Pixie Lighthorse | Self-Healing Writer

Writer: Self-Healing Earth-Centered Books

What It Takes To Write

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When I self-published my book of prayers earlier this year, I saw it as a little gesture of love to those who would come across it. What it was really like was that feeling you get when you’re driving across a neighbor-built suspension bridge over the San Carlos River in a truck and trailer that you have to climb up off of to get to the other side-basically, praying your ass off that it’s not going to kill you once you’ve agreed to take the risk and are hanging heavy over 25 feet of rushing water.

Simply put, the book is a place to keep my collection of similar writings. Writing books is not something one would necessarily do if one was a single parent trying to feed one’s family. Ahem. Super woot if you make a decent living at writing!  However, it’s one of those things most of us do because we live and breathe through the medium somehow, constantly chipping the ego off of what wants to be said, and hoping it comes across the way we intend it to.

It was a meaningful experience for me for many reasons, but the significant one was having to be with what came up for me when I considered that these are…private sentiments… between myself and the essence of cosmos I commune with. In my secret voice.

Part of me wanted to make it more writerly, so I consulted a thesaurus a couple of times and then found that it wasn’t my voice.

Then I wanted to make sure it didn’t offend anyone’s spiritual path, so I deleted some things. Then I went and put them back, because the me-ness was lacking and so was the soul. It wasn’t my voice.

And more things came up, popping up around every corner like little aliens,  asking me to betray my voice so that maybe the work would be better received.

I’m not fantastic about nakedness around others. Transparency is something I’m always striving for, and trying not to withhold, but giving great consideration to.

Only a few know my deep, deep heart, and even they have to dig a bit. But when it comes to my dialogue with the spirits, it’s the hardest thing to share of all. And only I knew what was going on behind the scenes as I bit my nails down to the red line and knit several good helpers around me like a quilt of insulation and pushed through, refusing to become paralyzed by the kind of fear that stops a sweet thing from coming into being.

Deena Metzger used to have a big retreat house where I lived in the mountains in the national forest, but I never got to meet her. I slept in her house on retreat a few times, but not with her groups. What was I thinking?! Taking one of her workshops is on my figurative bucket list (are they literally housed somewhere?) and I’m committed to getting to it soon. Her book, Writing For Your Life, reminded me to treat language as breath while I was in the process of writing and editing 28 prayers. Her words helped me find a way to put sentiment into words and survive when the process felt a little too life-or-death.

I was thinking about Allen Ginsburg today, something I read about him taking forEVER to walk a block because he stopped and studied things and wrote, crouched down in the curb, or stopped and went into a shop or a house, captivated by conversation with a stranger he was having. He’d sit right down and write afterwards, completely absorbed in the process. My random thought was, “What would he have thought about voice memos?!” And then it occurred to me that his writing would likely not have been the same. The raw quality of his experiences were what turned him on, and made his work exhilarating to read. I fantasized that his writing utensil was the gluey thread which kept him tethered to the earth, lest he float up into the heavens.

This morning I read Maya Stein’s 10-Line Tuesday, and slightly paraphrased it to make it easy to carry with me today:

 

“Hold your instrument close to your bones and play your heart out.”

Ain’t no modern technology can connect me to my more transparent expressions.

For me, it must be raw.

I must be close to the earth.

The work must scare me a little bit (or a lot) or I’m not being honest enough.

 

Making Time :: Staring Down Fears of Leaving Social Media

SouLodge Medicine Gathering 2016

Wild Women Belong to the Woods

I remember what it was like nursing my infants, how every moment of every day was about making sure they were full, or planning to. Not only did I want their bellies to be full and warm, but I wanted them to feel fully held, rested, nurtured, and picked up every time they cried out with a yet-to-be-known need.

I also remember that during that time I began to feel depleted, right around weaning-it was like the life was being sucked out of me. I think the truth is that I was sucking at making time to replenish my reserves. In my attempt to be the Sow Goddess, I’d forgotten (and had never been shown) that recharging was something I needed to think of, and create time for. In the era of attachment parenting, I felt an urgency to be with my babies at all times.

Years have passed since I nursed the wee ones, and I still have to remind myself to create time where there seems like there can be none.

A friend and I were talking about the concept of time being an illusion and irrelevant for the most part, if one conspires to believe that there is an eternal element to existence. I did some research for fun afterward. It got heady. I pulled away from the linear braincrunching (that’s not nearly as friendly a process as it once was) and thought about how I’ve experienced time as a quick flight or forgivingly elastic depending on what I’m doing in the moment. I reminded myself that the way I survived having tiny, needy people glued to my ribcage is that I made myself believe that when I had the thought “I don’t have enough time!” that not having enough time was not going to be my issue. My issue was always going to be my willingness to create the experience I wanted to have. I had to believe that I could make the time, create the time, just because I declared that it was important. It stuck. I still believe I can make time, not necessarily magically, but by seeing how easily I give it away. Then taking it back.

