Hello, Old Friend

 I've missed you.

I've watched you. While you made frantic friends with coworkers, and increased your alcohol tolerance.

I've watched you. While you flirted. While you waited for him to call.

For them to text.

For your heart to forget them all.

I've witnessed you in the morning, sluggishly scouring social media for the inspiration to get out of bed,

and rarely finding it.

Staring up at the ceiling, sometimes I've felt you nearer to me. As thoughts coalesced into nothingness, and time crawled, meaningless, and the shadows grew.

I've kept you upright as the world spun, intoxicatingly, on your way up the stairs to your apartment at 3am.

I've been waiting for you.

The other day, I broke through as you were driving on the freeway. The sunset aided and abetted me, and a yearning began deep inside

for a keyboard.

A blank document.

A platform.

I've watched you search the eyes of those outside of you for a similar yearning.

Connection.

Wondering if it was safe to be vulnerable.

Is it ever safe?

And then I watched as you slammed up your walls, and hid yourself behind clouds of smoke

and glasses of wine.

Patiently, I have been here.

A witness.

Waiting for you to miss me as much as I've missed you.

To see how much I still admire your courage,

your compassion,

and your effort to survive.

Dear Friend,

I've watched as you fell into loneliness, embraced silence, and found solace on the mat.

And when your wrist gave out, I watched you berate yourself for giving that up.

And when the critics of your mind and outside of you rabbled and rumbled, I have been here.

And when that crushing abandonment-feeling threatened,

I caressed you, and softly lead you into presence.

And when you decided to give up on love,

you saw me.

We smiled at each other, and began to laugh.

How can we give up on that which feeds me?

Gives me life?

Purpose?

Belonging?

In love, I am.

With you.

Us.

Me.

We.

All is one.

The Enormity of Now

Nothing,

There’s nothing

Not a single word

Or even a phrase

That can express –

You see, it was just so –

And then, when I close my eyes and breathe in deeply, it’s like –

But then, it’s gone on the exhale.

Because there’s no word

No word to describe Everything.

And I ask myself,

Was it the dry, warm desert air, the smell of salt and my hair which was drying, floating lazily in the breeze?

Or was it the enormity of it?

The enormity of the moment that stretched around this drop in the endless bottomlessness.

My eyes were not crafted to see in ultraviolet

The landscape laughs at me

In my fragility

And in the blindness of this being human.

What does the word ‘sunset’ even describe?

Six letters typed into a searchbar brings a flood of images taken by other humans,

Painted ones

Hazy ones

Blurry ones

Retouched

Photoshopped

Disturbingly colorful

Unsettlingly beautiful

Oh, and  how they taunt me

“look at this thing that you missed, this point of extraordinarity, sliver in time, suspended now in 2D forever.”

“wishing you were here”

And that’s the line that pops out at me,

This “wish you were here”

Because when the world we take for granted stops and shouts at us in technicolor,

And we stop in our tracks

Mouths making ‘o’s,

Pupils dilating

Hearts swelling,

Don’t we think of someone we know we could share this with? WE think, “OH MY GOD! My mother would die if she could see this!”

Or, achingly, “My fiance should have been here with me.”

I could name all the colors as they shift and change and morph and swirl

I could snap a picture, and try to show you

But what you miss is the enormity

The enormity of a moment wrapped around you in 360 degrees

That slides past you and through you

The enormity of “pinkish orange reddish WOW”

Like, that – that right there – that fucking poetry in the sky

That is why. That is the reason. The reason I can walk through an art store’s acrylic paint section for hours, losing time and urgency and even place – because I am trying to find that color

That one color

Or those many colors

 A task that seems utterly impossible

Because a picture … a picture can’t show you the vastness

The bigness

The wowness.

The Kalahari desert is one of the  most extreme landscapes, the harshest of climates

That sun bakes the sand into this brilliant red, and when it peaks out through long, wild grasses that glitter and dance in the Wowness of  that sun as it sets,

We followed twin lines of red parting the tall grasses

Grasses so tall we felt them brushing against the undercarriage of the van

Tickling and bending and breaking as we trundled past

I imagine the trail of broken grass smell

Green

Sharp

Smells that mingle with the dryness of air baked by sun in a vast –

You see the word ‘desert’

