#wildstrands

[dopetaleobject]

Opowieści o Czujątkach. Wstyd

Bajki pełne empatii: Opowieści o Czujątkach. Wstyd Ludzie mają głęboką potrzebę doświadczania szacunku, podziwu, miłości od najbliższych osób, ale również od samych siebie. Dziecko gotowe jest zrobić wszystko, aby zyskać ten rodzaj akceptacji. Towe Wildstrand Była sobie raz mała wróżka o imieniu Weronka. Rodzice naszej bohaterki zajmowali się rozsiewaniem magicznego ziarna miłości i przyjaźni…

[whilereadingandwalking]

Louise Erdrich's novels are always such lush, twisty epics. In The Plague of Doves, three narratives weave around an unsolved murder of a farm family. At the time of the incident, a group of local Ojibwe men were blamed and lynched, but it's common knowledge a generation on that they didn't commit the crime. 

In theory, we follow the stories of Evelina Harp and her grandfather Mooshum, as well as Judge Antone Bazil Courts, but in reality, we follow everyone's stories. We hear of awful plots and wicked heartbreaks, youthful queer crushes and senseless deaths, brutal cold and the freedom to run. The tangled, sticky story of the Peace family, the Harps, the Wildstrands, the Milks, the Courts and the Woldes, blend into an epic brimming with dark secrets and the painful truth of history, of silenced voices and lost land. 

A family tree would have some spoilers I suppose, but I still recommend it. My only complaint about the book was that the characters, much like the connections between them, become a jumble very quickly. I made a family tree of them all myself to keep the generations straight, so if you dive in, let me know and I can forward along a picture. 

Overall though, I couldn't put this book down. It was rich and tough and sharp. Erdrich mixes the truth of indigenous experience up with the ups and downs of living, the beauty of the Midwest, and absolutely perfectly written heartbreak, with absurdity and humor that's too good and real-feeling to even read like fiction. I waited too long to write this review, but on picking up the book and reading my family tree and notes, I realized I could feel that little ache in my chest all over again. That's how you can tell it was a good one. 

Content warnings for neglect, drug use / substance abuse / alcoholism, bullying, lynching, domestic and sexual abuse, suicide, transphobia / homophobia, anti-indigenous sentiment and violence. 

[setsailor]

Letters in Glass Jars Crossing the States

For years, I’ve used only the eraser, afraid sharpening the pencil and lead poisoning came hand in hand. Let’s turn it around and see what lines come out…

I was thinking of how our battoos never found their roosts, and how life is short.  Neruda says forgetting is so long, and I think cancer must be like forgetting.  The unwanted guest in my upper right selfspace rewrote my biological software; it cancelled my appointments, and forced a medical marriage I would rather have annulled. Now I but faintly feel my hair move, how ducking beneath the surface of the chlorine and blue makes the wildstrands weightless and wispy.  The knot near the back where my skull took chances against the wood floor left a walking fever dream 4 days long, colors of the sky swirling into the sun.  Don’t take fall so literally.

Today I opened up the jar of lightning bug hopes I’d saved and watched them blink themselves out of sight. I like to think they got swooped up by a mountain chill and carried to you, so that you can use them for a temporary nightlight.  Poke holes in the jar lid, or you’re hopeless too soon.

I’m glad you’ve found a grown up radio flyer to travel the world in, and someone to help pull the handle. I’m glad you’re still roaming the red, white, and blue and dipping into other colors from time to time.  I’m glad you’re happy, and most of all, I’m glad you’re still, always, the “to whom” I may concern.

[wildstrandsblog]

An Unconditional Love Story: Take Flight, Sisterhood

Issue 3 - May 28, 2021

It was June 2019 and I was going through that metaphorical, misty fog in my mind alone from a set of experiences I had just lived through. Nothing was making any sense to me. I didn’t know why when I left my home for my best friend, Lauren’s, home to find a little peace I would find a combustible horror show as if it was lurking in my shadow. I didn’t know why a wife and mother of three children would be the one selected for some kind of mission saving four others from annihilation. I didn’t know why I couldn’t find simple help from a neverending cycle of emotional and spiritual neglect, abandonment, and not being heard in my own home and family. Someone to sit down with me and give me love that didn’t feel painful would’ve been enough. I didn’t know why when I still searched for help from my father-in-law, he died almost instantly. His funeral was approaching and having taken the duties of leading his memorial service, I needed to find the words, an entire story, that could capture his quiet spirit. Fernanda was scheduled to show up for work soon so it meant it was time to put my game face on again. I walked down the stairs, saw her, and asked humbly if it would be okay if I took the day off and just drive. She said, “Of course.” I don’t know why I felt like I needed to ask her even seen in Fernanda’s eyes, but I had no idea where I was going. I just knew I needed to go. I thought I would find myself near a water source where I usually go for clarity. But that morning, feeling a little clearer than days previously, I let the road direct me. It called me as soon as I felt the road beneath the rumbling tires on the highway. It was calling me to the nearby mountains, toward Mount Weather specifically.

