A breath for these tough times

Sending out extra wishes of Safety & Sanctuary for everyone in the path of the hard things, what a scary time we are in, inhaling and exhaling, for compassion, strength, courage, swift and steady miracles.

Announcement / get your copy of Emergency Calming Down Techniques

I’ve been reeling hard lately in some cursed combination of heartache, numbness, political anxiety, winter stuff and some wild panic episodes.

Have been holding on (for dear life) to my Emergency Calm The Hell Down Techniques from a long time ago, and it’s been helping.

I am giving away a copy of these (ebook + audio recordings) to anyone who gives any sum of money to the appreciation funds / discretionary fund in the hopes that we can all keep practicing together, for each other and for the collective, and also for ourselves in these scary times. ❤️

Protest time: Hands Off!

If you’re in the United States and want to join a protest this weekend, here’s where to find one near you!

Strength in numbers. Let’s do this.

The elusive Havicorn (and other dreamscapes)

Where is the ground, asking for a friend

If we are ranking lyrics in breakup songs by the most heartbreaking — and most accurate gems of poetry-wisdom, it’s a tie for me.

My first pick is the line in It’s All Over Now Baby Blue about how your lover who just walked out the door has taken all his blankets from the floor, the carpet too is moving under you (and it’s all over now, baby blue).

That really is how it feels.

It’s not just that they left, it’s not just that they took with them the physical pieces that had formed your shared experience and a world of memories; it’s that the floor itself is moving under you. All stability is gone.

You are here (ungrounded, hurtling)

There is no ground, only hurtling. You are hurtling.

That’s what indicates that it’s over. There’s no footing to be had.

The rug was pulled out from under you, but also the floor itself, and also the foundational foundations, or what felt like grounded grounding ground.

When is that part over though? I don’t know.

You are here, baby blue. You are here, but the here is moving. Okay, so that’s a starting point.

It’s coming down again

I never fully appreciated the song Kshezeh Amok (When It’s Deep), by Corinne Allal, whom we lost this past year, a heartbreak of its own. I always loved the chorus though.

The chorus wrecks me, always, but on reflection, I think I just didn’t have enough appreciation for how the song quietly and steadily sets up that experience of nostalgic wreckage. And then wrecks you.

Here’s an off-the-cuff translation from the Hebrew of the verse that comes before [the chorus that wrecks you], I can’t do it justice but hope it works:

When it’s deep
it’s as if the wind is carrying you off to foreign places
when it’s deep
snowfalls of anger in a moment melt away


what is hiding within that sweet second
when it’s deep you know
what’s left in the end is just the silence
when he’s far away you’re alone

Are you ready to be wrecked?

Or maybe you are in a very different heart-space than I am, so maybe it won’t wreck you, poetically speaking, but if you are familiar with the depths of heart-hurting, here you go, here’s the chorus:

AND A MEMORY THAT IS FADING WITHIN THE HEART HURTS,
AND INSIDE YOU THE SNOW IS COMING DOWN AGAIN

Or you could say, a memory that is fading within THE HURTING HEART hurts.

Of course it does. The heart hurts, and the memory, and the fading. All of it.

It hurts so much. And the snow is coming down again.

Then / now / now

There was someone whose presence was so warm and grace-filled that the internal snowdrifts simply had no chance. Everything melted in the proximity of their love.

Except they went away, and took it away (their love, but also that seemingly magical ability to melt away all those snowdrifts of accumulated hurt and anger from your past).

And now it’s fucking snowing again, and here you are, and it’s just going to keep coming down and accumulating forever? That can’t be right. But it feels accurate.

Or at least that’s how it feels

I have been talking this out a lot, with my friends, with the tree friends and the pasture, with my imaginary therapist.

Thinking about various grief forms, not only of the heartbreak flavor, but all the hurting heart moments related to missing someone who is gone. Whether because they are dead, or they mysteriously disappeared from your life, or they stopped loving you, or circumstances shifted, or the many mysteries of human connection, who knows.

And obviously I know what wise me would say, or my therapist. That you can’t let someone else be in charge of being your snowfall-melter.

Interrelated circles of glow power

It’s lovely when someone can glow like that for you, and: realistically you have to be the one who trusts in your own glow-power, in your own healing properties and processes.

Community is a blessing, and we lean on support from friends where we can, absolutely, what a gift.

