Love: A Smug Tale Of Resilient Rib Cages

“Learning — slowly, slowly — to open up and love when I feel scared, rather than curl up like a threatened porcupine.”

That sentence was written in 2012 as my father was dying. I put his last days on Twitter because it helped anchor me as we floated around the hospital waiting for him to cast off into the next great adventure.

I’m thinking about it now because the anniversary of my father’s death is the day after Thanksgiving and I re-posted the tweets as a “Happy Death Day, Dad! You Were A Good One!” gesture.

Now I keep finding my eyes skimming over that one sentence - and worry that I’m back-sliding.

When we have these experiences, the ones that crack our hearts open, the raw vulnerability feels like it will last. Like this feeling of being broken open will last forever. There’s relief and even joy in it, as everything you’d kept bottled up comes flooding out.

But we rebuild. New experiences come in - like the explosion of three relationships in three years, whoops - and we start adding brick and new spackle to those heart walls.

As humans, we want to feel like we’re on a general upward trajectory. Moving forward, learning the lessons, growing. Onward and upward forever more.

But things just keep happening. Which is the definition of life, I guess.

Life: That Time When Things Kept Happening.

(Quick, someone give me a Pulitzer.)

After the implosion of three relationships in three years, I find myself being careful. Hesitant. Unwilling to blaze in the way I did the last three times.

I don’t want to curl up like a frightened hedgehog, but that doesn’t mean I won’t.

How do you continue to open up and love when it feels like the last few times you tried, your rib cage got caved in by a baseball bat?

I know it’s possible. People do it. I’ve done it.

But letting go of the old experiences to allow in the new ones feels scary. Like I’ll forget something important if I do. Like I’ll lose something.

But I don’t want to be that person who lets fear win. Partly because it doesn’t sound like any fun, but mostly because I want to be smug about trampling fear beneath my fuzzy boots.

Love may not win, but smug will.

DEAR LIFE, I WANT TO BE SMUG ABOUT HOW BRAVE AND LOVING I AM. GOT IT? K THANKS.

How do you throw yourself off the cliff again? How do you face down the baseball bat and say TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT! RIB CAGE OF STEEL, BABY!

Since I don’t know the answers, it seems I’ll just have to keep living life, life where things keep happening, and do my best to show up for the life I want rather than quaking at the mercy of things I’m scared of. That’s really all we can do. While taking whatever opportunities to be smug - and happy - that we can wrangle.

This picture doesn’t have much to do with this post, aside from the fact that I adore these women and also my face is a fairly accurate depiction of my feelings on love at the moment.

Talking to Dragons

On the scale of delightfully strange jobs, talking to dragons is probably near the top.

But now that it’s been a few years, I probably need to stop claiming that channeling unicorns and hurling light with Archangel Michael is weird.

Not that it is or isn’t, especially as jobs go, but because it’s mostly my way of trying to make people more comfortable. Like, “hahaha, I know I’m crazy but what can you do?”

Yes, making people comfortable is generally a good thing, a kind thing, but not when it means diluting yourself for common consumption.

Recognizing my worth has been one of my greatest challenges. It’s tangled up in owning my weird, allowing myself to receive, and … oh my god this is all exhausting. Like, I just got really tired and want to take a nap now.

Part of me just wants to wash my hands of the whole thing, but that’s the problem with Talking To Dragons As a Job (TM). You have to keep plowing through these self-constructed webs. You don’t get to stop, because then you won’t be as effective. (And might not be able to make rent.)

I want to be effective. I want to know my worth, not just as an intellectual concept but as something I fully embody and never have reason to question.

So what would the dragons tell me about this? If I can talk to dragons, may as well ask them for help when I’m riding the struggle bus.

Therefore:

Hi, dragons! How can I recognize and feel my worth?

“By knowing that the wounds of your childhood do not need to inform your adulthood. By steeping in the joy of each moment and knowing that life is ever-changing and you are never stuck. You are never trapped. You are always loved and supported and in divine hands. Surrender into those hands and give yourself a goddamn break.”

(Sometimes the dragons swear.)

Choosing joy and play and fulfillment and abundance sometimes feels harder than anything you could ever do. This is why I talk to dragons. This is why I teach this stuff. Because we teach what we need to learn.

Good Old-Fashioned Primal Shrieking (And Squirrels)

I’ve been doing a lot of primal screaming.

Also, a lot of actual screaming.

This is when living alone is glorious - there’s no one to frighten with your occasional cleansing shrieks. I may have scared a squirrel or two, but since they dive bomb my roof at least once a day, sometimes waking me out of a sound Saturday morning slumber, I feel zero remorse.

Forest rodents beware.

