I was driving home yesterday and it struck me. A switch flipped. Just like getting sober, a switch flipped.
I finally comprehend that my Stardust simply wasn’t right for me. And it’s not anyone’s fault. She couldn’t know at the beginning that she’d never trust me. And she tried so hard. I, in turn, couldn’t know that either.
We simply weren’t the right fit. And we learned so much about ourselves. I hope she did.
I don’t feel an overwhelming urge for her today. The one I’ve had for almost three years. Especially since I returned to Texas at the beginning of February eight months ago. I ache and miss her, yes. But I don’t miss how I felt when with her. And none of that is either of our faults.
It’s a fucking gorgeous day. I’m gonna go out in the woods somewhere for a little bit and hope the realizations set in so I can finally have a modicum of peace. For as long as it might last.
Quite a lot, I’m seeing more every day. Now, the time I was there in Idaho, last year exactly.
She taught me so much. These eight months of isolation and solitude has taught me even more.
I’ve seen that everything she hated the most about herself she saw in her mom and others she loved. And I saw that for what it was at the time I was with her.
But I chose to learn how to love rather than how not to.
When you think about what you love in another person…doesn’t it reflect your own feelings?
Everything I love in someone is something I’ve already loved inside me. Those things that make my heart wilt and my body soften, those things are most sacred. They’re the most sacred because I loved them in me, first, before I ever loved them in anyone else.
My love for nature and solitude, I love them in me and I love them in others.
My passion for literature and language and all the ways to spin a web with them that’s so intoxicating we ALL fall into it daily…those sparks I see in others, and I loved them in me first.
My deep abiding love of freedom, of experiencing every part of the world I possibly can, of learning and curiosity and playfulness, those all I loved first in me.
So in a way, my loving anyone is by extension just me loving myself.
And yet people forget that. They seek those things they love about other people, or the ideas, and they forget that they loved those things in themselves first.
Or they get confused and think there’s nothing loveable about themselves, that only others are worth loving. And in effect, their love changes into self-loathing, and feeling lost without someone to give their attention to.
Those things I love most about someone else, I loved those things in me first.
I loved me first. And if I can give anything to those I care about, it’s to show them it’s okay for them to love themselves too.
Woke desperately needing some wild, so took my ass out for a walk. Hike. Both.
It’s one of my favorite spots around here, just isolated (and unpopular) enough that I rarely ever see others in the same area. There’s a river with numerous wash-out areas that all lead to the water. The riverbed is carved through limestone, and rarely changes much.
It isn’t often, but Texas can be quite beautiful in the right spots.
There were still brilliant in-your-face explosions of color.
There’s an abundance of wild ice-cold springs that pop up along this little stretch of river, and the only way to find them is to wade through, feel the water temperature change from tepid to cold, and look for ferns.
It’s so very odd to encounter wild COLD springs in Texas. They exist, yes, but along this river I’ve encountered them along this stretch only.
Clambered to the top of the rocks and sat for a good long while, eye throbbing from what I thought was a horsefly sting, didn’t know it but had the stinger from the little meanie stuck in my eyelashes the entire time.
Didn’t matter, I was alone under the skies, watching eagles dip down to swoop past and touch the water, then soar off again, riding the thermals like a rollercoaster, silently thrilling me. I was quiet, and sunk into the rocks, shaded, at home.
Well-posed so as to NOT capture the puffy eye.
Inside the dark sideways crack in that rock was a small rattlesnake, coiled up, resting, watching me. I said hi to my little brother, thanked him for letting me take pictures of his home, and kept walking. Definitely tried to get some pictures but far too dark to come out clearly and I’m more considerate than to flash his poor eyes with my camera.
Not the clearest, but here is that little damn bastard stinger that hitchhiked inside my eyelashes the entire walk back to my car.
Doesn’t look like much but goddamn no THANK YOU!!
And my gross eye after…took this on the boulder, you can see the stinger clinging to my lashes, though blurry.
Eye throbbing, the whole right side of my face ached. Still pulsing even sitting in the dark at home. My shoe strap kept breaking the entire way back to my car. I twisted my ankle a bit because I couldn’t see clearly, so I slowed way down and took my time and listened.
