Shavawn M. Berry's Blog

In the end, we all become stories.

Margaret Atwood

It’s been a while since I’ve been back in this space. In the interim, I sold my house, bought a new one, moved, lost a close friend to a pulmonary embolism, got a book contract, wrote said book, turned in the manuscript, contracted Covid 19, helped my mom recover from gallstones, and a head injury, and taught a full teaching load.

Yes. I’ve been busy. Crazy busy.

Nothing happens. And nothing happens. Then, everything happens.

Fay Weldon

Here’s the description from the back cover of my new book, Evanescent Creature.

Evanescent Creature: Poems & Meditations explores the wisdom & life cycle of women through the archetypes of the wounded/magical/gifted child, the maiden, the mother, and the crone (Divine Feminine). These poems explore birth, sickness, old age, death, and rebirth. In them, Berry unpacks a myriad of experiences that affect and transform all women as they move through their lives.

Berry examines the evanescent creature she’s contained since birth, the one who is empathic and sensitive, and fragile in a world that often makes her terrified and exhausted. She reveals the shattered beauty of the young woman she was, a woman as muse, catalyst, & traveler in search of all the errant & lost parts of her most secret self.

She remembers her experience as a daughter, unraveling her longing for more in the face of the pressures of a society that has long wanted women to remain small & stuck living amputated lives. She examines her current role as a caregiver – as her mother’s mother – watching as her mother’s essence disappears and she descends into full-blown dementia.

And finally, she ruminates on her sense of the furious, incandescent, numinous strength of women. She raises her voice in defense of the Divine Feminine nature of life itself, of this earth, and its oceans, forests, and luminous wild animals.  Evanescent Creature is a book of searing poems and meditations seeking to offer solace and nourishment to women as they search for answers to the grief and beauty of life.

If you are interested in knowing more, or in reviewing the book, feel free to reach out here.

You can purchase a copy of Evanescent Creature here.

I hope those of you who have read my essays for years will sample my poetry now as well!

A taste…

And your doubt can become

Your ally, your fierce reminder

Of every blackened backroad

Every barren stream and

Every long moment

you stumbled through life

in red shoes the size of thimbles

Shoes that cut the arches

Of your white feet and

Told you to

accept only breadcrumbs.

Never to gulp the hungry air

Or open the shutters in your chest

To reveal your lion heart

Your doubts used to be the fairy tale

You spoke into dark stars under

The bright gaze of Venus

No more, dear heart.

No more.

Shavawn M. Berry

Copyright 2023 Shavawn M. Berry

All materials on this site are copyrighted. You need the author’s permission to use anything on this site.

Art by Tran NguyenI couldn’t sleep the past few days.

Perhaps the new moon was calling my name.

Perhaps my hair was on fire.

Or perhaps it was the heat, the wildfires, the drenching rain, the ass-kicking hurricanes, or the overflowing Covid wards.

Was it the anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-common sense I saw on full display everywhere I turned that made me too wired to sleep?

Was it the toddler who drowned a week ago in a basement apartment in Queens, NY?

Maybe.

Or maybe it’s just the sense that absolutely no one is OK right now.

And that’s OK.

That’s to be expected.

Our way of life is dying. We cannot ‘return to normal.’ Normal is long gone.

We’re in the midst of spiritual surgery.

We’re being split open and dissected and reformed and reassembled as something we’ve never been before.

We’re awakening from a long, tumultuous, unconscious, irresponsible slumber.

For some of us, we knew this was coming.

For others, it is a bit of a shock. And still others are resisting it with every ounce of strength and rage and bad behavior they can muster.

We all possess free will. Nobody has to get wise in this life.

But, if you ask me, the survival of the earth and the human race and every tree and insect and alligator depend on our awakening.

So, we’d better start waking the fuck up.

“It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.” – Eckhart Tolle

I realize I am in a state of profound and prolonged grief.

I grieve the loss of life from the pandemic. I grieve for my best friend as she mourns losing her husband of 20 years to pancreatic cancer. I grieve my mother’s forgetfulness. I try not to notice the difficulty she has finding words now. She sits through meals out at restaurants, mutely eating her food, never joining the conversation because she cannot find words anymore for what she wants to say.

I grieve my tender old dog and raggedy cat, getting more fragile with each passing day.

I grieve the world I grew up in, the world where people didn’t blow themselves up and kill hundreds of people they’ve never met, thinking that was the way to handle conflict.

We’ve forgotten that we are all in this together.

We rise and fall together.

None of us will survive if we don’t start to understand this.

So, I am making lists of what I can do.

I can’t control everything but I can control my immediate surroundings. I can donate to the food bank. I can clean out my closets and give away what I don’t use. I can meditate and raise my vibration. I can pray for wholeness. I can read and watch uplifting or enlightening materials.

I can comfort my friends, my mother, my critters.

I can be kind, even when someone’s behaving like a horse’s ass.

“In the place of stillness, rises potential. From the place of potential, emerges possibility. Where there is possibility, there is choice, and where there is choice, there is freedom!” – Gabrielle Goddard

I can fight for women’s sovereignty.

I can work for the passage of the ERA. I can protect women’s rights to bodily autonomy and health care.

