Living Libraries
In my continuing journey to connect with “whale” consciousness, I began a correspondence with June Sananjaleen Hughes, who wrote Whale Wisdom Dolphin Joy: Ascension Teachings from the Cetaceans (mentioned here). Through her I learned of the term: living libraries — anchor points for truths.
Whales are living libraries. So are master crystals, she says, and flight patterns of migratory birds.
I want to be a living library. I carry memories in my finger tips. Each day I go out into the world and I expand my library of sensory experiences, emotions, ideas.
Someday I will be a living library of nostalgia, dreams, potentials and love.
Related: Choosing your form and Whale wisdom
Updated: Dreaming as a technology
Dream imagery: Mental Clouds
Dreaming is a technology. Every night I become more adept at translating the language (symbols) of dreams.
On March 8, I dreamed someone who loved me hired a skywriter to write my name in the night sky in neon light, but there was so much cloud coverage that I could barely see it.
When I woke up, I had a knowing that the clouds were my thoughts getting in the way. My mental body was building a wall between love and me. Suddenly, so many other dreams from before made sense!
From Symbolic and the Real by Ira Progoff:
If the dream goes unheeded, or if it is not understood, and if its subject matter remains important, the dream will usually be repeated, either with the same or with equivalent symbols. It seems that if an important part of the process taking place in the depths of the psyche is not recognized on the conscious level so that the person cannot cooperate with it and draw it forward in the acts of his life, the process of growth is stymied. The individual then remains in a condition of self-stalemate until he learns to recognize the tendency of his inner life and manages to bring his outer life into accord with it.
I thought about the other coded symbols I had unlocked (specific to me or universal):
Water/Waves/Ocean — subconscious, different levels of consciousness or what is repressed.
Landscapes/Cities — usually depicts the state/shape/territory of my heart.
Movement/Transportation/Airplanes/Buses — journeys, mental/subconscious/emotional or otherwise.
Spaces/Rooms/Furniture — usually calls for rearranging of mental structures. perspective shifting. mental baggage.
Clouds — my thoughts, a system of intelligence that differs from my intuition or emotional body.
Dream imagery does what self-help books cannot do.
How dream imagery works for me: First it is the image, then the understanding or knowing of what the image represents, followed by the emotion that’s anchored to the dream which makes it so meaningful and has the power to transform something inside of me.
UPDATE:
El Candado (the Spanish word for padlock) is a provoker-symbol in dreams. It show me doors I’ve neglected to lock or unlock. Sometimes there is an intruder, other times I’ve locked someone out when they needed to be let in.
Dream language will never be entirely translatable — but the energy from dreams is what we need to carry with us in our waking lives.
When I dream of El Candado and wake up, I ask myself throughout the day: who I am locking out or what I am letting in?
Every dream has a request, and when I dream of El Candado, it is asking me to pay attention to my emotional boundaries and physical space. So I do exactly that.
Planetary objects as the heart
Are you a comet? Or are you a planet?
I woke up in the middle of the night asking this question. What I really meant to ask is are you passing me by or can I live on you? I don’t have a satisfactory answer for this.
I have been a comet to some people and a planet to others. In all cases, it’s the heart’s gravitational pull that influences the orbit.
Something beautiful I read this week:
How to Connect by Thich Nhat Hanh
Every morning, I go out into my backyard and I worship the Sun. I stand facing the East. I let the Sun warm my body. I whisper my prayers and gratitudes for life, for love, for inspiration, intuition and intelligence — all of which helps me to participate in the creation of the universe. Now I know the Sun is my heart.
Heart exercise” day
A love doodle I made when I was dating my husband (2014). Back then there were a lot of “heart exercise” days …
When I have a hard day I reframe it as a “heart exercise” day. I wish I could say I never resist what is out of my control, but of course I do. Nothing goes my way and I resist harder, past the point I think is possible. Eventually, I am forced to give in. I always feel defeated by the day, but the resistance still strengthens my heart in the end.
I am grateful for all my hard — heart exercise — days.
Everything is Sine Waves
My mind was blown 🤯 by this video podcast on Psilocybin, Depression, Synchronicity, Connectedness. The talk about empathic environments and the outside world mirroring your mind is true to my direct experience with psilocybin. But my most favorite takeaway is that “fundamental to reality is the sine wave.”