The grasshoppers sang in the fields as I passed by, a dry serenade to my steps, my breathing, cursing under the pants, it didn’t matter. None of it mattered because this is what nature gives me. I take her gifts and lessons in my stride and learn from them.
We must slow down enough to hear her. Having the whole world in our pockets funnily enough distracts us from her, and we have to stop. Put it down. Ignore the rings and buzzes and chirps unless they’re from the world around us , the REAL one, not the one in our pockets.
I videoed and took pics because I wanted to share the bliss of those moments. Then I put the phone down and walked away to sit far from it a while. To wander, to just exist for a bit anywhere that wasn’t digital. It isn’t there where we live. We live here, now, the glorious now, and how she saves us, if we just embrace her.
Put down the phone, turn off the electronics, go sit on the dirt, bare skin to bare earth if possible. Close your eyes, and just breathe and feel your prayers to the wind, send them and let them go. Our Mother hears us and knows exactly what we need, if we only listen. Trust her.
Be hope. Be love.
(And try to avoid being stung on the eyelid by bees while you’re at it. That shit hurts.)
I haven’t felt pretty in ever so long. Months and months. She knew how to make me feel pretty and loved, and voiced so many words of adoration almost every day that now I wonder if those too are a lie. I wonder if she was wrong and so am I and I’m a monster that reflects the ache inside of me and makes me keep people at a distance.
People fucking hurt. And I just don’t feel the need for intimacy outside of my own with myself. And I know I don’t trust me because for two years she lied to me and yet I believed that she trusted me enough to be honest with herself and she never was.
For two years she saw me as a whore and showed it in her distrust and how many times she threw me away. And every time she would love bomb me until I trusted her again with EVERYTHING I am and it was all a lie so how the hell can I trust me enough to let anyone that close again?
I’m not saying those things to make you pity me. I’m not saying them to say I’m a victim either. I own my shit. I’m saying those things because I know that inside me I have so very much to heal and improve before I’m well enough to have a relationship again.
And to be honest, no one has ever loved me like she did, or make me feel the way she did and so why leave a trail of people behind that I hurt over and over again when no one will ever be her?
So. Back to the first paragraph. I wanted to feel pretty. I bought myself some jewelry from Magpie’s Trick, and put on some makeup, and took some photos in the morning light. Best of which is this one:
And damn if it didn’t feel good to be a little pretty for a few minutes. Even wore femme dangly earrings, which I haven’t worn in over a year, and it felt awkward but I mostly felt pretty.
It felt good to stand bare-footed under my favorite tree (in the yard) and dig my toes into the cool damp soil and catch the morning light.
Eventually I’ll feel good more days than I feel bad, and things will balance again. I’m ever optimistic, and I’m too stubborn to give up.
I should have died. I tried to. I turned yellow. I got so skinny my clothes were falling off. I puked and cried and stank as the toxins left me.
My eyes were always wet from crying and yellow and dry from my flagging liver.
I was held and taught to hold myself. To live in the NOW and trust it. To not dwell on the past or what I thought my future was going to look like.
The desert of the Texas panhandle and the canyons saved me. Masibindi saved me.
I saved me. I haven’t craved alcohol since. I don’t know what the switch was that fell, but I am grateful for it every day.
I’m convinced that being in that magical place, in the Texas desert in my least favorite part of the year, was what did it. Something had to break inside of me for the shell to open, like a bluebonnet seed needing damage to sprout.
Seventeen years in a bottle. I should have died. I tried to, but I failed as I did in so many things. My marriage, my religion, my family, my tribe, all of my friends, everything left me. Or I left them.
I lost the love of my life. I tried to die. And then I was there, hardly able to sit upright, with a newly poured full drink in front of me, to the brim. I remember looking at it, smelling it, smelling me. And I couldn’t take another sip. It hurt. Everything hurt. Tunnel vision was only that drink and I shut it down and ran.
Ran to the desert, to quiet reflection looking at the ants crawl across the sand because I had to try to think about anything other than the gagging and puking and dry heaving I’d been doing for three days because I couldn’t keep anything down.
Apologizing repeatedly because I had to run to the bathroom to stand in a way I knew so well because I’d lived that way for weeks now and this was my reality but still I’d breathe and get through this.
Drawing hot baths under the starry night sky in a water trough so I could soak in the moon’s rays and heal while J sat and talked to me about Masibindi and how beautiful she would become.
