May we remember that today is Juneteenth, the date when two years after they were legally freed, hundreds of Afrocentric people finally learned of their legislated freedom.

They were free, and still disenfranchised as all people who formerly owned Afrocentric people received compensation from the government for the loss of their human property, while the formerly legally enslaved people have yet to receive compensation for their loss of dignity or their loss of the ability to live as themselves to build reasonably profitable lives.

Legislation did not then, and has still not magically transformed the minds of the masses regarding the social hierarchy and worth of formerly enslaved people.

We live with that legacy of dehumanization to this day. We experience it daily with a prolonged campaign of systemic gaslighting to convince us that we are insane if we believe that open racism has been restructured to a more subtle caste system which continues the legacy of injustice.

Only conscious acceptance of this reality will create transformation.

Alcohol is truth serum for this person well positioned and respected in the social hierarchy.

The dream is that one day we will no longer bear this burden. In the meantime we will continue to sail with this atmospheric factor affecting our journey.

I have been thinking about what I would say is the most important thing that I have learnt in all of my life. And today I think this is it: in this and every single moment of our lives with no exceptions we are your own heroes.

Does that sound like a self-centred, narcissistic, egotistical, implausible statement? Why? Why does it seem to be that?

Being grateful doesn’t mean that any human needs to suspend the ability to see themselves as the most skillful valuable asset to themselves, as a person who is meant to both profit and serve best in community.

Some of you might wonder why this is a groundbreaking thought for me.

It seems to me that many, if not all of us have been socialized to think of ourselves as heroes and missionary saviours to others. We fail to see all peoples’ worth and value through any other lenses but our own. And in that system we do not see all people, including and especially ourselves, as the heroes of their own lives. We have been taught that the heroes are those who save us.

The central idea to that belief is that we do not know best how to save ourselves, and we are taught to believe that we are inept if we delete, defer, or delegate tasks in order to empower us to be our best. We are only successful when we do everything ourselves, especially if the thing that we do allows us to hoard stores of money.

Therefore, we see those who seek assistance, especially monetary assistance, as unwise and unskilled.

That’s not our fault. It is a common human experience.

It is the impact of being raised in intrinsically narcissistic religious and political systems that position themselves as the definition of good and as keepers of the key to connection with God.

It is the impact of being raised in systems which teach us to define our worth by seeing how closely we can be a reflection of those systems.

They teach us to claim the systemic ways as our ways and to assert these ways of being as the best and wisest.

I come to this understanding as I reflect on how our family has endured through factors that even we still don’t comprehend, while being of service to everyone possible without optimal financial and relational gain.

Therefore I am working currently on learning how to position my children to learn that they are never again to allow themselves to be used without profit.

I hope to teach them to never again be caught in the exploitative web of religious and/or political communities.

The best missionaries, I now understand, have learned to deeply value all, and have learned to allow the beings whom they seek to help, to lead, and to value that leadership. They learn how to be partners instead of assuming that they are teachers.

Such relationships are not fraught with anxiety. There is great peace and profit in knowing that things do not have to be as we typically experience or as we expect them to be in order to be good.

When we get to this place we truly experience peace as we recognize that we are a world full of nothing but heroes, who function best as ourselves in community with each other.

And we learn to see all of us as missionaries, people on a mission, including and not limited to our roles in the lives of those closest to us, so as parents, teachers, partners, and friends etc.

When we accept this definition of being we will finally function as equals. And there we will finally be at peace.

As I live, I keep seeing systems being built to fix issues in systems, and I see new systems being effectively the same as the systems that needed to be fixed.

I realized this as I was doing it. I had to heal from the wounds of the systems that caused me pain because though I did not enjoy the wounds, what I knew of working for good was learned from the infected systems. I was infected. I am infected. I needed to learn a different model from a healthier source.

So I stopped building a system, and started living with real people.

I looked around and understood why I needed to consistently judge my thoughts.

And one day in the midst of that period after I stopped, I got dressed to go to a worship gathering in a weird green dress.

It was an interesting dress that grabbed my attention when I first saw it. Then it arrived and I thought what in the actual hell is this.

So I tried it on, and thought ewww. Fail.

Priya and I looked at it, and looked at me in it and we had such a great laugh.

