That lovely greenbelt

Almost a month has gone by and I’m still getting to know the neighborhood and parks nearby. Walking has become somewhat routine and finally I’ve a good route mapped out on the twisting streets that takes me an hour and doesn’t force me to look at my clock constantly to see if I’ll get back in time to log in for work. Settling into a routine again has taken time, though, and I barely even noticed that it’s been four weeks since I last wrote.

The park and greenbelt I was most excited about exploring when I moved here reminds me of the dryer parts of Texas that I grew up in. There are live oaks, sure, but there’s mostly scrub brush and non-native cedar, mesquite, cacti, grasses. Rabbits everywhere, little cottontails that freeze when they hear me walking, as to remain invisible. They leap and dash once they realize they’ve been seen, and I chuckle every time. The sign when entering the greenbelt says to keep cats indoors, dogs on leashes, and eyes open for coyotes. Thank goodness neither of my felines will ever have to worry about that.

A bit further away from the greenbelt, approximately a quarter mile down the main road, is a lush glory of an environment with trails winding through. Walking through the scrub brush in the closer greenbelt makes me feel desolate and dried-up, the sky is too big and hot white blue and oppressive. There are no breezes to soothe the sweat dripping down the back of my neck. But this lusher trail calls to me. I try to visit her when I can, even though walking along the road to get there is choked with traffic even early in the morning, and I can feel unwelcome human eyes watching as they drive by. I can’t stand how they feel.

There was a doe there napping in the early morning mist, casual as can be in this heart of green surrounded by houses and roads and harried humans.

The sharp iridescent greens of grasses assaulted my eyes, and I had to shade them as I’d go around the next curve and the fields opened to me. The rain this year has been generous, and keeps the trees and grasses vivid at a time of year in Texas when they’d usually be brown already, dust drifting with the pollen between cedars. The trees are ravenously barraging us now with their sex, giving everything a yellow haze and making my eyes dry and watery by the end of the day. I fall asleep early most nights, so that I may get up early in turn, and wander with a semblance of wild freedom before the human world awakens.

The first time I walked the lush greenbelt a freshwater spring opened out of the grass, brazen as can be, shallow and small, winding a little stream to the main creek. I squealed in the discovery, and dipped my fingertips in her small pool, it was icy cool so I wet a handkerchief and wound it around my neck. Carrying something so small and sacred and secret felt like hiding from the houses around me, a little communion with our Mother, and I thanked her for the moment and for revealing the spring.

I couldn’t help it that I sneered when people passed me on the trail, I wanted it all to myself. From childhood I’ve only found peace when alone with the trees and skies, and sought serenity alone as often as I could find it. Not easy to achieve when you share a bedroom with your sister until you’re 18 and are part of a cult that forces you to go door-to-door every Saturday morning instead of watching cartoons. School during the week, JW meetings on Tuesday and Thursday, door-to-door Saturday, another meeting on Sunday…every day was full of humans and I rarely had the peace I needed so badly.

So yes…I sneered when people entered my haven, and was happy to see them pass me on the trail and out of my energy field. I hugged the trees I passed and told them how strong they were. I laughed at the ducks at the duck pond I passed, and wondered at roots winding their way through layers of limestone. It was if the roots and rocks were in the middle of a waltz. Time passes so slowly for us they appear still, but I could see them winding in a dance that would last centuries, if the parks are allowed to last that long. So much necessary frailty lying in the hands of developers and contractors, defining the sacred with money and profit.

Sacrilegious. Profane.

And so I worship as I walk, touching branches above me, hoping the trees remember me when I’m gone. In this new home there is life and hope, a starting-over, a settling to let my roots stretch a little. Until I am on the road again to my next adventure.

Is it heartless

In the morning I wipe the sleep from my eyes, thanking my brain for not dreaming of her. And it feels good and right that I have habits that are mine and only mine and don’t come from our time together.

Even so she’s still there, when I look at my hair growing in from the scalp I shaved when we were together. I cut my locks and spirit off, the trees didn’t reach for me anymore, the wind didn’t know my name. I’m only now realizing how much it hobbled me. How much I hobbled myself, wrapping up into a pretty little compliant package to fit the person she thought I was. What she wanted me to be.

She’d get angry with me because I didn’t want to spend every waking moment with the love of my life. She couldn’t understand that I will always be this person, always craving solitude. She thought I didn’t love her enough when every day even now she’s in my thoughts and everywhere I look.

I just moved to a house she never touched me in. Under a roof she’s never walked beneath. With trees we never passed and wild places that don’t recognize me.

Yet. We are getting to know one another.