I heard this and I felt a very deep yes.
My period tracker Stardust syncs my cycle to the moon, connects me to the universe and displays my hormonal journey in sine waves. Every month, I track as my estrogen, progesterone and testosterone oscillate and with that I oscillate in energy — physical, mental and emotional. I am a sine wave and when I see myself in that way, I allow myself the space to act, to retreat, and to flow.
Everything is sine waves, even love — at times wavering, but never ceasing. Allowing love to ebb and flow is something I am still learning.
Find the higher, essential aspect of yourself
One of the most magical books I own is The Encyclopedia of Mental Imagery: Visualization Exercises for Personal Development, Healing, and Self-Knowledge. It is a collection of self-guided visualizations to make your imagination malleable, practice movement and instantaneous transformation.
How to sit for visualization exercises, page 12
The prompt I did this week was simple. Close your eyes, breathe out 3 times, and:
See yourself as a seed becoming a tree and then reverse back into a seed.
I became a row of Italian Cypress trees. The process of growing taller and taller felt like love, and the promise of a higher vantage point fueled my self-assurance. This is what fulfillment feels like. I knew what I was destined to become.
Then I had to shrink back into a seed, and when I was a seed, I asked, “Am I not still the same tree?” The potential is latent but it exists. I remember what it is like to see the world from up high.
And it’s the same thing with my body. The cellular memory of being beyond this life is there, but concealed. As long as I live close to my heart and purpose, the potential is activated. The seed has no choice but to continue growing. There has been movement since the beginning.
Landscapes and movements as symbols
Last night around 1AM, I woke up from a dream about Oakland. The cities and towns you live in have energies and histories and destinies, just like we do. I found myself there when I was at the lowest point in my consciousness. Oakland cradled me when no one else cared.
My apartments were shit holes. I was chased, cussed at or threatened everyday. I listened to a man get stabbed and bleed out right underneath my window. I heard my neighbor — a young mother and sex worker — get bargained down to a ten dollar blow job. My best friend’s car riddled with gun shots. My building raided by the FBI. West Oakland was a ring of Dante’s Inferno, but it was my lovely hell.
The ley lines of cities map your heart. I was poor. I was broken. I was depressed. There were no pretenses. I was sad and so was everyone else around me, and I found solace in that.
In last night’s dream, I parked my car at the top of the highest hill in Oakland, got out and set off on foot to search for my love. The town became the edge of a cliff. There was no railing, just a single-track trail. I almost slipped twice, and I was scared, but I kept going. Eventually, I hit a chain-link fence and remembered how I tore my wrist open climbing one just like it when I was 8, so I chickened-out and turn back toward my car. At that moment, I woke up.
A love note I wrote in 2010, while living in Oakland.
Some dream symbolism is so blatantly obvious it slaps you in the face. I still have chain-link fences posted up in my heart. It keeps me from loving the way I want to love. I need to tear those fuckers down.
Our personal journeys to evolve/ascend/bloom-then-wither-gracefully unfold like archetypes and legends and myths. The key to discovering what story you might be living, and obstacles you are to overcome, is to learn your symbols and patterns and rhythms. There has been movement since the beginning.
The ladder of divine ascent or how to love better
If life and growth is a ladder, we are meant to go up and down. The whole ladder is made of love. You fall only from shame, guilt and repression. Sometimes I find myself on that first rung — possessive and guarded. I know I’ve been up higher than this. I can love better than this. It’s easier to get back up there once you’ve descended so many times. Each step is a perspective you’ve inhabited before. The ascent is no longer arduous but swift. Just climb back up. Someday we’ll all reach the top of this goddamn ladder. There has been movement since the beginning.
My Kingdom of Heaven
My mother was a cult. Spiritually liberal and Bipolar. I was dragged from dogma to dogma, church to church. I’ve been baptized at least 10 times that I can remember. If you ask her, by the time I was two I had bible verses memorized. We walked door to door as Jehovah Witnesses on the hunt to convert. I remember the books and pamphlets we would hand out — the depictions of Heaven — I would get lost in those images.
I remember asking if there would be sharks and if I would have to swim with them, and being told Yes. I tried to wrap my baby brain around this ecological paradox. I truly felt this would be my heaven, but I was terrified of it at the same time. Now I understand the importance of accepting these polarities — pure love.
From Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming: Awakening the Visionary Life by Catherine Shainberg:
…sink into the body of the experience, the domain of the subconscious mind, where two seemingly opposite tendencies can co-exist. It is in this cauldron of paradox that "something other" can emerge…
… Having brought all the elements together we can only "let go and let God!” In the experimental alembic that is the womb or the mind is formed the new creation, a mixing of two seemingly incompatible parts…. The mix confuses the eye, amuses, astounds, disjoints, and unbalances our preconceived notions. Our hearts leap at the surprising freedom of the creative force to break inflexible boundaries, to mix incompatible forms. The shift, so shocking, so exciting, liberates our "True Imagination."
Imagination purified, pure love.
ISAIAH 11:6-9
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard lie down with the kid;
The calf, the beast of prey, and the fatling together
With a little boy to herd them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
Their young shall lie down together;
And the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw.
A babe shall play
Over a viper's hole,
And an infant pass his hand
Over an adder's den.
In all of My sacred mount
Nothing evil or vile shall be done;
For the land shall be filled with devotion to the Lord
As water covers the sea.
Choosing your form and Whale wisdom
From my dream book, A New Temple
In the last two psychedelic journeys (October 29, 2021 and January 8, 2022), the cosmic whales popped in. I resurfaced from the October journey with the ability to breathe deeper than I had before. They said this was important. The breath is a tool for rebirth.
Last month, I found myself with them again. The whales said, Look at your form. You choose the form you hold here on Earth.
Psychedelic journeys — like dreams and waking visions — are a gift. How you honor them is by action. I googled “whale breathing” and “whale messages.” I discovered a whole subculture of (mostly) women who swim with whales. Some of them have direct channels of communication with whales and can receive transmissions of wisdom.
I followed the path presented to me and I signed up for WhaleBreathing zoom sessions and began reading the book: Whale Wisdom Dolphin Joy: Ascension Teachings from the Cetaceans by June Sananjaleen Hughes.
The WhaleBreathing classes left me in an altered state. Euphoric. Like mini-journeys. I breathe deeper now. My breath is an anchor in the sea of my subconscious. It is a gift and a tool.
Regarding “the form we hold here on Earth” — I found clarity in the book:
…the Whales you see, are ever at this point of integration between the dimensions. Their physical body resides in the world of form, but their consciousness remains aware of their spiritual existence, their spirituality … They hold the balance between the dimensions, a statement you find hard to follow ~ but without the Whales the seas would be in chaos. And the seas represent the subconscious, that hidden and little understood part of your mind that dwells within your rhythm of awareness. … The Whales are at peace. Oblivious to outside interference, they live their dream in the ocean depths. They experience the turmoil, the turbulence, the inharmonious frequencies of the outer world, oh yes. But they allow it not to penetrate their inner being, their inner calm, the heart of their awareness. Their centeredness, or point of focus. Were they to allow the discord of an outer or alien world to penetrate their own, they would disintegrate, their form dispelled, annihilated by thought patterns of aggressiveness. The waves of calamitous sound would shatter their form. For their form is held in shape by a frequency that borders on Divine. Angelic perhaps would be more to your understanding. At any rate, there is a very fine frequency that holds their shape in form. And they have learned to hold fast to their ideal or focus that All is One, that they are not separate from the whole, from the Godhead, from the Source. And we encourage you and your cohorts to emulate the Whales, to practice steadfastness in holding true to a thought or pattern that is Divine in origin. Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all else shall follow. And it is for you to determine what is meant by kingdom of heaven. A State of Grace maybe. An elevated concept of consciousness, in which you may hold or carry your tune of intent with dedication and commitment to purpose. And here we are assuming that your purpose is the divine blueprint that you drew for yourselves, before you entered embodiment. Be like the Whales and allow nothing external to detract from this purpose. Insulate yourself. Pad your aura with an extra wad of good humor, of joie de vivre, of tolerance and respect. Glue it all together with the love of understanding, and wear this armor amour on all occasions….
I see whales now as satellites — spaceships in the sea. Divine consciousness. Something to emulate.
The ways we protect our hearts
The ways we protect our hearts. “He took certain liberties to protect his heart.” Only in costumes, only comedies, only short plays. But then he said we could wear whatever we wanted to wear on stage, and write our own lines, and as he told us his new plan for our show, his whole face lit up and I thought I saw God in the room.
