised pen to paper… I only hover intimately at the edge of the Cosmic Void.  I know that what I have is not what I want…. A single mother of two, consumed by the magnificent and faith-full act of self-healing.  I’m tired of being so tired.  I’m tired of feeling so isolated.  I’m tired of carrying a backpack full of boulders up this steep, crumbly mountain face.  

There is an art to knowing when to simply flow with what IS, and when to call on the inner warrior goddess and say ENOUGH NONSENSE, I choose something else.  

I want to manifest soul-satisfying work-  teaching online writing courses.  Leading real-time women’s circles dedicated to creativity and connection.  I want to reVIVE my love-drunk typewriter and pour forth healing words for the healing, upliftment and inspiration of ALL.  I want to write profound and groovy books that set others free.  

All of these dreams throbbing in a symphonic cry for realization within all that I AM.  I just need to lighten up and move forward.  Sounds profoundly simple…  But I feel like I’m wading upstream in a quicksand river.  

I know it starts where I AM.  

I know it starts with Gratitude for what I have.

A lot can be said for

The sweltering discipline of loving what IS.

Maybe it’s EVERYthing….

Slowly Swallowed by Surrender

Giordano told me today that he is dying and he will never forgive me.  Because I left with Forest…

Words are strong, aren’t they?  Wow.  Those words.  And the worlds they evoke within.  The universe is really making a grand effort to remind me of the POWer of words lately. (and moreso, the power of what is beneath and beyond them, which they aim to transmit…)  They are my Gift, and my Gift will be best given in the spirit of consciousness and reverence.  I’ve always done my best… but now I get to rise to the next level if I DARE be that awake and self referential and responsible.  And awesome.

But let’s talk about Forgiveness.  

When I first got my diagnosis I panicked.  I didn’t realize it, but I was operating under so many low-consciousness belief systems.  About cancer.  About disease.  About healing.  About myself and life and God.  (No wonder I got sick!)  The oncologist at the local hospital “Dr. Kundalini” told me I must start chemotherapy at once.  I told him I would get a second opinion.  Then I leapt into the abyss.  But I was still operating at a very gross level.  Powerless.  Fearful.  Desperate.  I hoped that being hyper controlling about my diet would save my life.  I went therapeutic keto and ate as much fat as I could… but it was never enough and…. my body said FERMA!!!  (That’s stop in italian.  Yeah I’m like SO inculturated that my body dabbles in italian!)  Instead my consciousness is slowly spreading open like a lotus emerging into the light.  And this is the true nature of healing.

Life sent me an AMAZING book.  “Healing and Recovery”.  It is spilling with diamonds that cut deep into my understanding.  It explains how to heal at the level of consciousness.  In the chapter about cancer, it said cancer can’t even grow in the higher energy fields which reflect Truth.  This book also refers to MY Good Book, A Course in Miracles, as it is a path of realigning with The Source through complete forgiveness.  

I am allowing Life to show me where I have been holding grievances and unconscious guilt, so I can let it go.  ACIM says that the Holy Spirit will assist with this process.  Thank frickin GOD because I don’t know how to do it alone.  But because MY LIFE DEPENDS ON IT at this point, I’m all about being helped by the Holy Spirit.  Honestly, I don’t even know exactly what the Holy Spirit IS…. but I’m sure it’s FANTASTIC and I’m jazzed to be assisted by such Cosmic Benevolence.  

Naturally Giordano is at the top of my list of grievances.  I just deleted the lines describing said grievances… as a part of my exploration around the power of words.  I don’t need to enroll you in his stupidity.  Especially if my commitment truly is forgiveness.  Look at ME, I’m growing UP!!  Haha.  He has given me myriad moments to meet myself in the darkest dimensions.  Hatred.  Rage.  Desperation.  Loneliness.  The Hard Stuff.  