It’s just this word

I learned it

I’ve visited

But the word doesn’t mean anything

But THIS desert

And THIS sunset

AND THE WOW OF IT ALL

Reached into me with metaphorical hands

Raked through me like a fine net

Brushed over me like sweet, delicate wind

I mean, I was DELIVERED

I was RECEIVED

I was HELD

I was SUSPENDED

I was TOUCHED, MOVED

I was SHAKEN

I was AWAKENED

I was REANIMATED

I breathed in sweet, unfettered LIFE

And all I have to explain it to you is a language that cannot

And a picture that cannot

Even begin to show you the ENORMITY

Because, what I’m saying is this

RIGHT NOW

Go out into your world

And leave your egos where they are

Just step out of them for a moment

And that MOMENT

God, The enormity of it…

Be like a child experiencing ‘sweet’ for the first time

Because this Wow that we miss

We miss because we’ve stuck ourselves in this world called Protocols

And my heart breaks

Because most of you will still not see it

Not feel it

Because we’ve been taught to shut ourselves up in our ivory towers

‘masters’ of the universe

But I dare you to stand in the desert

Come back from the brink of heat exhaustion

Salty and stiff from evaporated sweat

And gaze into a sunset

And recognize the smallness that is your life on this earth

Because outside your Urbanity,

You are nothing.

And yet, you discover you are everything.

Everything.

PDSD: Post Dramatic Sunset Disorder

 In the Kalahari desert,

I met a King who called me his love
and blessed my path.

We stood before the sunset,
And I felt it down, deep in my soul
Pouring breath into me
Like warm light, liquefied
Slipping into my cells,
Making my blood sing,
Calling me home.

It was boundless

As I am boundless

As are we all,

Always and ever following an endless wave of warmth,

The ever fading, shifting, vibrantly tinted interaction

between light and atmosphere, presence and absence.

Before, I walked as though blind
Blind with Ego.
          with Judgment.
Blind and lost and searching for what has been here, all along and always.

I met a King who peered into me with twinkling eyes

His desert, like a mother, stole from me my wretched sense of self.

Down in that darkness of the soul, I was drowning in a sea of water and wind,

thirsty but for all the salt
I couldn't drink.

My breath was stuck.
I stumbled into the bars of my self-made cage,
Bars called Heartache, Worthlessness, and Loss.
Bars named Lost child, and Lost faith.
It was cage called Abandonment,

named for what had been done to me,
And what I had had been taught to do.

I hid within the familiarity of a prison I named into existence.

But the door has always been open.

I met a King who sat beside me at the fire, took my hand and said,
"Tell me of your sorrows and hurts. I will listen as well as I can,
and if I understand you,
I will offer what healing I have to take with you,
For your journey has been blessed"

I left my sickness on the thorny, desert grass of the Kalahari.
I let it slip from me like a snake too big for its skin.
The call was always there,
in the stillness inside,
the sacred space within that never fails to resonate with the beauty of truth.
Beauty that scours like a coarse powder, scraping away at the comfortable lies and illusions that had padded my cell.

I emerged

Breathless and gasping
as the tears flooded,
Irrepressible and perfectly right

With whose eyes had I been looking but not seeing?

The motherland called me to her.

She called, and I accepted her

in the most ancient language of adoration
Forged in the discordant, perfect harmony of all that has been
And all that will be.

I am here
I live
I breathe
And  with the perfect clarity of a child,
I see that this world made me

In an endless ocean of you’s and us’s and we’s
And I cry shamelessly in love with what I encounter in the stillness.
Peace within that shelters and holds me
Ignited compassion
It fills me up and joyous, decanted love pours out,

daring and unfettered.

I am,

And have always been
In the right place
and at the right time that brought me to this desert

To see this sunset

This one that is all around and in every pore

This one that dies in shimmering grasses that hold the fading light and color like infinite, dancing canvases.

As it ends for me,

I bask in the knowledge that it never ends for ‘we’.

This desert,

Full of life
and love
And the pain of living.

Achingly beautiful, delicately balanced
and as strong as the people who live within it.

I met a King in the Kalahari who called me his love,

And his sunset brought me home.

Much Affirmations. Such Positive. Wow.

I’m sweating, but I’m not cold. I feel an ache in my bones. It’s like a fever, but how am I sick?

A symptom of my greater sickness, maybe?

All this bottled up grief looking for an outlet, attention, escape. Freedom.

Because ultimately, that’s what I crave. I crave emotional freedom.

So this is where it starts. It’s not always going to be convenient.

Growth,  I mean. It sort of happens when it happens. That I’ve come this far is strange enough as it is. Especially since I hardly know where my strength has come from. The survival mechanism inside that helped me out of the the darkness. It threatens me again, because I’m at a place where I can look at it and heal it, finally. I want to let it go. I want to be ok. 

I am ok; I want to be incredible.

I am already that.

I am already everything I need to be in order to fall into bliss with life.

I am willing to let go of the pattern that needs me to fail.

I am willing to release the need to fail.

I am willing to let go of my need to be a failure.

I can ask for help with ease, and will always find it.

Help will always come when I need it.

It is easy for me to ask for help.

I deserve help

I deserve to belong

I belong

I am connected to a wonderful, vibrant source of life energy.

