She gifted it to my mother upon the celebration of my birth. It's quite large at around 24×36” and hung for many years over my mother's vanity in an enormous, heavy, antique, plaster frame with many swirly fancy bits carved into it. It was one of the most beautiful paintings I had ever seen as a child and I when I was (rarely) permitted into my parents bedroom, I ran straight to it.

Eventually, I moved away and became a mother myself. The painting survived a few moves my parents made after retirement. It was swapped from storage areas, from attics, and then to closets for a bit. Sadly the antique frame finally suffered enough dings and cracks that it was discarded.

My Mother gifted the artwork to me on the occasion of the birth of my fourth child-- my 3rd daughter and my very own Pisces.

Of course the magic of it was still there when I saw it. The nostalgia. My Auntie was still alive at that time, so seeing it again was meaningful for her as well. It moved me to tears to receive something I had associated so closely with my mother.

This painting also began to drastically juxtapose my own journey as a mother. After receiving it, I hung it in my bedroom just as my mother had hung it in hers. I birthed my Pisces daughter on a snowy March night in our bedroom under the remote gaze of this tender 2D scene.

After she was born-- I'd look up from marveling at my newborn's precious eyelashes during the dream-like haze of our 40-day Babymoon where we were never more than a breath away from one another. I saw the painting with new eyes.

The tender gaze morphed into sadness. Bafflement. Aloofness. A frozen, romantic visage of a beautiful, detached, passive mother-- unwilling, or perhaps unable-- to hold, or comfort, or connect, with her new daughter. The baby doing all "the work" of reaching for connection. Forever and ever reaching. Decade after decade in quiet rooms, behind shut doors, in dark places unaccustomed to light. A quantum moment echoing. A need never fulfilled.

Am I saying I've never gazed down at my child before picking them up-- inadvertently recreating this very scene? Of course not. This is a moment and it only tells us one instant. If your reaction is to bristle at this because you are reading an accusation into this where none exists, then please understand I'm talking about *my* Matrilineal Grief. My journey-- which is marked by a lack of safety, trust, and warmth-- and trying with every fiber of my being to create it for my own babies out of thin air. Over and over again. As I mothered seven babies--never once seeing or experiencing for myself what I was providing them with.

This is not about blaming my mother or being angry with her. I love her deeply--as all daughters do whether the love has been reciprocal or tended to with care or not. I can understand the enormous complexities and social pressures she was under. She was contending with a intergenerationally-traumatized, Indigenous Residential School survivor, and Vietnam war veteran of a husband who was drinking more and more every day. Add in a lack of that same warmth in her own childhood. Let's not forget that when I was born she still couldn't open a bank account in her own name. I see her clearly. I mourn for us both. I'm grateful she did as well as she managed to do.

And harm was still done.

Like all women and daughters (and probably sons as well) I am seeking my own relationship with the Divine Feminine and having to learn it from scratch.

I'm grateful for this precious painting and the reminder of how far I’ve healed our mitochondrial DNA.

This is not a movie review. I don’t think I know how to write one of those.
This is a love letter.

I could list all of my favorite scenes and lines and shots. But I would just be providing a minute by minute synopsis if I did that.

I could tell you how funny it was.
I could tell you how beautiful it was.
I could tell you how creative and clever and important it was.

Instead I want to talk about how it made me feel.

Seen.
Giddy.
Heard.
Heartbroken.
Recognized.
Inspired.
Curious.
Happy.
Nostalgic.
Homesick.
Renewed.
Enchanted.


Did I recognize myself?
Yes.
Reclusive fancy lady with a full face of make-up living in a remote cabin in a haunted forest? Check.
Polyamorous bi-sexual representation.
Check.
Gen X meets Millennial love story
Check.
Sexual trauma and exploitation playing out in the public eye?
Check.
That trauma becoming the property of people who felt entitled to its consumption, critique, and censoring?
Check.
Seething Submerged Scorpio rage and revenge sunken deep into the center of a frozen lake awaiting a volcanic resurrection?
Check. Check. Check.

