A Woman and Her Age

Synchronistically, I read a post on Facebook about how a woman is always being asked how she stays looking so young and she had no answer to that, no beauty treatment or dietary suggestions. I could relate to that. This was immediately followed by yet another man telling me I looked young for my age.
Answers to both came to me:
1) Integrity within a person shows in the body keeping it's integrity. The body is an expression/extension of the spirit, soul, etc.
2) Telling a woman she looks young for her age is an insult on so many levels, these men cannot even imagine. If one wants to express a strong impression of a woman's appearance in relation to her chronological age, one could say "You make your age look amazing/desirable/good".
So why is it an insult? To say one looks "young" is to say one looks like society's 'ideal'; immature, unaware of one's self, ungrounded in one's self, looking to be acceptable, primped, worked on, manipulated, painted....and for those of us enjoying our maturity, groundedness, self awareness, wisdom........we have no desire to be young again. Secondly, "for your age" denotes a certain liability for being that age: "you look good despite this thing which is undesirable" . This denotes the presence of undesirability, no matter how much "good looking" exists. When maturity comes with age, age is an absolute asset in a companion and lover, a friend and mother.
To tell a woman she makes an age desirable/look good is to tell her you see her integrity, her desirability, her increased value. You attribute to her the "super power", the ability, to thrive and glean from life everything of value, making her perceptive, discerning and thus more than capable.  You see her creating value in something that naturally occurs and could be so much worse. She is setting a higher standard, being a ground-breaker, a rebel by simply being true to her.
When one can see and fully grasp all that, then their compliment holds value.

The nature spirits and the 8 year old's "Why?!"

      The dance of the spiral comes again to my eight year version...ready to romp and play and love and delight. There is no doubt they are just right, made as they should be, perceiving correctly, wild and free, experiencing no limitations. It's all just a game.
     I took the children to the park. They are never interested in the playground equipment very much. Nope, it's down to the fast moving, ungroomed side of the river we go!
    As we descended down the bank amongst the reeds and wild things, my imaginings were invaded by images of snakes and such things, for my children it was bear they thought they had heard and would see....."Nature spirits trying to scare me", I think. It stops immediately. I was on to their gig. Then came the question that so resonates with the eight year old version of me, and one my son asked recently..."WHY?!", a pleading for some deep, higher purpose for the pruning, the shaping, the instructing, the tearing up and devastating so not understood by the eight year old human and youngest of the trees who sees this happening on the other side of the river.......there is no honest answer that would suffice. We answer all right..fear, control....but the only answer that would suffice would be if it ceased to happen, that all things would be allowed to grow wild and free. That is why I sacrifice anything it takes to "radically whole life unschool" my children, interfere as little as possible, allowing them their own beliefs, perceptions, sleeping patterns, eating habits, etc.
    The children covered themselves in mud, Cort in showing me how to camouflage one's self and Rusty in just slipping and sliding about on the banks, doing her usual squat style sitting. The one thing the park does have that does draw us is huge old-style metal swings. The climate won't accommodate the cheap stuff, so the swing sets are big enough and tough enough to take a grown ass adult swinging as high as I can get them...flying! So, we dried off swinging on the swings. I took these nature spirits with me. It was not so big a thing to them, not a real reason for cutting down their friends. That weightlessness we feel while swinging, it's their perpetual state of being, even amidst the depression they feel when a human being comes near them. Just like young children can't overpower adults, the trees cannot overpower human machines. There can be playing on fears, causing fighting amongst them, but when it comes to physical power, we are helpless against them. So, in companionship, we swang.  I laid face down, spread eagle upon the grass, drawing in deeply the smell of the earth beneath me as the children dug in the sand.
   We came home eventually, the children quickly falling to sleep. I sat outside and even though it had not rained, I saw a rainbow in the sky and I heard "Thank you". Just like I am with my children at 8 and 9 yrs old, I make no excuses, no justifications, not trying to talk anyone out of their sense of injustice, especially when it is the same as mine. A desire to be no where near fellow humans still lingers......I realize that is probably why at 8 years old as I fell from the top of a tree, it's branches had cradled me so that my landing was soft and without injury, why the ground always seemed to rise to meet my feet and I could romp and play without any real injury from anything. Nature and I were resonating, as one in our "WHY?!" declaration of the injustice we felt we were experiencing. It also helped me let go, feel safer not "helicopter parenting" my children while we were there..they're resonating with nature with their "WHY?!" declaration...and yes, when we got home, they were both "Just leave me alone".......not wanting anything from another human being.