There will always be Very Good Reasons we humans can come up with for why we’re not living life in a way which honors it: our body temples, our creative dreams, our wishes for intimacy, satisfying work or study, our desire to be connected to something greater than our limited scope. The thing I always yearn for is being outside in nature, sitting on the Earth, alone or with my people. Every time I have the conversation with myself or my beloved, the answer is quick and easy.

I think I’ve read Alex Franzen’s Why I Do Not Use Social Media Anymore about 3,837 times. I go back to it again and again, because it’s one of the most important things I’ve read all year, maybe longer. I read it because I’m not only aware (from repetitive visiting) that we have 39,420,000 minutes in the average human lifespan, but that when I choose to make time for what I want to experience in my life, I am honoring those minutes.

Having left Facebook completely, (the fan page peeled off, too) and my years-neglected Twitter account, too, I think I’m making progress on honoring my minutes. Now I have no excuse not to read this book from cover to cover.

 

Are you thinking about leaving some or all social media behind? Here are some of the ridiculous fears I had to quickly unravel before I pulled the trigger on Twitter and Facebook:

 

Fear: “I won’t be able to connect with my friends and family as easily.”

Comforting counter-thought: Keywords are *as easily*, babe. Write them a letter or call them if you want to really connect. Better yet, make a date to see them. You’d love that.

 

Fear: “Will everyone forget about me and what I do?”

Comforting counter-thought: Not everyone.

Persistent fear: Can you expand on that?

Comforting counter-thought: No ma’am.

 

Fear: “This is how I tell people about my work. Will my business suffer?”

Comforting counter-thought: You had a successful business online seven years before social media became the norm. I think you’ll be okay, and maybe you’ll become a better writer from actually writing instead of putting random post-it notes up all over the social-media place and leaking out good ideas without making real commitments.

 

Fear: “What if I miss out on a really important conversation?!”

Comforting counter-thought: If it’s meant to make it to you, it will. Until then, have important conversations with anyone around you who wants to have them, too.

 

Marianne Williamson said “Ego is, quite literally, a fearful thought.”

As with so many things, I think fear is what keeps us from claiming our sacred lives as our own. Funny how tricky it can be.

 

 

 

New Moon Birthday Love

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It’s my 44th birthday week! And aren’t our birthdays a little bit like New Year’s?

I’m really earth-heavy in my chart, so my natural gesture is about use-able tools and grounded, practical knowledge. I take the opportunity at each birthday to set intentions for the year and see how I can put my tools to pragmatic use for the benefit of my goals. First on my list is making vows to my body and fleshing out the details for what that will look like. Secondly, after the chaos of a moving year and initiating myself into the new ways of living in a new town with new…everything, I’m inviting a calmer state of being to take up residence inside of me.

With grateful eyes, I’m greeting the transition of seasons, and welcoming the energies of the new moon. Looking to the sky, I find myself wanting to align even more with the natural gravitational rhythms which can make my earthwalk smoother.

With so much change in my recent history, this shift-loaded period coupled with cozy Fall temperatures calls for settling in, and cultivating calmer energies in my world. The solar eclipse showed me the error of some of my shadow ways last week and now I’m looking with a softer gaze toward the lunar eclipse after the Equinox later this month to help me shed the old habits which aren’t working and walk more lightly into the future. I’ll be walking (err, slithering) along with many women through the medicine of Snake beginning next week and hoping to lighten all of our loads as we shed skins and align with our sacred rhythms and honor the healer which lives inside all of us. (To join us with a little birthday present from me to you, use code SOULODGE20 when you register.)

On my heart today to share with you are these mantras:

I trust that I will understand.

I trust that I am understood by a cosmology greater than myself.

I trust that peace is found in becoming still.

I trust that the floodgate which I’m afraid will open will not drown me.

I trust that opening will always provide richer rewards than closing.

I trust that I am sacred.

I trust that I am loved and lovable and that my own love radiates out effortlessly to others.

I believe in miracles.

 

Carrying the divine feminine in my heart this early Fall as we practice walking in beauty.

The Purpose of Creative Anxiety

IMG_4306The avoidance of the anxiety of solitude by constant, agitated diversion is what Kierkegaard, in a nice simile, likened to the settlers in the early days of America who used to beat on pots and pans at night to keep the wolves away.

