Deep Continuity: the spiral web your soul weaves
A goddess of spiderwebs of alternate timelines and dimensions (Midjourney)
I dream of spiders and spiders can dream.
For several nights, I dreamed of stumbling upon spider webs. One night, I found a rainbow-colored web in the back of my closet. It was woven tightly like a sweater. The strongest material on earth made by the most fragile bodies. If you drop a tarantula from a small distance it will break and die.
In another dream, I was between the walls of Space and Time when I saw a book about the future trapped in a spider web. An old-timey radio broadcast came on and alerted the public that this book was being changed from the past. The words in printed copies were being altered as they were read.
The dream messengers said I could do this too. Write my own life across timelines — backwards and forwards. Change the past to create new futures.
Still the message is just a metaphor. Symbols are flat. And animal totems are shapeshifters. Dreams weave themselves outside of time — the meaning of them is revealed only after patience and reverence. So I carried the dreams with me for days, trying to fit them into my reality like puzzle pieces. Then one morning, I woke up to find a spider had spun part of its web on the lawn. It gleamed in the sun. I meditated on it quietly, until a meaning arose in the form of a question — what is the deepest desire that drives you?
I think of my parents, because I am a continuation of them. Their desires are encoded into my DNA and my whole life I've tried to disentangle my identity from theirs. My father, who never wanted to be poor, would spend hours shining his shoes only to hide his holey bottoms. My mother, even as a child, could never escape the male gaze, and it splintered her into a hundred pieces.
Fears often disguise themselves as desires and sit behind the wheel of all our decisions — these are things that need to be rewritten.
Your true desires are separate from any external influence. You sense them in the trajectory of your life. Every decision I have ever made has been driven by the desire to feel freedom and connect with God on my own terms.
So this is what I do. This is how I time travel. I connect with my deepest desires — not my parents, not anyone else's. I go back and sit with younger versions of myself. I consult and console. And each time I return to the now, I come back with another piece of my puzzle. This is how you establish Deep Continuity.
Sometimes I meditate and sit with my 60-year-old self. A woman I am getting to know little by little. She is graceful and wise and boundlessly loving, and I always ask her — how do I get from me to you? The path is not clear. One time I asked her in a dream "What is the difference between me and you?" and she responded, "Pull the universe toward you."
Deep Continuity is the spiral web that your soul weaves. You can travel it, back and forth across your life. You can quantum leap into paths not taken. You can extrapolate into futures not yet created. You can pull the universe toward you.
You can do this, because you now know what drives you in every direction.
Grow another face
You’re aching to give voice to this other side of you. It’s beating like a new heart just below your skin. We have no language for this and we don’t talk about it and no one, but you, will give you the grace to change.
You must grow another face.
This is an all-out grab for more and more consciousness. You want to swim in multiple waves of depth and you deserve that. You deserve to be fed more than just algorithms. You are the one pulling rabbits out of the cosmic hat.
You clawed your way out of the abyss to be here now. So be here now.
You must grow another face.
There is a mythical land called Shambhala where some say Jesus and Buddha might reside, and others say it’s not really a spiritual kingdom but more of a diamond, where every ascended master is a facet or a separate side.
You are also multi-faceted. You are allowed to be multiple you(s). This is what true depth is. You can be different now. Grow another face.
We are afraid to be complicated. We mute ourselves. We stay on the surface of things. Flatten our desires. We think growing new faces means mental illness, but you’re already living with multiple voices and none of them are yours. They belong to your parents and your friends and children — and they are all outdated and uninformed.
Reformat yourself. Auto-update. Delete. Do what you have to do to grow another face.
You are allowed to be all things, then some things, and not other things, and no things — all at once.
How I stay grounded and soar in the skies
Me
I’ve seen what happens when a spiritual seeker becomes ungrounded. I used to believe I could only live in one world at a time, or have one and not the other, but that’s not true. You can have both.
You can be a bird with legs that grow and stretch past your current point of existence and consciousness and you can also come back home — down to earth — whenever you want.
This image was actually intuited by Kathy Crabbe, who is an artist and soul reader, and a psychic I trust. Her energy is beaming with love and creativity and kindness. I’ve been getting readings from her for more than ten years now.
She saw me as this bird and when I heard her describing the bird, I got chills (chills and goosebumps can be a confirmation of truth). She had her own interpretation of what the bird meant, and said it was important spiritual imagery for me — and it is!