Answer all your self questions or else they float there like your lost bodies
The younger version of me could not be pulled through the dimension. Her skeletal frame was frozen and split and hanging from a branch. Her consciousness could not translate. I was sad but I accepted it. What else could I do? Answer the question, they say. Answer all your self questions or else they float there like your lost bodies. The girl drops from the tree as an egg 🥚. I bend in between the worlds to pick myself up. The egg is glowing. Obviously I’m fertile. A man is speaking on a PA system. I only hear the words … “Come be …. Your future is bright.”
A still-frame from a dream
I’m out in the backyard of a strange home that is my home. The sky is dim, like a French noir film. There is a little girl bathing in a kiddie pool. She is not mine, but she is an aspect of me — the young, feminine psyche baptizing herself in the shallow end of her subconscious. I look up and see an inflatable pool toy in the shape of a butterfly floating across the sky. It is colorful and striking against the grey light. The butterfly is both the spirit and the psyche and it belongs to me. It has broken free and glides across the forefront of my mind and thoughts. I reach for my phone to take a picture. I knew it would make a beautiful picture.
Claudia, The Growler
Three nights ago (02-08-2022), I felt embarrassed in a dream. The polar opposite of this dream experience:
Another version of me resurfaced from The Wild. She was on the news, and word had gotten around that she was me, and she was called Claudia, The Growler.
A Growler is someone who one day leaves behind their life and recedes into the wild to go crazy in peace. My mother had wanted to be a Growler too. (This is what I knew to be true in the dream).
Apparently, she had been in exile. I was embarrassed because now everyone knew that this Claudia existed, without ethos or etiquette. And that whoever I had become in the past 37 years would be replaced by this wild woman. Then I woke up.
I immediately thought of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the mother figure to all wild women. I went back into the book “Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype” and searched for solace and clarity. What I found was a manifesto and a newfound responsibility for my life and self:
The things that have been lost to women for centuries can be found again by following the shadows they cast. And make a candle to Guadalupe, for these lost and stolen treasures still cast shadows across our nightdreams and in our imaginal daydreams and in old, old stories, in poetry, and in any inspired moment. Women across the world—your mother, my mother, you and I, your sister, your friend, our daughters, all the tribes of women not yet met—we all dream what is lost, what next must rise from the unconscious. We all dream the same dreams worldwide. We are never without the map. We are never without each other. We unite through our dreams.
Dreams are compensatory, they provide a mirror into the deep unconscious most often reflecting what is lost, and, what is yet needed for correction and balance. Through dreams, the unconscious constantly produces teaching images. So, like a fabled lost continent, the wild dreamland rises out of our sleeping bodies, rises steaming and streaming to create a sheltering motherland over all of us. This is the continent of our knowing. It is the land of our Self.
And this is what we dream: We dream the archetype of Wild Woman, we dream of reunion. And we are born and reborn from this dream every day and create from its energy all during the daytime. We are born and reborn night after night from this same wild dream, and we return to daylight grasping a coarse hair, the soles of our feet black with damp earth, our hair smelling like ocean, or forest or cook fire.
It is from that land that we step into our day clothes, our day lives. We travel from that wildish place in order to sit before the computer, in front of the cook pot, before the window, in front of the teacher, the book, the customer. We breathe the wild into our corporate work, our business creations, our decisions, our art, the work of our hands and hearts, our politics, spirituality, plans, homelife, education, industry, foreign affairs, freedoms, rights, and duties. The wild feminine is not only sustainable in all worlds; it sustains all worlds.
Let us admit it. We women are building a motherland; each with her own plot of soil eked from a night of dreams, a day of work. We are spreading this soil in larger and larger circles, slowly, slowly. One day it will be a continuous land, a resurrected land come back from the dead. Munda de la Madre, psychic motherworld, coexisting and coequal with all other worlds. This world is being made from our lives, our cries, our laughter, our bones. It is a world worth making, a world worth living in, a world in which there is a prevailing and decent wild sanity.
The imagery of spreading the soil of my psyche in larger and larger circles until it becomes a continuous land, resurrected from the dead, is the same imagery as last week’s resurfaced audio. The Universe confirms your journey over and over and over again until you pay it attention.