But the Holy Spirit is helping me undo my seeing.  My self righteous view point.  I have no control over his behavior.  I can’t make him “do right” by way of a power struggle!  Funny that I even imagined that as the way and the light.  It’s so not.  In fact, binging on that behavior for two and a half years straight nearly KILLED me.   

But it’s damn tricky.  To keep practicing having boundaries.  Expressing my needs.  Without charge.  As kindly as I can manage.  But not fluffy.  Firm.  Clear.  Wow.  I just realized Darling Giordano is helping me strengthen my own inner masculine.  So are my kids, actually.  And so is Life.  If I had a shiny euro coin for every time I’ve needed to be held while on this “Italy Spree” and there was nobody there… Yup.  Rich Bitch.  But the beauty of nobody being there… is that I get to meet myself.  

I get to meet myself when people ARE there also….

I am learning hard but satisfying lessons.  Learning to hold myself.  Learning to trust myself.  My aforementioned book talks about how it’s ALL belief systems.  And we have the power to cancel them.  If our minds have the power to make us sick, they also have the power to make us WELL.  This is what I have been sitting with.  Letting it filter dowwwwn.  Innnnnn.  Opening to the sacred responsibility of being awake.  

Manuela Forte acknowledged me yesterday for walking the way of “natural faith”, and recognized the parallel between the healing journey I am now on, and the way that I birthed Forest.  Free from the constraints of meddling medical “authorities”.  Surrendered to the infinite wisdom of my body and soul.  I got dizzy trying to follow all the disparate external voices of “experts” (and a spray of arm-chair experts as well) and in the end, I fell back onto my own bony lap!  Haha it’s really not THAT bony these days… Anyway, it felt heavenly to be Seen.  Seen not through the eyes of conditioning, but for the deep and potent journey my soul is making.  This letting go, with as much trust as I can muster in a given moment, which is pumping into me at a slow, steady increase.  My mission is to fully surrender to The Source.  And to let this restored connection heal me on every level.  let’s not mess around.  Dig straight for the ROOTS, baby.

I have allies and guides on the Journey.  

But I am the only one who knows.  

And this is both thrilling and terrifying. 

(Just like men, but that’s another story!…)

Dance With Death (part II)

Then came Serena.  I took a few thwarted stabs at going to dance with her.  But then I was being mommy trying to dance, not Athena The Star.  I have lived six very sobering years, culminating with the past two and a half being the “Grand Finale”.  The Grand Finale of my old life.  My old self.  The irony, people, is that I ALREADY HAVE DIED.  A thousand times over.  I just haven’t left my body.  I am not ready to do so.  OH!  That reminds me of my Epiphany about life and death.  I’ll tell you in a sec!

(One element of this blog is my spontaneous comments on The Art of Writing.  Authentic writing requires TRUSTING THE MIND.  My Original Mind burst in and grabbed the wheel, hot to tell you about something other than what I was talking about… and if I was to be a “good girl”, I would have silently made a note or just pushed it aside and kept going.  But as the AUTHOR, I am incharge.  Let all the other Suckas follow the boring assed rules!  Author=AUTHORity)

Can you feel Edith Piaf’s impassioned voice boiling over behind these words?  It is… and it is touching my insides as they must be touched!  She transmits a depth of longing, experience, strength… that touches a world in me- wide awake and aching for S P A C E  and light.  She is singing me alive and I am writing you alive and YOU are______ .  It’s a fractiling domino chain of pressing wine out of our human struggles.  Does it get any better?!  Yeah.  If I was at the beach.  Or making transcendent love.  Or riding a horse.  

So in these recent grueling years, I would not have imagined that I was becoming what I most wanted to be (a clarified version of ME).  It felt like the farthest thing from what I was becoming.  My soul was withdrawing from this world because my experience sucked too much ass.  It was like walking through a looooong, daaaaaaark tunnnnnnnel.  I entered it through the portal of ecstatic dance six years ago, and last sunday, POP!  I finally made it to the other side.  Out into the light of intimacy and WHOLENESS.  And I am NOT going back.  I am SO fucking prooud of myself for the deep work I have done that I didn’t even realize `I was doing.  And this could be YOU too.  You might be sitting over there with your face melting off in the sweltering heat of your alchemical container and everything looks black and sludgy and you are thinking to yourself WHAT THE FUCK… Take heart my blossoming warriors, ambassadors and bearers of The Light.  You can TRUST in this alchemy.