You see, backtracking a bit, when I left my home for Lauren’s house Memorial Day weekend, I asked my husband to call his father to help with the children before I felt comfortable leaving. My husband hesitated to call. I pushed. I needed to know my children would be well cared for and not a burden I was pushing off on others. My husband conceded and he called his father as if standing in the corner I put him in. Bampa and his wife dropped everything they had planned for their Memorial Day weekend, packed up overnight bags and started heading in our direction. I left my home without seeing them arrive. Hours later, they would overhear the phone call I had with my husband when I was finally able to get to my phone about the near bloodbath and violent turbulence I was thrust in to. My husband had also had plans to find a hotel that night and let the grandparents take over watching the kids for a while. But by the time he and I were done talking, my husband a witness to Tom’s belligerence, lack of awareness about his verbal abuse towards me, and toxic karma, no hotels were left. My husband would have to sleep on the couch in his own home that night.

In the golden hours of the next morning, my husband woke under the same roof as his father unlike any moment the two of them had had in my husband’s 41 years of being his son. My husband didn’t grow up with his father in the home as a child. There was no real anger, resentment, or noticeable pain for either of them due to the separation, perhaps a feeling of loss on his father’s side, but there had been no time planned by either of them to entertain the connection. Somehow in the midst of it all, my voice was shoving the two of them together from a need for my own sake that began the fall of the first domino. After I got home from one night away in hell, torn up emotionally and spiritually which included conversations with family that made it clear their lack of understanding of my pain and ultimately their own. unpacking more than just my luggage, I universally apologized to my husband that he wasn’t able to get away for an evening. It was something we had both deserved and we still hadn’t been given. He said it was actually okay. It was actually better than okay. Having his father at our house had been the gift of opporunity to have the unexpected “talk,” that golden morning, that feeling of actual connection, that sense of belonging from a place of no expectation, something they hadn’t explored before. His father had said he was beginning to make plans, lots of them, something he’d never done before. His father said he had found a new brewery, Bear Chase, that he wanted to take his son to for more times like this. Both men, father and son, simple and honest, happy. It felt right and days were going to be brighter.

“I took a breath and went in as gently as I could about the violence I had just experienced, how my father-in-law had just passed suddenly days later, and I was there to gain some perspective leading his memorial service. Jaws dropped. I tried dressing up the drama in sheep’s clothing but the initial impact was already created. They looked at me in wonder like a mystic woman on a quest from an infinitely curious and confusing scenario and I had to admit to myself that, yes, it was and, I guess, I was all of that.”

Only days later after that great morning, after the shock and trauma of Bampa’s loss in an almost-instant, I was headed nowhere in particular, just to the mountains and Mount Weather to begin the road of building Bampa’s story in my own words. It felt monumental. I got to the base of the mountain and there was a dense mist making it barely visible twenty yards ahead of me mimicking the feeling in my mind. I could feel a small thrill rush inside me, venturing into the unknowable and unforeseable beyond, that told me to notice the synchronicity I’d be witnessing in real life right before my eyes, leading me along a path of illuminations. Just a little ways up the road, I was passing Bear Chase Brewery on the left, the place Bampa was going to take my husband the following week if he were still living. The irony of seeing the place didn’t elude me, it secured me that I was following the way, but I knew I was to drive further beyond the brewery continuing up the mountain. Weaving upward into the canopy of dense trees and mist reminding me of the cloud rainforests in Monteverde, Costa Rica, I was gaining altitude into the ether I needed to breathe. I reached the top of the mountain where FEMA’s Emergency Operations Center sits, prepared at all times for presidential arrival in case of serious threat. I was still without any clarity, submerged, trying to get answers and only seeing two ways — down the other side of the mountain or back the way I came. Suddenly, there was a break in the mist clearing just a bit to my right for me to see there was a small dirt road rutted out with potholes. My sense of adventure always taking over the best parts of me, I decided to take my minivan off-roading down this third way I wasn’t seeing.