The adventure with Gilbert continues

"Hi Stacey!" He stretches his hand out for a hand shake. I notice very quickly the buzzer he's trying to conceal. This is one of my personal boundaries: do not come at me with the agenda to get ANY sort of reaction from me! Don't "try" to make me laugh or scream or jump out of my skin. Do not try to trick me or impress me with magic tricks. I'm not your plaything and your discontent with my present state of being is your problem. If I need to feel my sadness or anger or frustration at any moment, do not try to take that from me because you want to see me smile so you don't feel so bad.......and if you do just want a playmate, get consent!
"No, thank you Gilbert, I don't like my hand getting buzzed like that".
He pushed it into my back anyways.
He did not respect my clear no.
Gilbert and I sat down for the talk.
Sympathetically: "Adults are always doing things to you even after you say 'no', aren't they Gilbert?"
He nods.
"It doesn't feel good does it?".
"No."
"I don't blame you. I don't like it either. You don't have to be like them, did you know that? You can respect other people's 'no'."
He thought about it and nodded; true, it occurs to him.
"Do you think that from now on you can respect it when I say 'no'?"
Big grin from Gilbert, nodding of the head.
"O.K., then...buzzer hand shake on it"..the damn grin! lol He wound that little thing up and up and up and proudly held out his hand and we "buzzer shook" on it, lol

Gilbert's wave

Gilbert waved to me.
It's a precious, very much worked for thing.
I don't know why I did it in my spare time, but I did.
He was always so guarded and suspicious. He was like the worst trouble making kid. He expected to be yelled at and criticized in every moment. I approached him with mere "hello" and let it go, his look one so suspicious. I'd catch him being destructive and simply approach with "Hey, Gilbert, what we doing?" He'd say it. "Think we should try to do something different?". "yeah", he said....and he would. I still said "Hi" every time he walked by. Then one day I saw him do something, a 'trick' and land on his ass. His mom started yelling at him "So stupid! What were you thinking?! You sacred me!". She looked to me; "That's what kids do, you're O.K. Gilbert". She eventually gave me part of their story: she had been 'happily' married for many years when Gilbert's father, her husband, had died. She was a mess. I don't think she was all together before that...did come out that she had spent time with husband homeless before Gilbert....I had met her older son, Gilbert's brother....he wore the mannerisms of one marked by doing drugs, upset due to experiencing prejudice because of the color of his skin (he's part Mexican, living in the wild, very white, west).......
Today Gilbert was not terrorizing other children's toys, he was playing with a remote control vehicle all his own. I was so happy for him. Before I could wave and wait to see if he would wave back, he waved first instead. He told me of this remote control vehicle, it's uniqueness and I told him how cool it was and how happy I was for him.
Spare time shenanigans really can mean something in the end......

Getting to know my lilac sprig and other greens.