Historically I have not been much a fan of the horror slasher genre. I understood some of the psychology involved—that is was deeply symbolic and provided something important to the primordial collective unconsciousness. However, as a woman and a mother I didn’t resonate with exposing myself to more graphic and creative forms of suffering— alchemizing the horrors of the real world kept me plenty occupied.

Of course the allure of Gillian Anderson in anything—let alone a sexy sapphic romp— was enticing. The more I learned from interviews and clips, the more I knew this was going to be something different. Then I saw a preview of the Fried Chicken Scene.

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The unexceptionally mundane— and completely unglamorous banality— of serving and consuming some KFC in this scene was translated into a profound sacred sensuality that viscerally affected my body— my solar plexus did a jump and my breath caught right around my heart. I wanted to be there alongside them feeling what they were feeling. Perhaps this is a common experience for most other humans—longing for something. Desiring something you don’t already have access to. It is not a common experience for me, however.

There is— I suspect—a traumatized part of me that gets to drive the bus most of the time. My Virgo Rising is in charge of this part, methinks. She is probably very similar to the Kris character in the film. She has wisely and responsibly decided to find happiness and joy within the parameters of what there already is agreed upon access to. Nourish the soil you are planted it. Grow quiet roots that fortify under the surface but don’t crowd out other deserving plants. Face the sunlight. But don’t demand to be planted where you might be the most magnificent bloom in sight. Good enough is safe enough.

It’s not that I lack ambition exactly, it is that I choose and decide to see what is good about the right here and the right now and not crave what is not being offered. I’ll just alchemize what is here. Spin straw into gold. So success. Much results.

I also don’t want to live excessively in regret and longing for a past that is no longer mine to shape. That sounds like it would create grief. Life gives me enough to grieve without time traveling to the lost past to hurt my own feelings. Learn the lessons from how things used to be and let them shape a responsible and informed present.

I have a limited relationship with fantasy and dreaming into the future because I am very cautious about the pitfalls of psychological projection or casting my loved ones into roles they did not audition for or agree to perform. It sounds like fantasizing a future that others are not consenting to or capable of co-creating with me will generate resentment and dissatisfaction.

Ships are safe in the harbor. But that is not what ships were built for.

Something clicked for me with this film. Perhaps it is slippery and elusive and I am not certain I can hang on to it— therefore here I am writing about it without much direction on where I am going with it. I want to capture the emotions and the excitement I was feeling last night when I saw it in a tiny, nearly empty theater. I applauded at the end like a goober.

One thought that has occurred to me is that there may be ethical and consensual ways to use Active Imagination (in the Jungian sense) for relational dreaming with other people. I will need to figure out what I even mean by that.

Is this longing?
Maybe. I am not sure.

Am I an Aquarius Moon who is seriously overthinking and over-analyzing this?
Absolutely. 100% that sounds like me.

So I am sitting with the uncertainty and the craving and the excitement of this right now. I am attempting to simply allow the happiness and the joy of this movie existing to wash through me. I want to go see it 10 more times in the theater with anyone and everyone who will go with me and clap at the end alongside me. I want to visit Camp Miasma and hang out with Kris and Billy over and over again. I’m running to the internet now to buy a Camp Miasma tee.

The desire to claim that you did something first, have the highest academic training, or belief that you deserve preferential treatment in a field — so therefore you get to dominate, detract, and denounce other practitioners based on your flag-staking, colonized, entitlement is steeped in White Supremacy Culture.

Before getting your knickers in a defensive twist and weaponize some tears to tell me you marched against the tiki-torch carrying notsees or donated to some causes so you are clearly NEVER the baddie, please go check out this article and this article to get yourself caught up on the differences in being a White Supremacist versus subscribing to White Supremacy Culture. I am NOT a scholar or expert on these topics and won’t pretend to be writing an academic paper here. I abandoned my worship of academia long ago.

White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, Christian hegemony - these and more are all interconnected and intersected and stirred together in a toxic brew that is reflected in our devastation of the air and water and land and living beings we have and are destroying and disregarding in the name of profit and power. This brew is a cancer, a dis-ease, an addiction, an infliction and it infects everything with and without our awareness. The miracle is that we have survived as well as we have, the miracle is our ancestors who have fought to remember who we really are, the miracle is the earth and wind and water that restores itself in soft and fierce determination to keep us all whole.