I was seeing beautiful vistas from the top of this side of the mountain where the fog opened up just enough. I could hear Bampa’s conversations play out in my mind with visions of buying the perfect property to build a home with his wife on top of Mount Weather. I continued further down the mountain and drove by a home decorated with lawn art using statues, that free-spirited, almost-too-crazy-to-make-a-social-connection person’s home with the freedom to express, and never too scared to build a house however they chose it. I slammed on the brakes and went to take a look. There was a mixture of Catholic and Americana statues, relics from different places creating a poor man’s sanctuary like a patterned quilt made up of old stones from different times and reasons. I walked up to a statue of the Virgin Mary and could feel how she was the embodiment of the woman I needed to show me the love I was missing this whole time. I honored the statue with my tears and decided to take a stone from the road and place it at her feet, leaving a trace of myself while I still journeyed down the path while she stay in place where I could find her if I needed it.

I made it to the bottom of the mountain and I kept looking for that thing, that vision that would give me the reason why I came to this place but I still couldn’t find it still. I continued further making a left to circle the base of the mountain. I saw a sign for Victory Farms. That gave me a small joy, although I quickly remembered that the feeling of victory can give us this false sense of completion like a roadblock from true meaning. So I decided to see what was further down the road after seeing the sign for victory. I kept winding and weaving through the back roads at the base of Mount Weather still trying to find what it was I was looking for but not forgetting to take in the simple pleasures of those country roads I was traveling.

The winding roads ended and I was back at the main one. That wasn’t the sense of adventure I was feeling and anticipating at all. I was still so lost and confused and no closer to understanding the bigger picture. I thought to myself that the quickest way back home now would be to take the main road leading me back up to the top of Mount Weather again. It felt like I was backtracking and that I had lost the trail toward my illuminating adventure but it didn’t feel like I had any other choice. So back up to the top I went with a course headed for home. It’s all I knew. I let the feeling of driving wash over me and let the expectation go of finding anything and appreciated the beautiful moments I had just experienced. And then like a flash when one gets to the end of a movie that doesn’t have the standard Hollywood ending all tied up and, instead, leaves you with a sense of wonder, I could see the tracks I was making this whole time. I was traveling the same roads that would have brought father and son back to each other at Bear Chase Brewery traveling up each side of the mountain, the whole point of everything, anyway. I just had to travel the long way to see it. I was in awe and tears began springing from eyes bringing these two together spiritually as they should have been even if it couldn’t be done physically. I felt complete.

In that sense of completion, I decided to stop off at Bear Chase before heading home so I could bring back the beer that would be my boon for my husband and I to enjoy. As I parked my van, there was a man about my age walking by. He had just come off the Appalachian Trail and was looking for the front door. He asked if I knew where it was. I told him, “Well, I haven’t been here before but the sign your standing next to says it’s thatta way.” I smiled and interiorly laughed at the slight oversight especially since he was coming off a trail where there were no signs posted. We walked in together but I took a quick turn to head to the bathroom. It was early, the brewery had just opened and there were a handful of people sitting at one end of a long table. I chatted a bit with the server who was getting me a pint so I could enjoy the time away from the house a little longer. All of a sudden, I could feel myself switch into a gear I had been in as a backpacker on the open road swinging from situation to situation on a vine. I decided it couldn’t hurt to walk up to these people I’m sure with a similar mind and ask if it was okay to sit down. They were happy to oblige.

I sat in the experience like nothing I had just gone through even existed, no direction charted because it really wasn’t. The guy I had walked in with also decided to sit down at the same table and we all began sharing stories from the road. It was a joy listening as it has always has been for me to hear other people's stories. They engaged and I peppered in with a few of my experiences to let them know some of the similar paths we had walked at different times. It was like old friends meeting at a reunion none had planned for or knew was coming. The guy I walked in with was a dominant figure. He had dealt with some relationship issues in the past and was using his experience hiking the AT to come to grips with all of it. He mentioned he had been using the time to journal and how cathartic he was finding it. Having kept my own journals and later finding a lot of meaning from reading the thoughts I had decades earlier, I encouraged him to keep up the front after the trail. He bluntly responded back saying how he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to have time once he got back to the real world to write things down anymore. I interiorly sighed and thought, it’s really the only world that leaves any remains but please take your time.

