Releases in Breathing

A lot has been going though my mind lately. Too much to stop and take the time to write it here in any coherent way. So I decided to just write it and hope that in maybe a sentence or two may make sense.

I have been having many dreams lately of women, sagely women in fact. It's been happening for a while now since I wrote "Spirit voices" as posted earlier. At that time I met a bunch of older women and thought that the message was that I needed to learn something from them. I have been doing just that. I have been gathering encouragement to grow emotionally and in my writing. I have been learning to be me in all situations no matter what is happening around me or what anyone else thinks. I have been loving openly. Lately as trivial as it sounds I have been learning to breathe.

Doing Yoga I am learning unfortunately that my mind and body doesn't relax, never relaxes. My mind being an abstract painting or swirling brush strokes is actually quite normal being bi-polar. Especially lately that I am in manic mode. But imagine trying to clear your mind and meditate and just breathe to realize that you just can't. It is quite scary. Now that I am aware of it I seem to be trying to relax in everything I do.

The last exercise we had was to send positive energy and good universal wishes to someone we love. A tear started rolling down my cheek I started trying to fight it then remembered "Sat nam". If I am the embodiment of truth then my love is true, and the fullness I felt of sending that true love is true. A stretch I know but it is the best I could explain the feeling I had that evening....though I still could not relax.

I lie awake at night and try to relax my body to the point where I am soaking into the bed bit by bit. Of course concentrating on this means my mind is working and still not relaxing....and when I do sleep, the women come.

Oshun comes.

Oshun is the beautiful and benevolent Orisha of love, war, life, marriage, sex and money. I am not Orisha. I have an Orisha grandfather who had a great influence on my life and self image however. I did not know about Oshun. She came to me one night, I cannot remember now the circumstances of the dream but she walked up to me and said very clearly "You have a gift, stop ignoring it." At first I wondered which gift she was talking about. I asked her her name and she smiled at me kindly, knowingly, "you know me .....(she called me by another name I cannot remember)" and started to walk away. I laughed and called after her (in another language) calling her Oshun.

Later the name kept coming up. My friend mentioned her. Apparently it was the time of Oshun in the Orisha faith. It still does not mean more than a slightly passing fact to me. However, I accepted her advice and started paying attention to all of my gifts and am awaiting the epiphany moment that should tell me what my next move should be. For now I am practicing to breathe.

Truth I Am

The purpose of the writer is explained very simply. We are the present representation of the truth. Our magic lies in not only capturing but re-directing that truth an element as flexible as probably anything you would ever come across. I have been thinking about this recently and realized that in fact whatever a writer writes once written becomes the truth. The fact is that the moment you pick up my writing fictional or non you are expecting a truth from me.

Now consider that alongside what i call surreal writing only cause I don't quite know the actual literary name for the form. Lately I read a book called "Like Water for Chocolate" written by Laura Esquivel. The novel takes you on an emotional ride using the ingredients of recipes set to time. The writer starts the novel talking about chopping onions finely to prevent crying and goes on to speak of her aunt Tita. The second paragraph starts

"Tita was so sensitive to onions, any time they were being chopped, they say she would just cry and cry; when she was still in my great-grandmother's belly her sobs were so loud that even Nacha, the cook, who was half deaf, could hear them easily. Once he wailing got so violent that it brought on an early labor. And before my great-grandmother could let out a word or even a whimper, Tita made her entrance into this world, prematurely, right there on the kitchen table amid the smells of simmering noodle soup, thyme, bay leaves, and cilantro, steamed milk, garlic, and, of course onion. Tita had no need for the usual slap on the bottom, because she was already crying as she emerged; maybe that was because she knew then that it would be her lot in life to be denied marriage. The way Nacha told it, Tita was literally washed into this world on a great tide of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor."

Every time I read that passage cause I did more than once a smile comes from my heart. The fact is that that flood of tears brought on y onions with the power to move a child unborn to a flood of creation "Yes I know how that sounds" is marvelous. And whether you as the reader believe it fully or not the fact remains that that flood was Tita's truth. The ability to shape something like that into a believable truth is not as simple as it seems. I have been practicing to write my surreal truths mostly about fire. For some reason the image of fire and the concept of heat and all that can come with it refuses to let me sleep a full night. I'm still practicing.

I started my first Yoga class yesterday. Kundalini Yoga with Elspeth Duncan. During the class she introduced us to the chant "Sat Nam" which means "Truth is my identity" It is a powerful thing to be the personification of truth, a liberating realization and an almost daunting responsibility still I had to think of the truth the writer reports, creates, represents and I had to smile to myself. Every time I pick up my pen I create truth. I send a truth out to the universe. Remember "Stranger than Fiction" with Will Ferrell? Imagine if every character you created was real, what about the ones you left hanging with no end to their truth? or the ones you killed off just cause you didn't know where to take them next.

After a friend of mine read some of my earlier work she asked me "Does everyone die in your stories?" Now that I know my pen sounds out a truth, my truth in many ways I guess I will have to reconsider some of my endings. They still aren't going to be happy and honky dory cause most things in life just don't end that way right? Still it's important to remember that conviction "Sat Nam."

Change's fear

And still….
I would reach to you
to hold, and hope
through star kissed fingers,
in greying days,
the feelings you whispered
into the past,
like diseased memories
slithering, scarred, pink
into my now.
Stopping them where they
lie discarded, mouldering
in waiting for
the movement of Death to pity.
Change has passed them,
skipping time for fear
that they may catch
and spread beyond
logical repair, her only
thinly veiled
hold of me.