And, also, we gotta do whatever helps us keep cultivating that sweet tenderness towards self so that we are not lost when alone.

Cultivate, a verb that is both active and patient

You cultivate your relationship to yourself and your relationship to the [piles of snow, snowfalls of anger, or whatever they are for you], because that’s the only part you have any say in.

I do love the word cultivate. Love a verb that is both active (I am doing this thing intentionally) and passive (the seeds have been planted, now I just sing to the future powers, I’m playing the long game.)

And that advice or counsel is not wrong; cultivation of the parts you have control over is a very wise approach, it’s just that it’s not enough when everything hurts.

Some wise words

Here is something a friend of mine texted me that helped this week:

I once read about breakups being like losing a part of your memory, so there is sadness but it is compounded by disorientation and a strong seeking impulse that is really painful. So yeah this all makes sense.

It all makes sense. Disorientation. Seeking something that isn’t. Destabilized. It’s snowing again in my heart.

Snowing again in my heart

It’s snowing again in my heart and also someone took all the blankets. Memory not working. Looking for warmth, but it has to be the right kind. There is a sense memory but it is faded, and my heart hurts.

Sometimes it helps too for someone else to say: THIS ALL MAKES SENSE.

So if you need someone to say that, let me and my friend say it here.

This all makes sense. It sucks and it makes sense.

The dream

I had a really lovely dream last week about my beloved chef friend who died last year, and I was so happy when I was in the dream, and then so sad when I woke up.

Sad, grateful for the gift of that dream time. I miss him so much.

In the dream he had this sweet little pop-up restaurant with a patio, only open a couple days a week. And he had also just published a cookbook and was soooo happy, just elated, it was so great.

I have never felt so thrilled for someone.

Everything goes together

I had stopped by early afternoon before it was officially open with a couple friends, and he was showing us around his new space

The pop-up kitchen only had four dishes, which was part of the plan (simplicity, everything goes together), and they were all fantastic, and I wish I could remember literally anything about that part

The main thing I remember is a giant vat of this incredibly delicious, completely addictive popcorn…

Popcorn

I told him that I was going to need the recipe for the popcorn spice blend he was using, and he said actually he’d invented this flavor based on our conversations, and he called it Havicorn. A nod to my inclination to be a Flavor Maximalist.

He said the recipe was in the book, and that I should take the book to the nearby park with a bag of the popcorn and read it there.

And that was the dream.

Like happy goats

It was just a sweet, simple, lighthearted good-mood dream, almost child-like in a way?

By which I mean that it reminds me of dreams I had as a very small child that were just experiences of happy moments, like frolicking in a field with goats who all knew my name.

To be free, to be known, to thrive. And to be friends with goats. What else could you want?

I was very honored, both in the dream and in real life, to have taken part in inspiring a popcorn flavor. What a thing to have done in this world, or in any world.

What treasure, baby blue

And I’m not sure why my subconscious or the universe or whatever found that detail important but it made me smile. There was a giant vat of delicious popcorn! Havicorn!

My brilliant, talented, creative, one-of-a-kind sweet friend made popcorn in part because of me, what treasure. Even if it only happened in a dream universe.

Except then I woke up into a full on panic episode, which is the part of grieving where it feels like someone took their blankets from the floor, and now the carpet too is moving under you. It’s all over now, baby blue.

What does the popcorn taste like though

I don’t know. I am going to have to experiment. And everyone I could have a really good conversation about this with (my friend, my mom, my ex) is gone from my life.

Another friend said: Oh man, what a beautiful dream! Havicorn! I want to know what it tasted like and what all the food was, sounds like heaven, I don’t think I ever wanted to escape into someone else’s dream before, but it sounds so lovely.

It really was lovely. And now it’s a memory that’s fading in the hurting heart, and it’s snowing.

Boring, so boring

My friend the Vicar and I talk quite a bit about how grief and heartbreak are just so fucking boring, like the process is boring, and still being in it is boring, and that moment of [suddenly gutted again out of nowhere] is so miserable but somehow also boring.

You’re making progress. You are.

You know that you are, both because sometimes you can tell, and sometimes you find the ground faster than you did the last time, and occasionally you can even laugh about it. But yes, the process is somehow both ridiculous and excruciatingly tedious.

A forever gut punch but also different each time. That’s also a form of progress and also I don’t like it.

What do we do with all this?