The guy left for a refill on his beer so without his presence at the table, it allowed for others to ask questions. They soon realized I hadn’t spoken about my journey and what brought me there that day. “This should be fun,” I thought. I took a deep breath and went in as gently as I could about the violence I had just experienced, how my father-in-law had just passed suddenly days later, and I was there to gain some perspective leading his memorial service. Jaws dropped. I tried dressing up the drama in sheep’s clothing but the initial impact had already been created. They looked at me in wonder like a mystic woman on a quest from an infinitely curious and confusing scenario and I had to admit to myself that, yes, it was and, I guess, I was all of that.

The dominant figure who had walked away from the table was now back with his energy stuck in oblivion, not aware of the story I had just told. His presence didn’t break the magic spell of communion between me and the others but it did distract the trance of knowing anything deeper and the experience was over. I could feel it was my time to go and I walked away hearing how all the backpackers were on their way to Harper’s Ferry, WV, the middle point along the trail extending from Georgia to Maine. A part of me wished I could join them on their magic journeys but there were obligations of my own that needed tending to and I had a growler of beer to deliver to my husband who was hurting from the loss of his dad. But I could feel how everything was going to be good in the end even in the incomplete state it was all in. There was still so much more journey to hoe before getting there.

[wildstrandsblog]

An Unconditional Love Story: Take Flight, Sisterhood

Issue 2 - May 7, 2021

(Suggested listening)

My original plan after hiring Fernanda to help around the home was for her to work twenty hours a week in the morning time for the first four months after having our third baby, but that idea changed as we approached the end date. I was neither physically or mentally prepared to take on the full breadth of childcare for my three young children, ages three years old and under, and all the homecare, too. Life, however, was offering up a different set of plans for us. After giving Fernanda the greenlight she could stay on indefinitely, she said that may be all the time she had. Her visa was running out and she was having to fly back to Brazil with hopes of getting it renewed. She explained how it was a very rigorous process. She was scared it wouldn’t go through and wasn’t ready to let go of her dream of coming to America fighting back the tears. I wasn't ready to let her go, either. Her love and her light were the best thing keeping my little family afloat. We had no choice, though. She had to go. So in my Christmas shopping I found something that caught my eye, something I thought might be the perfect gift to tell Fernanda how much I thought of her, perhaps something we both needed. It was a necklace with an engraving that read, “Be Brave” on it. She was in tears receiving it with feelings even a little misplaced, unsure of what to do with that kind of encouragement from a near perfect stranger. I’m sure it wasn’t common. I remained stoic, putting all my energy back into the hope that the little message in the necklace would somehow bring Fernanda back to us.

Those four weeks she was gone for me were long and brutal to be without her. It was a hellish Christmas working through my husband’s depression and anxiety which were in need of unhealthy attention and me not strong enough for all of it still. Fernanda, however, got through all her tests with flying colors at the Brazilian Embassy like doors suddenly opened. She even had enough time to go run into the ocean, their summertime, wearing white, the custom for the Brazilian New Year starting things off brand new. I received her back in Virginia with exhalation and praise for getting through all the tough parts. I suppose I silently praised myself, too. I was hopeful for the dawning of new days with my newborn son beginning to sleep through the nights. But the pressure of supporting everyone as the family’s lone caregiver had gotten too much for me. My forearms and hands were feeling like hot irons stuck in a fire. I was barely able to hold a glass of water to my lips, holding on to too much psychological debris like many Empaths. I had no one to pour it into.

“She was holding up the part of the sky I couldn’t, not coming into my space, as I called on the mountains, seas, skies, and all the galaxies combined to support me. It was all I had left getting me through, getting the worst from too many loved ones I had once considered home.”

I poured as much as I could silently into my art and writing but it could only support so much. I went in search of help again, this time through an energy healer and found a woman fifteen years my senior. She was a Yoga Therapist who was the most intuitively-gifted person I’ve ever met and had three children of her own. Through her conversation and massage therapy work to dislodge some of the emotional trauma, I began to see many of the cycles I had been missing. Having written about some of these illuminations in a previous post (see “Pulling The String”), I’ll progress [quickly] through what happened next once I made the choice to surrender and got sent full throttle like a rocket crashing into the sky inside - a three fold process.