Sitting with the silence

After a year and a half sobbing daily for her I feel cut off from the emotions, the ones that stole my breath, sheared my feet off with spirit, encased me, desolate. I get angry that I don’t cry for her anymore. But as I write this the itching of tears inevitable begins, and I wipe my eyes clear of wet, blaming it on allergies.

It’s good to know I do still feel. Living in a house that hasn’t seen my heart shatter, though only a week now. I’d wondered if I could feel so deeply still. And it felt painful not touching the exquisite beauty of despair. I felt heartless.

Gray matter knows this numbness is a protection…but my passionate heart has been sad without that ache she handed me. I keep it safe, tucked away. But I never look at it anymore. It doesn’t deserve the sun.

And I know she thinks I’ve moved on and am screwing numerous people and partying and being the whore she called me.

I’ve moved on. But not in the way she would have chosen. She can’t justify her insecurity and jealousy by pointing at me and saying, “SEE?! I TOLD you!!”

It feels as my hair grows out that she does too…I don’t have a strand on my head she’s touched, even if my arms still feel her hands shoving me. My skin carries the memory of her, and so I walk in the mornings and sweat her out of my pores.

In walking the grasses sweep around me, growing sacred and deeper than our eyes can see, rooting beneath my skin until I can feel their tendrils brush my spine.

Creek near my new home

In the rain pours to replace her, as I look up under clouds. They cradle the water a school of salmon swam through a millennia ago. I hear their tails flick the surface of the rivers they traveled, and the waters laugh at them.

As raindrops strike my sins from me my eyes fill with branches, reaching, grabbing greedily to pluck mosquitoes from the air. I look up and the trees are a lodge I can rest in, sweeping their arms to knock me to my knees.

I rub soil into my fingertips, to erase her touch, and feel her buzz beneath the soles of my feet, so I scrape my toes through the waving creeks to wash them free, but I can’t because the love I had for her is a part of me.

And finally I can accept that, but I still feel heartless sometimes. Slowly I’m learning that I never was. Just as I was never anything close to what she called me.

I’m finding the hole she left in me never really was there, because I’d always filled it myself. I just made room for her as well inside me. And it’s freedom to only be me in here. There’s no room for anyone, and I love the little refuge I’ve created inside, where the wild things roam. It’s the way it should have always been, and I’ve known it since I was young.

Some of us are meant to be filled with others.

Some of us feel crowded alone.

Heal yourself

“Heal yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon. With the sound of the river and the waterfall. With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.

Heal yourself with mint, neem, and eucalyptus. Sweeten with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile. Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a hint of cinnamon. Put love in tea instead of sugar and drink it looking at the stars.

Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain. Stand strong with your bare feet on the ground and with everything that comes from it. Be smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with your forehead. Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier.

Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember … you are the medicine.”

-Maria Sabina, Mexican healer and poet

From Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

“‘I like the woods,” she said. ‘In them, the possibilities seem endless. They are where wild things are, and I like to think the wild always wins. In the woods, it doesn’t matter that there is no patch of earth that has not known bone, known blood, known rot. It feeds from that. It grows the trees. The mushrooms.’

‘It turns sorrow into flowers.’

They both sat down, sweaty arm to sweaty arm. They remained until the woods were black but for patches of moonlight. The remained until they could hear the night calls of one thousand living things, screaming their existence, assuring the world of their survival.

Vern screamed back.”

Routine

Predictability is tiresome to me. I know that most creatures, humans as well, thrive on routines, but to me they’re maddening.

I’m a morning person and love getting up with the sun, but as soon as the stretching is done I have to slip back into the usual every morning and it makes me want to rip my hair out. It’s the same damn thing every day. I get up, stumble to the bathroom, listen to Yuki tell me good morning and fluff and purr with excitement at seeing me up and about. I get dressed and brush my teeth and take my meds. I put on earbuds and turn on music and strap bulky clothes about me to make me unremarkable. (Because no woman walking alone wants to be noticed, believe me, it’s dangerous.) I walk the same sidewalks in the same shoes looking at the same cars and houses. The trees and wild things change, yes, but where in the city do you actually find those? I get back, take off my clothes once again, shower, feed Yuki the same dry and wet food, get dressed again, have to eat, and log in to work.

With work at the least it’s variable and rarely the same from day to day, when we actually get someone calling for help with something in scope for our team. Most of the day is NOT that.

This is why I read and read and read every day. Adventures and lives I can live just in pages in a book.

Perhaps it’s escapism…perhaps I don’t like sitting still in a manufactured world. In a house I’m so far removed from nature that it makes me restless. If I go too long without getting somewhere wild I feel an itchiness of the soul as if my skin is writhing from the inside out and I’m more impatient for the things that aren’t truly living.