I can’t be embarrassed or ignore Claudia, The Growler. I know the answer is to not feel embarrassed, and to instead wear her like my soul. She’s returned from exile. She wants to live beside me. I breathe her wild and it infuses everything I do.
How to draw closer to your mystery
The above audio is a reading from a transcript. It is a thirdhand creation story. They are not my words, but the story was told to me orally by someone I loved, and for almost twenty years has lived on a microcassette unplayed. It is an unearthed treasure and I wanted to share it with you.
The Grounding Stakes or a Resolution for Trauma
You can feel free and blow in the wind and be grounded.
The psychic language of images is intimate. There is no universal visual dictionary to help you decipher your visions or dreams. Why would you want one anyway?
You are a Psyche Archeologist and this is a solo expedition. Your mission is to discover new aspects of your self, interpret your personal images, and then merge this new meaning into your soul. This is a long journey we are on.
On the inside of my left wrist is the word heal tattooed in white ink. It is fourteen years old and fading and it is a monument to my suffering.
After years of therapy and talking about the trauma and then not talking about the trauma, I wondered what the end game would be. What does a healed person look like?
What do I feel like? Someone who has sovereignty over her mind, body and spirit. Someone who can pause and reflect in the face of strong emotions. Someone who is grounded and open-minded, and most of all, open-hearted.
Still, the question persisted. What does a healed person look like? The answer came in the form of an image — an image infused with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and love and freedom.
I saw myself as an expansive tent — if not tied down — I would blow away. I saw the traumatic event in my life as a stake grounding me to the Earth. I felt grateful for my grounding stake.
I recognize and accept the event as a part of my history. It is not the suffering I appreciate, but the journey to heal and how it has widened my capacity to love.
Not all of my stakes are made of trauma. One of them is my loving husband. The others I am still getting to know, but each day I am grateful for them.
How beautiful that I can be a sprawling tent with the wind blowing in my face, and how it feels like I am flying, all because of my grounding stakes.
Guide Posts as God Posts
Confession: I have been carrying the belief that one day I would get to the peak of the mountain I’ve been climbing and awarded with all the answers to the unknown. I had a realization yesterday that there is no mountain peak with answers, only guide posts along this never-ending path. So, I speech-to-texted myself this epiphany and it auto-corrected “guide posts” to “God posts.” Maybe that is one answer.
Becoming: a process for transformation or how to create pivotal change
There has been a persistent question echoing inside me. I can’t put it into one sentence, but it involves creating pivotal change and becoming.
Becoming is the process of transformation and not an ending. I hope there is never an ending.
The answer came in the form of a visual: An anchor dropping into my heart.
Something needs to anchor itself in you visually and emotionally to create pivotal change.
I’m learning to live with the imaginal world. It’s been speaking this entire time. It speaks in dreams and waking life. It speaks in images that flicker in and out during the day. It speaks in thoughts that press to your forehead like sticky notes. It speaks.
For every desire there is a visual and emotional resonance. Anchor these in your heart. Live with it daily. Ask them out to play. You are not an automaton building habits. You are a creator imagining an ideal world and then pulling that world closer to you.
A New Temple
A New Temple is the completion of a three-month psyche project. It is a short, small book of poetry, dreams, visions and animal spirit messages. It is a quest for healing ancestral trauma and it is dedicated to my bloody, muddy ancestral mothers who made their entrance in the middle of my life and said, “You wanted aliens, but instead you got us.” It is available here.
A form of cord cutting is becoming a new creature. This book was a quest to heal and to honor my mothers by building a temple with my words. Their blood is my ink. Completing this was a form of soul recovery. Now that it’s out of my system, my psyche has more room to play and imagine and create something new.
The book itself is 5 x 7 inches and 54 pages long. A New Temple begins somewhere in the middle and the rest is a visual journey through dreams, visions, poetry and animal spirit messages. Below are some pages from the book.
Diary excerpts from 2021
A year in review. Here are fragments of my life in 2021. I pulled them from diary entries.
JANUARY
Have I been circling the same shallow depths for so long?
After a call with my journey guide:
She asked me to share about myself, specifically what has brought me to this moment — what has made me want to do a journey. What came out of my mouth was a word jumble of bad things that had happened to me. No, not happened to me — the bad circumstances of my life. I was born to two teenagers… we moved around a lot … my mother left us … she is bipolar … I never had stability … I had suicidal ideation since I was 11 … and 14 … and 22 … and 24 … and 26.