So much has been rumbling to the surface lately that sometimes it’s necessary to let it out with a solid yell. The occasional yelp. Even a whimper or two. Though sliding into the pathetic whimpering usually means it’s time to do something else. Like take a walk in the woods (provided the air quality isn’t currently at You Gonna Die because of the wildfires). Do the dishes, write something, make something, color something. Stand under, sit in, or drink a lot of water. Visit your friend Adriene on her yoga youtube channel (she’s not really my friend but isn’t she really the whole world’s friend?). And of course… yell. How to best shift the sticky, crispy energy is a constant curiosity, something my sensitive peeps (which is all of you, hi!) understand 100 percent.

OH MY GOD I JUST GOT DIVE BOMBED BY ANOTHER SQUIRREL. It sounds like frantic skittering right over my head, mostly because my roof seems to be a major squirrel thoroughfare as they dart between trees.

Anyway, life, am I right? It’s good, all and all. I just shift between feeling like I’m standing on a precipice and like I’m stuck in an extra confining box and I know it’s completely within my power and capacity to shift it in a hot second, but then I don’t. Or I do and then I shift it back again. I don’t know. Energy is weird and I’m still learning (remembering) how it works.

Part of me can’t wait for change, part of me fears change, the rest of me wants potato chips. I think that’s called being human.

Hi, human friends. I hope you’re doing well and letting a good old-fashioned primal shriek whenever necessary.

Here, have a soothing dragon.

Turns Out, I Am Literally The Bee's Knees

I was reading a book in the sun, drinking free coffee (my super power is scoring free coffee) and minding my own business, when a bee decided to land on my thigh.

Memories of my childhood are fuzzy. Our brain processes information differently when we feel intense emotion and, as an empath with no coping skills, I was constantly flooded with feels. So my brain trained itself to survive the moment rather than record it for later. But a few of the memories I do have are of being stung by bees - screaming because a bee bit me on the inside of my mouth after it landed on my sandwich on a camping trip and wearing jelly sandals for a week because the top of my foot was so swollen I couldn’t wear anything else.

So when the bee landed on my leg, I panicked a bit, wondering if it was about to poke me with its stinger.

Then I noticed that it was cleaning itself.

Its little stinger retracted and extended as the bee gently washed its torso and legs and fuzzy little bee butt. I had to consciously keep breathing - in and out - to keep my cortisol levels from spiking, but it was astonishing. I’d never seen a bee take a bath before and I was rather honored that it chose me.

I love it when dogs and children wander up to me of their own accord. Like they’re drawn to me or feel safe with me. Or maybe they see the unicorns over my shoulder. I don’t know. Either way, it always makes my day a little bit better. Same with this little bee giving itself a wash on my thigh, even as I wondered the entire time if I was in for a sharp sting and a few days of swelling.

But the bee continued to bathe itself while I watched and, when it was done, fluttered gently off into the sunshine.

Image borrowed from this lovely Etsy shop.

Dedicated To Everyone Who Confuses The World

From refusing to enter the world (the female doctor trying to deliver me had to call in a burly dude with forceps to yank me out) to some serious sexual dysfunction in my 20s that Kaiser had no idea what to do with for years (that was a festival of terrible, let me tell you) to this morning when my doctor sat staring at me for twenty minutes with a deeply confused look on her face, I’ve been baffling western medicine since 1978.

Guys, this is how I became a hippie in the first place. No one else ever knew what to do with me.

Luckily, I've always been physically healthy. Sure, inside I was a giant ball of traumatized anxiety sponging up every emotion within a three mile radius, but I figured that was normal. Mental and emotional health is so deeply tricky because no one else can see the inside of our heads, and we've always lived there so don't know anything else.

While any number of arguments could be made both for and against my mental health, I feel much better and happier than I ever have in my life and I chalk it up to being a relentless - and one could even claim obnoxious - hippie. Playing with energy healing sorted me out nicely, which is how I accidentally fell into Hippie-As-Profession. When people ask me what I do, I tend to say something like, "I just want everyone to feel better."

Which is both true and also how I end up confusing every well-meaning person who's ever asked me what I do for a living.

Now I'm just laughing in my living room because OH THIS WORLD, YOU GUYS. Do any of us know what to do with it? Even a little?

Since we don't, I think we just keep looking for our own answers, our own truth, and chalk up the days where you get a message from your doctor saying, "I think you can take care of this with an $8 over-the-counter medication, let me know if that doesn't work" as a serious win.

Especially when you spend the rest of that day cheerfully driving down the coast with the top down, eating shepherd's pie in the window seat, and reading your book in the November sun.

And if you come home to a delivery of your new Harry Potter sheets emblazoned with golden stars and owls - well that’s pretty much perfect.

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(Speaking of rampant hippie-ism and energy healing and being both confusing and confused, I did an energy healing on youtube related to all this today. :)

(Book pictured is Capital Gaines, which I loved.)