The Song of the Wild Woman

I pull up my Notes app, typing in the phrase with fervor.

gathering twigs

It sits there for years.

I see it now, in the long list of notes I’ve written since. No additional text fills the screen underneath the words that I dropped into that space in July of 2019. I don’t remember much of July 2019. I don’t remember what caused me to put this phrase down. I don’t remember what I was reading or watching. What I do remember is why I wrote it down.

gathering twigs reminded me of gathering bones.

La Loba leaned over me, whispering in my ear her song. I had no choice but to follow along.

//

“You are a wild woman,” she says as she looks into the camera. I am watching her video in the morning, with my cereal. It’s a past life reading, a thing I have always wanted to do but never found the right person. This woman fell into my algorithm when I still had TikTok, and I knew like you do when you see anything meant for you.

There she is, I thought to myself.

And so I am watching her video and listening to what she gathered. There is something to my history with chronic illness. There is something to herbal relief and Chinese medicine. It is Samhain season when I receive this reading, and within weeks I will find a practitioner who will guide me through acupuncture and herbal remedies and for the first time in years, I won’t be laid up in bed with a respiratory virus that teeters on pneumonia.

But she says I’m a wild woman.
That I am meant to be wild.

I smile when I hear this, my soul leaning toward the particular truth that all bone women know: wildness requires its own form of shapeshifting—selkie, falcon, wolf, fox—they all have their place here.

//

There is this thing that happens to me when I am approaching a topic that dips into the marrow. When I circle the truth, however hot, I tend to feel nothing because I am not allowing myself the full experience. I’m circling it, and in a way, avoiding it. I point to it, admit it’s there, perhaps talk around the impact of it being there, but never lift my hand to its cheek in knowing.

But when I’m walking right through the Meadow of truth, when I am in the middle of it instead of circling around it, my hands grow hot. My chest starts to vibrate. I blink back tears.

Right now, my hands feel as if I could turn my palm to the sky and a flame would erupt from its lines.

//

Here is the truth, however slant, that I am in the midst of: there is an ache where my wild used to rest. There is an ache, and the only thing I know to do is begin to gather bones to figure out where my wild disappeared.

I pick up one bone, the soil around it dusty and forgotten. This bone held the story of my dreams—of publishing books with the sound of booming thunder and the glare of a singular lamp. This bone, if you press it against your cheek so you can hear, whispers the just you wait promise that went marrow deep in those early days. Before the hope dried out. Before the promise fell flat. Before the doubt took over.

I pick up another bone—hidden between rocks and thistle. I almost miss it, because it’s taken the shape of rocks around it, nearly fossilized into something new. This bone, hiding in the protective landscape and changing shape, carries the scent of expectation. Who can be wild when you’re living as everyone else says you should live? Who can be wild when you’re denying the very parts of you that open up to freedom and belonging? I hold the bone close to my chest, cradling it with care.

I pick up another bone, the marrow sucked dry by vultures. I wince, feeling the pain of being siphoned without consent. This bone carries the story of all of the ways my power was stolen and at times, given away. The ways in which I gave up my dreams for certainty. The ways in which I leaned into algorithm instead of nature. The ways in which I carried mask after mask after mask in order to stay safe and hidden. I find it in the middle of a dried out creek, in between two saguros standing guard.

I pick up bone after bone after bone. Each one telling a story of loss. Each one pointing toward death and yet desperate for new life. Each one creating a bigger picture of a life that is mine and fully wild. This bone, carrying the story of my lineage. That bone, with healed lines indicative of fracture, carrying the story of my childhood. This other bone hiding in a rose bush carries the story of a Christian bookstore and stargazing and singing on Oklahoma backroads.

That bone, with shards poking in and around it, carries the story I still cannot name. It lies perpendicular to the bone with the story of dark hallways and lights under doors and whispered laughter and the desperate feeling of wanting to escape.

I gather them, humming as I work, and resist the urge to make them something they are not. I let them rest. Once I gather them all, I lay them down on the desert floor. I turn to the wood, for I have also gathered twigs that serve as fuel for my bonfire. I light it, watching the flames lick the sky, and I begin to sing.

Bones begin to snap together.
Star light drops down, filling the spaces where marrow was sucked dry.
Sparks fill my vision and the scent of life takes over.

The bones begin to dance.
The joy creating skin and muscle and fangs and hair.

I continue to sing, my voice echoing on the walls of this desert canyon, and the sound of a rushing river joins. Coyotes howl in the distance. The crackle of fire the only percussion needed. I sing until I can’t anymore, until my throat is dry and the fire has dwindled to embers. And then I hear it—a breath.

