State of Wilderness

I went for a walk around the lake the other night on the paved trail I walk on often. On my walk, I noticed a rock that stood out to me. There were several planted trees near the park, and all had a nice bed of mulch and dirt, and just one tree had this bright, white and light brownish-ish, egg-shaped, hand-sized rock in the mulch. I thought about picking up that rock and claiming it as my own, a gift from the universe, or at least from this trail that I spend so much time on, but I didn’t want to have to carry this heavy rock the rest of the way home.

A couple of days later, I had forgotten about this rock but happened to be back in the same area, taking my lunch break at the park. I had time for a short walk, so I started down the path, and my eyes were drawn to that rock again. On the way back to my car, I decided to pick it up and take it home.

That evening, I took a good look at the rock. It was thick, made of clear or white colored quartz, with a vertical pink line visible in the middle. I washed the rock in my sink, trying to scrape off what I thought was a layer of grime from its backside. The rough debris did not come off, and I realized these rough edges, although not originally part of the rock, had become a part of it over time and has given it character, like the pink line. They are both signs that this rock had been through some trauma but had come out not only intact, but with depth of character.

I feel that rock’s essence as I contemplate my own journey through life.

Over the weekend, I had attended an Inner Child Healing workshop, and we were assigned some homework. Last night I worked on some of these homework assignments. One was to buy our inner child a gift. I had a hard time not feeling awkward choosing a child’s gift in the store, and I also found it to be a struggle to buy something just for myself. The only way I was comfortable with this really was to combine this trip with a holiday gift and grocery shopping run, with the things I was buying for myself blending in with so many items I was buying for other people.

When I got home, I opened the packaging on the two toys I had chosen and attempted the next part of the assignment: play with them. Playing was also awkward. I tried to remember how I used to play, enlisting the help of my young son to help me remember how. Along the way, I realized that not only does he not really play with toys himself anymore, but that he didn’t really play with toys the same way I did. Eventually, we made play time work out, and then I placed the toys on my altar to remember this moment by.

Later, I lit a candle and held on to an object that reminded me of my inner child. It was a Playmobile angel character with a blonde hair cut like mine as a child, dressed in a white robe and covered in glitter from a failed art project we had attempted with it. My son pointed out to me that this character actually looked a lot like a photo he had seen of me as a child. I knew what photo he was talking about because I could see it in my mind, too. This object helped me to connect with this inner child from that photo. I moved the hands to a position where it was reaching out to me. Then, I wrote from the perspective of this inner child, with my non-dominant hand. It was rough, but I understood the cry for help. I then responded to this writing with my dominant hand, with me as the adult writing back in a way that reassured this inner child, comforted it, parented it.

After this, I meditated for a while, holding on to some crystals: two small egg-shaped stones that I use to represent my relationship with my mother that is a source of inner child wounding, two amethyst crystals, and two pink moss agate stones. Both of the latter are good for forgiveness and healing, and I concentrated on these feelings during my meditation.

Following my meditation, I drew some Oracle Cards. The first ones that I drew, out of the Sacred Feminine deck, were Healing, Progress, and Intuition. I felt that these cards accurately represented the outcome of this inner child work I was doing. After this, I drew from another deck, and I drew two cards that have been coming up for me lately. “Star Mother” asks, how can you mother yourself? That is exactly what I was doing in the written exercise. The other card, Anna, Grandmother of Jesus, suggests a divine plan is unfolding. From a third deck, I drew a card that said, “Have Fun”, and it showed a picture of an adult profile next to a smaller, younger version of the same person, a child profile. I think this card was a reference to the work playing with the toys, and a reminder to keep that youthful innocence.

Later, I thought back on that rock I picked up, and how it seemed symbolic of my journey from my childhood to now. I felt the innocence of youth in its sparking whiteness, in the white robe of the character that I held up to represent me in my thoughts, in my connection to church and scouts as a child. I felt that pink line of cuts to the heart from the relationship with my mother, and the resulting debris that stuck to me as a result as I made my way through life as an adult dealing with unhealed inner child wounds.

In the middle of the night, I woke up because my dog was making a strange noise. She had gotten out of bed, and was rolling around in the living room, making happy noises like she was playing. Who was she playing with? I got up to check this out.

As I stepped into the space she had been in, I felt an energy around me. It was so pleasurable that I felt really good inside. I was filled with a feeling of peace and of deep healing. I stood for a few moments within this energy, feeling it absorb through me. My pains, especially my arm and shoulder that has been hurting for two months, suddenly felt better. I am not sure if this energy was something real or something I was simply believing in, but I think about Misty’s words when I asked her before about something similar: does the distinction matter?