I can raise my voice and speak my truth.

The loudest voices are not the ones who speak the truth.

The truth lives in stillness, silence. It walks on quiet feet. It isn’t ostentatious or brash or narcissistic.

In a world full of bloviating talking heads and bullshit broadcasters, pay attention to those who are helping, those who are writing letters, those who are holding peoples’ hands, and those who are delivering hot meals to folks with nothing. Pay attention to small gestures. Pay attention to those saving rivers and animals and cultures and sustainable ways of life.

No, we’re not OK.

But, if we each do something, something graceful, something kind, something small, then perhaps we will be.

© 2021 Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

Feel free to share this post with others, as long as you include the copyright information and keep the whole posting intact. If you like this piece please share it with others. You can like me on Facebook or Twitter to see more of my writing and my spiritual journey on my website at www.thewonderlandfiles.com

Ed Binkley Art

“We are all butterflies. Earth is our chrysalis.”

― LeeAnn Taylor

A chrysalis spills open.

Here we are. The moon swallowing the sun in a total solar eclipse (December 14). A twenty-year cycle closing. A 200-year cycle opening.

Yet another round of letting go in the penultimate year of letting go. We shed old skin and walk out of one life to start another.

I don’t know about you but I feel as though I am unzipping a dress (my old life) and leaving it on the floor for someone to find later.

Goodbye, before.

Do you feel it, too?

We are passing through a cosmic birth canal. A pinprick of light is becoming larger and larger; the booming outside is getting louder and louder.

I find myself shaking; I am a bud just starting to open, a fragile winged-thing taking shape as I rush toward — what is that? A star? Jupiter and Saturn dancing? A meteor shower?

Frightened by all this clanging and banging, by the hubbub and the shouting and the pushing and the fray, I wonder if I am finally ready for all this.

Am I ready for a blast of other-worldly light?

Am I ready to rip myself open and spin tales?

Am I ready to tell stories of transmutation, and traveling for eons, and shaking off my wet wings to air them out, as they glisten on my back inside this terrible brightness?

Am I ready to breathe in this strange new land where I find myself?

***

The clock on this former world is winding down. The sand in the hourglass swirls as it falls.

We are leaping into the void.

Some of us may feel everything shift. Some of us may feel nothing.

Some may remain stuck in the lower worlds of greed, anger, and stupidity.

But for those of us who’ve listened to the wild call of the wind and the stars for as long as I have, this is not just an expected reckoning – it is a rebirth. This is a promised place where the ground underfoot gives way and we learn to fly.

We’ve always been able to. We just didn’t know it.

We’re Galactic, multi-dimensional beings. We’re connected to everyone and everything.

Our stories matter. Our songs thrum and circle and resonate, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime.

We’re sacred kin.

If you’ve found your way to these words, we have known each other before and we will know each other again.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Soon, we will emerge into a changed world.

My breath catches in my throat as I ponder the enormity of what’s transpiring now.

I remember the first tentative messages I channeled 22 years ago while living in a tiny apartment a block from Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. I realized messages were flooding through me and as I wrote them down, their kind, encouraging, warm words gave me a sense of what was possible in my life.

Those messages helped me pick myself up and make something of my life.

They helped me recover from horrible grief and loss. They helped me see the road I needed to take.

They led me to teaching, to writing, to moving my work life online, to finding a comfortable place to settle and build a handmade life.

I don’t know what’s next.

Right now, I can only see what’s falling away.

I see my baby-bird-like mother sitting in her ratty green chair, eating waffles I made her, with light on her face as she heads into 2021. For her, this is the threshold of her 86th circle around the sun.

Her mind is like a hive of honey bees. Sometimes she’s calm, sometimes she’s impossible.

Aren’t we all?

She reminds of where I came from. She reminds me of how far I’ve come.

She’s the person who has held my hand for a lot of this particular incarnation.

I hope she lives to see this new age bloom.

This stark life, this deep breath, this winged flight – is upon us.

Buckle up.

© 2020  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

Feel free to share this post with others, as long as you include the copyright information and keep the whole posting intact. If you like this piece please share it with others. You can like me on Facebook or Twitter to see more of my writing and my spiritual journey on my website at www.thewonderlandfiles.com

Art by Christian Schloe

“The Age of Aquarius demands that we hold a worldview that none of us is separate from one another nor from the planet.”

― Andrew Lutts, How to Live a Magnificent Life: Becoming the Living Expression of Higher Consciousness

Nine months have passed since I wrote The End of the World As We Know It here in March. Sleep-walking and numb for much of the year, I’ve watched my former life peel away like the layers of a rotting onion. I’ve packed each bit up in tissue paper and newsprint, and shipped it off to parts unknown.

Now, I find myself waking from this blur of a year, trying to rinse the bad taste from my mouth. At the same time, I feel blessed and grateful for what I’ve learned. I feel grateful for the shedding of my old skins and the emergence of a different, lighter ‘me.’

My losses gutted me and put me on my knees. My marmalade cat, Emma, died in mid-May.

I lost two people to suicide and several of my students have had Covid-19.

My mother struggled with the isolation of the lockdown.