With the internal pressure of everything I carried getting greater - caring for three very young children, supporting a depressed and anxious husband with childhood trauma, supporting my own severe childhood trauma, large psychological upheavals within the worlds of loved ones, and even larger unknowns still left for myself from an invisible world continuing to open up my heart and mind and wary not to repeat the same “almost-death” part - by May 2019, I was left with only two choices to release it. It was a pressure so great it had me crying for a full hour and half in the hands of the Yoga Therapist and I could’ve probably cried longer. I kept thinking, “How is she tolerating this?” It was that kind of cry only an unconditionally loving mother could love, moaning, gut-wrenching, curled-up-in-a-ball, body-practically-seizing kind of cry. I was unable to speak though encouraged. The only words I could get out by the end of the session were, “My husband is hurting me.” It was that kind of hurt that can’t be touched, far deeper than any physical wounding. It was wounding from abandonment in my greatest hour of need, a care I had long needed, for me to be loved and to be heard unconditionally, not with questions just expansive listening that only requires a nod to know the person is still engaged. I had loved myself fully and unconditionally already. It was what ferried me through my opening processes and completed my individuation during my spiritual awakenings. I needed more, though. I needed to be seen for how human I was, and am, without feeling I needed to use any superpower to make anyone love my human self, that part of me that has always been drawn to a person and their pain, even a stranger, and never running away. It is the human and the ether in those tears that they have manifested from I have always loved.

My spirit was cracking and I couldn’t put the pieces of a fragmented self and family back together even though I had been trying. Nothing I was doing was helping. Even asking for help from others went disregarded or downplayed, and I was reminded of the voice of my mother who told me as a young child after telling me the story of her assault and rape in a public mall parking lot as well as her own home in front of her two young sons, “It is better to yell ‘fire’ than to call out for help. People run away when you ask for help. They come running when you yell ‘fire.’” Undeniably, I was getting myself to a similar place where my pain had nowhere to go, nowhere to be heard, and I was scared for my safety. My two choices were to go nuclear or get some space. I chose space and called one of my best girlfriends who was happy to put me up for an extended visit over the Memorial Day weekend. I couldn’t have known, though, that even in choosing the more sustainable approach, the Universe only had one set of plans for me and wouldn’t let me go until I saw the entire picture way beyond myself. It needed me to be a witness to the fact that I wasn’t the only human suffering, in desperate need of a universal culture shift and it was calling me up on my best girlfriend’s phone.

I left my home in haste, though clear conscious, kissing my children’s heads and waving goodbye to everyone. A few hours later, I was received into my girlfriend’s home, who I’ll call Lauren, leaving a pool party she had been at with her husband and two friends, another couple, to come be with me. After a long vent-fest and both of us feeling clearer about each of our troubles, no sips even needed from the wine we broke out, Lauren and I headed from her home to go see our alma mater, get some ice cream, and were making plans to head to the beach the following day to play some volleyball with friends. I was in love, totally in the space I was needing. We got diverted almost instantly on our drive with a text from her friend, the other woman from the pool party Lauren had left to be with me, who I’ll call Crystal. Crystal asked Lauren to come back to the townhouse to come pick up her husband, who I’ll call Tom, in a vague text where Crystal wrote how her boyfriend had hit her and Tom was beside himself. When Lauren and I got there, Tom said, “Kayt! Sing me something! You used to be a singer!,” to help get his mind off things. With care, I obliged and began singing the first thing from the library of recent songs I had just been listening to. I pulled out Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust,” like an omen. Tom soon equalized and we all went inside the townhouse to collect the shoes Tom was missing - myself, Lauren, Tom, and Crystal - but something told me not to stray too far from the front door.

It was like a Hollywood film where all three white girls go inside the townhouse with the belligerent, drunk white guy without any reason, but the one thing different was than I had some. The unseen boyfriend off camera, who I’ll call Greg, was back on the scene within ten minutes. Greg walked back into his townhouse hitting me hard on my left shoulder with the front door I was standing in front of. The hit triggered something, remembering how I had just avoided a cataclysmic car collision on the drive down because of a surge of pain coming through my left shoulder that told me veer right, and right then a little sports car peeled out. I jolted as this unknown guy walked by with a strange feeling that said, “He’s got a gun.” I then saw him lunge for the door, his hand swiftly going for the lock. I reacted quickly by putting my left foot in between the door and the door jamb and had it slammed on looking the man square in the eyes. He left me to have it out again with Tom, a continuation from earlier, who was two sheets to the wind. Lauren, myself, and Crystal watched as two alpha males were facing off, ready to finish each other off this time in a drunken rage. I ran out of the townhouse and watched the rest of them stay inside. I was screaming for Lauren to get out of there but she wasn’t going to leave Tom behind. I looked down at my purse and had nothing to help me, no car keys, not even my phone. Do I just watch? I could already see what was going to happen next. I was going to hear and see more fighting, then a flash from gunfire, and a woman screaming. I couldn’t just stand there. I ran back inside the townhouse summoning up my big voice to tell Tom to back down. I was starting to get a response and he began to back away. The other guy, Greg, though, with shadows not keen on stopping, leaned in to raise the fight back up.