The feeling of deep healing persisted as I went back to bed, as I woke in the morning and lay still, listening to the sound of crickets singing in the backyard, to the sounds of my family waking up, and throughout my preparations for work, through my workday. That healing feeling could be stemming from the inner child homework, the meditations, the crystals, the validation of my emotions through the cards, the reflections of the rock, the moment with this energy in the middle of the night, or all of the above, but overall, I feel so much peace, serenity and healing today and I am glad I took the time to spend in all of this.

A circle of women 

Shoes off in the grass

Grounding themselves 

Harnessing the healing energy

Moving their Chi

Flick off the “ick”

Pull that good energy in

Move it from side to side

We all become connected

In a circle of luminous light

Holding our energy in

Healing the earth as it heals us

The trees enjoyed our company

As we paid homage to them during our walk

Touching them all, admiring their bark

The plants, all different textures 

Every now and then, flowers

Blue, pink and red

And one rare white lilly in the forest

At the pond, we all laid down

On a shady boardwalk 

At least a dozen women or so

We all relaxed as our leader 

Guided us in a meditation 

Watching the clouds move

And the trees swaying in the wind

Lilly pads sparkling in the sun

Turtles basking on a log

Afterwards, we walked past the meadow 

Silently returning through a wetlands path 

Gathering together around a circle of stumps

To share our observations

What we were taking away with ua

Create a gesture to match 

We mirrored each others gestures

And in this process, a little of ourselves

Joined with the greater whole

Afterwards, still basking in the glow

She and I visit a Korean day spa

The first hour or so

We shared pools with naked ladies

Of all shapes and sizes

We heal what needs healing

Clean what needs cleaning

In one pool, my body is a vehicle

In another, a body of light 

I scrub every part of my soul clean

Letting go of others energy stuck to me

Call back my own energy from all places

So I can be fully in my power

I am learning to be a body of light

Surrendering to the universe

Allowing the flow of white light 

To run through my center

Move my hands to hearts center

To capture and hold this light 

Self love, the route to soul healing

I contemplate the lessons this body has learned

I feel the last vestige of snake skin slide

New skin tingling and fresh

Absorbing hot, cold, back and forth

Awakening the life force

Recharging our mortal batteries

Shower, wash hair, put on clean clothes

Fill out bellies with Korean delights

Then roam around the place

With quiet reflection in various spaces

Legs up in a wooden recliner

Watching drone footage of forest trails

Birds chirping, following the sound of water

To a babbling brook

We lounge in heat over various floors

Ocher, jade, Himalayan salt

Find our place on mats, benches, floors

An outside terrace, tables in the shade

A boba tea to cool us down

Women all around us

Some alone, some with friends

Some leading men, smiling over their shoulders 

Four older crones sharing snow ice

I reflect on the maidens and mothers too

We all know the secret is

Take care of yourself, darling

It’s the only you that we have

What are the reflections we see

In all these other women we encounter today

Open hearts and good will

A willingness to lead and be led

Esoteric and scientific knowledge

We are all here to care for ourselves

And in turn, we care for each other

By being beams of light in the world

And my beam is connected to your beam

Like the line of lights in the Cistern railings

Or the circle of light that I saw

In the guided Moon Magic meditation 

At Christine’s house the following night

Like the circle of light of women in the grass

This circle holds us together

Inside the circle, we have

Connection, community, healing

Universal love, recharging our souls 

So we can do the work of

Being a light for others lives

Into this cosmic web we live in

Sharing the collective light of the Divine Feminine

It’s a crisp October day, two days before the full moon, and my little boy and I are walking in the woods in Oklahoma.  We passed a pile of cut logs at the edge of a stream, and follow a trail along the water’s edge.  The trail opens up into a wide shoreline of soft mud, covered in little deer tracks. Just on the other side of the mud, there is a movement of grey, and three deer, flushed out of the water’s edge by our presence, climbed up the bank ahead and disappeared.

The trail here just disappeared, so we retraced our steps and started heading back to the car.  I walk the land with intention, heart and eyes searching for meaning behind every blade of grass, touch of wind, song of bird. Along the way, I found a perfect little white feather in the brown leaves below us.  I have been finding feathers on the regular the past few months, since my spiritual awakening begun in earnest.

We find a secondary trail, one that appears to have been cut by truck tires, and our feet crumble dried brown leaves as we walk, destination unknown.  We are just exploring. Along this walk, he is telling me about an anime he has been playing online called “Bleach” in which there are two types of resurrections: a regular resurrection is where you die and then you get revived, and a “resurreccion” in which the character is transformed. The regular kind can happen any time, but “resurreccion” only happens during a full moon.  The character says a magical trigger word and then releases a burst of “reiatsu”, a word meaning “spiritual energy” in order to cause this transformation to occur.

I am intrigued by this because it reminds me of my experience last full moon.  I had put a concentrated focus on transformation. “I let go of self-doubt and fear.  I walk in faith and confidence”, I had affirmed to myself.  I still feel the skin of self-doubt, but it has begun to loosen and slide off. I can recognize the feeling and remind myself to let it go.