-Rollo May, The Courage to Create

I have always found it to be a fantastic irony that wolves are feared as devourers. It’s kind of a sexy thought, in a Red Riding Hood kind of way, (if you’re into pulling that fairy tale apart a thousand ways, which I very much was in college). But at the core of anxiety around the idea of “wolves coming out of the walls”, “wolves at the door”, “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, is perhaps fear of our own wild nature, and perhaps, too, fear of our own wild creativity. It’s a feminine function, creativity. As we’re shown day in and out that women, their bodies, and what they represent are something to be feared rather than revered, it’s no surprise that the creative function in anyone would be subject to being hastily run away from.

I find the subject of fear to be one that will never be fully fleshed and hung up between two sturdy poles. Though it can be useful as a warning at times, fear inserted into the creative process usually leads to seizing up. Part of it might be faced while another sly bit of it slinks off into the shadows, like snatches of unremembered nightmare, later to return.

When the world around us becomes quiet enough that we can *actually hear*, what can come up are the visions which lead us to action. Hallelujah! Just enough peace to get a great idea, within the clarity of solitude. In my ever-constant 4-process mind, the next natural step is to begin taking action. After that comes dreaded surrender, and that’s where things start to get tricky. This quagmire is where the shadows lurk and doubts arise, and the so called wolves are lying in wait, aimed fang-first at the femoral artery.

For every process, there’s a booby-trap ready to take you down, and your beautiful expression-in-wait with it. At this very point, folks turn back for the safety of banging the pots and pans. Because if we can just create enough noise, we’ll forget about that old idea-which-probably-wouldn’t-have-worked-anyway. The trouble with this is that it leaves us restless and unsatisfied. I struggle with unfinished business. I believe it lingers inside of us until we get it out, especially creative notions (and unresolved conflicts).

If we can hang in there with the anxiety, the levee will break. If we can see the doubts and fears through, and face them courageously, listen to what they have to say, dismiss them when it’s time, surrender to the flow of what is wanting to be born, we can get through the laborious release and with hope, celebrate the wisdom that comes from seeing any worthwhile thing through.

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Women Have Magical Powers

barnowlHope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

-Emily Dickinson

 

Women are mystical, magical creatures to me, with a most complex physiological tendency toward loving nurture, which is why it perplexes the heck out of me when I hear about women would tearing each other down.

I wonder if it’s a case of being over-dominant in the masculine function which causes this phenomenon? Knowing some very skilled intuitives, folks who are gifted empathically, and straight-up, down-to-earth grounded-in-their-perception women, it’s easy for me to have faith in women to heal and change.

Amidst our patriarchal way of life (that most complain about at some level which doesn’t personally work in their favor) many do not see it working in themselves. This model persists in all cultures, all over the world, embodied by most men and women, for lack of knowing another way, or lack of seeking one out.

When I witness or hear women tearing one another down- frothing with animosity, resentment, jealousy and untruths, it diminishes my hope-which I’m very keen on maintaining. Hope is the thing with feathers, it’s been said.

Women are creators, the givers of life, Great Mother in the flesh. We are infused with the breath of life, the masculine animation to move and act, and we can use that locomotion for good, if we choose, to elevate our perspectives. We can raise our children with patience and empathy, tend gardens and animal creatures with love and kindness, and treat one another with the respect and admiration we seek for ourselves. And warrior like Artemis on behalf of the voiceless when called to, of course.

It’s not that we women have magical powers, except that creation is pretty dang magical. It’s not that we have sorcery up our sleeves, however, we do have some pretty sharp intuition when we learn to listen. It’s not that we have a direct hotline to God, but that we can learn to sense the divine light which shines through us when we slay old shame at the altar, and move from that light place. I believe all women have the potential to be activated in the womb, after millennia of smackdown, the crossroads for creativity and healing. We each contain the seeds and ancestral wisdom for our own healing and subsequent radiance.

There are a great many people who are not loving themselves, and worse, are not willing to. This is a grand shame for them and for the world at large. There are folks online who will not recognize the flaws in their story until they meet you in person and can shake your fleshy hand and hug your solid bones and see you as a radiant human being. We are not very open to receive online, as we are in person.

Having online identities means that folks don’t get to look you in the eye. They don’t get to see how you move. They don’t know how you parent your children, speak with arrogance or humility, deliver on your claims-unrealistic expectations are formed around the illusion of who you are perceived to be, which can ultimately be disappointing. Or heartening! Depending on who it is.

Something to think about:

Find your familiars.