I’ve been numb with grief, working hard to put one foot in front of the other. Through all of it though, I realize that without our sorrows, the rest of our lives wouldn’t be as sweet.

***

The world we once knew, is gone.

Make no mistake. Things are different and won’t go back to the way it was.

If you are throwing yourself against this tide of monumental change, valiantly pretending you are strong enough to buck the current and continue heading back, you will be sorely — not to mention — bitterly disappointed.

That world is gone.

Poof.

***

Anyone who knows me, knows of my fascination and passion for both the mystical and the mysterious.

I love the esoteric. Things like astrology, tarot, the i Ching, and semiotics captivate me. I savor the idea that messages meant for me can be found in the books I happen upon and the billboards that catch my eye.

There are messages everywhere if you are paying attention.

This terrible, tumultuous, transformative year is just that.

It’s a message in a bottle, washing up from a river mucky with our dreams and nightmares.

There are angels and monsters in the mix. There always are.

However, we are here because we chose to be here for this shift.

What it is offering us is nothing short of a truly transcendent opportunity to completely change direction and, likely, save the planet and ourselves in the process.

People, Get Ready.

“The great sun, moving in the heavenly houses, has left the House of the Fishes for the House of the Water-bearer. In the coming age shall humanity be holy, and in the perfection of the human, shall we find the humane.”

— Dion Fortune, The Sea Priestess

Next month, on the winter solstice, (December 21, the longest night of the year) the Age of Aquarius begins.

A portal to dramatic and permanent change like this last happened 800 years ago when the Magna Carta was signed.

The Age of Aquarius heralds big shifts, as we re-envision and re-build our communities and cultures to be more humane, inclusive, collaborative, creative and sustainable. It offers us a chance to shift our focus from ‘me’ to ‘we.’

If we choose to make this profound shift, the world will transform as it never has before.

Obstacles are detours in the right direction. — Gabby Bernstein

Writing this year has been elusive and difficult. Mostly, I felt like I had nothing to say. I was mute with sadness and, in a strange way, amazement. We’re witnessing history. We standing on the edge of an abyss, about to take flight.

Don’t get me wrong. As excited as I am for the changes I see coming, I am also soaking in the terrible sadness of losing a quarter of a million people to an invisible invader, a virus that lingers in the air and sets up shop in our lungs – shutting down the very thing that sustains us – our breath.

For awhile, I almost stopped breathing, simply out of sorrow and grief.

***

The world disappeared under our feet.

And we are falling and falling and falling.

I am offering my hand to you – to anyone struggling in the bleakness of this moment of ‘no longer that’ and ‘not quite yet.’

As I fall, I feel icy cold air stinging my skin.

But I also see the stars, poking through a riotous crowd of clouds, offering a glimpse of the wonder that’s on its way.

© 2020  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

Feel free to share this post with others, as long as you include the copyright information and keep the whole posting intact. If you like this piece please share it with others. You can like me on Facebook or Twitter to see more of my writing and my spiritual journey on my website at www.thewonderlandfiles.com

I’ve long been a keen observer of the machinations of the outside world; I watch and I wonder. I take my time and slowly assimilate what I observe.

However, as we descend into the Pluto transit of the United States (once every 246 years) and the shattering of the status quo that will be the hallmark of these coming years, I have begun to see how difficult this rebirth will be for those who are not paying attention or those who are not yet awake.

This is going to be ugly. And painful.

These shifts will take guts.

Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

It’s not just the coronavirus.

It’s not just the environment.

It’s not just the tribalist, hateful, us-vs-them fallout.

In the next few weeks, we will discover what we are made of.

We will realize we’ve landed in a completely new place and there’s no going back to where we were, no matter how hard we try.

Instead, it’s time to look deeply into the mirror of our own lives and stop hanging on to old versions of ourselves, our identities, our countries, and our bullshit nationalism.

There are no borders here.

We rise or we fall, together.

We must accept ourselves as we are.

We must agree to let this weary earth heal.

We must do this even if it means embracing our messy, imperfect humanity. We must do it with our frail hearts beating furiously in our chests. We must do it as we feel something akin to terror over the coming chaos; over the things that are dying, or already dead.

We are at a choice point.

What we do now matters.

We must believe we are enough.

We must believe in the goodness of ourselves and others.

We can’t earn worthiness.

It is inherent. We were born with it and now we need to step up, step out, and live our missions. As spiritual warriors, we must step out of the cloister of our own sanctuaries and allow our light to be seen.  We must flood the world with love.

Right now, everyone’s wounds are torn open.

You can’t unsee the trouble we’re in. We’re scratched up, exhausted, bruised and bloody. These feelings of woundedness are universal.

They affect everyone.

No one is immune to the clarion wake-up call that’s blaring everywhere we go. We are what we focus on. We are what we expect. We are what we prepare to receive.

Believe it, dears. Our thoughts create the world.

We cannot pretend we didn’t create the blazing nightmare in which we find ourselves.

We did.

We did it whether we signed up for the current political chaos or not. We’ve fomented it – either through our direct actions or through our laissez-faire treatment of our right to vote with our thoughts, words, and actions, and with our failure to act responsibly in terms of actively participating in our own governance.

We’re the people we’ve been waiting for.

We’ve lived as consumers rather than creators and it shows.