My bounty of Ananda friends love to tout that “the joy is within you”.  And I confess that in my moments of “dark night” (most of my life), I have really hated to hear that, because then it’s like what the fuck is wrong with me for not having access to my own damn self????  But now that I am reclaiming my life and my Self, I am living this joy daily.  I feel it now.  It’s like a soft, breezy melody of my own soul, swelling inside me,  flushing me with prismatic glow.  Maybe I AM made of joy after all.  Haha.

But move over, Spiritual Polly-Anna!  Life sure ain’t all lovenlight.  `How many moments have I been cruising along in my sporty little joy bubble and an unwieldy wave of fear rushes in and knocks me on my bony ass.  Waaaaait, I asserted in my last blog that I was RIDING the waves.  Doh… well… I don’t know exactly how to metaphor-ize my experience… all I know is that I am going along fine and then in a lightning flash, I am on my knees, grappling for the highest course of navigation.  It’s usually body sensations that set off the alarm bells. (or Serena not listening and asking why twelve thousand times) Actually it’s more like the bell that sounds at the start of a boxing match.  And then I step in the ring, my bare chest glistening, a trail of blue gatorade still lingering on my chin.  Bobbing.  Weaving.  Jabbing.

Ok I went too far.  But it’s a wild experience to move so swiftly between joy and fear or anger.  Maybe it will make me so dizzy that I will lose my grip on duality once and for all.  I will only feign faith in the transient world of form.  THIS will be my emergence as “Our Lady of God-Drunk Grace”.  The woman I was born to be.

Or maybe I am just hopped up on some questionable sauce… But this is my prayer.  If I don’t make it that far in this life, guess I’ll just keep chipping away on my next galactic adventure(s).

Fuck that I didn’t come straight home from dance and WRITE IT ALL DOWN.  (In fact, while we’re on the subject, FUCK that I didn’t come straight home from EVERYWHERE and WRITE IT ALL DOWN.  My stories… they are a hopelessly swift waterfall spilling into an abyss.  On sunday, the dance was still throbbing in my veins, my cells, my nutrinos!  And now it’s… toilet water in the bay (time for a refreshed metaphor.)  

But here is THE climax moment of my whole dance:  It was toward the end.  As I was moving, I flashed on what my spirit guides told me- to call this cancer journey my “Dance with Death”.  I let the idea filter down through layers of my consciousness as I spun and shimmied and slithered serpentine.  The light was ON.  And I got that “dancing with death” is actually the equivalent to dancing with LIFE.  The yin-yang is not just a cool symbol.  It is a universal truth.  I realized that I am one of the privileged few… (maybe) who was graced with direct experience.  I am no longer regurgitating cheap universal wisdom.  I am paying my own way to WISDOM and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

When I was a child and a young adult, I suffered for not having the EXPERIENCE to match the wisdom of my soul.  And when I reached inside to find the book that I am meant to write… all I got was a blasted DIAL TONE.  Deep down I knew this was because I had essential experiences yet ahead of me, which would ripen my wisdom such that it would just fall on your head with a splat.  Fuck the strained, fabricated shit.  

Life wants FULL SURRENDER from me.  Full fucking surrender.  She told me this directly.  When I asked Giordano months ago to take Forest overnight, he refused.  Then, when I had (actually) let go, BAM!  He whisked Forest out of my bereft arms.  I feel a similar process happening with my writing.  I was desperate to “succeed” at my Art.  A desperation born of feeling “not enough”.  Like if I don’t realize my Gift in this life, I FAIL.  But the sheer beauty of having my life threatened is the realization that just BEING here is enough.  “Let the soft animal of my body love what it loves”.