I am willing to purge this sickness from me.

My breath is healing and powerful.

I can do anything I set my mind to do.

I am strong enough to handle my life. 

I am strong enough to feel grief and heal from it. 

I am strong enough to be deepened by it. 

Letting it go will help me rise above. 

Letting it go will make room for more beauty in my soul.

Love is everywhere, and I find it easily within me. 

On Vulnerability

It’s a silly thing, to get ourselves all bent out of shape because we think ourselves into trouble. I am a prime example of someone who has over-complicated life with her mind. If anyone ever says that thoughts are not objects, then they’re operating on tired information. Thoughts like, “I can’t do this,” and “he left me because I’m not lovable” and “he didn’t stop drinking because I wasn’t worth it” have really done a number on my health, my sanity, and my whole life.

Something about my life circumstances, however, have led me to an amazing place. I am not perfect, and I can finally accept my humanity. We are all strong in our fragility, made even more powerful when we learn to be vulnerable.

I used to think I had to be hard-hearted, and so that’s the vibe I would give off. A friend in my drama class was surprised the first time she saw me cry. We were rehearsing a scene in which I had to get upset, and when the tears came down without my consent, it surprised the both of us. She thought my life was perfect because I was always happy, or at least stoic. Nothing seemed to affect me.

I thought if I pretended hard enough, nothing could hurt me.

My parents divorced when I was eleven. My dad moved away to become an alcoholic, and when I went to stay with him against my family’s advice I discovered just how deep a hold his demons had on him. It was one of the most trying times of my life. I tried my damndest to change him. The last time I tried an emotional appeal, when a single tear escaped my façade of composure, he had told me to “quit acting”.

No wonder I didn’t want to show real emotion to people; they’d just think I was acting anyway. Plus it was proof I was weak, that I could be hurt, and I deeply feared giving anybody the power to hurt me the way my father had. He taught me to harden my heart.

The rest of my story to date has been one big, long journey toward re-discovering the power and freedom of vulnerability. And man, has it been an incredible journey.

It’s ok if you don’t believe in destiny; I don’t either. But I do believe that if we set our intention, we can encounter our purpose.

Step one in my journey was using my anger to give me the energy to take care of myself in relationships. Oh, boy –  did I get angry! I tried the tools I learned in therapy and support groups – “I” messages and soft words, counting to ten – but it took a while for me to get the hang of it. My poor ex-boyfriend dealt with my anger for four years. And when I finally started to let it go and change my tune, he became resentful because I was busy telling him things that he tried to tell me back when. What a mess to get ourselves into.

I sometimes feel like I’m not anyone who should be giving life advice to people because I’m still figuring it out as I change my relationship to my experiences and my thoughts about them.

Want to know a secret, though?

Well, it’s not really a secret. It’s just something that I’ve stumbled upon, and there’s plenty of literature out there written by more enlightened souls than mine.

And the secret is this: we can change our life simply by watching our thoughts. First we must identify certain beliefs, and where they came from. Next, we must relinquish ownership over the hindering beliefs, and just as important is accepting the thoughts that are good for us.

Changing from “I am not lovable” to “I am worthy of love” is miraculous… but it took me a good while to be able to even whisper it, let alone think it without resistance.

It sounds like a simple concept, but it is one of the hardest – and most rewarding and freeing – things I have ever attempted.

In the act of taking responsibility for my thoughts, I was telling the universe that I was done being a Ping-Pong ball, letting my fears over how other people will treat or perceive me dictate how I treat myself.

Then the affirmations just started flowing. The ones that were the hardest to say were often the ones I needed to say the most.

“I deserve to feel my emotions openly.” This one was very hard at first.

“I am worthy of all good things in life.”

“I approve of myself.”

And if I couldn’t even say that, I could begin an affirmation with the phrase “I am willing to learn to. . .”

Or simply, “I am willing to change”.

The lesson I learned was not that I needed to accept fault for my coping mechanisms – whether healthy or otherwise – but that I could choose to handle things differently. To set myself free.

When my ex-boyfriend broke up with me, my entire world crashed around me because I had made him and our life together my center – for better or for worse. The worst part (or maybe the best, depending on how you view it) was that his reasoning was, in his eyes, noble. He had descended into a deep depression and saw how I had been pouring so much of myself into trying to help him and in keeping a hold of our life together so it wouldn’t crumble. When I found Louise L. Hay’s book, “You Can Heal Your Life” and started saying her affirmations and working in my journal, he saw the change in me and it deepened his guilt. He didn’t know how to tell me about his resentment, his guilt, his distance. But I felt it, and I tried so hard to make him love me, I demanded it. And when he couldn’t meet me in that loving space, he let me go.  The reason I say this is terrible is because I couldn’t use my anger and hate that I was so used to in order to “get over him”. If he had cheated, or been a complete asshole, or gambled all our money away, it would have been easy to ‘write him off’ and blame our failed relationship on him. Instead, I had to look inward and recognize my own part in the parting. And not because I was fault-finding, but because his “adult break up” allowed me to look inside in order to grow.