It shows in the more than a billion dead animals and thousands of acres of blackened arboreal forests in Australia. It shows in the wildfires burning in the American West. It shows in the intentional fires set in the Amazon and Africa this past year.

We’ve killed off 83% of the world’s wildlife in the past 100 years.

The world’s on fire, and, yes, we lit the match.

We believed – collectively – that there were no consequences for what we’ve done, how we’ve lived, and the choices we’ve made.

We were oh so wrong.

***

So, now what?

How does Dorothy get home?

If she can no longer go home, then what?

How can we add our energy and our voices to push the needed changes forward? How can we enlist others, even when they’re terrified of the very change we’re pushing?

What can we do to show the way?

We have to choose another way. We have to evolve.

We have to stretch and work and innovate and create and collaborate to the point of exhaustion.

We cannot look away. We cannot pretend it’s not our fault anymore.

We cannot live unconsciously, fearfully, full of reprisal and regret and hate.

Let’s find our voices. Let’s listen to opera and birdsong and the way the wind moves in the trees.

Let’s get quiet and remember how nature is a balm and our families are our sanctuaries.

Walk on the wet ground. Watch the crocus push up through the moist earth.

Keep your eye out for a raven.

Change is upon us.

Sit in solitude. Know in your bones we can do this.

There’s no one to call.

There’s nothing to do but ride this wave.

© 2020  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

Feel free to share this post with others, as long as you include the copyright information and keep the whole posting intact. If you like this piece please share it with others. You can like me on Facebook or Twitter to see more of my writing and my spiritual journey on my website at www.thewonderlandfiles.com

 

 

 

 

 

Art by Christian Schloe via Google Image

Some of you may wonder where I’ve been.

I haven’t written here (or anywhere else for that matter) since November of 2018.

I’ve been walking through the dark night of the soul. I’ve been tending to my mother after her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s. I’ve been saving my life. I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes in January.

For the past nine months, I’ve been focused on eating the right foods, staying hydrated, napping, taking my meds, sitting out in my backyard watching tanagers and hummingbirds and unraveling the mess I’d made of my health.

I’ve lost 48 pounds since December.

My brain fog has lifted; I am eating to live, rather than living to eat.

When I was diagnosed, my fasting blood sugar was 328. (Normal is 89.) My A1C level was 11.5.

You are diabetic if it is over 7.0.

Now, my sugars hover just above normal, between 98 and 110. I’ve lost the voracious appetite that diabetes brought on. Now, I eat three small meals of mostly protein, veggies, and low glycemic fruit, watch my carbs, avoid all sugar, alcohol, and white foods (rice, pizza, pasta, potatoes) and get outside in the sunlight every day to boost my vitamin D levels.

I have found my way back from the darkness that threatened to kill me at the end of last year.

At the time, my mom was hospitalized; I nearly lost my youngest cat to a UTI, and I was spinning into a real health nightmare myself.

Nothing made sense. I felt horrible and exhausted all the time. No matter what I ate, nothing satiated my appetite. I was constantly thirsty and blindly tired.

Of course, now I know that these things are all signs that something is seriously out of whack.

At the time, I simply wondered what in the fucking hell was wrong with me.

My doctor talked to me about the possibility of diabetes in October of 2018, but I wasn’t ready to listen. I didn’t want it to be true. My father had Type II diabetes. I didn’t want to end up with my health in total shambles the way he did.

So, I pretended I was OK for a few more months.

I continued to run my body into the ground and worked incessantly and pretended I needed no downtime, no care, no intervention.

In January when my fasting blood sugar was tested again, the doctor called me, concern staining her voice.

“I want you to come in on Monday for another blood test,” she said. “I seriously think you are diabetic and we need to start treating you.”

Her words somehow woke me up.

So, then and there, I decided to see my diagnosis as a gift.

It was a gift, an awakening, another chance to stop mistreating my body and to practice something my friend, Darla, calls, “sacred selfishness” (coachdarla.com).

Sacred selfishness is tender, light-infused, guilt-free self-care.

I became my own beloved.

I began to see that if I didn’t put on my own oxygen mask first, I would be useless to my mother and to anyone else I needed to serve – be it my students, my friends, my colleagues, or my Buddhist sangha.

Once I shifted my focus, the changes became easy.

I wasn’t hungry, so eating less was easy.

I no longer craved things that made me feel shitty, so I didn’t eat them anymore. I was no longer lying comatose on my bed after every meal. I didn’t need ten cups of coffee to wake up. I could finish more than one thing on my ‘to do’ list each day.

And the weight that I’ve carried for the past 30 years started to fall away.

***

Three entire seasons have passed since diabetes became my reality and I made my decision to quit being an asshole to my body.

I grocery shop carefully – choosing only clean, organic foods — and prepare my meals with love and tenderness.

I eat things I love and avoid things that trip me up.

“You, more than anyone else, deserve your love and affection.” ~ Buddha

There’s more light in my face.

I am able to be wakeful all day, most days.  For me, this was unheard of for the past 10 years.

I started therapy and I took some long overdue downtime.

The result of all this care and compassion?

I feel completely alive for the first time in years.

