Discussion with people who want to learn how to feel all emotion well is my favourite part of doing my work. We’re just all regular people who want to do well together. What’s below is some of what I’ve learned through lived experience, vulnerable conversation, therapy, reading, listening to podcasts, and listening to other people’s lived experience.

We often fear communicating our thoughts because we’re worried about whether or not we’ll be able to handle seeing someone else experience a painful emotion, as we are honestly addressing our needs from a place of love and hope for healthy connection. It’s better to communicate, because it hurts more to withhold. It hurts us all more, because the painful energy attached to whatever we’re feeling hangs between us like acid eating away at our connections. Energy is palpable. It’s felt (as it should be) because feeling our energy lets us know that we’re either okay or we need to take action to get to okay.

Connect first. Let them know that you want to maintain connection, and want to work on fixing the things that will create unhealthy connection (AKA separation) if left unchecked.

Share about your hurts as well. Don’t assume that there is no room for your loved ones to hear your hurts because they share about theirs. And if you’re accustomed to holding your hurts close in fear of rejection, tap into the courage of vulnerability. Be brave, and share wisely.

If those whom we love never have the opportunity to help someone carry their hurts then they won’t know how to. Mastering anything takes practice.

Be whom you need for yourself. Be willing to carry your own hurts without another person. David, my teacher/mentor reminds me often that we need to be willing to be the only person to carry our hurts. In fact, I think that our very lives depend on this. And also ask other people if they have the space to be present for you, because we were meant to do life in connection with at least one other, and ideally more than just one.

We are made to be our own best adult support, and we are also made to need each other. Both things.

Love for the process. It’s hard; we got this, AND Dad’s got us.

Happy birthday week 💚🦋🦅🌈.

It has been such a gift of love and connection, and grief; which is perfect for my melancholic soul that appreciates the gift of bittersweetness, because my fam how would we know joy without sorrow, pleasure without pain, hot without cold, well-seasoned without bland, or love without force?

Today is the anniversary of the two most bittersweet days of my life, and I celebrate those days which brought such incomprehensible richness to my life. They brought me the gifts of connection and separation which forever changed my heart, enhanced my life, sharpened my vision, and brought into focus my purpose, my dharma, my destiny, my heart, my raison d’être designed by Me and Dad in conjunction with the universal family, with the family who became my ancestors, my biological connection, and the family of my soul who chose me and whom I chose in some way that I still don’t quite understand, but which I have clearly experienced as I have lived.

And so we celebrate: Dad, I, and all of you with His Spirit of love like a beautiful refreshing wind.

For Dad so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son, that whoever believes on Him would not die, but would have [the immediate joy of] everlasting life. For Dad did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world, through Him, might be saved. John 3:16, 17

And so we celebrate. Happy birthday week to me. I am here, and I am here with you.

The prodigal son did not go home because he wanted to make amends to his father. He went home because he needed a place to be cared for, and he knew his father’s caring heart based on his father’s consistent actions.

Me too. Dad has proven His heart for me, and I can consistently lean in to Him.

This is what Jesus wanted us to know. Dad is not and has never been unapproachable as some religious writers would have us think.

He does whatever He needs to do to be with us, and He comes in whatever form He can be closest to us when we allow Him to come close. He does this for ALL people without exception. Immanuel: God with us.

I want my children to always know that they can come home – no matter what, and that is why I do the work needed to stay in healing so that I can be more like Dad. Because the moment that I asked for healing I was healed (even though I did not know it yet). And then Dad taught me what I was healed from, how to stay in healing, and how to claim healing when I am wounded by my hand or someone else’s hand again.

But have you ever wondered why the son went away? I imagine that his brother who stayed at home was just as he had always been. I wonder if that brother’s attitude overshadowed the father’s love and caused the prodigal son to blame the father for his hurt.

www.instagram.com/reel/Cf3IevlA7gW/

Breathe

For generations people who are not heterosexual have had to assess risk in coming out of the closet to live authentically in all areas of their lives. Should it matter whom you consensually love in the most intimate way? NO. And it has mattered. Because people have been killed; their lives have been threatened; their livelihood has been at risk; they face loss of significant relationships; they have been refused the opportunity to have a family. They live with the fear of being themselves, because being themselves could cause them harm.

I feel such deep gratitude to people like Ellen Degeneres, who chose to come out knowing that they risked losing everything, even their lives, as so many like Matthew Shepard did.

https://www.matthewshepard.org/about-us/our-story/

It is time that we are all able to live out. All people were created with the right to live freely. Individual beliefs lived out in individual lives is our God-given right, and He is quite able to be the individual’s guide. Our restrictive hands of fear are not needed and have no place in other people’s lives.

https://youtu.be/x_0E_SmIg3A – Life and Favour (John P. Kee)

NB: In the video below, in the example regarding Jesus and divorce, Jesus did not ask us to stay in places and situations that will harm us and/or our kiddos. Jesus otherwise tells us to know how to shake the dust off our feet, and He also tells us to reclaim our blessing when we are treated inhospitably. The point that I was trying to make is that not every cultural law or tradition that we accept is God’s ideal. Much of what we do is because of human selfishness and fear. This is our world’s reality.

https://www.facebook.com/Little.Jewels/videos/2196222053860723/?d=n

Psst: Mama rocking it alone. Today isn’t our day. I know that people tend to tell you happy Father’s Day, but can I tell you why I say no thank you?