Get me away from the city where people forget that food doesn’t come from grocery stores. Get me away from air smelling of exhaust rather than grasses. Get me to land that hasn’t been cleared to build housing developments on, shaven close to the skin of the earth until no spirit remains and all that is left is barrenness that never leaves the soil.

Give me a life as broad as this planet and give me experiences that change each day that I live it.

Perhaps I’m restless and just need a vacation.

Perhaps I’m too much a nomad for modern life.

All I know for sure is I need soil, soul, soil, that holds so many microbes and biodiversity that the very air above it sings with life and I can feel the tendrils of trees and mycelium branching beneath me, connecting my energy to theirs until I am a sheath of life pointing to the sun and can finally

breathe.

Drawing a circle

Shared with me from bestie in Washington State

It’s so odd looking back now. Every relationship I’ve been in, how I thought I was a whole, interesting, solid person. Then years past I look back and see nothing but the scared girl I was.

I grew up thinking I’d had an idyllic childhood. Who else’s parents bring her up on her grandparent’s airport? Who else got to cross the country every summer on road trips to the Carolinas and Washington and Florida? Who else was encouraged to read as much as they could as often as they wanted? What girl doesn’t dream of getting horses and being free to ride as far as she liked?

My mind tends to wander along more pleasant lanes of thought than negativity. I find it impossible to hold grudges, even if they’re warranted. I didn’t think too deeply on the trauma of being brought up in a doomsday cult, being forced to go door-to-door multiple times a week, my introverted heart crying. The constant guilt that I felt, knowing I’d never live up to their god, and how I had more of a relationship with the trees and wild things outside than I ever did with him. I didn’t think much about my father’s uncontrollable temper and how I never knew if I was going to get praised or screamed at each day. How my sensitive heart lived in constant supplication to my parents, to an angry god, to the stern elders in the congregation. How my queer spirit was killed and quelled constantly, every day, until I wore a mask of compulsive heteronormativity and didn’t even recognize the little girl I was at ten, and how I knew who I was even then. Until I grew up.

Time changes so very much of us, and I welcome it, I don’t want to lie stagnant and fallow, I want to be ever-evolving and growing. And so when my bestie sent the above photo I had to pause and realize these are the things that I’m doing now. At least most of them. I’m still growing, after all, and shall always be until I stop breathing and close my eyes for the last time.

Growing up I was traumatized by my second grade teacher. I don’t even recall that year, everything I know of it has been told by me to others. She abused me in front of the class because I was a Jehovah’s Witness and from that point on until I graduated high school they thought it was “open season” on hunting me down each day and making me miserable. I was seven or eight, I didn’t know how to defend myself when she’d take me to the front of the class and “make an example” of me to my peers. I didn’t fight back when she shoved me to the ground outside of the classroom so that I was excluded from forbidden birthday parties like my parents and religion required. I was always separate, always other, always left out that year.

And I didn’t even tell my parents. I didn’t go to them and I couldn’t fathom why years later. For my entire life I wondered why this tiny child wouldn’t tell her parents that her teacher was abusive and that her classmates chased her on the playground until she learned to run so fast she thought she was flying. Until I realized why…there was no point. They wouldn’t stop her, they couldn’t. There was no point in telling them because I was ashamed and brainwashed by EVERY authority figure in my life at that point into thinking that I was wrong and did something to deserve it. They didn’t know until it was too late and the school year had finished.

So I became a loner, and found refuge in the fields and in books. I played alone outside and once I had horses I could ride even farther away from the things that cause the most pain of all, people. The only refuge I had, the only place I felt at peace, was outdoors in the arms of the wild places, and people only hurt. I could never be right enough for any of them, so I withdrew.

I genuinely loved and preferred to be alone. At the same time when I got older and started finally going through puberty at sixteen I needed confirmation from others SO BADLY. I only saw myself through the eyes of others and if they thought I was trash I WAS. I hungered for positive attention because it affirmed me to be more than I’d ever been to anyone else. I’d cling to my crushes or eventually my husband at the age of nineteen because I only saw myself through their eyes. Just as in second grade.

I wish I’d been strong enough to tell them all to fuck off. I wish I’d been told when I was ten that I didn’t need to compromise anymore, not EVER, not for anyone, and that I’d been told it again, and again, and again every year or more, as often as I needed it.

Instead I bonded with those I thought could save me. I felt whole when with someone who loved me, even when I craved being alone most of all. I loved myself into bonds and relationships and situations I had no idea how to handle but I still tried because I’m made of love and that’s all I ever had to give. And they took it, and took it, and called it cheap because it was so easy to come by. They forgot, they moved on.

I betrayed myself to be chosen over and over again until I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted and went through the motions to remain safe and needed and accepted. For forty years I did all those things, until I left my wifey in Idaho right before my fortieth birthday in 2020.

And then the world fell apart.