Go toward those who carry HOPE.

Don’t listen to those who have made careers out of putting other people down.

Recognize fearmongering.

Honor your MAGICAL POWER as a woman.

 

Yes, I said MAGICAL POWER.

 

 

And I’ll probably get in a bit of trouble for it.

SouLodge 2016: Wolf, Hawk & Owl

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2016 SouLodge has come together -and will be a beautiful year with Wolf, Hawk and Owl!

The teachers who have stepped forward to walk with you are all concerned with honoring. Honoring wisdom, silence, vision, dreams, feelings, and psychic abilities.

Wolf teaches us to walk in our integrity and to take the time to honor our wisdom. Something I teach about ad infinitum, is that our culture is practically devoid of honorable practice and celebration of the elders. They are the forgotten and the tucked-away, as their knowledge is just becoming quieter and more seasoned. We, too, carry deep wisdom, and winter, the period of being in the North, is the perfect season to sit still and become intimate with it.

Hawk is the great Mercurial Messenger. Soaring overhead, the keen-eyed raptor invites us to take a journey into our dreams and visions. This is a time of analysis of what has been recurring for us-the animals who frequently bless and visit us, the plants who sprout up near our doorsteps, and the hopes which we’ve carried and require lift for. It is easy to reside in the East, the place of new beginnings and blank canvases. Hawk allows us to take what we’ve got and make something of it.

Owl is the harbinger of the harvest. Watching over fields and hillsides, she teaches us about death, grief, and honoring them as we experience the West on the Wheel of Life. Her silent flight is a reminder to acknowledge what has been and to draw inward as we call upon our psychic resources and feminine nature to feel into the spirit world. She is the guardian of memories and a great healer of the past.

It’s an enormous joy to work with these animals and their medicine in the coming year, which may be my last of teaching in typical SouLodge fashion as I prepare for a sabbatical in 2017.

What Are You Afraid of Today?

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Each day I wake, I face some fear or another. In checking in with others, I find that we all seem to carry a daily fear, some which subside with a pep talk and others which linger and simply become part of the background landscape as we learn to seamlessly dodge our vulnerabilities.

When my dad got sick last year, I remember feeling a dreadful sense of fear that he would not get well. This feeling has hung on me all year- and when he came to help the Cowboy and I stack 44 tons of hay two weeks ago and landed up having emergency kidney surgery instead– it rushed right up front, and I stared down this fear of losing him again.

Staying connected to our fear (while we are indeed courageous beings who take many leaps of faith and overcome countless limitations) helps us understand who we are as powerless beings. And I think a great many good things can come of that surrender.

One of them has to be finding our medicine while engaging our faith. Accepting that what is to be, will be. Another is the reminder that life is short, always, and that if there is something which you feel strongly called to do, take those steps to do it.

Here are a few things I’ve been wanting to do that I’m bringing back into focus:

Track wolves
(I got to track Mountain Lions many times last year, but you know how I feel about wolves. By the way, have you seen this breaking wolf news??)

Go to Hawaii with my children for two weeks
I am planning this for the Fall, if you know any great places and resources on Kauai! We intend to explore the islands landscape and magical medicine while on a mini-sabbatical.

Speak to large audiences about healing women’s relationships
If you don’t know about the BG Symposium, it will be a beautiful and healing event!

Participate in native plant restoration
Follow my blog to see what this process will look like, as I attempt to restore native species on this beautiful piece of Oregon ground.

What’s shakin’ on your bucket (I actually prefer baskets…) list?

Don’t be afraid to hold fear in one hand and faith in the other.

Image of SouLodge Fire Circle dancers by the illustrious Stacy de la Rosa

Nostalgia and the Eternal

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Nostalgia has been described as the memory of a wound, and it’s sometimes this thought that I reflect on when my children cry upon hearing native flute music or even “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show. They can’t bear it, and both of them tend to react to the same types of songs, asking me to please turn it off, and fall into my chest in a heap of tears.

There’s something very tender about the things which affect our emotions, and it may have something to do with our connection to and yearning for the eternal, which lives inside of us, but can be difficult to pin down in words.

I believe there is a part of us that remembers things from so long ago that we can’t acknowledge them without a bit of confusion- but we know that we are somehow connected to events, people, places in the past. It’s when we get lost in the reverie that we feel strongly tied to something much greater than ourselves, or our experiences thus far in this lifetime.

I’ve drummed for hundreds of women, and there are always some who feel very at home in the outer realms, and do not wish to return when the callback sounds. That sense of home is always calling to us. If we can allow ourselves to know that it is there, and that it lives inside of us, always on the ready to radiate it’s light outward, it may bring a comfort. Sometimes only the comfort of the eternal will do.