Ah but the secret paradox is that from my current perch at the edge of the abyss, I am rediscovering my worth.  My edges have become softer (not to mention my gooey tootsie roll Center.)  I am genuinely content to flow through my days on winds of ineffable grace.

AND.

That said, I keep writing, because I MUST.  Because it feels so damn GOOD that it MUST be what I am here for.  And now for the moment that Athena Grace toots her own horn!  I have been getting some BITCHIN feedback lately.  I am some peoples’ Favorite Writer.  I move people.  And my writing has its own Life and Plan.  I just need to keep showing up and being receptive.

Can I approach Life and Death with the same depth of faith and surrender?

This is my aim.  By now it is no secret that I WANT TO HEAL and LIVE… but… do I have the ovaries to genuinely and wholeheartedly put mySELF and my LIFE in God’s hands?  I know that’s a dumb question on some level, because there is no other place that my SELF and LIFE could ever be.  It’s a matter of internal orientation.   Like that I can just go on tending my garden of joy, beauty, peace, sensuality, creativity, friendship, etc…. While doing all that is shown me to do to restore my body’s health… and let whatever comes come.  God I want to feel that free.  Not to suffer about what will happen to my kids if I die, or why didn’t I become a hella famous writer.  (Not just famous among my facebook friends and token random strangers.)  

No matter when it’s my time to leave this wacky spaceship, I want to go out blazing with PASSION.  I will be writing and dancing and making love and peeling back the endless folds of my enchanting (and deranged) emptiness.  Self, I promise NEVER to abandon you again.  If you say “GET THE FUCK OUT”, I will listen.  

God help me.

Dancing with Death (part I)

Well I survived my first night without Forest (since the hospital six months ago).  I had this raw dough gnawing feeling the whole time, but I made it!  Amidst my silent suffering, Shanti-ma reminded me to feel into FOREST and what HE wants.  He was very happy to be with his Nonnie and Papa.  I can see that it’s my own trip… I notice that I’ve come to rely on my sun’s solid, grounding presence.

Serena was elated to have me all to herself.  She practically became another person.  Cooperative.  Kind.  Sweet.  I mean those qualities are authentic to her nature, but lately amidst all the thrills and spills, the less savory aspects of her personality have been louder than I would prefer.  `I can feel her begging for my unwavering, unconditional acceptance, presence and holding… I try to give it to her… but I’ve been too starved for too long and I often feel desperate to… what is it?… To feel FREE.  Free to be me on my terms.  Haha.  Not really the “life context” of a (single) mother of a two and five year old.  When shit gets bad, I feel this wave of violence overtake me and I literally have to raise my hands to the heavens, as if begging for the Gods to intervene.  It works.  Mostly.  

Anyway, even though I wanted to finish my writing in the morning, Serena was content to be near me, watching cartoons.  Her satisfaction and delight were palpable.  Then as soon as Forest returned home, she flew south for the winter.  Meaning she lost her shit at every turn.  Well that’s clear communication.  Having a little brother has been a wound for her to contend with.  And a gift.  Their love spans the chasm where light and shadow merge.

Later in the morning we went to ecstatic dance.  Rachel, my neighbor, friend and life-line to California, organized it (at my urging).  ‘Member when I told you that I was exploring possibilities of who Serena could live with if I died?  Well Mirabai has first (and only) place at the moment.  But honestly, I am so focused on healing, I have not been paying much attention to that.  I just brought it up because Mirabai is a professional tango dancer.  And as soon as she entered my field, I realized DANCING will save my life.  I’m not kidding. TANGO, people!  The most passionate dance there is.  The message sunk straight into my soul:  Dance or Die, Bitch.

But what I didn’t know is how light and freeee I would feel on the dance floor!  Fuck those words “light” and “freeee” because you have heard them so many times that your mind slid right over them without barely registering the MIRACULOUS nature of lightness and freeness.  It was the REAL easter.  Resurrection at it’s finest.  