[The] cost of white privilege and white supremacy for white people is nothing short of trading in humanity for the illusion of comfort. In order to cash in on the privileges and benefits of white supremacy, white people must fear, disown, demean, ignore, dehumanize, exoticize, murder, incarcerate, and segregate ourselves from the majority of humanity.

​RESOURCE: A thoughtful look at 10 Ways White Supremacy Wounds White People by Greg Elliott

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So now that we are all caught up and we understand that I am not attempting to create a comprehensive overview or scholarly article on these topics, let us move forward with my point:

If I hear of one more nice white lady— nastily denouncing other women’s professional work while drenched in self-pitying tears—declaring herself the BEST or the only practitioner WORTH following, consulting, supporting, or purchasing from because she did it first, or she works harder than anyone else, or she has a kerjillion name dropping certifications, or a celebrity client list, or a letter salad of made-up titles in her bio— I will be forced to write her name on a wee bay leaf and shove it in a lemon and chuck her in my freezer.

By all means sing your own praises, sister. You worked hard for your shit. I see you.

But if that seeing is not reciprocal and your song includes vitriol, hate, and derision for MY path as invalid and undeserving and worthless, then no thanks.

Let me share a secret with you— I can admire how hard you’ve worked and be proud of you AND think your path was cultural brainwashing that I’d never subscribe to. I’m not trying to save you from that though. I am genuinely supportive because you are a human being who deserves love and support. I don’t see you as less valid at what you do or who you serve just because your path is antithetical to mine.

I chose my path knowing that it ran against White Supremacy Culture. That’s why I chose it. You denouncing it as inferior to your authority-approved path is a confession of your alignment with my enemy, not an accusation I feel shame about. This juncture is where my support for you will end and your time in my freezer begins. Tearing me down does not elevate you. Interacting from a place of heartfelt confidence, inner knowing, trust, and relationality with your clients and those who seek your service will elevate you. Try that next time.

I know there is pain and ache for many women in our culture—
Not being loved well by detached or immature mothers has created an entire genre of attitudes and personalities in women in our culture:

Craving recognition and praise
Testing loved ones with loyalty games
Coveting other’s achievements
Wanting to be chosen and desired
Questioning worthiness
Low self-esteem
Feeling the need to be perfect
Patterns of codependency, people pleasing, poor boundaries, and self-sabotage
Negative and loud inner critic
A deep-rooted fear of becoming like your mother

Controversial take— let’s remember to have empathy for our mothers as well, they were surviving a bunch of the same shit we are, but without the internet to learn a wider world existed, without models of what to do, without even having vocabulary to express it.

They also did harm to their children.
They struggled to overcome their own childhoods.
They struggled to be an adequate caregiver to you in your childhood.
Every single one of those stories can be true simultaneously.
And many of us are trying hard to show our mothers that reality.
To show them the way that they could repair it. They could heal it. They could make it right so we could get the mother we deserved.
If they would just educate themselves, just read this book, listen to this podcast, think with an updated lens— we are right here with open arms and they still have a chance to make it right with us.
It is devastating to find out they won’t.
Crushing. We show them the way and they defend themselves. Justify it. Deny it. Diminish it. Center themselves.
That is enormously dictated by White Supremacy Culture.

It is equally devastating to see the cultural waters YOU and ME are swimming in and realize that the women, the sisters, the friends, the community members we are peers with are being shown the way, shown the truth, but refuse to do the work.

In both instances it cleaves us right in that primordial wound— I’m not important enough to change for. You’d rather be comfortable then love me better.

Now place those wounded women— YOU and ME— with all of our own delayed creativity, thwarted desires, and endless cultural trauma in a room full of equally wounded women. Now imagine that you cannot fully see and comprehend the container of White Supremacy Culture that we all are marinating in. That’s the perfect delicious recipe for a crab boil:

Unpacking White Supremacy Culture and our blind adherence to it (even me as someone of mixed race—of course me too) is brutally uncomfortable. Check out the list from earlier in the post— your strong belief in your right to comfort is a clue to lead you to this big work. This work is anything but cozy and validating and good vibes.