All this changed when I turned 30 and went on a vision quest, spent more time in nature and committed to therapy. I described how my entire childhood I bounced from one dogma to another, and how at 30, I finally cut the cord with my mother and created myself as an adult. How my career, my husband and choosing to be childfree are the best choices I ever made. But also, how I feel like I have no creative voice.
Later I realized, my voice is lost because I cut the cord with the narrator. The narrator who wrote all those poems in the past is gone. She’s no longer depressed or dark and as much as I miss that voice, it’s not coming back. I can’t summon her. I think it’s time I get to know my new narrator. This woman that I am.
FEBRUARY
I try to break free from the expected everyday.
An oracle card reading:
I pulled The Cauldron card, which says, “We become integrated and mature by watching, waiting, and trusting that all these insights and impressions will be added to the cauldron and will, one day, be fully cooked.”
This year is about creating the space. About following what ignites my heart and trusting it will guide me somewhere better. It is a waiting game, but I am the cauldron. I am the witch brewing my dreams.
A dream I had in February:
Last night I dreamed that they kept showing me an ultrasound of my womb and why I could never get pregnant. The energy that was supposed to latch on just kept “floating away,” like the smoke that comes out of my oil diffuser. The souls just kept diffusing. But I was OK with it. I don’t want to birth children. I can be a mother in other ways.
The back and forth of integrating trauma:
This day is displaced from other timelines. It feels new. Or maybe I am new. The years are piling on like dust on top of dust. I am being buried under patterns, synchronicities and routines. New goals. New Year. Resolutions. Old habits break through. I lose myself in other people and the ticking of the time hand. And like the trees lose their leaves and then return, I think that the same thing is happening to me, but no, it’s not. The opposite thing is happening to me. The leaves only fall and don’t regrow, and every new day is different and I am on a path I can see and sense, but ignore anyway. I see other people have one foot in reality and the other god knows where, and they uproot their minds and fly away so easily, yet I keep treading this darkness one step at a time. Only now I can see the form. I know I can.
….. I lean into the darkness again, this time more protected. There are no shadows. All the unknowns are outlined. Nothing scurries or brushes past in pitch blackness. Nothing groans or howls. Except for me. Darkness, I am enveloping you. It is a momentary eclipse. We’ll become the same, but I'll still keep my shape.
MARCH
I will no longer dull my edges.
On being the older sister:
My therapist told me something last week that stuck with me. My sister came into this life with a different purpose and journey, and her journey to evolve is different from mine. I am her friend and her sister, but I am not here to save her. Her journey does not have to look like mine.
On my dead brother’s birthday:
My brother Steven would have been 36 years old today. He only lived one month. Why do they come and go and where is his life force today? What happens to these short spirits?
SHORT SPIRITS
A light cuts through briefly
flowers limbs and bones
sprouts from nothing
gathers dust, disappears
again, leaving my mother
holding the bag,
a palmful of ash is enough
to spread grief for lightyears
APRIL
Anyone who goes digging into their subconscious is a witch, attempting to make sense of everything in her cauldron.
Life came to me in pieces. Slowly I could see that I had long been trying to make sense of it. Since birth. Since crawling. Since hiding. Since discovering dark rooms and hidden agendas and bad people and secret dreams and imagination and in the safety and sacredness of solitude.
A description of how I feel:
Myself — loosened
spread all over
in another time
unanchored from now
A lesson in a dream:
I found myself hanging from a high cliff because I had climbed up the wrong way. I was about to blame the dream people for leading me astray, but they didn’t know any better. In the end, it turned out that the easier climb was just inches away from where I started. If I would have just taken a few steps back before climbing, the other option would have come into view. This is a reminder to trust myself, stand back and consider my options.
Automatic writing on Easter: How to ascend (a growing list of ways to elevate your energy)
MAY
I dust off my aura, I protect my aura.
Spiritual Border Control or How to Share Space with a Stranger:
I build a wall around my aura. This is my space. This is allowed. This is not discriminatory. We are all part of the source, but your energy is yours, don’t siphon mine. I am allowed to say mine, because this is my journey. This is my consciousness.