Having loved the smell of lilac but not wanting to cut them off a bush, I rejoiced at seeing some in a brush pile. I pulled over to the side of the road, cut myself some and brought them home. How I loved the smell in my kitchen! Then they began to close up and fade away. Time to throw them away....
   I was stopped from just putting them in my kitchen trash bag, they really wanted to be put out with the grass clippings, etc in the "yard waste" bin. O.K. They shared the feeling they have lying amongst their fellow green. I couldn't blame them, it was a very good feeling, so rich and well, green......I had interrupted their journey to bring them in, enjoy their smell and use them as a prop for a photo, but they really wanted their journey to continue now as it was meant for them, to be with their friends.
  Along with them were some flowers and greens left from a bouquet I was given out of a grocery store. I tapped into them. They didn't care where they went. They were commodities, just like everything else in the store, from their perception, their belief. They felt they belonged in with plastics. They shared with me their initial confusion upon being placed with the greens. Then they shared with me their feeling of being reminded of their green origins and ultimately the good feeling the lilacs had shared with me, of the comfort of laying amongst the greens.
  Everything has a story, it seems.....

Of inner journies with "higher callings"

Feeling the healing of a breakthrough!
So I have discovered this inner aspect of myself that draws fear, hurt to gut tearing degrees, illness, etc into it's self to keep me from getting "big". I had seen it all around throughout my life: those people who make friends choose between them and me because they are more needy. The only way they know how to get attention, get what they want is be sick, to be angry, to be victims of injustice. The fear is that I will no longer show it attention....a justified fear, really....as the saying goes "The squeaky wheel gets the grease" while the one fulfilling their responsibilities, the one no one has to worry about gets forgotten on the sidelines, asked to give up their place, their things, their relationships so the needier one can have them...that's how I got homeless for the first time; my mother told me parole conditions were that my brother live with her, he refused to if I still lived there, so I had to go; "You can take care of yourself". So, a part of me adopted that ploy with the other aspects of me; be in need, she'll not take those steps, make those choices that will allow us to succeed and then she won't forget me.....so what is it I will forget? To ride horses, to go swimming, to sit in trees....when I am small and homeless, there is nothing to do except those things, to linger in wild places, find solace in nature, etc. We should not go to nature simply for solace, why not when we are well? This aspect only allows me to feel wellness when there is nothing but me in nature without means to become distracted. So, that is why I've begun waking up profoundly sad, terrified, hopeless, keeping me paralyzed until I sit with it and give it my full attention. The earthly aspects that do not want to be abandoned for the heavenly ones because well-being is easy for it to achieve and if it is well, I might get carried off with some "higher purpose" or ":higher mission". And who should knock on my door this very moment as I believed I was at the end of typing this? Jehovah's Witnesses, to whom I used to belong who believed the gifts of spirit have ceased for all humans, where simplicity of existence was cherished and I originally felt like I also was.........lol My innocence wants attention! Now it all comes together....to be accepted among them, to be the congregation's darling, to be the one held up as an example required I denied my oneness with the Earth, my "magic", my "miraculous" abilities, it required I hate, so against my very nature....to hate what "god" hates, to hate the world, to hate "sins" rather than understand them, have compassion for them, acknowledge the validity of their existence, the reasons behind them......it required I hate aspects of myself without necessarily saying "I hate you" to them.....my stomach is easing it's clenching.......the story continues on within me, she tells me her story.....how it was OK with her to be denied, to have credit taken by some outside "god" for things she did and was capable of because even though she was denied to exist, she, too got to feed off the feelings of being cherished, valued while I was feeling them as a whole, it was the "higher calling" which drove us from the congregation deprived her of even that, though, and so she resented it....the wandering alone, dragged about and "taught" this "god" 's perspective, denied her gifts, no longer cherished by anyone except this "him".......so there we have the fear and resentment of "higher callings".
Thank you beloved, for sharing your story with me......
It continues with letting it be known the reason it comes forth as such at this time is because she sees what is coming into our experience......those with whom we share a resonance, who share a similar nature and she wants to be a part of it fully.....we had always been in the woods alone, never in groups, to "do our thing" and no one to tell about it who could appreciate it, that was never even a dream and yet now it is a potential and one we desire to experience, to feel, to dream into this reality. She wants that for me. 

Of knights and beasts, the epic inside me....