And I took that imagery and I sat with it and I drew it out and in that process, I made the final decision as to what it meant for me — and that’s how all of this psyche archeology / psychic revealings should work — it can be collaborative, but ultimately, it is your fate to create.
Healing your inner child is time travel
When I was in Sedona, Arizona last year for my 37th birthday, I met with four different healers. A shaman, dream weaver, reiki therapist and someone whose business card said multidimensional intuitive. Each one talked about the importance of healing your inner child.
During one of the sessions, I was given a visualization exercise that had profound effects on my psyche and was definitely a form of time travel.
The exercise:
I was told to go back in my mind to my first moment of shame. I was told to see myself as a child and let myself feel every painful thing Little Claudia was feeling. To induce tears. To let that moment in time break through me and cry. I did. Then I was told to swoop in — as myself from this current point of existence — knowing everything I know now, with all the love I have now, and to pick up that little version of me and heal her with my compassion and wisdom and tell her all the things she needed to hear back then.
My first moment of shame:
I was 4 years old and I was in an upstairs bedroom listening to the radio. There was a Spanish love song playing and I was singing along with it. I had a pen and a piece of paper and I was writing a love letter. I don’t know to who, but I suspect it was to God. My mother came into the room and asked me what I was doing. I told her I was writing a love letter. She laughed at me and I felt embarrassed for the first time in my life. I didn’t want to finish my letter. I didn’t want to sing along to the love song. I thought I had done something wrong — and I was ashamed of being so in love.
How I healed Little Claudia:
In Sedona I was 37 years old when I went back in time and picked up my 4-year-old self and I hugged her, and I kissed her and I told her she had done nothing wrong. I told her she came into this world in love and that’s how she was supposed to remain. I told her to write more and more love letters, and to sing along to all the Spanish love songs and to never — for one moment — feel embarrassed about it. I told her that her heart was pure and that was her super power and to let herself be guided by that for the rest of her life.
We walked out of that bedroom together, Little Claudia and I, and she’s been with me ever since.
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.
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.
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.
The Wisdom Index
I took the Jeste-Thomas Wisdom Index, a short survey created by researchers at UC San Diego that can determine your level of wisdom. Here are my scores:
I was surprised that I scored the highest in Spirituality. My first thought was, “Is there something wrong with that?” I answered myself with a gentle “no” and realized that I’m still holding on to an outdated concept of Spirituality.
My mother indoctrinated me to be “spiritually liberal” and I grew up in and out of churches. As an adult I have an aversion to group think and anything that requires my weekly attendance to evolve or grow in any way. But that is more Community than Spirituality.
I actively try not to lead with Spirituality, but I think I’m only kidding myself. Because underneath every nature outing, or meet-up with a friend, my heart beats with communion. When I’m alone, I’m never alone. There is a cathedral inside me and the church bells ring hourly.
The Labyrinth Theory
What I love about walking labyrinths is that the closer you get to the center the farther you are in distance. Life has often felt that way too.
A brief summary of the past 37 years: I am born to two teenage immigrants who speak no English. As they grow, I grow too. Their mistakes are my mistakes. I am uprooted and left behind. In my earliest memories, I am always alone. I write love letters to God and search for portals in trees. I will be the new girl in school 15 times. Being called “weird” or “poor” will never faze me. By age 10, I am irrevocably damaged and weighed down with worry. Poetry saves me. I write it all down — the dark parts and the dreams. I never stop searching for meaning. At age 17, I move across the country to survive on my own. Besides books and my own intuition — and the occasional Divine interference — there is no guidance. A decade is spent destroying when all I want is to create. After one near-death experience and three suicide attempts — at age 30 — I decide to get off Zoloft and heal through nature and talk therapy. I give up poetry for a brief time. I ground myself in the Earth. I meet my husband — my anchor. I grow beautiful friendships. I find my center. It feels a lot like the wonder and magic of my short childhood. All those years spent in the outer circles, I never knew how close I was to myself.
