My first three books released are never what I would’ve intended to’ve put out in the world if any had asked me years back what I would be expending my energy voicing creatively. That through being inspired towards a life in love with rewilding and loving humanity in all its complexities in my own ways of perceiving, embracing my darkness and light simultaneously, and the darkness and lightness of the heritages I am intrinsically a part of, that that would result in me experiencing the things that life led me to consequentially endure. Though truthfully, it was the light that I avoided more.  Regardless, that my larger work would emerge out of a fight or flight necessity, such an exploration for pushing for the most human base level he­­althy boundaries to be even acknowledged. Not even respected, just acknowledged. Like stepping back into the dark ages.

Quite the irony of response for someone whose living mantra dream led was moving towards embodying and becoming “why fight, outcreate”, illuminating how my inner world was stirring. But sometimes we have to meet the world how it meets us, don’t we?  And I’ve most of my life still ahead of me assuming I maintain my good health in blessing moving forward.

That such gross grassroots organizing could have grown to’ve been experienced as so abusive personally by little me, someone by all sane measures who was completely unseen and of zero relevance. I mean I had my intuitions and subtle experiences with activist dehumanizing realities, witnessing similar effects on all sides, but I still clung to narratives of injustices past for excusing them in some directions, until I couldn’t. When they were thrown in my face in demanded contradictions. I just would not have even had the dehumanizing imagination or drive to foresee what I was ultimately led to see happening.  And it nearly killed me in heart ache to see so much pain being deliberately chosen to be inflicted in real time, yet to also have a deep reminder lesson in seeing that we are never truly broken brought something totally alien to such deeply explored heart ache as well.

To feel so boxed in and suffocated and powerless to do anything about it other than disappear for good in any life participation outward sense was the worst experience I have ever experienced. Far worse than overcoming the history of having had a pedophilic father. To’ve lost trust in the goodness of everyday humans, and to’ve fought so bloody hard within to not lose that. The ones who are supposed to be like any of us, from any direction, and any background.  The random and well intentioned.  Synchronicity pinged ones.  To see them just as privy and deeply so, in so many places I turned, in something trying so very hard to stomp out and hurt you in ways unfathomable.  Toughen up as some would say, and that may not be untrue, because it exists, but not being tough in the face of it doesn’t change anything about it.  What was made with it.

Yet to fall into the graces of the overarching collective love portrayed from it, was to embrace being unquestionably controlled in ways most were made blind to, so that wasn’t an option either, to surrender within it as good intentioned, nor towards educators educating against it too who were plenty.  I couldn’t get away from individuals involved in it, somehow, or wondering if they were, and yet my heart, I see hindsight how I kept observing breaking my own heart by doing so because it was determined to find my own way to not just close down and hibernate from the outside world forever.  That, I knew I could do, as that’s where they had mostly found me, hence me mattering so little, but that was the easy path too.  And I’m not one to choose easy roads.

It sounds crazy to reflect on it. That I even kept looking or standing up for myself at all, trying to figure out what it was, but it became far too personal as many labor for it to be. I don’t think I’ll ever make full sense of it. Nor do I necessarily want or need to. Jeanette Armstrong’s words for never discussing details of traumas past ring differently now. I understand them so well in my own way, and I am trying to heed them terribly, poorly through the personal most of all. It takes so much strength and courage to do so. There will come a day where I won’t speak of a lick of it at all. My speaking is but my boundary making. Me taking back my innocence, refusing to be controlled, and wholeheartedly going my own way.

How does one reconcile a deep and needful falling out of love with humanity in larger conversational aim potentials and senses having seen an absolute centralization of control from the grassroots up as an unyielding wickedness of sorts in it, everything grassroots thinking was supposed to be against, so I thought from how I’d listened, while still holding onto love for life and the human complexities of living in this life at the same time?

I don’t have the answers for such a juxtaposed question but work by work I’m getting closer to what works for me in such a reckoning. An inner peace and balancing that I don’t need another soul to harness within. I’ve found myself so far distanced from relating to most because of what I’ve experienced. Everyday conversation feels rather distant. And I don’t know if I ever will again. I mean I will in that I know my inner warmness, and I see others in simple acts as such when I am serving tables as a waitress, when they feel it, but to truly relate to others closely so as to feel seen closely I can’t say for certain I will again because the gap between will never really be known or seen outside of me as to what made it. And I’m responsible for a lot of it too, but I can’t say how much better many others would’ve done if they’d been put through the same as I was in the same ways.

