Practicing Spirituality in the Debris

~~~~~~~~you may want to play this recording softly while reading:  female chakra sounds~~~~~~~~~

After years of having a daily, morning spiritual practice, a few too many personal emotional challenges were delivered my way within a span of a few years.  

2013 - a big turning point year for me.  51 years living then; the specifics of battle and heart break do not and still do not matter much; we all have them.  I tell the stories of What Happened to my spiritual confidants.  I do believe each of has must learn how to skip the compare/contrast plea for stylish sympathy to which we are prone and lured.  

I have come to witness spiritual mandate of gratitude and humility as innate and simple - a natural reflex -  in the tininess and poorest of children.

2013 ended a year of being part of a team of spiritual practitioners who would guide a process and listen to siblings in faith reflect on and articulate on the nature of collaboration in daily theological practice.  The fall from belief to abandonment and ultimately obsolescence dumped me in a sea of my own collection of garbage.  What no one knew, even I, is that is where I would learn to find gems from long long ago, made anew.   I learned that gems do not rot nor lose original form.

Going down below, into the dark and damp basement work space became the only way for me to be sober and present to physical pain that arrived by 2015, especially when each tendril of my root chakra talked to me like insightful shards of glass.  In time I learned to create art in a different way.  This wasn't a decision on my part.  Art came through my hands while my eyes blurred, murky heart showed me art by it's meek glow of emerald tourmaline.

Throughout the years, I have listened to the best of my capacity to many a seer, saint, and shaman.  It takes awhile for me to first feel what I hear.  The shapes of the sound first must make an arrangement before I can see the meaning.  From that point on, my feet would create small paths through leaves and over sand at low tide.  The pain felt like a teacher.  I tuck tiny gems of analysis - spun wisdom - into my pockets.  Spread out onto the floor, one would shine as sacred center.  My hands built:  el centro diminuto de los altares sagrados es como los niños de un lago perdido.

I was 54 years old when I collapsed as a condition of the wind.  Four hands gently and mightily delivered un aborto de una idea and many aspirations for creative force, relieving harmony, plain and constant justice....aborto espontáneo.  

The power of menopause is not only in and of itself a rite of bodily passage.  It is a reckoning force that marches us to draw circles of truth; confrontation (never).  All this bears the heart and everything else naked, screaming silence no where near a forest.  What's worse, to others it appears as weakness or a private matter.  This natural process has been disrupted by so many acts of liberation that it has been humbling to recognize every bit of it to a visual and visceral call to daily truth in being and action in mundane living.  There is no where to hide, especially in the dark, damp basement.  

White Man Frost said "the woods are dark and lovely" and he had promises to keep.  Well I don't wonder much what Bob was doing in the woods, what promises he hadn't yet fulfilled (or to whom), and whether he ever marveled at the holy shard mosaic of a woman's soul.  

Beautiful shards surrounded by stories spun into wisdom.....