Scavenge + Starlight

For most of my life I was untooled unskilled unresourced for what was happening to me on the energetic-spiritual-soul level. It didn't occur to me that people would have these similar experiences. My childhood environment lacked a spiritual base (thanks to residential school generational impact and the inherent blandness of Canadian cultural landscape we were trying to mimic). While I was sent to Catholic school, there's nothing there that hinted at similar experiences. I didn't think anyone understood or could help me decipher what had happened to me; one minute I was a grown woman on a desert road, dying, and the next, a small child with carpet under my hands. The steps inbetween were known but non-conceptual/not understandable to the small child I was. By the time I was 18, I had been reintroduced to native culture but the rebirth that was occurring was just too fresh, and not very substantive to what started happening that year. Time-space-deat...

Some of my clients (okay, a lot of my clients) struggle with fully comprehending the immensity of the self they are. "How are you doing?" is usually greeted with a mind-based response, or if the client considers themselves to be aware, they pause a little and respond, or list out grievances with personal annotations that make their grievances feel, to them, less like holding a victim-position, and more like self-conscious witnessing. When I ask, "How are you doing?" in a session, your "aura" expands with unprocessed, unwanted, unacknowledged subconscious data and I see this filter down into a response. I learned to look for this while working with an elder who did medicine work; he'd ask the question over and over to different people, and his gaze (and his being) widened to accept the subconscious data. He'd tell me to look, look at what they do, look at what he does; don't listen, don't try to figure anything out, just sit a...

Sometimes it kind of surprises people that I don't have much faith, or that I don't believe in God, with all the spirituality I chase, the books I read, the help I may be able to give them. They think I must have some great understanding of a personalized, helpful God who is awesome and fills my heart with love and light. Love and light, there's another thing I have no time for. My spirituality is very earthly; if I am to agree that there is a God, it is primarily a creative wave of self-expressed realizations coming into being and then passing out of being again. It ain't about to whisk into my life and lay down some divine tracks to live by. My spirituality is hard won, emptyish, a puzzle I can't quite crack. This may be the fault of the first act alison; too many years in the memory bank, too many times seeing spirituality organized and corrupting itself as it heads away from the earth and towards the grasping human heart. We don...

Spirit woke me up for my own sunrise ceremony today. I did my best, and then did some beading, and then got around to sitting and meditating too. I've been thinking a lot about where my life is right now and where I would like it to go, or, when I'm in a bad mood, where it should already be. I've been thinking about young kids, and me as a young kid, and what I would have wanted to hear, what I needed to know, to navigate the complexities of life so the simplicity of it all could emerge and guide me from one transition to another. Transition periods are usually to the brim with fear-based actions for most people. Rarely do we step into uncertainty and breathe it in; we want clarity, sureness, assurance. We want guides, maps, comfort. This works against us and coaxes out our fears so they begin to be all we interact with, and create from. Our need for sureness sucks us into familiar patterns that keep us comfortable. This comfortableness does us in. It's c...

So I've been quiet; I'm normally quiet except for a stream of reposts and some quotes and some pics but nothing too personal, nothing private. I struggle with the idea that my private life is private, even private in relation to close friends and Daughter. This echoes back to childhood, when I was very small, trying to understand how this world I seem to be moving body in and through did not (and still kind of does not) match the landscape and the map I remembered. And still remember. I remember a me beyond me; I actually remember a few of these, in snippets and in whole stories, but the me I feel I am is having a second act, here in this life now. It's taken too many years to sort of bridge that awareness but I truly believe had I not been born Nipissing, specifically, it would have taken longer. From what I've been told, Nipissings were spacewalkers, able to see, be, and be seen through time, space (outer and inner), location, and in non-reality (s...