I turned to him, a black man with a white girlfriend who he had cruelly thrown down the stairs just hours earlier, was now aiming his sights at me. This was one of the unknowns not given in Crystal’s vague text while Lauren and I were off living carefree. Standing there, now, in the den of an unknown townhouse, I could feel how Greg wanted to believe I was there to help him. He was desperately hurting, fueled with anger as a mistreated black man and military veteran with mental illness whose mother, as well as his best friend, had just died a cruel death from cancer months before and he wasn’t coping. He had nowhere to go, just like me. Nowhere to be heard. He had made a choice that weekend, too, but he was going with nuclear. With racism, domestic violence, mental illness, gun violence, and a ceaseless cycle of blame and denial rampant, it was the inevitability I could no longer elude, darker than dark and beyond twisted. I found myself at the center of the Labyrinth, drawn to the Minotaur that looked more like a human to me with tears he hid.

I could feel how broken Greg was as I was yelling at him to back down. I was now standing inside his pain because he had let me in. He may have even loved me in that moment because someone was finally showing up to be with him in his great hour of need and he wanted to show his appreciation in the same way he had been shown love all these years. With me working to save Tom from annihilation, Greg decided he would now point the intended gun at my head and said “You’re a fucking racist!” and my life flashed. Bang. Episode 1. I felt my mind shift in that moment, in surprise I was able to walk away. It was a flashlight Greg was holding to scare me with his gun was too far away, although none of it I truly knew, it was all still just a feeling. Reality struck on my drive home with Tom while escorting him away from the scene he kept racing back into even after the police were called and Lauren stayed behind with Crystal to give testimony. Tom in anguish revealed to me Greg had pressed a gun against his head, repeating, “Oh my God!,” multiple times in his storytelling, after he had tried to stop Greg from brutally beating his girlfriend in front of him and almost died. Tom continued saying how the world was fucked and we might as well blow it all up. In the end, both men were eventually arrested. And in the alternative ending where my presence wasn’t there taking Lauren away from the pool party, I imagine things may have happened so quickly they might’ve even made it just in time for the 6 o’clock news.

After an explosive first part to the trilogy crashing me into the sky inside, Episode 2 began with the swirling mind of an Empath that got sent through the imaginal realm of time and space of personal traumas, ones I had experienced and further back that were not my own. None of the original pain I was carrying before I left my home that weekend got disposed off. They were all now amplified, carrying Lauren’s, Tom’s, Crystal’s, and Greg’s pain. Lauren, who I had hugged leaving her home the next day, both of us promising not to disconnect, was now avoiding me. I was struggling with the fact she was banging on her bubble, too, but in too much denial about her abuse from her husband’s alcoholism. I wanted to help her. I was also sad she wasn’t loving me the way I needed to be loved, too, even having gone through a shared traumatic experience. I was beginning to attract more negative energy at this point including my husband’s, direct from his childhood trauma. The psychological levies were broken and spilling. I called my husband’s father in a desperate plea for help again to talk his son out of his anger aimed at me. His father handed the phone over and I got told, once more, how I was the one spiraling out of control. I couldn’t deal with hearing it again. I threw the phone down. Not again.