But the FANTASTIC news is that you didn’t choose it. You didn’t sign up for it. You didn’t make a mistake. You are not bad. It was chosen for you. Inherited by you against your will. We are all raised in it no matter our genetics or regional USA geography. No matter our socioeconomic status. No matter our political leanings. To what extent and depth it penetrates and becomes our identity can vary by our relational proximity to BIPOC and to other cultures.

But now that you DO know, all your have to do is unchoose it.
Unsubscribe.
You can stop any time you want just by ending your self-pity story.
Your victimized tears of not being liked and admired.
Ending the irrational terror of being not good enough that you got brainwashed into believing.
You can remind yourself that the loud critical voice hollering at you all the time is internalized White Supremacy Culture and it lies to you.
That crippling shame and fear of open conflict and those horrible boundaries making you manipulative and resentful and envious of other’s achievements can stop because you choose to stop it.
Looking away from your own individual experience of navel gazing long enough to see how the system got you to do its dirty work is empowering AF.
You aren’t THE biggest worst baddie of all time, but we all will continue to be baddie-adjacent until we DO the work to stop.
Declaring “No I’m not like that” isn’t the work.
Sharing a list of all the Good Deeds you’ve done isn’t the work.

Listing your merits and accomplishments and awards and degrees and trainings and certifications as reasons you— and you alone— are permitted and entitled to colonize and gatekeep and flag-plant in the inherently human world of healing, care, intuition, ceremony, magic, astrology, tarot, arts, performance, music, movement, dance, coaching, wellness etc… must stop.

I know we are all trying to earn enough money to feed our kids and our cats and our addiction to crystals and candles. But not every practitioner is the right one for every client or every audience. That is your mother wound fucking with you, babes. Telling you that if you aren’t chosen that you aren’t safe or loved. But it is also making you bitter, cruel, petty, and ugly —on the inside where it counts.

Your mother should have loved you unconditionally.
Little You deserved that so much.
She should never have said those cruel things to you to shame you into compliance.
She should never have been so overwhelmed with domestic and relational and nuclear family over-extension that she was irritated and impatient with you.
She should never exiled Little You to figure it out all alone.
Your mother was suppose to love you UNCONDITIONALLY.

But that is not what society owes you or what your friends, lovers, or colleagues owe you.
We have conditions.
Conditions like treat me with dignity and like I have inherent human value.
Conditions like don’t run your mouth to dissuade people from doing business with me because you feel envious or neglected or passed over.
Conditions like process your own shit before you vomit it all over me.
Conditions like end your commitment to triangulation and manipulation.
Conditions like hearing what I said and not what you fantasized I meant.
Conditions like mastering the art of an apology and changed behavior

Your mom was supposed to still feed you, and love you, and legally obligated to do a bunch of domestic and emotional labor for you— even when you were a little shitass with an attitude and big hurt feelings that came out sideways. You pulled her hair and cracked her in the nose with your head when you flailed around about not getting your way a few times. I don’t have to tolerate that from you though. I don’t have to love you through that if I don’t want to. You’re grown. And I am not your mother. We all get messy of course. But then we make amends and we do better and we grow and we deepen our understanding and we make messes less and less. If you aren’t doing those things though, you are really just testing me to see if I love you unconditionally. And the answer is no. I do not. Stop abusing other women to fill a void your own mother refuses to.

I keep giving people who really wound and hurt me chance after chance, because I can see past those cultural defense strategies and notice someone who really does want to belong, and be authentically loved, and to be embraced by community. I am willing to see the bucket we all are in and forgive you for mistaking me for a handle to pull on in your attempt to escape. But just because I can comprehend and understand what is happening does not mean I will tolerate it any longer. It’s been long enough and you know I am not a handle anymore. Stop yanking when you see me rise, Crabby McCrabby Pants. I know how to get out of the bucket without harming anyone else to do it. Follow me if you want. Or stay. But don’t you dare attempt to pull me down again.