A couple of weeks ago my dad came to help us stack a LOT of hay in the barn for winter. Forty-four tons, to be exact, which is a mega-youknowwhat-load. He came in snuggled into a San Francisco airport sweatshirt on a ninety-degree day and went immediately to bed. After two days of me asking a million questions and him feeling terrible, we went to ER. It was quickly determined that he had a UTI and was put on IV antibiotics, fluids and checked in. After ultrasound, it was discovered that his non-functioning kidney was still just producing enough urine to be pesky, and two stones were stuck in the ureter, blocking the flow- and he’d need to have a stent put in. You need to also know that he’s had three surgeries this year to blast the stones which fill his other kidney, the only working one, which has taken a toll on it’s health and functionality. This man has two stents in the main artery of his heart and now one in each kidney. Flow. Flow. The lessons are not lost on me.

A four day stay at a resort-like hospital here in Redmond caused him to miss his flight home and so we got to keep him a extra few days. Being mostly laid up, all we had to do was tell stories about his childhood and the way things were “back then”.  Stories about hunting deer in Oklahoma, and his family’s migration to California, how grandma wanted to keep him back there and send him to school, but his mama and daddy wouldn’t allow it. More stories about pranking guys in the grocery store he started working in at thirteen, and all of the men he looked up to and occasionally got taken advantage of.

I think the memories which cause us the most joy also cause the most pain. We beautiful humans are yearning creatures, knowing the safety of the womb, fearing the call home and also knowing it. We can recognize it in one another in fleeting moments, when space and time stop and recall is clear.

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Featured at Annapurna Living

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“I’ve learned that I am fully able to live my purpose every day, even if just in little snippets. That my gifts are an offering to the world. That everyone has unique gifts, and the best ones are not monetizable. I’ve learned that if I listen closely, I can hear the plants and trees whispering their ancient stories. I can hear the animals teaching me by unapologetically going about their lives in ritualistic ways which honor their exact nature. I see the sky kissing the earth with a love which can only be aspired to, and never described in language. I’ve also learned that I’m a fumbling human who makes mistakes every single day! And that I can live with that.”

If you missed this interview with Carrie Anne Moss, catch it HERE.

And follow her wherever she goes. Lightyears beyond Trinity from The Matrix Trilogy, Carrie Anne breaks new ground weekly as a mother, performer, yogi, and changemaker. Check out her course, MOTHER, which begins September 14.

Feminizing the Economy: Barter, Trade & Giveaway

IMG_1616One of my very favorite and most surprising elements of SouLodge Earth Medicine School is something that came about when we were going narrow and deep with our stone families in the second module last Spring. We had a beautiful conversation about what drives the crystal and stone mining business-in part, us. We healers and students of magic and manifestation are the ones combing the rock and gemstone stores online and in our towns, giving reason for mass mining to take place in order to feed our hoarding tendencies.

The issue with this is that beautiful specimens end up in drawers and boxes, cluttering our spaces and mixing energy with one another in discarded piles. We made another way!

What we did was opened up the trade floor. Women were holding off on impulsive shopping and enhancing to their collections by trading and asking the others in their community group, for example, if they had a piece of clear quartz to donate to their wheels and charging stations, making it a communal altar and even more special. It was amazing to see how many women had “extras” and were willing to mail them to a sister in need. This led to all sorts of abundant exchanges and helped us build our gratitude for one another, too.

Gemstones are formed by geothermal activity (lava cooling underground) in layers (veins) of different types of igneous and metamorphic rocks. It’s true that there are different kinds of mining, some which do damage to the Earth (explosives commonly used in ore mining) and some which do…less damage (rock hounds and hobby collectors harvesting by hand or removed in underground or dug-out pit mines). To avoid environmental and safety concerns associated with over-harvesting, another solution to working with the stone people is looking in thrift stores or going to estate sales to pick up low-cost items which may resonate with the work you’re doing. In the end, working with tons of different kinds of stones may be less effective than getting intimate with a few good relatives from the deep Earth.

If everything has a spirit, then it makes sense that we treat them accordingly. If rocks provide protection from the elements and habitats for other creatures, then we can even educate our children and limit their hoarding of surface rocks for a future with the Mama more in tact. These resources are not replaceable, and they work their own energetic magic inside of the Earth where they formed, perhaps better than in our drawers and boxes. We can ask ourselves why beautiful rocks give us a fix, and then take a few steps to enjoy everything in moderation.

More isn’t always better. Sometimes it’s just more.