Ok, this is where I break a sweat.  Coaxing the english language to do justice to a physical, emotional and spiritual experience….

It was a small group of women (maybe seven?), which made it an entirely safe container for full expression.  There was plenty of space and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  Every song on Rachel’s playlist rubbed me the right way (not such a common experience at ecstatic dance).  `I am noticing and affirming ease these days, and there was a delicious feeling of ease about being on the dance floor.  hOMe.  

I was WITH myself.  At a level I have never experienced in this body, in this life.  An unprecedented fullness, peace, kindness.  Eyes closed, a voice inside me whispered “I feel like a STAR”.  I told that voice, “YOU ARE A STAR”.  And in the lucid floodlight of my own self-granted permission, I came alive at a whole nother level.  I resurrected the young one who received the message that it’s not ok to shine.  (Little Dawniecakes spent her “childhood career” being invisible because she didn’t feel safe)  My desire is that my full self expression will liberate others ready to emerge from their self-imposed cage and FLY. 

I haven’t seriously danced since before Serena was born… I’m pretty sure… although committing that to “paper”, it looks absurd.  Pure sin.  “Looks to be”… but in actuality, it was a potent barometer of my growth.  The version of me who existed six years ago, though she gave as much of herself to her dance as she was able, there were many “inner rooms” which were still locked.  This translated as a lot of my energy “going out”- like long, curious fingers groping about the “otherness” in the room.  All this externalized awareness was exhausting.  Don’t get me wrong… I still LOVED dancing… but I could only access a limited amount of my SELF.

A Night Without Forest

This one goes out to alla y’all who are experiencing intense waves of fear recently.  I’m with you.  Riding some hella gnarly waves.  But riding them is certainly preferable to being knocked down, sucked under, washing machined, obliterated….

This morning I woke up and was feeling strange sensations in my liver and WOOOOSH!  In no time, my heart was pounding.  Just like that.  Standing before the gas range in my kitchen at five am, illuminated by the stove light, I pressed my hands against my heart with gentle yet firm pressure.  It felt like I was free falling through emptiness and all there was to hold onto was this vulnerable vehicle of flesh.  

I know my work is to STAND STILL.

Stand still and let the fear speak it’s piece while I listen with presence and compassion.

I got this inner nudge to call on Saint Germain and his all consuming violet flame, so I found an exquisite photo of him on the internet and saved it on the lock screen of my phone.  As soon as I flashed to the lock screen to view the fruits of my creativity, the time flashed 5:55 in a blaze of white light from his forehead.  I felt like he rushed through the phone, into the heart of my consciousness.  I knew that 555 was an explicit message from him, so I googled it.  555 is the number of change. Transformation.  Shedding of the old.  Emerging as the Woman of my Dreams.  As I read the extensive message, my pulse slowed again and the fear dispersed like fog in sunlight. 

Gaia took the kids up to the mountain so I could have some space.  I want to tell you about Gaia because she is a divine messenger sent from heaven to shepherd our family through this stormy summit.  Yeah, I really could write a whole blog about Gaia in our life.  How present, attentive and loving she is with Serena (and Forest, although he is not in need as Serena is…  He is like a peacock.  He can swallow poison and transmute it in his blue shiva throat.  I am in awe of that tiny boy.), how she triggers me, her profound devotion to God, the spiritual synergy between us…  

Plus we still have beloved Rosa.   THANK YOU LIFE, FOR SENDING THE “BIG GUNS” to our family at this sensitive time.  Your grace has not slid under the radar.  When I reflect on all of the bitchin souls around me, I nearly fall to my knees in reverence for the magnitude of goodness in our lives.  But then what about the grace of the less savory characters in my story?  (Not mentioning any names 😉  Byron Katie says that our ENEMIES are our REAL friends because they help us grow and evolve, whereas a lot of times, our “friends” just blow smoke up our asses and make us feel good about ourselves.  Listen we are free to