Somewhere in our laughter we thought that maybe it might be different when accessorized. I put it away.

Rest, weird dress.

Then one Saturday morning shortly after the night of our big laugh I awoke with a clear knowing that I needed to get to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church (SDA) in the area. I was in Alberta, didn’t know the area, and hadn’t been to an SDA church in quite some time. So I called the one that I knew in a town further away. Getting there seemed out of reach.

I knew that I needed to go, and I had been learning to listen to what I know. So I persevered in getting there by asking the people around me if they knew of a way. There was no transit in, and no Uber out.

It turned out that there was an SDA church right close by. That is where I needed to be. So I began to get ready, and that weird dress began to say “HEY! I am for this.”

For some reason, maybe my listening is improving, I agreed to give her a shot. Weird Dress was right. She was for this.

As soon as I put her on, I realized that I was going to wear her again twice that same weekend as a part of a learning experience about how much more alike we are than different, and how unique and appropriately wonderful our differences were.

Weird Dress on me, and I in her, or is it I in she, set out on the first part of our adventure.

We arrived, as usual, in perfect time. Other people around us had been worried and stressed that we were going to be late – even though they weren’t even coming with us.

Weird Dress and I knew better. We were always perfectly on time, because we had been doing lots of work around releasing stressful ideas related to time.

And what a day it turned out to be. We met an Uber driver who taught us a LOT in ten minutes about boundaries. We needed that. He told us a story about a time when he had done what he said he would do, and how that went up to ten years later when someone tried to get him to do more. He said no. Simple. And then he looked at the situation and saw an area where he did need to say yes, and he did that. Thanks, Bob. I’m saying thanks now, and I have already said thank you to Bob in person for teaching me so much in ten minutes. I think Bob thought I was weird. 🤷🏾‍♀️ I don’t know. I’m probably wrong about that.

Anyway. So we arrived right in perfect time, Weird Dress and I. We heard a sermon that included an illustration which brought rivers of tears of joy and hope, and affirmation running out of me. It was important that this happened in a Seventh-Day Adventist church.

I’d grown up in the SDA religious community, and although I had come to see the value of some beautiful connections with people, I was very angry, hurt, and disappointed by the systemic Adventist experience. And I chose about a year ago to fully withdraw from membership with the denomination – from the system, not from the people.

Listening to that sermon which was full of things with which I disagreed and found harmful, AND also full of ideas and heartfulls of joy and light that were perfectly in tune with the encouragement that my soul needed that day was WONDERFUL.

Finish strong: even though we’ve been hurt, wounded, in pain, we can finish strong, especially if we do it together.

One of the biggest joys of my life has been releasing the stress attached to rightness and owning truth. We are a whole world of wheat and tares. The balance of wheat and tares differs in different places, and there’s a reason for that. We don’t understand the reasons. We just see the tares, and our instinct is to pull them up ourselves. Jesus said not to do this.

Jesus told us to wait until the right time, until the harvest. And harvest time differs for each one of us, and for each system.

We can, in our own minds, accept the existence of tares and figure out once we get to acceptance, how to exist with tares until the harvest, in ourselves, in others, and in systems. I’m finding this part to be my biggest challenge. I’m approaching conscious competence in this though. I am grateful.

So Weird Dress and I celebrated the gifts of connection that we received that day. We shared tears and prayers with the speaker, and we talked about how we have hope for change.

It was another healing day.

And it was so perfect that the end of that experience was a conversation in a washroom with two preteen Princess best friends who decided by the end of our conversation that they could be princesses who loved sports and other fun things, AND they agreed that they would talk to each other about disagreements with hope throughout their friendship.

Princess 1 began our conversation by complimenting me on how awesome I looked. Way to go Weird Dress. We rocked it.

Two SDA washrooms were a huge source of healing for me on that trip. It’s amazing that both times I had that experience because I decided to live as myself, embracing my bladder’s needs. Are we veering into TMI? Nah. It’s good.

The second experience was in a Burman University washroom where messages around consent and rape are placed in stalls in the women’s washroom. I don’t yet have the words to share about the powerful healing that happened for me in that space. The tears of power that have slowly begun to fall from the corner of my eyes as I write about that moment is all I can share of it. I am deeply grateful.