We ARE amazing mothers, and we do that on our own with a whole world looking on telling us how we are superhuman for carrying the responsibilities of two people when we’re not. The world elevates us as superheroes because that lie deadens onlookers’ consciences when they don’t step in to serve as a part of our community (it’s called cognitive dissonance).

Mama, if you buy into the lie that you are an amazing father you will rob your children of the best of you, because you will keep trying to do ALL of the things, at the cost of your own health and well-being, and your children, over whom the statisticians declare doom, will suffer too.

So, here’s what I suggest we do:

1. Look what is true in the face

2. Grieve the physical absence of the father

3. Find your healer and begin to heal from the painful loss

4. Make a healing plan for the wounds from the barrage of judgment that will come from bystanders.

5. Plan life with your children as mom alone, and build a village of other moms who understand.

6. Know that God will fill the father gaps that matter most now, and then in eternity all will be well again

7. Expect pain. Know that beauty will come of it in some way.

Your children will have what matters most – a strong, vibrant, innovative you, if you face truth with love.

Happy unFather’s Day single mama. Today is a day for you to love what is.

I choose Love. My Supreme Father is Love. My earthly father chose Love. My earthly mother chose Love. I choose Love. My children choose Love. Every day, I see more of love displacing our family’s pain, because we choose to make it so.

I know exactly who my enemy is, and so while I mourn many ills in life, I ask my Father to help me to remember that my enemy does not have a human face. My enemy, whom I shall not name, is the instigator of evil, the creator of crosses, the designer of destructive distraction, the wanter of worship, devoid of love.

He wishes me to live in fear so that my mind will be too clouded to turn to Love. I refuse. I choose love.

Our collective human pain is bound up in crosses, so many crosses, all meant to divide us. I could write an epistle on our crosses. I could write a list, a list that would never end, of the ills and the isms that separate us from each other, and which make it so much harder to love. But I won’t. Today, I’ll just mention one. Racism. The attached pictures define it. Sterling K. Browne speaks to it: https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=264456458069828&_rdr

This is the legacy of modern human relationships.
It is impossible to legislate away the psychological impact of this type of behaviour. Legislation may make racism illegal, but legislation cannot dig deep, unearth the experiences, process them, cognitively integrate them, and choose to change the neurological pathways that pass these conscious and unconscious ways of seeing each other down to our children. We must each personally choose to engage in that process. There is no other way; any other claim to victory is pyrrhic; we stifle others and we do the same to ourselves.

The means of suffocation is not usually as graphic as a knee nonchalantly ground into one’s throat, but every so often these visibly tragic events vividly remind us of how intentionally we have to breathe in order to bear the subconscious evil that haunts us, and which we daily carry as crosses meant to torture instead of seeking to redeem relationships and restore love.

This evil will continue for many more generations if individually and collectively we fail to choose the cultivation of love.

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:1-7,11-13 – https://www.biblegateway.com/passage?search=1%20Corinthians%2013:1-7,11-13&version=NLT

Photo 1: The lynching of Reuben Stacy
“Reuben Stacy, a 37-year-old black man, hangs from a tree on Old Davie Road in Fort Lauderdale, blood trickling down his body and dripping off his toes. Behind him, a white girl, about 7 years old, looks on, a strange smile on her face as she takes in the sight of the “strange fruit” her elders had just created that hot day in July 1935.”

Photo 2
The lynching of Sam Hose https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/lynchings-sadism-white-men-why-america-must-atone

Photo 3
Japanese Americans/Canadians being herded and transported to internment camps https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/internment-of-japanese-canadians

Photo 4
Passengers aboard the Komagata Maru
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/komagata-maru

Photo 5
Before and after arriving at residential school to “kill the Indian in the child”.
https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/

Photo 6
The murder of George Floyd

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/05/27/george-floyd-arrest-surveillance-video-restaurant-sidner-lkl-lead-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/top-news-videos/

Photo 7
Amy Cooper attempts to use police to subdue and humiliate Christopher Cooper

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/us/central-park-video-dog-video-african-american-trnd/index.html

So this thing keeps happening. My bed keeps slipping off of its frame. It’s been about a month, and I keep doing the uncomfortable laborious lifting to put it back in its place. It’s a pain in the ass.

Yesterday we put it back together. Usually it stays put for a while. Today it felt as if my head and stomach were connected with some torturous contraption whose maker had perfected the perfect balance of pounding tied to nausea. All day.

I decided that I’d stay in productive posture in the recliner instead of laid out on the bed. Both my body and the climbing toddler said no. So, I thought about going to bed. And I realized that my mind, though well on its freedom journey, was still looking for some publicly acceptable justification for rest.