Ha!  I just ended a paragraph in mid sentence.  Soooo wrong!  But I HAD to break the rules just for the sheer BANG of it.  I know that’s immature.  But oh well.  I got off. 😉

I stopped in mid sentence because I only have a smattering of minutes to write and I confess that I was guilty of Beating Around The Bush.  I always have a ton to say… but… in this moment there is really only ONE thing to say:

I just received an audio from Giordano saying that his mom wants Forest to spend the night at their house tonight.  A few months ago, I was pushing for this.  Hard.  Giordano dug his heels into the ground and refused on the grounds that he and Forest were still traumatized from when I was in the hospital in October.  I retorted with “but if I go back to the hospital or die, he will need to have a place where he feels totally safe and comfortable.”  Even though that makes total sense intellectually, G was not ready emotionally and he held his ground.  I was pissed for a while, but honestly I do not enjoy feeling pissed, so daily, I tried my hand at surrender.  Little by little I got to a place where I felt more peaceful than not in regards to our circumstances.  

And then, of course, they shifted.

I have become deeply attached to Forest.  His soul has a solidity about it that is breath-giving… for a 20 month old.  I get a sense that all of the relational drama and ego bullshit around him just rolls like water off a duck’s back.  I love watching sleep claim him each night… his eyelids becoming increasingly heavy until he can no longer keep them open…. His hands touching my face, a contented smile spread across his cherubic face.  The way he plays with his belly button for comfort.  On tuesday morning, he fell and hit his head on a cement corner.  He cried for all of one minute.  There was a lot of blood.  We cleaned the wound and applied a bandaid… but when I checked it later in the afternoon, it was too open, so we went to the hospital and he got two “punti” (stitches in Italian).  I know I’m veering off the road again, but I had to tell you about that moment, restraining him on the padded table in the emergency room….

God it hurts my heart to remember.  The crescent shaped needle penetrating the flesh above his right eyebrow.  His red, tear streaked face.  All I could do is repeat “I love you” like a mantra.  When he repeated through his heart-wrenching cries, “I love you”, I shattered in a thousand pieces.

Oh god, now I’m crying.  But I’ll keep writing through my tears.  Words can’t describe how I love him.  And now, tonight, he is sleeping with his “Nonnie” (he made that word up himself, instead of calling her “Nonna”) and my heart is broken.  I don’t feel ready to hand him over to The World.  

Now it’s 8:13am and I am back to complete this installment of the ecstatic trials of Our Lady of God-Drunk Grace.  I did not imagine it would feel like this to release Forest to the other half of his family.  It’s been this incessant tugging ache in my chest the whole time.  An uneasy feeling that something essential is missing.  

But then Serena is ELATED.  She is basking in the exclusivity of my attention.  A little piece of me is resisting surrender to this, because I had a fantasy that I might actually get an extended and exclusive spree with my own beloved Self.  But pouring my attention on Serena is like watering a thirst-stricken plant.  She becomes plump and bright and precious.  And this is a priority.  I hear the crisp crush of juicy apple against her little baby teeth as she perches on the couch behind me and watches Peppa Pig.  Even though we are not “doing something” together, there is a palpable intimacy in our nearness.

Loving Serena is an exotic yet efficient scenic route to loving myself.  But one of the more difficult of endeavors.  I’m not quite sure why… maybe because I still believe that there are more important things in Life than healing.  (Healing= restoring connection to Source/Love within)  At 10:30am we will DANCE!  A little “ecstatic dance” for the wilder strains of humans laced in the surrounding agriculturally persuaded, forest-dappled, sprawling hills.  I’m looking forward to a literal “dance with death”.  Meaning a space where I can EMBODY all of the kaleidoscopic feelings that rise and fall within me as I partake in this courageous dance with death.  Where they can move and breathe and exist in the hallowed Light of Perfection.