It was another one of those “hardest moments of my life” things, and Louise helped me identify the negative thoughts and beliefs that had led me to allowing myself to be a side character in someone else’s life instead of the Leading Lady of my own.

Now, I can chalk up the experience to “growing pains” in the understanding that all of us – every single one – go through it. We all feel pain, of varying degrees, and we all experience loss. What sets us apart is our ability to not just get through it but to also grow through it.

I made the decision to be done allowing the pain of my past to be a defining characteristic of my present.

It doesn’t mean I’ve ascended pain and found enlightenment like some mythical monk on a beautiful, ethereal hilltop. It means that it has become okay to feel. Okay to be sad. Okay to feel love. Okay to risk heartbreak. Okay to share the deepest parts of me. Okay to connect to people. Okay to let my walls down.

Sometimes it’s scary as hell, but when did people expand horizons by remaining inside their comfort zones?

So my challenge to you is: dare to be vulnerable. Dare to become responsible for your thoughts. It is one of the most courageous, heart-poundingly meaningful gifts we can give to the world and to ourselves. Side effects may include emotional freedom, bliss, moments of euphoria, self-love, and the power to create the life of which you’ve always dreamed. 

Don't Feed It

It kind of feels like I’m falling backwards

Like the wind has been knocked out of me.

Like my insides have floated away.

Like I might be sick to my stomach

Or that someone mistook my guts for shoelaces. And tied them. In a bow. With bunny ears.

I guess I am not really “over”.

I often forget to think of him.

But he is also often on my mind.

People have all kinds of opinions about him.

But then there’s this pit inside.

This pit that I am still falling down.

Air rushing past

Struggling to catch my breath

So that’s what I’m focusing on.

Deep breath in. . . deep breath out.

Don’t feed the beast inside.

Lock it in a cage.

Kill it with kindness

But don’t feed it.

If I don’t look at it

It doesn’t die

It just lies in wait for a chance to lash out the moment my defenses are down.

So I’m determined.

Now, this time, the beast and I have a date.

We have to have it out.

I need to kill it now.

This bio is hard to write. I am grappling with publicly admitting my survivorship. While I must admit that there are many life-altering events that perforate my past, I choose not to let them define me. I am a Survivor because I do not subscribe to the line of thought that says I must be “damaged goods”. I am a Survivor because my focus is on being honestly, truly, and vividly alive. That means living in honesty with myself. It means dedicating each day to recovery. My tattoo has nothing to do with my survorship, technically. My sister and I got matching ones on a (thought out) sisterly impulse. I have always loved and looked up to my sister, who I am completely blessed to have in my life.

Bonnyjean's path to recovery has taken her to very unexpected places. She had lived with depression and chronic illness for years before taking the baby steps necessary to take a more loving approach to life. At the age of 19, repressed memories surfaced that changed the shape of her...

One Day, Not Tomorrow

So. One day, I sat down at a computer and I wrote about the sadness that I see.

I wrote how it moved me

How I moved it around

Alienated it

Made love to it

Through it

Around it

In spite of it

To quell it

To grieve it

To smother it.

Today, I notice it. I notice the sadness in the sobriety of knowing

It just is.

In the sobriety of knowing

It doesn’t define me.

One day, I will make love to me.

Today, I make love sing.

I twist the tortured cables of my computer

I tap the keys swiftly

I listen to Radiohead

I notice the sadness

I notice the heartache

I notice me noticing

I notice the desire

I notice the judgement

I notice the critic

And I am love

Within and without the cacophony.

Deep breaths starve the ego.

The place where I am, where I make these songs, often cries out for me to trust. We are built to take risks. There is risk in every choice. Calculation. Response time. Reflexes. Assessment. To see myself through the others’ eyes. What would I see? If they could see themselves through my eyes, would they revel in their beauty as I do? Would they cry at the disparity in our perceptions? What if we could all sit within the realm of conscious perception, each seeing through collective eyes

What if we all could be open?

A shut box

A dark soul

A thick wall

High and ostentatious

Can it be scaled?

I could die a thousand lifetimes waiting for it to fall.

But I want to live. I want to breathe the life of a thousand lifetimes

And if I could I would exhale the strongest wind

And the compassion of my air would float the wall away

And we could stare into each other’s eyes

Marveling at our nakedness

In the certainty of the strength in our helplessness

For we may sit

And gaze

And be

And we would know love.

But today, I sit before a high stone wall

I could die a thousand lifetimes waiting for it to fall.