Weird Dress and I went to two other services at two other buildings with two different religious groups of different denominations that weekend. Each time we accessorized slightly differently in celebration of how much we are the same, with small differences.

All three experiences were wonderful. Each touched my heart and healed a bit more of my soul in connection with others.

It’s likely that nothing is as weird as we think it is. It is also good to know that where there is harm there can be healing and hope.

So I’m trying to learn to leave the tares for God, all three, to uproot at the harvest, and instead I am working on sharing my heart and my story, and whatever messages our God inspires me to share, as a part of our process of finishing strong, together.

Thanks for being on that journey with me Weird Dress. It’s so cool that because I paused to take a second look, I actually love you.

Sometimes we wonder about the difference between adult siblings who were raised as childen in the same household. Hold this image in mind when that judgment arises.

One plant, in its position, benefits from the rain, the other does not. The plants don’t know this.

Similarly, in our relational systems, we often do not understand the difference in ourselves, because as we fight to live we just don’t know what we don’t know. This is why it is majorly important to consciously purge shame from our world.

We shame each other and ourselves when we live with judgment against people, instead of being open to judging our thoughts for self and for each other.

I believe that this process of judging thoughts becomes so much more powerful when we can do it together, with faith in the process, and with warmth and lovingkindness for each other.

Life is life. When we know better we do better without fail. Always. No exceptions.

What we know varies in ways that we don’t understand, so just be kind. Give a little water when we see that water is needed, and do that with love, without shame.

It may take some work to release the shame. Do the work.

http://www.thework.com

It is worth it. These plants won’t learn how to find food and water themselves, and as humans we can learn how to consciously do our best at nourishing our hearts.

Here are the same plants, one day, and a little water later.

Being compassionate, open, inclusive, and shame-free is 100% always worth it.

Beyond Behaviour:

Beyond Behaviours: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/cSGamtX5XXfNtNXD/?

It had been a while since I had the space and taken the time to be in solitude to gather myself. I needed this.

The world is at war. People are dying, while breathing day by day, and with no more breath, and I am feeling it all, and speaking up as needed, even though my inner critical monster, whom I have named C-Yu, tries, now in vain, to silence me.

C-Yu has a name because I refuse to be haunted by a phantom. They have been brought into the light, and they’ll stay there until My Love declares with me, “It is finished. Peace, be still.”

C-Yu uses the eyes of those precious to me in the stories that I tell myself about our connection. And so speaking in the face of the stories, with C-Yu’s piercing glare doing its best to stop love from piercing through the darkness of shame, has cost me a lot. It’s a price that I am willing to pay though, because I know that the cost is an illusion. All is well. And it still hurts.

Shalom until faith becomes sight for you and for me. All is well.

There is this person with whom I struggle a LOT! AND when I was really struggling and burnt out totally exhausted they gave me just the gift of space and time and place that I needed.

My struggle is valid.

This person with whom I REALLY struggle I also REALLY love.

AND God spoke that person’s words to me fully clearly as instructions for healing and growing in relationship with others.

In a room all by myself with not one other person present I HEARD God say to me: “Let yourself be known”, not audibly, and VERY clearly.

AND I did. I 100% began to let myself be known from that moment on. Then some time later I found out that those words had been a core, and often shared idea, from this person’s heart. I didn’t know that. I had never heard it before. But God shared it with me.

It’s unlikely that I would have accepted the idea without that supernatural component.

AND I still struggle with that person, AND my struggle is valid.

We are human. We are amazing AND our struggle with each other is valid.

When we can see each other with those truths aligned we will experience compassion, and we will begin to be open to seeing the near enemies of our desires.

This is not the only person with whom I struggle and whom I also love. There are tons of people with whom I have this intense an experience. In fact it’s the experience that I have with all people. I feel intensely. This is who I am.

There are a few whom I love so deeply that the struggle is epic and will never separate us, even when we seem to be separated. The struggle with them is a struggle for not a struggle against. I don’t understand this yet. I just know it to be true

I encourage, validate, and support, AND I say in love what I see that creates a struggle. I have been learning to say in love. This did not come naturally it required supernatural intervention.