I have been hesitant to write much about Giordano, because it is such a sensitive subject.  But I need to.  For my healing.  Stay tuned… but for now, I will say that our ships are drifting to opposite horizons of their own accord… and this makes sharing Forest all the harder.  Because there is no safe-porting or generosity or togetherness throughout the process.  Which makes it grate on my insides like metal on metal.  For example I texted him to check in last night and I didn’t get a reply for hours and then this is what it said, “Everything ok”.  Wow Giordano, che profundo.

But Saint Germain told me, “No matter what challenges you are facing, you are sure to be on the verge of health, abundance and love on a level you’ve never experienced before. You shouldn’t let yourself be held back by some skittish emotions. Embrace the new and cast away the old. Affirmations are a great way to do this.”

“Skittish emotions”… is THAT all St. G?  Ok, then I will loosen my grip and let them slide through my soul’s fingers like cool spring water, as I embrace the rapid fire changes streaming through my life right now.  I will stretch the skin of my awareness and let it span the cosmos.  So my heart aches….? Perhaps heart ache is but another flavor of ecstatic Existence.  Perhaps it has its own intelligence and purpose.  Perhaps when I hold it up to The Light, it will cast rainbows about the walls of Infinity Within.

How Thick Can One Plot Get???

Sometimes Life gives you a whopper of a story- special sauce squirting all over you, wilted pickles pleasantly sour, mystery meat grease lingering on your tongue for weeks.  

Eleven days ago, I took a risk and chose to spend sunday with “The Family”, rather than indulging in the rare and exquisite delicacy of Aloneness.  If you have been following me for a while, maybe you cringed at the uncouth, kaleidoscopic possibilities that such an activity unearths.  I didn’t.  I was brave.  But still it hurt.  Many times over.  Early on, G and I got into a potentially benign tiff, which of course escalated, and then he threatened to leave with Forest and never come back and even though I know that’s a crock of colossal bullshit because he won’t even take our Sun for a damn overnight, it still affected my nervous system in a caustic way.  These little moments where the sky crashes down on me like corroded metal.  And I am declaring it Officially Unacceptable.  

Gently unacceptable.  You know, Gandhi style- stone cold chillin’ on the capitol steps, beaming starlight and broadcasting wellbeing for forty days and forty nights with no food and no water.  Only smiles, sincerely kind words and blessings or sacred-stained silence.

By the end of the day, my heart was RAW.  Do you know how to say “raw” in Italian?  Crudo!  Yeah, my heart was hella crudo.  And then my phone rings and it’s Dhuti, who’s house I am subletting.  (Love you Dhuti!) My nervous system has like one thread of synaptic sanity left… so I decline the call.  But the ringing flairs up again.  She is fierce to get me.  “Hi,” I say with flat, slightly agitated voice.

Long preamble…

But I know where it’s going.  The landlords asked me to leave.  

Yep, a single mama with two kids, healing cancer, left her husband after he was physically violent (let it be known that I kicked him under the covers in bed once!!!  Many times.  Until he wouldn’t talk to me anymore.  I was mad because he interruped me and showed zero interest in what I was sharing, which happened to matter deeply to me.), in a fucking foreign country.  Don’t get me wrong, I am not making myself a Victim Sundae with whipped cream, nuts and a cherry.  I’m just marveling at the plummeting drops and sprawling, panoramic expanses of this story as I ride it like an epic, gnarly wave to the shore on the other side of Life.

I am currently undergoing a process of undoing my default habits of mind and emotion.  So while I was tempted to crumble under the destabilized weight of the circumstances, instead I said to God, “Ok Lord, your hand is mighty obvious in this… so what would you have me do NOW?” 

–Let me just give you the abridged version of the “back story”, which is that a couple days before, the landlords (an old couple whose ancestors have probably tread this medieval  wonderland since Jesus and the dinosaurs roamed the earth) where here trimming trees in my yard and I asked them (in broken italian) if I could grow a garden here (there is a wonderful open space, begging to become a garden…).  The darling oldish lady told me that the house belonged to her, and back in “The Day”, her Zia (Auntie) used to have a garden there.  Hearing this warmed my heart, as I felt that I would be carrying on a legacy, an alliance between Earth and Woman.  