***

A Note to My Readers

Perhaps many of my readers have fallen away during my long hiatus. Perhaps some of the hardy souls who were reading these missives are still here, listening, waiting patiently for this patient to return.

Whatever happens next, I hope you will come along for the journey.

I will be making some changes, adding some writing courses, revamping this site, adding merchandise and coaching, and just generally starting to kick some artistic ass as I move forward in much better physical and mental health. It is tough being highly sensitive to this world – whether it be through food, news (turn that shit off!), noise, interactions, or just general malaise and overwhelm.

As an empath, I am learning I must be caring toward myself.

Please reach out to me if you are interested in working directly with me. Perhaps you are interested in taking some self-paced basic writing courses (via Wet Ink) or you would like to be on my email list. Send your details to shavawnberrywritingsalon@gmail.com. I would love you to join me as I embark on some destination writing workshops in Santa Fe, NM, some year-round writing workshops online, some book projects, and some publishing projects over the coming months and years.

***

Do you relate to my experience, dearheart? Leave me a comment below or click the link to get connected to my website and email list so we can exchange stories. You can also find me via the links below to my Facebook writer’s page.

***

Everyone has a book inside of them. Everyone has a story. Wouldn’t you love to share yours with the world? Get your free writer’s toolkit packed with tricks and tips to get you started.

Just do it.

Don’t wait.

Don’t die with an untold story inside you.

© 2019  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

Feel free to share this post with others, as long as you include the copyright information and keep the whole posting intact. If you like this piece please share it with others. You can like me on Facebook or Twitter to see more of my writing and my spiritual journey on my website at www.thewonderlandfiles.com

Image by Christian Schloe

I sing the body electric.  I celebrate the ‘me’ yet to come.                   

                                                                       ~ [a song based on Whitman’s poem]

You awaken with these words running barefoot across your mind.

They feel like a reminder to embrace whatever is coming, to celebrate what is, and to marvel at the chance to do both.

***

You are a Phoenix, that mythical bird, burning feather and ash. You rise from a silver-blue fire.

***

For most of your life, you’ve felt like a wallflower wearing an invisibility cape.

As a result, you sat in trees and talked to sparrowhawks and ravens; you watched the rain kiss all the plants and keep them alive; you licked its salt off your skin.

You sat in silence and coughed up dark, striated pebbles. You washed your tired feet after you walked through Europe.

You made yourself small in order to survive.

The world wasn’t a safe place for the likes of you – too sensitive, too intuitive, too heart-centered, too empathic, to able to see who people were behind their clever masks, and the claws they sharpened for ready use.

So, you developed your superpowers and lived as an outlier, like the intuitive witch’s daughter you’d been born to be.

And it worked for a while.

It worked for a long time.

Then, you found yourself face-to-face with the child version of yourself as she wept and wailed. She wanted more. She needed air. She needed to sit in the desert and watch the stars poke through.

She demanded your consideration, your care.

***

In your twenties and thirties, you dreamt you were pregnant but miscarried.

You dreamt you gave birth, but the baby died.

You saw your belly warm and round. You felt the pulse and kick of a child.

You readied yourself and gave birth in your dream, but the baby girl was weak, tiny, mewling.

You had to keep her safe.

So, you hid her. You hid her under the stairs in a steamer trunk. You hid her, and you forgot where.

Frantically, you searched and searched. You ran through the halls of this particular nightmare, wondering, “Where did I put her? What have I done?”

And each time you dreamt this, you found the child dead.

You mourned her, but you couldn’t save her. You dreamt of this magical child, this wondrous girl, but you lost her again and again.

***

At forty, you walked out of your hermitage of invisibility and safety.

You dreamt of your baby again.

But this time you found her in time. This time, you jumped in a yellow cab and took her to the nearest hospital and saved her life.

You saved yourself.

You walked away from the job you hated and people who sickened you. You walked away from the pointless chit-chat and dressing ‘professionally’ and eating lunch with coworkers who didn’t know the first thing about you. You walked out on managerial time, soul-sucking meetings, and ticking off items on to-do lists. You stopped mortgaging your life – sixty hours a week, plus the commute – to jump into the fire of your work as an artist.

You knew you were a writer. You’d been a writer since you were ten-years-old.

You wrote poems and sent query letters to agents. Fourteen of them read your first manuscript and rejected it.

You took it hard.

You wondered if you could do it.

You queried magazines and websites trying to get your work published. The rejections fluttered in like homing pigeons with undecipherable messages wrapped in the bands around their ankles.

It’s an understatement to say you felt verklempt.

You ended up doing data entry as a temp.

You were in hell.

***

But the thing is, you were free. You’d escaped.

And with that freedom, you spent two years writing and resting. You spent it down on your knees chanting.

You opened your gold Buddhist altar in the City of Angels and laid out your vision.

You saw yourself working as a teacher, writing books, traveling. You imagined the house you’d live in, the animals you’d share it with. You saw the velvet couch and the Indian rugs and the cherry-colored office walls. You envisioned your big desk, projects piled on the floor, littered with papers, the room full of light and succulents.

You saw the life you’d have. You saw your future.

***

The following August, you got your first part-time teaching job at the community college in your hometown.

Two years later, you moved to Phoenix to teach fulltime.