AND through this journey with God, I have come to the place where it deeply matters to me that all people’s name is safe in my mouth.

AND so God has been helping me to understand the struggle AND helping me to understand the rejection and conflict thus associated.

On my 45th birthday I remember that I asked everyone who could hear me to please call Donald Trump by his name instead of calling him 45.

He has a name. He is a person affected by the experiences of his life, just like every single other human being who has ever lived. And he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, because it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle Jesus said, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

Jesus wasn’t saying that wealthy people can’t enter the kingdom of God. Jesus was teaching us to be compassionate, because money often creates huge blindspots of false sufficiency, and attracts crowds who seek influence instead of honest reflective relationships.

In a dream, on the sofa in our Princess Court house in Abbotsford, in my 42nd year of life, God told me that my 45th year would be a significant one. I kept looking for the significance in that year, and JUST NOW as I write this I realized that THIS which has become the message of my heart is what made my 45th year so significant.

FUCK! Yes. I get to share another eureka moment with you, dear reader. This is one of my favourite things.

Four years after my 45th year I understand.

I’m a slow processor, and I’m so grateful for how slowly I process what I hear and experience because I feel everything SO intensely that there’s no way I could handle seeing it more quickly.

Being a slow processor is not a deficit. It is a reality of my being. It is how I thrive as myself, learning to love in this world. Being overwhelmed by the input of the world would mortally wound me. It wounds all of us.

This is why we use various means of survival which we shamefully call addictions. They help us to feel “normal” for a while, so we chase them HARD, and we find and create communities that fit our normal of that season.

I am learning as I walk with God that God slowly and surely transforms our addictions, our survival mechanisms, to healthy ways of being, if we allow Them (God) to help us transform. And the beginning of that journey of deep healing is to banish shame. The banishment may take years or seconds. It’s different for all of us, and in this realm we may never understand why.

That is why it is SO important that shame is banished among us. We don’t know what we don’t know. And as we become open to that truth in love we can have deep compassion for each other. We CAN do life with boundaries which remain stable.

Boundaries mean that we know what we will do, and we allow others the freedom to do what they will do.

Grief helps us to have beautiful boundaries. We grieve so that we need never reject anyone. We need never malign anyone. We need never gather together against anyone.

We can just keep learning to be the truth of ourselves. We keep allowing others to be the truth of themselves, and so we become open to receiving the light from each of the shards of the bigger shattered light that we all hold.

AND what an AMAZING day it will be when we all hold up our shards together with perfect love, without shame. It is said that on that day angels will fold their wings in awe.

I can barely wait.

Today’s finished product: The Warmth and Loving-kindness Blanket Company

I’ve been making this blanket for many months now. I got the fabric, then months later tied the corners. A few months later I began to cut the strips of connection. Finally today I got it done. I often stress a lot when a blanket is born in my heart for someone and I am not getting that blanket completed in what seems like quick time. And every single time it’s right.

I don’t know why it’s right today. I just know it is.

Faith. I believe in the perfection of timing, and I believe that God restores what the locusts stole even when we are our own locusts.

WarmthAndLovingkindness #Perfect

God Freed My Fucks (and became my best friend)

Foreword:

For the longest time God has been telling me to write. For some reason I thought They meant that I needed to write in a physical journal. I love the idea of journals, and I have a zillion begun, and not completed. Anyway, I kept fighting with writing because I also assumed that it needed to be an epic War and Peace length opus.

 Fuck that.

How did I get to that fuck? Here is how?

Academics kept telling me that I needed to write too, and then they laid out this box into which my writing needed to fit. This many words. That structure. They might as well have given me the keys to a rockin’ stick shift Toyota, or an Audi if we’re getting hifalutin, and then set a mountain down in front of me, as my route. I can rock the shit out of that shift, and I absolutely freeze like a sloth in headlights on mountains. Well not freeze, because I always keep moving, I actually can’t stop until I get to the base. I just move like a terrified decelerated sloth in fright mode.

Then the dearest friend of my heart wrote and published an anthology – a beautiful gift of the poetry of her heart: Rise up And Speak: In Rhyme If You Must, by Tina L. Stenmark.