I cry now because it was such a beautiful miserable painful time and yet I miss those days of simplicity and wild bees and honey and quiet ghostly abandoned towns and canyons that bloomed green out of the red desert like a glorious lush vulva, slick and cold and mossy and damp.
The desert held me and healed me as the dogs Tucker and Porter sat at my side, watching the sun set, smelling the moisture settle on the dust outside, hearing J splash in the moon bath on the porch. The giant windmills would blink in unison, like slow eyes of a drowsy cat, and the Now was beautiful and serene and just what it needed to be.
Two years ago today I didn’t just fight to survive new sobriety, I fought to rebirth myself, and it was bloody and yellow and smelly and I was terrified the entire time.
But I made it. I haven’t looked back, only forward, even if I lost my way a little again I still haven’t touched booze for two years. I have the Now, I have me, a tribe, my son, a family of my own making, and they’re worth it. I’m worth it. And I always have been. I’m learning that now.
It’s raining outdoors, the incensed sky is coming in the cracked window, raining heat onto my floor. I just finished a shift at my new job and it feels like I just woke, really, even though I just finished an eight hour shift. I’m getting goosebumps hearing the raindrops misting the tree outside, slapping the road with intensity, every drop sounding different from any other drop that hits around it. I hear blue jays calling to one another over the thunder, concerned with nothing and everything at the same time.
I’ve felt the same way for a while, aimless, just working then coming home and sleeping to do it again the next day. And again. And again. An endless cycle that puts food on the table and clothes on my back, but goddamn it I’m not made for a 9-5 40-hour work week that means nothing and betters no one, not even myself. Thankfully this new job gives me more than stability. It’s a purpose too, even though I have to seek it out, but the options are varied and SO SO BIG that I’m excited for the days to come again, finally. That, along with my own writing projects and some collaborations that will be a few months or a year in the making, and I’m feeling lighter again.
It’s not that I can’t work a 9-5, it’s not that I’m not willing to. I actually love working, and flourish when busy. It’s that I need something that will ignite me inside, in a way the last job simply never could. It’s never been enough for me to just “be” and mull around a life that is unremarkable. One where I benefit no one else has absolutely no appeal. Even if I despise humanity as a whole there are many people I care about and love, and to make their lives better, to inspire them to smirks and smiles and new experiences, and THAT is something I can be proud of. Even if I insist on keeping everyone at arm’s length (or six feet away). Yes, I want to benefit those I care about…but on MY terms.
There finally is some hope in what I do. It just took some time to get there, and fucking hell it felt like I was drowning for far too long. Months of anti-motivation and disappointment in myself has eaten away at the edges of my mind until it overwhelmed and it was everything I could do to keep treading water, knowing that eventually I’d touch shore again. And now I’m tiptoeing feeling the silty sand swish around my feet and I can breathe at the same time and I know which way to swim so I can find a sandbar to cling to, instead of drowning in everything washing my way.
These times aren’t easy for anyone. More and more I encounter people who say they want to leave the USA, because the country is “lost”. But it’s more than that. Having little computers in our pockets have connected us in ways humans have never encountered in their millennia of existence. We can instantly know what’s happening to friends on the other side of the planet, while we forget to connect to those in our own homes. Family dinners aren’t daily, they’re special occasions. We talk on screens to one another and forget how to make eye contact in person. Touching one another is an accident we apologize for, in passing, instead of sharing energy and intention, and touches hurt so badly we shrink away.
Is it any wonder we feel alone? Unheard even though we scream on social media? And I’m not talking about the solitude that we choose. We’ve only had cellular phones and computers around for a blip in time, not even 50 years for most of us, and yet they have invaded every facet of our lives. We are connected, yet we stay apart. We’ve found community yet we don’t feel a part of it. And I’m not referring only to the social distancing that the pandemic foisted upon us. It’s just made the disconnect even more visible, and we can’t escape it. It taints every kiss, every interaction we have with someone, every human is a potential death sentence, and even when we are able to be physically close to our families our minds are elsewhere, and not in the moment we share.
I don’t claim to have the answer because there’s no way it will be the same for every one of us. I don’t even have the answer for myself. The weight of the world has settled upon our shoulders and it’s crushing us as we struggle, not knowing what the world will look like in a month, or three months, or thirty.