There, you truly began to wear the woman you are on your sleeve.

You see the alchemy of the shift now.

***

A few years in, you met a colleague and a professor, who told you, “Teaching will take up as much of your time as you allow it to.”

You’d been complaining about how you didn’t have time to write. He called you on your bullshit.

You took a magical realism course from him and one of the poems you wrote was published by the Huffington Post a year later. Several others landed in prominent literary journals.

Whenever you felt lazy about your writing, you’d hear his voice, “You aren’t a writer unless you are publishing.”

So, despite your terror, you sent your work out.

And you were published. Many times.

***

All this was a part of your visioning process.

However, you stumbled when it came time to write a book.

You didn’t come from a family where anyone finished anything.

You didn’t know what it meant to see something through to fruition. You tried to imagine it but couldn’t. You marveled at what it must be like to finish the long, complex creative projects you start.

***

Without a doubt, you are the truth-teller of your family. The scribe. The black sheep. The Empath. The magical child. The Storyteller.

Your books and poems and essays are the only children of your life.

You cannot hide them away any longer. You cannot let them die under the stairs.

You need to bring them into the light.

And by doing so, you will save your life.

Again.

***

These days, you see the glow on your face, the silver-white hair, deep hazel eyes. You see the map of your own awakening wherever you look.

You trace blue veins trailing across the backs of your hands and thank them for all they’ve taught you.

When you look in the mirror, you see someone who’s magical, raw, and real.

You wear a crown of roses.

You’ve fully entered the next phase of your life: a crone and member of the wise council of women.

You will be a part of the shift of ages.

You will keep the flame of women’s work and women’s stories alive. You will change the world by doing so.

It turns out, you’ve been a fire-walker your whole life.

Now, you will teach others.

***

Author’s Note: I’ve been taking a Weaving Our Story, Weaving Our Future writing workshop with Cathy Pagano since the end of September. This piece is in response to the class’s writing assignment of rewriting my story in a way that empowers me. We were tasked to take whatever fairy tale or myth had run as an undercurrent in our lives and turn the tables on it, revising it to become a story that allows us to ‘weave the future’ we want to see for ourselves. Although this piece doesn’t revamp the Cinderella story directly, indirectly it does. I am no longer the little cinder girl. I have risen up from ash and reinvented myself.

***

Do you relate to my experience, dearheart? Leave me a comment below or click the link to get connected to my website and email list so we can exchange stories. You can also find me via the links below to my Facebook writer’s page.

***

Everyone has a book inside of them. Everyone has a story. Wouldn’t you love to share yours with the world? Get your free writer’s toolkit, packed with tricks and tips to get you started. Just do it. Don’t wait. Don’t die with an untold story inside you.

© 2018  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

Feel free to share this post with others, as long as you include the copyright information and keep the whole posting intact. If you like this piece please share it with others. You can like me on Facebook or Twitter to see more of my writing and my spiritual journey on my website at www.thewonderlandfiles.com

Art by Amanda Clarke

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye. ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Often these days, I feel a little like a prairie dog popping my head up from my underground hidey-hole. I find myself wondering if it is safe to live above ground and let myself be seen.

Invisible is a place where I feel safe.

Invisible is easier for me, less exhausting. Allowing myself to be seen leaves me raw. It terrifies me in a hundred different ways.

I want to stay where it is warm and quiet. The clang of the world is too much for me. It bruises and twists my brain. It makes me ache.

How can I live in such a world?

How can I move through this river of noise and violence and hatred? How I can risk breaking my own heart by watching the news of bombings, blasts, and shootings? How can I bear the increasing litany of mass extinctions?

It is terrible to be so able to see and feel what so few are able to see and feel.

I am a stranger in a strange land.

***

But then, I remember.

I am not as alone as I often think I am.

I am not the only empath hiding my head, bracing for impact, wondering when the next blast will come.

There are others who feel all of this and still bravely peek out of their rooms. They unpin the blackout curtains and venture out to talk to barren trees standing like centaurs in the yard. They listen to songbirds devouring a bowl of seed left out for them and take in the easy chit-chat those tiny birds engage in.

They hear the wind differently and watch the lenticular clouds pile up like blankets over the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

This world can be hard but it is still beautiful.

We can spend our whole lives standing outside the life imagine we were ‘meant to live,’ only to suddenly sink into the terrible realization we’ve bought into an illusion.

Then, we see the cracks in everything. We recognize we’ve been fooled.

All along, there were others.

All along as we hid and ran and soldiered on in solitude there were others just like us.

Everywhere.

***

I have trouble asking for help.

I was raised by a woman who never asked anyone for help. She still bristles any time she has to ask for help.

As a result, I felt deep shame if I ever needed help. I was taught it was honorable and necessary to bootstrap it through life.

Buck it up, buttercup.

To need help was a bold admission of my complete failure as a human being.

Living in this universe of ‘perfectly holding my shit together’ and ‘never needing to lean on another person [ever]’ made me hermetic and scared.

It shriveled me up and made me small.

I lost years, hiding out.

Yet, as I reached my mid-fifties, that stoic ‘I-do-not-need-anybody’ version of me, started to fall away.