We cultivate and tend, remembering that a lot of cultivation is about hope, waiting, and singing to the seeds.

We make art and we make popcorn.

We rank sad songs and laugh about that a little.

We talk to people who get it, if we are lucky to have that. Or we talk to Incoming Selves, or Slightly Wiser You or a good imaginary therapist, or someone you think has wise thoughts. Journal it out, walk it out, dance it out, keep it moving.

Human, the most human

Grief is this shared human experience but we don’t talk about it a lot with each other, maybe because it feels so personal, or maybe because if we paused to really acknowledge how much grief tears us up, how would anything function? I do not know.

I walk circles in the pasture and cry over lost love, over missing my mom, over all the questions I can’t ask people who are gone, over dog friends who are gone, over how hard it is to wake up from a dream.

And I spend a lot of time thinking about what is a good SMOPL – Something Meaningful On a Personal Level, a ritual or an activity or an experiment or a moment.

Something that honors the person or the relationship or the dream or the past wish that was, and also honors this ongoing phase of singing to the seeds. Love, courage, strength, miracles.

Love, courage, strength, miracles

Love, courage, strength, miracles. Channeling the wild courage to be able to hope for something new, beautiful, meaningful, something better.

The daily work of cultivating, tending, checking in, nourishing, noticing, adding more compassion. It takes so much patience. And often it is not fun. But a thousand points to us for doing any of it, for keeping on keeping on.

Elusive

I am laughing a little bit about how the popcorn named for me is elusive, like a unicorn. Unicorn popcorn. Havicorn. Maybe that was an element of the name too. This popcorn came into existence, and you helped bring it to life but you can’t find it.

Maybe the way I can meet this sensation of [everything is elusive] is through being as playful as I can be inside of a dream.

If my unconscious can come up with a flavor of popcorn that deserves a remarkable name and a vat of it in a chef restaurant, then it can also come up with new forms of heart-healing that I haven’t encountered yet.

Or I can follow the clues to get to them.

Pebbles

Leave a pebble in the comments (o) to say you were here, and if you want to drop any wishes of your own (heart-related or otherwise), please do. Or you can name anything you noticed that came up for you.

I hope the hurting parts of your heart are being comforted by the resilient and nurturing parts of your heart, and that you are going to join me in making popcorn (or substitute anything for popcorn), while the snow falls, trusting in the glow powers that you are cultivating.

Here’s to peace within, and when peace within is elusive, as it often is, here’s to adding even more compassion to tide us over until it reappears.

Come play in the comments, I appreciate the company

Leave a pebble (o) to say you were here, so I know I’m not doing this alone.

Also it feels good to pick up a pebble and place it somewhere, I have noticed.

And of course you are welcome to share anything that sparked for you while reading, anything that helped, clues received, or anything on your mind, wish some wishes, process what’s percolating…

I am lighting a candle for us and our beautiful heart-wishes. What a brave thing it is to allow ourselves to want something better for us and for the world.

Or if there’s anything you’d like to explore further or toss into the wishing pot, the healing power of the collective is no small thing, companionship helps.

Whatever comes to mind or heart. Let’s support each other’s hope-sparks…

Housekeeping note: You can subscribe to posts by email again!

If you aren’t seeing these updates in your in your email and want to, you can can solve that here.

This will pop up a new page on Follow.It that lets you subscribe via email, newsletter, or RSS reader. They say “expect 50 stories a week”, and that’s a very imaginary number, once a week is the dream.

I am emailing copies of the Emergency Calming Techniques package!

Anyone who gives to the Discretionary this week (more info below) will get my Emergency Calming Techniques package by email as a pdf. I am only checking email twice a week because I no longer have wifi at my place, long story, so be patient with me but if it doesn’t show up within the week then let me know!

I have some ideas for the next ebook too but if you do too, shoot me an email or share in the comments.

A request!

If you received clues or perspective or want to send appreciation for the writing and work/play we do here, I appreciate it tremendously.

I am accepting support (with joy & gratitude) in the form of Appreciation Money to the Discretionary Fund. Asking is not where my strength resides but Brave & Stalwart is the theme these days, and pattern-rewriting is the work, it all helps with fixing the many broken things.

And if those aren’t options, I get it, you can light a candle for support (or light one in your mind!), share this with someone who loves words, tell people about these techniques, approaches and themes, send them here, it all helps, it’s all welcome, and I appreciate it and you so much. ❤️