"A whole new space happy inside me,
A whole new place that can abide me.......".
Singing to myself yesterday after translating the meaning of my first song "I get to keep my paycheck!".
I got to do my happy dance out in a warm rain. Oh! I had been looking forward to being out in a rain one doesn't want to bundle up against!..........

The city folk's knight in shining armor stood outside the mouth of a cave rumored to be full of mythological beasts, shouting a warning into the depths of it. He would draw the 'problem' beast out. The residents of the cave responded with "That's pretty old news and even sharing it amongst friends would not be huge; they're all capable and coming to such understandings of their own. We have no problem east among us" Back to their business they went, thinking the warning meant little to them. All their ducks were in a row.
The knight in shining armor shot a well-placed arrow into the heart of that cave and to even it's residents' surprise, a spirit that had been quietly hiding in it's recesses came out screeching it's pain, wanting to shoot it's barbs at somebody, something, anything to stop the unjust, unfair suffering it had existed in and furthered by what the arrow was bringing!
Now naked before it's fellow residents, in the face of this bold knight, the beast had to see it's it's self. It tempered it's need to strike out, it chose not to recede. It became aware of it's self and how it was perceived. It found peace. The knight in shining armor from the city folks retreated, no longer needed.
The rest of residents of the cave rejoiced at the increased light within it's recesses, the spacious cavern that had now been added to it where the unseen dark, dank, sorrows had previously been hidden. Great feasts and dancing were engaged in. Neighbors were called, gifts given. And the city folk went about their business, forgetting the existence of their myths.