Fast forward ONE DAY… and… I am asked to leave.  ASAP.  

People, I’m forty one by now.  (and yes, the Yoniverse did NOT pass over my golden chance at a midlife crisis, as I imagined it would) (I thought this because my whole life has been sorta crisis-y… so I thought it would be like black on black.  But nope.  I have plenty to unravel!)  Having whipped around the sun a few times, I have had many-a-door fling open or slam in my face and I know this is by Intelligent Design.  I have felt Heaven dripping sweat upon my haloed crown as She works tripple time to direct The Flow from Above.  So instead of panicking, I calmly said to God, “Ok Dude, so what’ve you got in mind?”

And I was sure He said, “Thou shalt go back to Giordano’s house”, and so I did.  Well… I brought a huge duffle of clothes and some plants and vitamins and stuff….

But no sooner had I set foot on our familial soil… than my wise and benevolent gut said “Girlfriend, get the fuck out of here, ASAP.”  And I did.  And I did not look back.  But I laughed nervously with Rosa as I realized that if I had a thousand dollars for every time I had packed my massive, black duffle bag with a pounding heart, I would…. Have enough to put down on a ramshackle little house in the Italian Countryside to call my own.  (Which is something I am exploring….)

FEAR.  It was as if I was waking up from a thick sleep.  I know that you’ve heard that one a bazillion times…. But… that’s because it cuts to the heart of a very common human experience, which is along the lines of wash, rinse, repeat.  That of sleepwalking through Life, buried beneath a heavy pile of programs, which most of us are doing… and then suddenly being aware that we have not been aware.  In that moment, it simply was not ok to be spoken to with such cruelty.  Period.

So with as much certainty and quintessential rightness as I could  scoop up in my prayer-stained palms, as if riding a revolving door, I stuffed said bag full of my modest existence and drove back to my american refugee camp in the beautiful and “intimate” (a friendly mode of expressing the way everyone is up in each other’s business…) Morano Madonnuccia (the perfect name for the village called home by a woman who was once a girl who blushed and swooned and daydreamed of Madonna.)  Turns out it’s not legal to kick people out of their homes during covid.  Even if they are not on the lease.  

I will find another place as soon as I can… but in the meantime, I feel very blessed to call this hOMe.  And I completely trust.  Life has never dropped me.  (maybe I’m not hot enough???)  Especially not when I am living in fearless alignment with my values.  This act never goes unacknowledged by Life.  She eats that shit UP.  

Isn’t that a juicy plot twist?!?! At first I imagined that the “lesson” was to humble myself and choose family.  But I quickly realized that the lesson was to TRUST MYSELF and have no qualms about getting the fuck out of a toxic environment.  Choosing myself, choosing Life, choosing health and peace and wellbeing.

I’m still not perfect, because I can’t always remain cucumber cool and unresponsive when he says antagonizing shit… but I’m getting better.  Also getting better at not yelling at my kids.  Thanks Mama Cannabis.  (I will anchor this new habit into my system, so that I am not dependent on “help” to achieve a sprawling state of radical kindness.) 

I feel scared to admit that I’m done trying with G.  Truthfully, I have been feeling this for a while.  But I felt way too vulnerable to say it out loud.  In fact I still haven’t said it to G.  Does that  make me a shmuck to say it here first?  Yes.  Or maybe not.  But.  G has shown me that he’s not always capable of being “decent”, even when I am soft and unguarded.  No mi piace.  Right now I need decency.  I’m not enlightened to the point of being untouchable yet.  (I have a feeling that’s not tooooo far down the road at the rate I am traveling…)  I feel vulnerable. Being in a country that is not my own.   Caring for two kids.  I guess the good thing is that since I am not dependent on G for much at this point (except the car), I don’t have much to lose.  Actually that’s not true.  I have a child that I have become soooo attatched to… and some semblance of peace to maintain in my heart and home.