I ordered it as soon as it was available, and squealed with delight on the day that I finally retrieved mine from the mailbox. Snail mail. Snail mail, Amazon. I’d been waiting for the typical Prime speedy delivery to my door. Snail mail. That makes perfect sense in light of my story though. A recurring message is that I need to slow down, and trust the process.

Fuck! Writing that was a Eureka moment for me.  I’m glad that I got to share that with you, dear reader. I love sharing these moments, especially when they show up right in the middle of my time in interaction with others. You’re not here with me physically, reader friend, and I am with you in spirit. I feel you near, and I am writing as if I was sitting in conversation with you.

This is me. Fuck yeah!

So, I opened the package and had two simultaneous moments of orgasmic joy. Look what my friend DID, and OH! I don’t have to write War and Peace. I can write as me. Even now as I write these words my heart is smiling so deeply because her work freed me.

Fuuuck. Yeah.

As I write this we are not actively in friendship, and my heart bleeds. It matters that I include this fact, because I believe in living with integrity. Life is not a fairytale. And though my heart bleeds and feels as if it will bleed from the space where we were forever, I am carrying on. We are carrying on I think, because we know that we can. God is with us – with me and with her, even if we are not any longer journeying together.

So  now I write because it is so deeply important to me to share with you the idea that we can be free if we choose to accept God’s love. To get here God freed my fucks, and became my best friend. And They want me to tell you that you can be best friends with Them too. Not with me though. I love you and all. I love being with people for blocks of time in large numbers. I love connecting with people one on one, and I have come to learn that I function best with a small kitchen table of very close friends. So let me introduce you to God, My Love, my best friend. They are still opening spaces at Their table.

Friday was May 24th. It’s a significant day and one that was filled with sadness for me this year. But God gave me hope on Friday, through Granny and the story of the man by the pool of Bethesda.

But God. Those two words mean so much to me in my “not but, I meant and” world. Anyway on Friday, Leah showed up to help us get things from the storage unit to the house. She’s a powerhouse guys. I remember when I was able to move mostly on my own, and thought I was a powerhouse. She’s a powerhouse with a loving heart who is doing the work to get to peace. We’re on that journey together even when we’re not walking side by side.

I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to do on Friday, because on Thursday I was in so much physical pain, and so physically weak because of emotional pain. On Thursday I barely made it in the door to take care of a thing that was quite important.

In fact I shouldn’t have made it in the door, but I always ask, and now I can stand ready to hear and accept no. I asked and waited, and was invited in, and I was grateful.

I did a few things with supernatural strength, and then went home to bed.

On Friday as I was heading back home, God started talking with me about that Bethesda man and God’s love.

Leah showed up, listened to what was important to me, loaded her vehicle, and mine, and then left to drop off the things that she carried, while I more slowly put things back, and felt everything that I was feeling physically and emotionally.

When I got back down with the expectation that I would be helping her to put things in the vehicle, I found it loaded and waiting for me. She’d gone ahead. I felt a bit stressed, as if I had let her down somehow, and I almost let that stressful thought take control. I really needed to urinate, and I was some kilometers along on the highway home before I came back to my senses, and remembered to live as myself, and to communicate towards that end.

Old programming popped in, but my new gentle relationship with God stepped in to remind me that I am not a paralyzed people-pleaser. I am myself, and I needed to live as me.

So I got off the highway, and thankfully I was very close to one of my favourite on the road washrooms. It is always fabulously clean. I sent Leah a message, and carried on.

God had started talking with me about that Bethesda man, and reminded me of Granny’s lifelong legacy of walking as herself. She was a powerhouse too. And so am I. I walk on my knees if I need to. I forgot for a minute.

Jesus went to look for that man because for years he had been trying his best with no healing.

In almost forty years no one had helped him to the water.

Jesus came to tell him to take up his bed and walk. God was and would be with him. He didn’t know, and what we don’t know has a huge impact on our lives.

On Friday, I think God showed me that we assume that this man got up and ran. I heard Granny then asking Daddy; “Len, dem people say that I must walk faster than I can walk?”

I think that maybe he got up and walked as he could with the knowing that God was with him.

It’s so super rare to find someone who can walk with us at our pace, or maybe it’s rare to see that there are people who can walk with us at our pace, because we are so stressed by the idea that we have to walk at a certain pace to match the people who show up. And people are stressed by the idea that we should be able to stay apace with them.