I began to see the bereft child inside me.

I began to understand her fierce desire to nest close to me yet also venture into the fray.

I falteringly began to acknowledge I did need a lot of help.

In fact, it became clear I no longer need or want to go it alone.

***

This week I saw a documentary called Sensitive: The Untold Story.

It told my story.

It reflected my life perfectly, unraveling and explaining exactly what it is like to be a highly sensitive person. This is a character trait I didn’t even know existed until I read Elaine Aron’s book, The Highly Sensitive Person in 2016.

For five decades, I never knew anyone like me.

To realize there are others was catalyzing.

***

This past weekend, I’d signed up for a streaming online workshop. As it started with its hip-hop soundtrack and loud audience call and response, I found myself shuttering. I stayed online for the first two hours and then turned it off. My head was pounding.

I didn’t care about the money I’d lost by not attending. I simply couldn’t deal with any aspect of it. I was completely overwhelmed.

Instead of trying to motor through, I practiced self-care. I let myself enjoy the ensuing silence. I went out to my backyard and visited the trees. I made myself a delicious lunch. I soaked my feet and read a book.

I remembered to care for me.

***

These days, I hide my light, less and less.

I don’t feel safe, per se, but I realize the whole idea of safety is overrated. Being a big, juicy, creative mess is better.

Being authentic is better. Sitting inside the comfortable imperfection of my heart is better. Being me is better.

***

Do you relate to my experience, dearheart? Leave me a comment below or click the link to get connected to my website and email list so we can exchange stories. You can also find me via the links below to my Facebook writer’s page.

***

Everyone has a book inside of them. Everyone has a story. Wouldn’t you love to share yours with the world? Get your free writer’s toolkit, packed with tricks and tips to get you started. Just do it. Don’t wait. Don’t die with an untold story inside you.

© 2018  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

Feel free to share this post with others, as long as you include the copyright information and keep the whole posting intact. If you like this piece please share it with others. You can like me on Facebook or Twitter to see more of my writing and my spiritual journey on my website at www.thewonderlandfiles.com

 

stock image

“I am not crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”- Cheshire Cat” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: With an Excerpt from the Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll

I can’t tell whether I should be excited by all this change or terrified.

Truth be told, I am a little of both.

My life is revving up in a way that I haven’t experienced since Pluto started to transit my astrological chart in 2005.

I have had Pluto – the great transformer – sitting in my 5th House of creativity, children, and play since I was 45. I am nearly 58 and the transit doesn’t finish for a few more years. I interpret its meaning as a wide swath of transformation – painful, messy, chaotic, emotionally exhausting – in the area of my creative life.

And boy has that been true.

I hardly recognize the woman and writer I was back then. She’s shed so many layers of skin, she is raw and newly born.

But she’s still here.

I haven’t blogged much over the past 12 months largely because of the whirlwind that life became. I used up all my fucks on the books I birthed.

I wanted to focus. I wanted to root and grow. I finished a skeletal draft of something last August and plan to workshop it and finish it this year. (I won’t talk much about the details until that baby’s ready to come into the world.) I gathered together a very rough draft of a collection of poems in November and plan to refine it this summer.

I spent a great deal of deep time working on myself.

Not in the sense of sitting around navel-gazing. More in the sense of realizing that my life depended on me learning to love and care for myself in a way that was tender and totally foreign to me. I started to know my inner self in a different and profound way.

I stopped wasting time.

Now, I tumble down and down and down, looking for the missing bits of me. I sweep up what I find and keep moving.

I start a memoir course in California next month. I won a scholarship and am fundraising to pay for the rest. (Feel free to donate here, if the spirit moves you. Every bit helps.)

For the next twelve weeks, I am taking an online course on entrepreneurship and one on motivating the masses through speaking and writing. I am getting ready to finally launch a writing workshop online. I am ruminating about products and books and original cards.

I have so many ideas I easily get overwhelmed.

However, I am not letting my terror stop me.

For such a long time, I let fear stop me. I let fear tell me its sad-sack tale of woe, wasting precious days and hours and minutes I can never retrieve.

I can’t do that anymore.

“Impossible is my specialty.” – Marissa Meyer, Heartless

So, I ground myself – imagining a silver cord, a swirling root that stretches from my center to the center of the earth, allowing me to sit in the present moment, unworried by the past or the future. I sit and I breathe. I breathe. I sit. I quiet my monkey mind and see myself as perfect as I am now – at midlife – with a shock of beautiful white hair.

I watch that root stretch within me until it reflects all the branches of my life above it.

Do you realize we are seeding the next 30 years? We are choosing our tribe and our path.

Pluto stands in my doorway, ever the teacher, the awakener. He’s blown up my life and set me on a new path.

Now, I see myself  – a wildwood-warrior-woman- writer – on the verge of something juicy, something big.

I meet myself for the first time and realize I’ve arrived at last. I pull leaves and dirt from my hair and set out in the direction that most scares me.

Life is about stretching our hearts and shedding our old familiar skins.

By the end of it, we should be as vast as the stars we sit under.

We should contain a multitude of memories fluttering and flickering like fireflies in jars.

We should be filled with god damn darkness and light. You see, I believe we are meant to arrive at the end of everything, disheveled, eyes shining, our shirts half off.