Confront yourself. Confront your sisters (and brothers). Get uncomfortable and look at the ugly truth. And then crawl out of it by lifting one another up and reaching back for anyone left behind. I’ve tolerated my last and final Mean Girl being permitted to cause harm to me without being confronted— both the Mean Girl inside of me and those that have orbited around me externally.

We must risk finding out something true about ourselves in the process of becoming safe people in order to build our safe future together. White Supremacy Culture is not safe for anyone. No one can thrive in it. It was build to extract, not to nourish. Escape with me

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More resources I urge your to consider subscribing to, reading, discussing, studying:

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White Supremacy Culture Characteristics

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Juno Adventurine

Subscribe to Juno with the link below and pick up her zine entitled The Good People Will Destroy Us: Social Incarceration

I'm looking at the FB profiles of my only known Indigenous genetic relations.

We were never close in relationship or in geography. That's how they getcha, I think to myself. College. Jobs. Marriages. The lure of good school districts. They feel like powerful choices setting us up for success in the world. For safety and resources and stability. When we are so settled and so, so, so successful, our relations will migrate to us and join in our prosperity. We can all finally be together and recreate the village we lost. The village that was sunk under the water like Atlantis.

I stood at the railing of that sunken ancestral home this past weekend and looked over the beauty of it. It’s breathtaking. Achingly majestic.

I'm overcome with the sensation of a molton hot stone in my solar plexus as I squint into the sparkling water and see fish the size of surfboards wriggling in the shallows near the shore.

The urge rises up from the heat of that stone to cry out at the top of my lungs SHE:WAK SÖH DA'AGAHSËNÖYË’' I dont have a name but I am your daughter! I want to feel it echo off the most ancient mountains on earth. I heard they are older than the rings of Saturn. Who could know such things?

I want to shake the mountains awake with my voice. I want to be claimed by them. Known by them. I want them to break and quake and rise from their ancient cursed slumber at the sound of my voice and rumble back Ë:H, OSHA:A’S SĀ:SÖH KWAJI:YÄ’ yes, the mountains remember. You are called Family.

Just like the crows answer when I call them by their original name. We can all remember one another.

Instead, I breathe air deeply into my lungs and exhale slowly to regulate my internal earthquake.

The air tastes of boat fuel.

I answer my youngest daughter's questions as she dances and hops from one foot to the other. She wants a Caprisun. Her European Welsh/French/ Slavic skin and hair and green eyes are the most beautiful things I've ever seen. What a gift she is. Part of me is so relieved she is safe-- she can pass as anything she likes. Pick an identify. Pick an origin story. They all belong to you and will buy you the safety of your father's people.

But does another part of her ache when she sees this place?

I remember coming here before I knew I was from here. Barely two handfuls of years since it was flooded. My parents would bring me here. Right here. This same overlook. The exact same mountains. I knew the story of the church steeple you could see peeking above the blue waters in dry seasons. I never saw it myself, but I would search for it eagerly to get a glimpse of what was purposefully being hidden. I knew what happened to the land. The stories were always recounted to me whenever we made these treks north.

It made my heart ache for the people. I imagined them fleeing with babies on their backs and baskets of precious things clutched to their chests. Hot tears and choking sobs for the puppies and the kitties the people forgot about. The bunnies who ran underground not ever imagining how the enormous incoming wave would find their wee little warren door. The cleverly hidden warren diligently dug with wee cute bunnies paws. Their Beatrix Potter-esque quilted beds and itty bitty tea sets washed away while frightened confused baby bunnies squeaked for their mother.

But the bunnies didn’t know how water worked! I’d bawl. They thought they were safe! What about kids or grandma's who couldn’t run fast enough? I'd sob.

You're right. The bunnies probably didn't make it. But the people knew and had time to leave, my father would assure me as he watched the boats laden with grown ups drinking beer, while wearing brightly colored swimwear, on the shimmering water. A flash of something would dance across his face sometimes.

He probably wishes we had a boat, I'd think. I couldn't have known. Because no one told me.