The Black Tapestry
I found myself in a dark void, surrounded by a primordial and formless space. At first, I thought I had lost all my senses. Everything was deep black and soundless and there was no gravity. I was a floating consciousness with no home. This is limbo, I thought — or maybe I just knew and didn’t think any thoughts. I seemed to understand things without processing them. This is intuition. This is clairvoyance. This is my third eye. Out of the void, a bolt of fabric came into view. It was also black and began to slowly unroll itself before me. A velvety, onyx-colored cloth expanding to the edges of my perception, until it became what I knew as my sole existence. All at once, an invisible hand started embroidering symbols and archetypes and allegories. I read the fabric from left to right — stitch by stitch — I was witnessing my life from birth to now. An orphrey of multi-dimensional imagery. Each symbolic stitching embodying a multitude of history and emotion and language. And the colors — such vivid hues of violet, orange, crimson and pink. It looked like something my long-lost ancestral aunts in Mexico might have sewn. But even though the colors were bright and festive, I was quickly overtaken by grief and discouragement. By now, the invisible hand had finished its work midway through the fabric, leaving almost exactly half of it blank. What lay before me was an unfinished tapestry so deeply embedded with neglect and loss and scarcity — all of which were at this moment so foreign to me. I wanted out of this vision, and hurtful reminder of where I had come from. My shapeless consciousness grew hot with shame, and pulsated with anxiety that spread outward into nothing. This must be how stars die, I thought. No, This is how stars die. I knew. Then came a gentle cooling. I was reminded — telepathically — that what I was seeing was my past. The other half of the tapestry still remained to be embroidered. They said it would be stitched by my own hand and with only the values and experiences that I wanted for this life. Symbols of love and animals and friendship and nature and art and freedom and magic, and these simple words do no justice to the rich power that lies behind them, because just like the embroidery they are a prism. Multi-faceted and pure light. An energy of such high vibration that it could only belong to the Gods. And as I began to accept this as truth — in the core of my being — my sadness gracefully morphed into rapture and gratitude and passion. This was an invitation to stand at the helm of my life. And I took it. And my own black velvet tapestry is just one of infinite tapestries eternally unfolding across the universe — a divine display of all the soul journeys that embark onto unknown space and create something beautiful.
Be a weird adult
“That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult — if you don’t lose it.” — Kevin Kelly
What has carried me (an ever-expanding list)
What has carried me from birth until now has been this: love, the openness of the world, wild overgrown yards, imagining I am a princess warrior, digging for dinosaur bones, calling out for god in the dark, what prayer is, wishes, the sky at night, that one star brighter than the rest, my grandfather communicating from the dead, love, the dimensions of dreams, coincidences — no — synchronicities, magic spells that work, love, being alone but not feeling alone, love that grows claws, my mother in my throat chakra, art as a choice, stretching past my shame, a wide open sky, walking in nature, aliens, the believers, love, a murmuration of birds, love, falling down on my knees, getting back up, a warm bed, nostalgia, oh my god, so much nostalgia, animals as familiars, freedom, every beautiful thing, this incessant flowering of time and life — each day, I open my heart up for the looting.
A chart for finding your reason for being
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that translates roughly to “reason for being.” Your Ikigai is found at the intersection where your passions and talents converge with the things that the world needs and is willing to pay for. Make a list of all the things you're curious about and figure out where they intersect. Then, find a medium through which you can express that passion.
Favorite quotes: Warrior Goddess Training by HeatherAsh Amara
The first step to claiming your strength and igniting your will is to get clear about what you want. Not what your victim wants, or what your judge wants, or what you would like, but what your highest vision and purpose is for yourself. What I have found is that when you get clear about your heart's desire, the Universe steps up in magnificent ways to support you!
So I say, if you are burning, burn. If you can stand it, the shame will burn away and leave you shining, radiant, and righteously shameless. —Elizabeth Cunningham
What is your main taproot? Make it deep and solid. Redirect it if it has grown attached to a person or ideal. Anchor yourself in infinity, in earth, to the life-force. Where is your true source of energy and stability? Reach deep.
How to clear old emotions: Take five minutes each day, whether you feel like it or not, to move through some emotions. You can also do this by dancing vigorously and yelling. Use your voice; scream, cry, om, growl . . . let your emotions move!
Life does not personally punish people or seek to cause suffering; it simply moves.
When you let go of who you wish you were, you reclaim your power to be radiantly, magnetically, and creatively who you are.
Be a wholehearted creative
The wholehearted creative woman knows that art is not simply the work of her hands. Her truest artistic work is being fully herself in the presence of others. The book, the painting, the meal, the presentation are all simply evidence of a deeper art happening within the soul of the artist.
“Art is what happens when we dare to be who we really are. ”
— Emily P. Freeman