Then out of nowhere we got a call from my father-in-law’s wife who was screaming over a voice message I could hear even through the standard audio of my husband’s phone. My father-in-law was dead, his wife finding him on the floor when she got home just a day and half later after the last words I spoke saying, “I need your help,” not even a week after having the Universal gun pointed at me. We were all in shock. It was an aneurysm with no symptom leading up that would’ve alerted us that took him. I lead my husband through each step of shock turned trauma and stepped up to lead the last rites of passage for my husband’s family through our completely unexpected loss. I had never done anything like that before. I felt called and my husband’s family believed I was the one to do it. Things were moving so fast there were only glimmers of Fernanda during this time. I imagine her watching a fallen woman, gray in skin color, pushing through severe episodes of apathy, still directing like she knew to do, unable to feel anything besides a rollercoaster of sensation, waking up in agony, and being thrown curve balls left and right. My reputation was now up for debate by my family and Lauren who had been talking behind the scenes during all of this. My family, with negative projections of my mother now placed on me, all thought I had gone crazy and were hell bent on fixing the situation. They believed I was out of control. In the midst of it all, Fernanda was there doing exactly what I needed her to be doing. She was holding up the part of the sky I couldn’t, not coming into my space, as I called on the mountains, seas, skies, and all the galaxies combined to support me. It was all I left to get me through, getting the worst from too many loved ones I had once considered home.

[Issue 3 coming May 14th!...]

SNEAK PEEK:

“One could believe that would be the end to the merciless saga, just like I did, but that was just the eye of the storm. Episode 3 still held a second wall to break through which opened up a month later while I lay on my front lawn and police showed up.”

[wildstrandsblog]

This is the 1st time I’ve done anything like this. I’ve backpacked alone but this time was different. On the flight to AK I could see myself dancing all over Alaska. So when I was stopped in my tracks by all the beauty, I pulled over & got a slo-mo. One turned into many turned into this! Music by @iksonmusic . This was the 1st time I was filming, editing & directing a #shortfilm solo.

I hope this video encourages other moms & women to get out there and dance like their lives & others depended on it. We deserve it.

(More pictures to come)

[wildstrandsblog]

Shifting Towards Love

I’ve had so many thoughts flowing through my mind lately as the world has suddenly shifted into a new COVID culture, where we’re all forced to take a backseat and ride the most current wave coming in. Many are perhaps bombarded by the whirlpool of neverending news cycle and maybe even dealing with their own COVID-related problem, whether its health, finance, concern over loved ones, educating children, or simply fear of the future.

I’m no stranger to drama—an energy I’ve learned to transform into the idea of life’s adventure. Having gone through a ceaseless cycle of change since twenty-five (I’ll be 40 this year), gaining perspective has always been my key. So while I’m still working out my new work flow to bring more writing and art in a time that needs it, I thought I’d share others’ words that have been bringing meaning to me and my husband.

Last night my husband and I started a **free** virtual Ram Dass retreat that aired this past weekend April 18th - 19th. While we weren’t able to catch it live, the stream has been made public until May 1st so we’re taking every night this week (and probably into the weekend) to listen to what we can. The retreat gives a practice of Pranayama yogic breathwork, translates Ram Dass’s lectures into modern psychology, gives the case for the union of science and spirituality, and offers one of the most important actions we can do as human beings - shift towards love - offering compassion even in the face of anger.

In my own mind, I have been hearing so much anger and have been hearing that same voice around the world. If the world has ever been given the opportunity to calm the mind to honor what we’re feeling, why we’re angry, lonely, sad, and a whole host of feelings, now’s the time. From that perspective, I am excited and look forward to carving out time to focus my voice into the collective catharsis that is happening, leaving my guilty pleasures of Real Housewives and Love is Blind behind.

I hope you find some peace, comfort, and the time to listen to this resource that has been offering me and my husband the same opportunity. I also look forward to dusting off some of my other writing projects. The next piece I’ll be focusing on and publishing will be a short mythological story I wrote almost two years ago titled “The Forgiving Tree,” which may feel like a big hug to other women, especially those who held Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree close to the heart like me. I’m hopeful to spread joy every chance I get in this uncertain but opportunistic time! Thanks for reading anything and everything here! It’s always appreciated!

[wildstrandsblog]

Lost Dreams

How do we recover our lost dreams? Like many of you, I have lost so many of my own, from the loss of our first child and pregnancy, the loss of my father almost 8 years ago and my husband’s father last month, to the loss of my mind. It’s no coincidence my favorite artist, Feist, is beginning a series as beautiful and as poignant as she is, all inspired by a great loss she faced and the fear that followed to reconstruct and put it all back together. It’s one of the greatest fears humans can face other than death. How do we go on in the face of fear? One way I’ve been practicing is by simply sharing my story. Feist takes us on a journey through loss in this first podcast, “Lost Dreams: The Neutral Cruelty of Hope” through the simple act of storytelling.