When I was younger I would go out to bars and bump up against others, and kiss strangers, and bond drunkenly in bathrooms, and then wake up feeling empty. It was so exciting until it wasn’t. Then you learn to conserve, that there is a balance in connecting and sharing space. You are allowed to be selective.
On revisiting old diaries:
I forget there is treasure in there. My subconscious bleeds out of me on to those pages. There are 15 years of confessions, dreams, wishes, changes, mistakes. I find it’s easy to get lost in that space, that time. What was I so desperately wanting? Not men — Life. I was desperate for life, it seemed.
A note about my grandfather’s ghost:
Somewhere embedded in the fabric of my reality is my dead grandfather. He comes as white butterflies, and in dreams. The weight of his consciousness I could not tell you, it is heavy, maybe tons. Like a whale, but he is just one dead person.
A freewrite about the moon/life/process:
I try to stay connected to the moon, whatever that means. I cut myself in slits. I am waning, I am waxing, I am growing myself whole. I am becoming bigger than I am. I follow the folklore, nothing should be planted on the full moon, only cut your hair on the new moon, banishing spells when the moon is large, any love spells should grow with the crescent moon. I watch myself expand and shrink in the matter of weeks, like the ocean, my body bloated with salt. I hide away when the sky is dark. I am brewing something magical inside. When the moon is bloated like my body, I bleed, and the process begins again. This constant shrinking and expanding wears on me, but I realize every 28 days I become something new, something bigger than I was before. I head toward the sun and the end of my life with hair as white as the moon and sun spots from the universe. I am spinning with the earth toward death, growing closer to my body, to the mother earth, blossoming and withering at the same exact time. This is the process destined by the heavenly bodies that govern us. So yes, of course we are connected to the moon.
JUNE
There is no completion to life. It just continues.
How hard it is to be human sometimes, to not neglect any part of my being — physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. … I can only be on one side of the dodecahedron die at a time.
Birthday trip to Sedona:
On the road headed toward Arizona, trusting we will meet our life somewhere along the way.
Fragments from a psychedelic journey:
It began with doors opening to the sacred chapel of mirrors. Climbing the stairs of my grandmother’s apartment building in Morelia, it transformed into a temple. … They kept telling me the imagery does not matter. The universe expanded into a bismuth stone. So many dimensions, so much work that is unseen. They kept repeating “The imagery doesn’t matter.” They kept telling me I was focusing too much on form, and my form kept shapeshifting into something else. I became gooey and shapeless and I called out, “I don’t want to be gooey and shapeless, I want form!” I want this body, and yes I will honor it. They were showing me: this is what clairvoyance is. You see the lineage and archetypes and the chakras people get stuck in. Astrology, tarot cards, breath work, these are just tools, they say. They showed me the dimension where play takes place and said all art comes from this place. Play here. Pull from here.
JULY
I am trying to exist below the surface of everything.
A dream question:
In another part of the dream, I was in an old neighborhood from my childhood. Through the window blinds, I peeked out on a group of women walking. I recognized them as children I had met and played with briefly, before moving again to somewhere new. The possibility of life-long friendships was never in the cards for me. I woke up with a question on my mind: How do I root myself in a past I never had?
On Reality Tunnels:
I wake up with the message: they’re only going to show me what I can handle. In a dream, I see myself seated on an alien tapestry, like a magic carpet. On a wall of the universe, I see messages reflected in Space meant only for me. I see others seated on their own magic carpets, tuning into their own private screenings, I take a peek. They tell me those messages are not meant for me. Stick to your own reality tunnel, they say.
AUGUST
You’re never going to lose touch with the world because you are the world.
On boredom and loneliness:
For a moment, I’ve abandoned myself. I can feel the negative space that it leaves and I think this is what you call loneliness. Ten degrees to the right and it would be solitude and it would be sacred, and I think of all the ways I can veer off course to my true north. Since birth this has been a solo voyage, so why am I aching for something other than myself? Turn your compass inward. The needle vibrates and spins out of control. You’ll need to figure this out on foot with no equipment/tools/compass. You do not want someone else, you do not need another voice to speak for you, to guide you, to hug you, to love you, to accept you. You only need yourself. Turn the compass inward. What are you feeling? The words that come up are uninspired, bored, aimless. You feel like you need a spark. What could it be? Inside yourself there is no light on, if only you turned on the light you would see a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration and love and epiphanies and revelations — so many that you would never want to come out. Investigate. Be curious of yourself. Close your eyes. See an image that has been haunting you.