A couple of weeks ago, during the time of the New Moon, I had gone to this spiritual retreat called “Soul Camp”. While there, one of the exercises was to do an hour-long silent meditation walk in nature. I had wandered slowly, eyes wide in wonder. By the edge of a pond, the sun had baked the land into hard cracks at the shoreline. A small ribbon snake, coiled up, reared his head at me in an unexpected warning.

I leave it be, retreating to the cooler side of the pond to sit under the trees in the shade. My bottom rested on soft, cool dirt as I took a moment to ground myself. My eye was drawn to the light falling on a shimmering flat object in the dirt to my left. I pulled it out of the earth to examine it. It’s a piece of petrified snake skin in the striped pattern of that ribbon snake. I carry this around like a treasure and put it on my altar when I get home, a symbol of the transformation I am going through in my spiritual awakening.

A week or so later, I was walking slowly across a field with a wise woman.  We were picking up trash in the park as a form of service to Mother Earth.  Our eyes were focused on finding objects white and plastic to scoop up and put into our trash bag.  I reached down to pick up something white I saw in the grass, and then realized it was moving. It was a grasshopper in the white molting phase, shedding his oversize paper-thin skin to transform into a new form in the cycle of metamorphosis. This is a fragile time in the life of a grasshopper, where they are more likely to be picked off by a predator, being less likely to be able to get away from them.

Later, I contemplate what it means to be transformed, what skin am I shedding. At Soul Camp, I told myself I was letting go of worrying about what people thought of me, and just focusing on how I feel. As I let this skin shed, I find myself taking more risks socially and creatively. When I care less about judgement, I put my true self out there more.

I am also less willing to put up with bullshit, and I want my friends to be as fiercely authentic as I am now. I used to just allow them to be disingenuous, accepting them where they were. Now I want to press into their wounds, asking them to tell me more, ask them to admit more to themselves.

Change is uncomfortable.  Honesty is uncomfortable. Sometimes, so is growth. I want my friends to grow along with me now. I want my relationships to grow with me. I challenge even my marriage in this way, asking my husband to step out of his comfort zone in order to more fully create space for my wants and needs that I am finally standing up for.

If you asked me to put my fingers on that first layer of skin coming off, though, I would say it is the conditioning of my family; the apparent misogyny of my parents, the catering to men and forgiveness of their sins while holding women to an impossible standard. It’s the worry that if I expose my true self to my family, I will be subject to attacks and ridicule, and the recognition that this behavior is their problem, no longer mine, and I will not let it stop me from putting myself out there.

It’s also about letting go of the hold that food has had over me. Changing my relationship with food is a big physical transformation I am currently undergoing. Maybe the shedding of skin is literal, not metaphysical, and this time next year, I will have completed my own metamorphosis.

In my transformation, I will reveal my talents boldly and unapologetically. I will not be afraid to step into my gifts as a creative person. I will share my work in ways that feel right and comfortable to me with other people.  I will not be afraid of failure or ridicule.  I will simply create the life I want to live with my magic.

On this walk with my son on this October day, the trail ended in a clearing, with a structure at the opposite end.  We walked over to it, my son curious about what it was.  I explained to him that it was a deer blind, but those words meant nothing to him.  I explained further that the hunters would sit inside of it, hidden to the deer, and when the deer came out to the clearing, exposed, the hunters would shoot them.  My son was horrified at the idea that something so innocent and beautiful would come to a brutal end, not understanding it was part of a cycle passed down for generations. Birth, growth and death, and then the cycle behinds anew.

On the way back, we took a side journey to an old graveyard, a simple fenced in area with about a dozen marked graves, and possibly several unmarked ones.  We admired a huge tree in the middle of the graveyard, tall and sturdy, but with all its branches missing except one, possibly transformed itself by the recent tornadoes or simply just age or disease. My son pointed out that it’s one good branch would make a nice place for birds to rest, and he wasn’t wrong. Its transformation made it ready for a new purpose.

Death is a part of transformation that we don’t like to think about, but sometimes death is necessary to fully complete the changes required.  That morning that I was picking up trash with the wise woman, we also found several dead dragonflies.  Dead dragonflies can be reminders that endings are necessary for new beginnings, and allowing ourselves to evolve. We have to let go of the old ways and the old conditions to allow the new life to begin.

That same morning, I also found four feathers, three of them white like the one I found on this morning walk with my son. As he and I walked back to the car after finding the deer blind, I had found another feather, this one white fluffy down at the base, but a glittering blue-ish brown along the top. I bring the feathers home and add them to my collection, reminders from the spirit that I am on the right path, even though I am just feeling my way through it.

https://youtu.be/b__kjReL_a0?si=fLNUuhXoEai-gmej