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I held my daughter's hand as we watched the loud boats pulling waterskiing tourist around in circles. The surface of the water holding them afloat would have once been 40ft in the air above the home where my grandmother first fell in love, held her babies, and shared secrets with her friends.

My FB feed tells me my only Indigenous relations just lost a beloved father. He wasn't the Indigenous one. His wife was my auntie and she was a baby when she left the beautiful mountains her mother grew up in. I'm looking at her only son's face on my screen. His daughter's faces. As I collect my words to send condolences about his father, I think, He's an orphan now. He is all his daughters have now. Does something deep in them remember the mountains? Would the mountains call back to them? Are they hearing it right now?

I know it's social media. I understand this is not showing me a deep slice of their internal lives or their emotional world. I know that logically. I find myself staring into faces I should know better. Love better. They made us scared to love one another I think. They. They. The same they who flooded that beautiful valley. That same they made sure I don't have a name the mountains know me by.

I find myself searching their eyes for hints of the loss and homesickness gnawing at me. Or are they being so much wiser than me and just graciously accepting the gift our adoptive grandmother gave us all? The gift my daughter has access to-- the gift of claiming someplace else. Ground that one can walk upon. A homeland you can return to.

Our adoptive grandmother provided cultural cover for the babies she was allowed to rescue. Be something else and be safe, she offered in a time when it did indeed keep them safe.

Are these distant relations letting Indigeneity stay quietly slumbering inside of them? Peaceful. At rest. Honoring the secrets our adoptive grandmother held for her new beloved children?

Are they moving forward with lives that feel attainable and satisfying? Reachable. Realistic. Versus me— trying to resurrect something no one but me wants me to resurrect. Why this desire to pursue something difficult when I could pass as anything I wanted?

Maybe everyone has it right. Let go of this quest and stop hurting my own feelings for fucks sake. Invest where I am welcome and wanted. Stop trying to make fetch happen.

Or maybe my distant relations feel like I felt as a kid? Confused. Like secrets and seismic revelations were a heartbeat away. Maybe they don't know the root of that is about their indigeneity? Maybe they think they have something wrong with them? Maybe they worry they are depressed because of brain chemicals and they don't know the ache is because they were already born as orphans too far away from the mountains?

This is my toxic trait-- I think people just haven't investigated things deeply enough. But what if everything isn't supposed to be dissected so completely and deeply. I could be following along by the rules of productivity and saving up for a boat to zoom around the lake in a colorful swimsuit drinking beer from a can instead of looking so fucking closely at everything for meaning and symbolism and the lesson it’s hiding.

Maybe having enough money in the bank and a row of Employee of the Year awards quiets and mutes the impulse to yell at the mountains.

Maybe if I stop asking questions with no answers I won't feel so betrayed when no answer arrives.

Perfection would have me waiting forever to start writing again. It did.

So I drop these articles as soon as they occur to me. I am not dazzled by what I have been writing here thus far. It’s messy and my points meander around. I’m not being clever. My prose is mediocre compared with what I know I am capable of. I used to love what I wrote. Sometimes I send a text to my lovers or my friends that echos my former relationship to words and story and I get excited. I used to be a writer. I earned a degree in it. I published stuff. I’d wake up with fully-formed, complete stories in my head and rush to pour them out onto the page. I was fucking inspired, I tell you. Every astrologer, palm reader, and medium I’ve worked with has asked me “Oh! You must be a prolific writer! Where can I buy your books?” I read my old stuff and I cannot fathom where those turns of phrase arose from because they seem profoundly unfamiliar.

Just like with returning to the gym after 427 428 skipped days (who is counting?) anyone would remind me to be gentle with myself. No one would expect me to start with the weights and reps I left off with. I have to start anew and build up to that or risk hurting myself. Deliberating, drafting, and editing endlessly is going to hurt me. I have to risk being banal and boring and predictable and numbingly normal for now until the muses descend upon me like they used to. I’m just happy to be writing. It’s great if someone enjoys any of it, but thank goodness I am not here for praise. Especially not insincere praise. I’m here to be brave and be vulnerable and remember who the fuck I am.