I made lunch for the toddler; fed her while in productive posture in the recliner, and then rocked her to sleep in that position too, instead of following her example, and tunnelling into and wrapping myself in my bedding as she had. But my mind was likely protecting the space that I knew I needed.

Anyway, I had the toddler put in her bed, and then set out to walk to the nearby school to pick up that little queen. Because of course I could do it, and wasn’t good cardio the cure for everything? Thankfully, my Father kept intervening. He does that you know, as the One Who loves and sees.

So, five minutes into my walk, a call comes through; Leah on the line. “Hey girl. Are you sure that you wanted me to meet you at the school, or did you want me to pick you up at the house?”

Well, first of all, I overestimated my horsepower, and secondly I was in soooo much pain. And there she was.

By the end of our route I felt so much worse than I had at any point of the day. I barely made it up the stairs, and finally crawled into bed. Within a couple of hours, between a concerned tucker-in of a daughter and a boisterous toddler, plunk, there goes the bed.

I tried to shift it without calling anyone, because the talking, the concern, the well-intentioned movements to show love were just too much, and I’d have to either call out loudly or walk. Back on the wonky bed I went.

And as I lay there my ailing self said, “just get rid of it”. Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that before?! “Well,” the more integrated part of me reminded, “you’d be too low. You don’t like that.” Oh yeah. But it’s not worth all this trouble, and it’s now so uncomfortable. Just get rid of it.

My annoyed self got up to do just that, when that more integrated me interrupted; “how about if we fix it? I bet you that it needs some nuts and bolts, and I bet you that you have something appropriate in that tool box which you fortuitously moved into this room last night.”

And so it was. Two nuts and bolts kept from a happily demolished piece of furniture. (Tip – don’t throw out the hardware.) Moving the mattress and box spring out of the way, I fixed the frame, and then put them back in place, on a solid foundation that will hold.

It occurred to me as I was finding the connectors that this was a significant lesson needed for life. When I initially finally crawled into bed to rest I was able to listen to a two-part podcast that perfectly fed my soul. Then, as I went to find the hardware, I wondered how many relationships have been thrown out because we keep trying to make things comfortable without real connection. Even though the two pieces of the frame fit perfectly together, until I was willing to actively insert strong connection the frame could not serve its purpose. A pair of connectors needed on each end: one bolt of love, and its corresponding nut of truth.

At least two people, each actively integrated with love and truth is the stuff of which beautiful relationships that support rest and a strong place on which to spread are made.

And now I’ll put the bedding back together, so that I can tunnel, snuggle, and be tucked in with no shame.

Even though disconnection and separation have been gifts of protection, it is in the moment that I looked life in the face, and said “It’s okay if you break my heart, I now know that I can rest, heal and keep going” that I truly belonged to myself, belonged everywhere, and nowhere, to everyone, and no one. Because the gifts of protection preserved me until I could belong and be in connection.

And this is the playlist because celebration and connection in music is how my Father and I roll.

Yesterday morning I took an alternate route to bypass construction traffic, and had the pleasure on the way of watching an eagle and a crow interact. I love being reminded whom I am, and why with the wingspan and strength of an eagle, I can soar without using energy to attack aggressors and risk harming myself.

When God spoke these words to me over a decade ago, He knew that as we journeyed together, I would understand the layers of meaning in these words. I was reasoning, more like angrily asking Him the why of many things. And this was His response – audibly.

“But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength. They will soar high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint.”
‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭40:31‬ ‭NLT‬‬ https://bible.com/bible/116/isa.40.31.NLT

I’ve begun to run, figuratively, and not grow weary. Actually when I did run at my pace every morning in reality, I also did not grow weary. I let other people’s weighted shade create the ball and chain which wearied me. That dude who walked by and said “You call that running?” I don’t even remember his face, but I certainly remember how he made me feel. Aunty Maya is right again.

But back to God and the 🦅 eagle. I am living and learning to fly higher and higher with figurative crows on my back, or flying around me, trying to obstruct my path to the nourishment of freedom, love, and healthy connection. This is literally what crows do to eagles to prevent them from feeding on publicly available carrion. Eagles keep rising, and they never use their energy to fight the crows. They just keep flying higher and higher. Their energy is focused on living and finding the way upward.

I am not calling any person a crow – just to make that abundantly clear. Crows are the traditions, fallacies, and traumas that try to ride on our backs, try to obstruct our paths, try to prevent us from reaching the nourishment of publicly available truth that will help us soar to freedom, love, and healthy connection.

I am so incredibly grateful to God for the gifts that He packed in the earliest days of my seclusion, as David describes in Psalm 139. And I am incredibly grateful that I have accepted His invitation to unpack those gifts with Him. Our unpacking parties have given me the ability to find the road less travelled; and when l drive down that road there are always treasured moments like these.

It’s so worth unpacking with Him. Your eagle strength is waiting to be unboxed.