A moon poem:
I am the crescent light of the moon
cradling my own shadow
each day I look inward
brighten the darkness
inching my way toward wholeness
SEPTEMBER
I dress myself in dream imagery.
On my ancestral mothers, and the start of what would become A New Temple:
To build a new temple means to create a new language for my bloody, muddy mothers. I have been pieces of them throughout my life. In the beginning they felt like shards of glass piercing through my skin, manipulating my body like a grotesque Pinocchio. Breaking me into pieces with their suffering - but now I see what they made me — a mosaic of mirrors to see all of my soul.
Something my journey guide said:
There is no rush. Just be aware, honor what you are shown. Celebrate yourself.
A reminder:
Reminder: I get to participate in life today. Work. Create. Write. Make something out of nothing. Connect with the world.
OCTOBER
The great mystery of life is a gift.
Dreams symbolizing mental constructs:
The balcony fell down. We sat all of our friends in rocking chairs we made and then it crashed down. The children were playing in the room and pushed the bunkbeds off which created a tremor and the balcony crashed down and I thought all the older people were injured but they were not. This was the second dream about balconies falling off. I know these symbolize shedding mental constructs. In the last dream, I was sharing war stories with a stranger about living in Oakland. He said the terrace on his apartment was so poorly built that it had broken off, but it was OK because he still sees it from time to time. I asked “how?” He said a homeless man must have picked it up, because every once in a while he’ll see it in a shopping cart rolling on by.
A dream about past perspectives:
I am in an empty parking lot in Mexico. I intentionally sit facing a cliff and look out upon a vast and unknown territory that is my home. A rear view mirror appears to be growing out of the cracked concrete. I gaze into it and see the magical blue sky behind me, the clouds marching. I see a mariachi band walking past. A walking celebration of life. I can’t stop gazing into the rearview mirror.
A case against compartmentalizing:
All last week I pulled the death card. An aspect or construct of me died. The construct is the idea that I can compartmentalize these aspects of myself. If you lob off a side to a prism it becomes less luminous. We are all multi-sided, messy and beautiful humans. I sit here spiraling in my thoughts, a multitude of voices chiming in, wanting to say things, ask questions. This morning I meditated and I met an angel in my sacred space, and she held me and I asked her how can I be more myself and yet be pure. She said the answer is desire itself. I am allowed to be complicated and dark and scared and guarded and hesitant and still be pure in that sense. Yes, I am a spirit having a human experience, but I have been so, so, so, deeply human in my errors and ways and it is the intention of my desires that pull me closer to my pure self.
NOVEMBER
What is this individuation process? I thought I was supposed to be getting clearer and now it feels like I’m getting more complicated.
A dream about shadow work:
In a rented room that I share I try to put together my dilapidated furniture. I broke a mirror trying to move it. My furniture is old, chipped and from my childhood. I see other rented rooms designed so extravagantly. I wish my room was swanky and stylish. I keep rearranging furniture, trying to design something beautiful and minimize the space my shadow furniture takes up.
On controlling the expansion of consciousness:
My gray hair was growing in. At first I was happy, this was the mark of living. It said to the world, I am still here and I am sticking it out and I love every minute of it. On a closer look in the mirror I saw that my grays were growing in the opposite way, from end to root. I felt a desire to control it or cover it up. I didn’t want to be vain. I woke up with the message that we cannot control where awakenings and wisdom choose to appear.
How to get closer to heaven:
My hope is that by the time I leave this life I am closer to heaven, by the way that I love, by the way that I walk the earth, and by the grace that I gift myself.
DECEMBER
For the first half of December, I do not journal. There is no excavating of my psyche or logging of my dreams. I put all my energy into completing this small book of visions, poems, dreams and animal spirits that I call A New Temple. It is dedicated to my ancestral mothers who appeared to me last August during a psychedelic journey. It is an artifact of my subconsciousness and it is available here.
It’s been a long year of inner work. I set off in the beginning of the year to get to know my new narrator — the woman that I am now — and I did exactly that. I am ending this year closer to myself than I’ve ever been.