All of a sudden I had to face it all, and support myself with only the tools that I had, and I grew to see that they were never enough. That I was grasping for acceptance and love because I just never had them in me for myself to begin with.

The world was full of people drawing circles around themselves to stay safe from the pandemic. I had to do the same, and find safety in that circle alone. I didn’t know how to. The girl who preferred to always be alone had no one to depend on for confirmation any longer. I’d burned so many bridges, with my irresponsible inconsistent behavior, because I’d hidden from the world in as many ways as I could, including in whatever bottle of booze I could afford at the time. For so many years. And here I was alone and sober and it was all my choice and I was forty with everything left behind in Idaho and nothing but my car, my cat, a few clothes, alone in a circle of my own devising.

It’s safe here, and quiet. I can see now how much I’ve grown, how years ago I often thought I was at a pinnacle of growth and development. I couldn’t have imagined twenty years ago that I’d be where I am now and yet I can see that I’ve only just begun. And it’s beautiful and marvelous and grandiose to realize that there is still so much time ahead.

So I keep my circle tight, because for so long I betrayed myself to be chosen. For decades I didn’t think that I could be complete and content without someone to partner with. I fill my own needs and have to reach deep inside to find them still because I hid them on a secret shelf inside and sometimes lose my way to them. How long I’ve scrambled in the dark with my fingertips along fading walls just to reach them again.

I don’t want to fill my shelves with anyone else’s expectations and dreams anymore. There’s no room now, my shelves are bursting with stacked volumes I’d forgotten. Dusty little nicknacks remind me of the moments I found them and why I treasured them enough to hide them away. There’s no room for anything but me now, and it’s not scary anymore to stand in these abandoned hallways alone. My circle is tighter than it’s ever been and slowly slowly I ease it out with my toes until it feels safe enough to allow someone else to step close. I’m not sure if I’ll ever want anyone to actually step in again.

I’ve the whole wild world in my circle with me, there isn’t room for more. And that’s okay. Sometimes a woman needs to be the only person inside it.

From “Untamed – The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island” by Will Harlan

“Carol began wondering if she would ever escape Atlanta. Amid her daily drudgery, she followed one guiding principle, which kept her connected to the real world beneath the concrete and beyond the city limits; search for the source. Food didn’t come from a grocery store. Water didn’t come from a faucet. Ultimately, everything came from nature.

Even the seemingly mundane items in her everyday city life were derived from the natural world. Each morning, she woke up to an alarm clock, which used quartz crystals–highly compressed sand–to keep time. She brushed her teeth with toothpaste made with the same seaweed that sheltered sea turtle hatchlings. She sat on a toilet made of heated clay and wiped with toilet paper made from trees. She got dressed in clothes woven from sheep-sheared wool and drove to work in a jeep made mostly out of iron–which came from the guts of exploding stars. She filled it with oil made from dead plants and animals decaying on the ocean floor for five hundred million years. After work, she went for a hike in boots comprised of dried cow skin and the milky sap of a rubber tree and, afterward, drank river water from a glass formed by lightning striking beach sand. At the end of a long day, she rested her head on a pillow made of feathers stripped from geese.

She was no different than the caveman in her total reliance on nature. Money enabled her to hire middlemen to mine and refine natural resources for her, but it also distanced her from the source of her sustenance.

‘For most of human history, we lived in direct contact with nature. Now we get resources from companies who extract them from nature for us,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘We’ve added a money economy between us and nature.'”

From “No Rules” by Sharon Dukett

“I stood and began walking through the mammoth trees, keeping the river in sight. There was a hush in the forest as I entered it. The trees seemed to absorb all sound. It reminded me of reverence, like when you enter a church and voices grow dim and respectful. Except church was the exact opposite of this, as tamed and repressive as this was wild and expressive.

This really is Eden, I thought. This is the earth the way it was created, before Europeans came along and destroyed much of it.

But it was in the name of God that they destroyed it, I recalled with anguish. Destroyed it, and the Indians…This felt like the soul of the planet, the heart of Mother Earth–not the creation of God but God himself, alive and breathing.

I stopped walking in a cluster of towering evergreens. My eyes followed the long trunks to the top of these magnificent timbers where they framed a piece of sky. Streams of sunlight poured down on me. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, as though I could inhale the spirit surrounding me and feel it through my whole body. There was no way I could experience this sitting in a church pew or reading the New Testament that I still carried in my jacket pocket. Maybe that’s what this trip across Canada was teaching me, that I needed to move close to nature. I had been expecting people to have the answers, when this deep, primeval need in me was outside the realm of humans. God wasn’t in a book that had been written two thousand years ago. He was right here all around me, in the pulse of the river and the layers of soil beneath my feet.

He and Mother Earth were one and the same.”