It is a gasp, an urgent intake of life.

And then, laughter.

The woman appears, naked and unafraid, her hair blowing in the wind.

She walks up to me and places her hand on my cheek before cracking open my ribcage and crawling inside.

Are you ready? She asks. And I know what she needs—what I need. I rub my nose with my arm and look at the path in front of me, speckled with the night sky. I let the wildness within me rise, my veins filling with the crackling of electricity. There are clouds in the distance and I know a storm is on its way.

It’s me.
I am the storm.

I get on my hands on knees and howl at the moon, the fur breaking open my skin.

And then I start to run.

All We Have is Our Hunger

I wanted to write something today about word making. I wanted to come here, to this space, and share with you tried and true methods that have helped me put pen to page over and over and over again.

Instead, I am showing up with a bottomless rage.

//

A few years ago, I had a dream. In this dream I was in a mall with some friends, and I set my bag down in an area we recognized as safe.

But it wasn’t safe. My bag was stolen.

Devastated, I went to the shop owner to see if it was possible to look at security footage so we would know who took the bag. She didn’t hesitate, and led me to her office where we were easily able to determine who did it. It was a group of grown men. And even though what they were doing in the video was simply stealing something, the actions were violent. I remember their laughter. I remember them intentionally taking this bag because they knew it would hurt me.

I felt violated.

It felt as if I’d woken up from being drugged, sore from the attack.

I began weeping uncontrollably.

“Will we be able to find these men with just their faces?” I asked in between tears.

The woman smiled.

“Oh yeah. We got ‘em. Don’t worry.”

I did get my bag back, and immediately looked through to see what they took. I was mostly concerned about cash I had, but they took nothing material, only my wallet that had my driver’s license. I got worried.

Looking at the security officer near me who’d join the search in helping me find my things, I asked her if I was going to have issues getting to where I needed to go.

She told me no.

“How, though?” I asked, confused. “I don’t have my license — and I need to go somewhere tomorrow.”

She looked at me.

“Word of mouth.”

I woke up then, and as I lay in bed processing the dream, a few things came to mind:

• I was moving deeper into healing. Deeper into my calling. Deeper into my Naming.

• The first thing I heard when I asked why this dream, why now, was this: it is always the woman who save each other. I realized then I was at the mall with my girlfriends, and they were the ones who held me as I waited. They were the ones who comforted me as I grieved. It was the shop owner who helped me find the perpetrators who stole from me. And it was the security officer who protected me and told me she would look out for me, telling her sisters to look out for me too.

• Even more, we save each other through story. In her book When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams says: “My body is my compass, and it does not lie. As women, we are quiet about our personal lives, especially when it comes to sex. We are quiet because there is a history of abuse and hard committed toward those who tell the truth. Marriages are shattered. Families are broken. Judgments are rendered. The woman stands alone. Our stories live underground….Muriel Rukeyser asked the question, ‘what would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.’ The world is splitting open.”
  The security officer told me I would be able to get where I need to go because of word of mouth, meaning the telling of my story.

• In my dream, I found that I had nothing material stolen from me. The only thing taken was my wallet with my driver’s license. When I thought about this fact after I woke up, I realized something else: they stole my identity and they did so with violence. The only way I could get this back was through the telling of my story.

//

I wanted to write about words today. Instead, I am writing about hunger. I am writing about rage.

I am still convinced that these two things are interlinked.

//

A few weeks ago, I saw that Meggan Watterson, a woman who is absolutely part of my lineage of thought, had an interview on We Can Do Hard Things podcast with Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach. I started listening to the first few minutes, and immediately tears started falling from my eyes. They were gathering together to go feral — how they need women around them, individuals who understand what is happening and are feeling a growing rage within them. They were talking about the Epstein files. And they were mentioning Deepak Chopra, who in an email to Epstein said, “God is a construct. Little girls are real.”

I got two minutes in before my heart felt too big for my chest, I heaved a sob, and turned off the interview. I finished the dishes in silence, the tears running down my cheeks.

//

My husband and I were returning home from dinner one night, and I was talking to him about this author I’d heard about from another podcast I listened to at the time. The author was Florence Scovel Shinn, and I’d just spent the last week binging some of her books. This was before the pandemic, before I fully deconstructed from evangelicalism. Listening to these books, talking about these books, still felt risky. But, something had happened in the process. As I was listening to these books, a thought kept surfacing. These books very much center on the power of your words—Shinn says your word is your wand and for years, this was a sticker on my phone, reminding me of the thoughts manifesting into my conversation and life. She also uses Scripture in her work, and this is where the thought kept peeking around darkened corners. This is where I was circling with my husband on our way home from dinner.