The only time anything feels real and tangible is when I’m outdoors under the skies, the trees holding me from across the fields, my bare skin touching bare earth. There’s comfort in the vastness of reality, and I’m no longer my own little island, I’m the very water that flows around it, filling the landscape. Feeling the landscape. The NOW is what saved me two years ago when I got sober and the now is what I’m finding I’ve struggled against the most.
Life looks nothing like I thought it would this time last year. I was moving to Idaho with my wifey to have grand adventures and be in love and embrace difficult moments together because that’s what I needed, wanted, planned for. And now moments I didn’t even consider are my reality and I’m having to rebuild and I can make it look however I like. The hardest thing has been trying to figure out exactly what I want it to look like, and knowing it will be alone. Being alone doesn’t scare me. I prefer it. I just didn’t think I’d be making a life of my own again, starting anew.
So as it pours outside I sit here poring over what it is now, this life. I have my 6,000 mile companion, sweet void kitty Yuki, I have my chilly toes, and I have the rain. I have books and writing projects and poetry. I have people who love me and I have my son who would do anything to make me smile, and I have my now.
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love for your dreams for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon… I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain mine or your own without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy mine or your own if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful be realistic to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure yours and mine and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes.”
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
Yesterday I grabbed one of my favorite humans and took us to a sacred place. Not far from here is a very little known spot in a riverbed that has ancient footprints from two different kind of dinosaurs, one a large brontosaurus-like critter and the other a smaller velociraptor-like predator called an acrocathosaurus.
There are 11 footprints of this big boy interspersed with hollows from the herbivore, which are less impressive and appear to be mostly large divots in the riverbed about two feet across.
After grabbing some kolaches and water we began walking early, which is exactly what we needed, as the sun proceeded to crank up to 110 in my vehicle later that day.
We had good conversations about the past two or so years it had been since we last spent any significant time together. I felt like I went on and on about what a blessing this time alone has been, and how I don’t think dating is anything I’ll look for anytime soon. It’s just not fair of me to inflict that on anyone right now, I’m far too centered on healing. Having a person would distract me, and I know my codependent ways in the past have a habit of sneaking in and ruining things.
To be quite blunt, I need a good foundation inside me to build anything on and right now I feel like a rickety bamboo frame holding me in the air like a sky burial, stories above any of the normal life that mills around below. Definitely a frame suited for my mind at the moment but most definitely not sturdy enough for any other people to join.
Lately I’ve felt a bit like I’d added too much height and separation to that platform so high above the ground, but it was comfortable there so undisturbed by those who walked below me. Or perhaps one of the poles isn’t as sturdy as I thought, and my little secure nest so high was waving in the breezes, enough to make me nauseous from motion sickness.
This hike was exactly what I needed. We walked west along the mostly dry riverbed, talked to the trees as we passed them, smelling their leaves and giggling at the tiny perch in the river. They liked bits of our bread and so we threw crumbs into the water and watched the minnows grab crumbs bigger than they were and then speed away while their pals chased them. The river bubbled and chuckled along with us, murmuring under its breath about how happy it was that we’d come to wake up with the wild.
Most areas were flat and dry limestone riverbed, and a half mile upstream we finally found them. Every time I see them again it’s a surprise, as if I’ve been startled in the brush by a big carnivorous beast.
Barefoot I walked in the footprints, toeing my own little prints around them, imagining that now I stood in space millions of creatures had before, an overlapping echo of existence across all the parallel universes. I could feel the beasts and birds breathe across the millennia, almost smelling their hides, some warm and furry, or feathered, or cool and smelling like the moss that surrounded them. The same moss that surrounded us now.
We found a sweet little spot I’m fond of, under the watchful eyes of ancient oaks whose acorns were almost as big as my fist (I should have gotten a pic of them but was too happy to say hi to the trees).
The skies were brilliant to the point of painful, so even though I wanted to wander farther upstream we packed up and walked out, saying goodbye to the boulders that sheltered us and the caves that whispered beyond the trail. The river was glad we came and almost felt like it was trying to pull us back to love us more, cradled in wilderness without a sound or sight of humanity other than our selves.
Yes, limestone, yes river and yes, you buxom full trees, home to hundreds, always giving and always nurturing on your own terms.
A Burd in Flight 