That's about how it went down. I had been receiving understandings, mostly in the form of ponderings, such as: "If time is a construct created to hone our ability to focus on individual aspects, we are living in one single moment, one single breath of divinity, then our past is ALWAYS present, standing right next to us. We are either holding hands with it, benefiting from it's gifts or it has claws in us, constantly dragging at us, fighting us for our attention.". Others were concerning the relationship between body and spirit, why some linger in debilitation so long before "death" finally claims them.....the truth of the saying "They gave up the ghost". If it is our ghosts that keep us living, then is physicality solely made up of fear?
I didn't share any of these as I usually would, the passion and excitement of doing so just wasn't there and truly, those I interact with online have pretty much got this on their own: sharing understandings as they get them, not too different from my own. Turns out that the lack of passion was an inner knowing; "When one asks for whom the bell tolls, it's usually first for them!".
In this case, the warning about the past was for me. I hadn't completely resolved, accepted, a certain aspect of my past. So, when the arrow came and struck, right in the heart of my experience: the financial well-being I had finally begun to experience, all that old unresolved shit came up. Waves of peace were underlying my intellectual panic and emotional trauma, so I knew we'd get through this. Answers would come. So I accepted my pain, my perspective and took what actions I could. I rested. I woke the next morning with thoughts of things like; "If I had a friend who was a judge and they offered to take care of what was troubling me, I might have felt I had no other choice but to let them". "If I was a Jehovah's Witness who was given the means by a worldly person to take something I had relinquished due to insecurity and immaturity, would I not have allowed people to convince me it was Jehovah using the worldly person to serve me?" and "Is this what it felt like: being unreasonably over-burdened for endless seeming years...my refusing to have an abortion an energetic equivalent, from his perspective, as $224 out every $300 paycheck for 18 years?".
With those reflections, something in me burst wide open. I felt more spacious, more free. I was still facing the financial limitation, I believed. When I arrived at work my boss called me into her office to let me know corporate had gotten my message and that even if the law had loopholes to protect someone in my circumstances, the corporation "couldn't" NOT withhold because of fines and things they'd e facing if the child support agency disagreed. Ah, fear, the great motivator keeping corporations in the clutches, hurting their own employees rather than protecting them and facing "possibly" their own 'suffering'. Not really news to me. I accepted it gracefully.
Later that day my boss called me. Corporate had called her so she could tell me that Maine had contacted them and terminated the order....holy shit. Maine said they had no idea why that order happened, they didn't even know I was in Montana! I leaped and shok my booty! I sang "I get to keep my paycheck!". The white knight had retreated!
A neighor had agreed to take me to the bank after work so I could withdraw everything I had in it so I'd be able to pay May's rent, at least, if they had also decided to freeze my assets. That potential now gone, when she texted me to let me know she was outside ready to drive me there, I didn't share the news yet. I had promised her $20 to drive me there. She happened to had to cancel an event because she didn't have gas money to make it, until I had promised her that $20. So, knowing she'd be happy for me and not take it as the drive was no longer necessary...I withheld the news for a minute. Once I got that $20 in her hands, a pack of smokes she hadn't been expecting and treats for her kids, I broke the news to her and she shared in my excitement. We celebrated the rest of the day. Rusty got her pretzel crust cheese pizza with no sauce from Pizza Hut in the quiet of her own home (she hated the noise of eating in the restaurant), Cort enjoying that giant chocolate chip cookie 'pizza' I ordered along with it. Cort learned how to do laundry in coin machines. Rusty and Cort learned how to use the pop machine outside our building. I had wine to drink ;) weee a truly fun evening! and my friend is off attending her event today. We are restored to financial well-being!
Through all this I realize, there is no justice in this world from the worldly perspective. There really is only what is needed to trigger our expansions. Yes, the ones used to trigger those expansions might need a it more force to stop playing their role so effectively and we might perceive that as the serving of justice, but it may be in fact, only what their soul needs to be expanded, an expansion that may have been facilitated by our own which they were used to initiate and "encourage". And yes, there was a time I would have railed against such a "simplistic" and "spiritually bypassing" understanding. That would e the stage of developement where self acceptence and one's perspective is MORE important to embody efore we can move on to accepting another perspective. Sometimes we must must fully embody victim and apologies before we can accept "the good in everything". Even now, fully getting this understanding, I WILL allow certain aspects to go through this process, just as I did yesterday morning. I had to fully allow all my feelings and my own perspective as a victim before I could myself to accept my 'persecutors' could possibly feel the same way about me.
I also accepted in a new way how yes, people tend to favor those who need them more than they do a happy, self-sufficient, content, generous me. I used to resent that. They'd favor mean, selfish friends over me "because they need me". Now, I accept it. I don't need constant connection and get to enjoy mostly random moments of excitement and sharing. It works for me. I'm not missing out on anything. There's a whole party inside me.
Another synchronistic thing happened as I had a moment of realization at work: "Wow, this is the first time I did not start a job totally green, catch on quickly and exceed my co-workers!. Cool!" I wasn't being a perfectionist and I felt relief. Just as those thoughts were completing, a co-worker leaned over, put her arm around me and said "You know, I am so impressed with how fast you're catching on to this job and how well you're doing!"....lol My boss has mentioned how much she appreciates me after I braved my fear of being told I was being too sensitive about words co-workers had been using in referring to residents. "I feel the same way" she told me. I raved a fear in bringing a gift to one of the residents, of being told it was not my place only to be told by my boss she so appreciated employees who were so thoughtful about residents needs and smiled joyfully, sharing my excitement that I'd e able to share this thing I had bought with a resident who might benefit from it.
My entire experience is changing and morphing. My heart is breaking-in that good way day after day. It's so exciting! and painful and exhausting, lol Sleep time is of "dreams" where I am setting up camp in other "dimensions" where I've had negative relationship experiences. The place not really needing to be secure or able to provide anything, being more like a "spawn point" in a video game. It's where my consciousness will begin it's focus when my body is sleeping and where it will exit that "dimension" as my body here awakes, it appearing to be going to sleep there. Fascinating. Busy little bee, pollinating all sorts of places with this expanded and expanding consciousness!
So, yeah, it's been a few days since ya'll have heard the usual amount from me and so now it's all been cooked and I can served it out again 
An American Bald Eagle is gliding overhead again this morning.
An ;)