As I move forward I will be learning a lot about myself and strengthening my courage muscles. My creative bones will be challenged in turn. I’m starting from where I am and since I love this version of myself, I love what she writes too. In the same way i love my children’s evolving art and writing. Hope you’ll stay long enough to notice when the good shit shows up. I think I have a lot to say.

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Being chronically ill since 2016 has revealed a million truths for me. Some of my favorites include:

I won’t be more lovable with context.
Discernment is imperative.
Motherhood is not defined by the services I perform.
I am not the protagonist of anyone else’s story (especially not my children’s).
This isn’t the dress rehearsal. This is the real thing. Right now.
Uncertainty is bearable.
My body is speaking to me constantly.
Life is breathtakingly sacred.
We are interconnected in ways we cannot comprehend.
Healing is quantum.

My body didn’t just fail or fall apart for no discernible reason. Although, being the innocent and long-suffering owner of a body that betrayed me out of nowhere certainly helps me to stay very cozy in the Karpman Drama Triangle’s most juicy and choice role of victim. But I’m not only the victim. I also regularly enjoy being a rescuer and a persecutor as well! And I bet you do, too.

The work of restoring my well-being has been anything but linear. It is a spiral. A waxing and waning shadowy orb that never seems to hold still. A slippery, mercurial sea dweller that manages to escape the net over an over. I’m not sure there will ever be a time of lasting uninterrupted ease and wellness that holds steady over a sustained amount of time. That is capitalism mindset I think—that growth can be ever upward and onward and every down cycle is an emergency requiring valiant dragon slaying efforts. Instead, I’ve had to embrace something closer to seasonal or lunar expectations for myself. But I practice several things that do help:

Consciousness
Radical self compassion
Rejecting urgency
Immersion in the sacred
Communicating deeply with my body
Honoring promises I make to my nervous system
Vulnerable authenticity with my loved ones
Following seasonal time frames
Organizing myself around planetary hours

I always thought my Sehnsucht was about the loss of my indigenous roots. Or not being stable enough to have homes that felt like real homes. Or a fractured relationship with my family of origin. Or a sense of being misunderstood. The part I was missing, however, was that I didn’t think of my own body as a home. I was a brain in a jar who was saddled with a lemon for a body and feeling so very victimized and sad and long-suffering about it. I still feel that way sometimes even though I know it is not a path to healing. And a healed body is not a good body any more than a disabled body is a bad body. I wasn’t needing to heal so I could get back to <insert productivity script here> I wanted to be WHOLE— not just improved. That had almost nothing to do with how efficiently my body worked, but in fact, how my soul and my connection to my thoughts and emotions worked. Come to find out when I came home to myself, my body finally believed me too. It’s like my nervous system remembered this body was our real home all along and knew just where the coziest spots could be found and enjoyed.

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As you may have guessed Tiamat Redeye is not my government name.
It is a name I created to reflect who I am to myself.
But really— Tiamat Redeye is the Utterly Unknowable Me most of all.
The Future Me, Yet to Come

Tiamat is the ancient primordial salt sea Mother Goddess that inhabits the mitochondria of my cells. Your cells, too. She is who shakes me awake and roars in my face, in my chest, in my belly. She is of the Sea and yet She is simultaneously Chthonic. I promised not to over-perform biography here, so the short version is that I asked Creator to introduce me to my Inner Oracle a decade or so ago and this baddie showed up immediately.

Redeye is the family name of my Hodinöhsö:ni’ Grandmother who died before her own children could form memories of her. She is the ache in my bones for what I have lost. She is the grief in my lungs and the blackened ash of a hearthfire I never sat at. The same grandmother who visited me in a single dream to hold my hand and take me soaring to the Andromeda Galaxy— where our laughter rang like a million trillion bells—each chime made a different star twinkle in the universe. She also revealed to me in that dream that she could not be with me and watch over me in her Grandmother form because she was sent to be by side in childhood in the form of my baby brother. There is another long story there perhaps for another day.

So Tiamat Redeye is who I aspire to be.
She is who I aspire to be loved by.
She is all of the women I ache to be mentored by.
Ache to be mothered by.
Ache to be held by.