So maybe as he walked the people around him showed up as themselves doing their best to walk with him.

They might have forgotten him because he was out of sight for so many years, or they got so caught up in their own lives, and they assumed that someone else would show up.

So many possible variables of the story showed up for me. In all of them the comfort was that God was there the whole time.

It made me more compassionate towards all of us when we show up, when we don’t show up, and then opened light on all the possible various thoughts and judgments running through our minds that affect our interactions whether we show up or not.

I think God showed me that just like the butterfly which someone thought it was good to help out of its cocoon, God stays with us while we walk at our best here. And when it’s needed and as often as it is needed God will wrinkle time for us, or move us supernaturally or create paths supernaturally. Sometimes people die forgotten and misunderstood. And God was with them.

Remembering the village, and asking God to help me see and appreciate the village that shows up as they can, when they can, while grieving the pain of the unfulfilled dream of conscious unity and compassion in peace has been God’s gift to me.

I really needed that gift.

Today, the process of healing in the room for a new fraternity of roomies who are in retreat at the LifeApp 3Day has been on my heart. My heart is in prayer to our Creator with gratitude for the outcome. Lives being brought to light is a beautiful beautiful thing. I’m inviting us to join in gratitude for the process and the outcome.

Today, I read about 10 year old, Sarah Rector who my heart saw as a vision of hope. She was the child of former slaves who was a part of two Indian tribes through ancestral adoption and enslavement.

In 1913, Sarah was given 160 acres of barren land as a part of a land allocation program. It seems that the idea was to fulfill the obligation to give land to her kind, while minimizing her chance of success, maybe hoping to kill her spirit and maybe even pushing her to work herself to death or to despair as she toiled uselessly on barren land.

I don’t know Sarah’s whole story, and it is said that she struck oil on that land, making her one of America’s first Afrocentric millionaires – from barren land.

The story of colonialism and colonization is the same globally with a few small variances across the world.

If we are willing to consciously face the truth we will heal, grow, and live together.

We have been equally brutalized, and if we begin to work together in recognition of our common pain, we could work toward healing and growth together with power that would unite this land – all the world being the land, because the story is the same with different players all across the world.

In our story on this side of the world, African people were stolen from their homeland, dragged across the ocean, and treated worse than or equal to animals depending on the hand of the massa under whom they fell in this land.

Indigenous people were stolen from their land, brutalized and shoved into corners so that land became suddenly free for development.

Europeans stole land from one territory and stole labour from another.

There is pain unacknowledged and unconscious energy being wasted by all players in the scenario.

Trying to compare pain leaves us expending energy that would be best spent in healing together.

Barren land takes different forms, and until we can look at the truth without shame, until we look at the truth through God’s loving compassionate eyes we will suffer needlessly. We are choosing suffering. We are choosing not to heal because we are trying to force others to heal in order to make our experience better.

Taking space to look at a whole scenario including looking at our own selves is the path to finding oil in barren land. If we stand on the barren land and use space to keep our condemnation and justification stories running through our minds we will keep just barely missing the oil on our land. We’ll keep running away to start all over again.

It’s important to know the difference between stepping away from that battle of condemnation to keep life in play with an open door to unity another day, and stepping away to pulverize an enemy so that we can preserve the rights to our barren land.

It is the difference between being focused and grounded for success in creation with a host of creators, and living in unconscious or conscious fear which steals our ability to enjoy the gift that our Creator intended when They created creators to create in cohesion with fabulous diversity.

And I know this because this is a part of my ongoing healing experience.

I invite us to open ourselves to the light of healing. Here are a few of my favourite resources:

Caste: the origin of our discontents by Isabelle Wilkerson

Homecoming by John Bradshaw

It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolyn

What Happened To You by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey

Parenting from the Inside Out by Dr. Daniel Siegel

The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown

Psalm 103 New Living Translation of the Bible

Wheel of Awareness

And the place where my heart is today:

https://www.lifeapp.ca/3day

I believe that we can experience healing in love now on Earth, as Jesus taught us to experience in the prayer that we call the Lord’s Prayer. Your kingdom come on Earth as it is in heaven. I believe.