But my work is that for me now. A bridge for myself to see others again and being open to being seen if even in the smallest ways after being put through living hell by even some of my once most beloved of friends who I’d shared countless meals and moments with. Those that I’d thought would be there until the end of this life without question prior. To have lost so much love in such a short time, by forced interjections, very real suicides of others caught in similar things, and untimely deaths that life also threw at me, there are no words for the ways I’ve changed.  But the ways I have not mean vastly more to me.

Truth be told, my trip to Europe was me saving my own life. Trusting that I would find my way by trying something totally new and in absolute solitude as that is something I have always turned to in times of actual personal challenge. Europe, all on my own, gifted me that and more in ways I’ve always somehow known mattered and that it would. And not some temporary vacation kind of escape, but lasting imprints that can always be carried with me. It just took me moving towards it and the ancestors, human and non-human, took over all the rest of the details of working out my return home being just the medicine I needed.

In the trenches of coming back stateside to the gutted aspects of life I now live here in, without longing to return to what once was community here for me, slowly am I readying to share more again, though without any time frame or pressure within of what that will look like. And least of all, expectations it will land anywhere with anyone. That is not really the artist’s purpose. And looking outward at present, that is not my world as I see it. We must all confront our reality right before us in any given moment. They won in that I am mostly unrelatable for most I now feel. I won in that their projected annihilation did not overtake me.

My first books out came through at light speed as a trilogy ultimately during an immense period of surviving what no human should have to endure. Though in our own ways, we all did, didn’t we? Humans in the West that survived what the future may know as Covid scandals. A worldwide phenomenon. When, from my experiences, social justice warriors, and the woke beyond them collective hive minding globally, were given full reign to box everyone in to tune more into tuning in by any and all means necessary, so triangulations could gain better control and drown out alternative synergies by isolating us all. When online bullying hit record scaling, designedly and was well funded to do so too. The things most will hopefully be grateful they never had to have witnessed closely, though far too many did too though. A burden of proof that is not on me or survivors of grief that experienced it, but on those who were lifted up and beat down through power others.

I still sure wish I hadn’t gone through it, even as I find full grace slowly to be grateful to’ve seen what I’ve seen. It’s twisted, I know this. But it was in its wholeness, so of course reflections on it too would be for someone devoted across one’s life provenly to working with soul alchemy to better their life through expansion through lessons. Though perhaps before I never had such language specifics for expression.

I feel like I’m coming out of a nightmare, but I made it. A nightmare where even God was made to be nightmarish all over again. I used to have a hard time with that language, saying God at all. Having had childhood experiences where religion itself put children in harm’s way in the name of God, and to’ve met so many early on who experienced the same. To’ve been delivered worse, yet under the guise of everyday grassroots humans, including indigenous peeps strongly involved in it, and far more, who could be anyone anywhere, no longer just those representing God in power structures, but common folk who allege to know trauma themselves, and be defenders of the voiceless, for them to leverage abuse as the sacred in Creator’s defense, in God’s name, so abusively, in ways that are not even sane to be voiced for those that haven’t experienced it and experienced it abusively. It’s a miracle I’m alive and didn’t just lose my mind or kill myself.  Especially given that I had not a friend left to turn to about it.

By the grace of the ancestors, I am so strong in saying that now, a few kind hearted souls seen along the way, and the sheer resiliency and beauty more fully tapped into within me, I survived. It’s like seeing yourself on the other side of hell and giving yourself the biggest hug you could’ve ever wanted.

I hope in time my works of dancing with light and dark so vulnerably put out into the ether can help others along the way in ways they need somehow. Those for whom the alleged light they are exposed to from the external world coming in on them feels more like a raping of the soul and hell than anything one wants to bask in as sunlike.  Those are my kind of people.  And I have to trust they’re out there, yet even if they are not, my work is but my own healing and conversation across generations far greater than the one living one that we are all a part of. In less than 200 years we will all be seen as one generation.  So easily we forget this.

So easily we forget so much. The manners in which I am humbled through relational teachings as I experience them are my own inspiration for how petty our trials in time really are.