Otherwise, what have we done with our time?

Otherwise, what was the purpose of this whole ragtag journey?

I want to get off this merry-go-round all used up, words spilling from my pockets, a stack of stories still to tell.

I want to be full. Of life. Of joy. Of everything I ever wanted to do.

Then I want to turn the page and begin again.

***

Everyone has a book inside of them. Everyone has a story. Wouldn’t you love to share yours with the world? Get your free writer’s toolkit, packed with tricks and tips to get you started. Just do it. Don’t wait. Don’t die with an untold story inside you.

© 2018  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

Feel free to share this post with others, as long as you include the copyright information and keep the whole posting intact. If you like this piece please share it with others. You can like me on Facebook or Twitter to see more of my writing and my spiritual journey on my website at www.thewonderlandfiles.com

 

 

Image by Catrin Welz-Stein via Google Image

 

In memory of G. Valmont Thomas – December 15, 1959 – December 18, 2017

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” ~ Albert Einstein

Focusing on what’s good.

As the year’s end approaches, I’ve been thinking about what’s good in my life, what’s right. It’s easy to identify the ways in which our lives fall short of our expectations. But can we see — really see — the treasures we possess?

I’ve thought about the people who love and care for me, day after day, year after year. I’ve thought about the beautiful bounty of the past twelve months – the dreams I fulfilled, the people I met, the places I went.

I’ve thought about the losses, too, but only in terms of my gratitude that I was blessed to even briefly know each and every person of my kindred kin who has crossed the river of death this year.

And I admit, I recognize what grace blooming in my life has done for me. I am filled with profound gratitude for every bit, every thread, every moment – even those that were painful or difficult or devastating.

We are only on this planet for a short time.

Compared to the millions of years that have passed on earth, human beings appear for only milliseconds, lifetime upon lifetime. We spark and fade as quickly as the universe snaps its fingers.

As I age, this becomes more and more obvious.

As a young woman, I may have thought I had unlimited time, but as each year shuttles past, it is clear that’s not the case.

We’re here and then we’re gone. And more often than not now, what seems most important is not how much stuff we’ve managed to amass, but what we’ve collected as memories, experiences, relationships, moments.

It seems like only yesterday, I was sitting next to my mom on the train over the Cascade Mountains on my way to Seattle for Christmas in 1966. It was the first time I’d spent Christmas with my grandparents, aunt and uncle, and cousins. The train was oversold and my younger brother and I had to take turns sitting on my Dad’s lap. Snow fell and I felt the wonder of being inside a living snow globe, white flakes falling steadily, bending the branches of the evergreens as we traveled from Eastern Washington into the Emerald City, as it would later be named. The train rattled and swayed. We ate  bologna sandwiches and drank sodas from the dining car; we napped off and on, all through the night. The doll I got that Christmas sits in my bedroom, even now. We spent those holidays at my grandparents’ doll-sized house, snow on the ground, presents splayed under the tree. I remember the smell of cloves and ham roasting, and the sounds of laughter and conversation, late into the night. I remember the glow of my cousin Karen’s face while we played pick up sticks in the back bedroom.

I was six then; I am 57 now.

And those intervening years are nothing but a smear of color. I can see shapes and faces, I can remember graduations and funerals and weddings and birthdays. I can see my father’s ashes sinking in the waters of Puget Sound. I hear myself saying, “Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god,” as I paced after the Sheriff told us he was dead.

My aunt’s in hospice now.

My uncle’s in assisted living.

My cousins’ children have children now.

My mom’s nearly 83.

We’ve buried countless pets – those perennially ephemeral beings –  in countless backyards all over my home state, and countless relatives — sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, friends, colleagues.

I guess the point of all this is to remind myself that time is waning. Time is precious. Time is priceless.

So, turn off the endless stream of bad news polluting the airwaves. Walk away from anyone or anything that doesn’t value you.

We are each one of us, a gift that came to the world to open someone’s heart, or change someone’s life, or make something better, or alter the course of life from one of destruction and chaos to one of beauty and collaboration.

We are here to bring each other joy, wisdom, light. And yes, we must each open a little box of darkness, too.

So, in this season of light, strike a match and spark that flame within you.

We’ve got work to do.

However, for now, what we need most is to savor our lives and the gifts they bestow on us each day: a dog’s sigh, tears of relief, chocolate, a smattering of bright stars.

Another day. Another chance. And another after that.

Love, in all its luminous incandescence, has decided to let us go on, tumbling through our messy lives, awakening slowly to all we know; to all we’ve always known.

This is it, babe. This is all there is.

Let’s make it good.

#happychristmas #haveyourselfamerrylittlechristmas #loveeachother

***

Everyone has a book inside of them. Everyone has a story. Wouldn’t you love to share yours with the world? Get your free writer’s toolkit, packed with tricks and tips to get you started. Just do it. Don’t wait. Don’t die with an untold story inside you.

© 2017  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

Feel free to share this post with others, as long as you include the copyright information and keep the whole posting intact. If you like this piece please share it with others. You can like me on Facebook or Twitter to see more of my writing and my spiritual journey on my website at www.shavawnmberry.com.