“I keep wondering, as she is using these verses that I grew up with and know like the back of my hand, the impact of men standing behind a podium and telling me how to interpret these words.”

“I don’t understand.” He said.

“I mean that I keep wondering what would have happened if I had the chance to read these verses through a different context instead of a man controlling the narrative? How would I have interpreted them? How would I have lived? If someone wasn’t in front of me telling me how to do so, what would I have done differently?”

“Ah.” He replied.

“And if I go even further,” I continued, “how have these interpretations of scripture been used to control us rather than free us?”

We were quiet for the rest of the drive home, but I couldn’t stop thinking about men, placing themselves as the gatekeepers to the divine, telling us what to do and how to feel and what was good and holy and what was decidedly not.

Within a few months of that moment, I would read Mary Magdalene Revealed and the trajectory of my life would irrevocably change.

//

This past week, I sat down at my computer to write. Threads was open on my screen, and a post caught my eye. It was a woman requesting other women who were fed up with men to respond. The comments were filled with memes of women smoking Molotov cocktails, dystopian Barbies lighting shit on fire, and one that stole every ounce of breath from my body.

“Let me guess,” the post read. It included a link. The link was for a CNN article that released in March.

“Rape Academy,” I whispered to myself as I clicked on the link.

And then my world disappeared.

I didn’t write that day.
I haven’t written since.
Instead, there has been a growing rage, a vortex of hunger, opening up within me.

It only grew more ravenous last night when an alert dropped on my phone: teenage boys, taking pictures of their peers who are girls, and using AI to remove their clothes.

The warmth of Eve beckoned me, and I dropped into her fire.

//

Here is where I am at now—where these two disparate things keep circling around each other: if it is the women who will save us, if it is the stories of our sisters that will open our eyes and loosen our chains—then what is THE story I keep pushing away for fear of judgment? What is the thing behind the thing, the truer root that speaks to every story poking its head above ground? Where are the storied grottos waiting for me to baptize myself, like Thecla? And where are the satchels of cardamon and cinnamon so I can throw them on my sisters who are doing the same?

Because I think it might be this rage.
I think it might go deeper and spread wider than I ever thought possible.
I think it might, like mycelium networks, brush up against the stories of my sisters, whispering truths and direction, carving pathways underground for the stories that have yet to see the light of day.
I think it’s time for these stories to stretch into new roots, the rage at our back, with fingers that feel like Eve.
Because we are not the first who have known the silencing power and violence of men.

But there’s another question forming right beneath that one—the one where I hold my rage close and listen for signs of life.

If new maplines are drawn when we speak our truth, then what is this terraform we are creating and who are we bringing along with us? Because if we don’t include everyone, if our love is limited, then we haven’t hit bedrock yet. We have yet to grapple with what is root bound within us—the ways in which this system continues to rip out our tongues and keep us silent so we swallow our words until we become bloated and malnourished.

We cannot transmute this sacred rage within us, pointing us toward what we have always known, if we still listen for the gatekeepers and believe in their version of reality. And perhaps you’re like, well it isn’t that big of a deal. It’s just an ounce. But giving them an ounce of power is still an ounce. It is a seed that is not planted where it belongs—within you.

So what is that ounce?
What is that seed?
And how might that seed grow, if given the proper attention and care?

//

They have taken away our power.
They have taken away our magic.
They have taken away our tongues.

All we have is our hunger.
All we have is this seed.

What is your hunger shouting into the void?
What is this seed you’ve let them steal from you?
I’m holding my hand out, a single root reaching for your soil, and listening to the whispers waiting to be released.

Here is the secret they don’t want you to know: we can take everything back.
Our power.
Our magic.
Our words.
Our hunger.

It is all there, waiting for us to return. Waiting for our sacred rage to burn a path deeper within us. That clearing—that ash—is fertile ground.

Use it.

Drop the seed and feed yourself.
And then write the words you’ve swallowed.
We’ll be waiting with the satchels of spices, throwing them your way, pounding our feet and yelling at the top of our lungs—millions of women reclaiming their power and magic and hunger and lighting the world on fire with their Truth that is filled with sacred rage.

Saturn, Dreaming of Mercury (pt 2)

I grew up with an eating disorder.

I didn’t know it at the time. Wouldn’t know it until I was in my late 20s. I kept having moments where suddenly I didn’t know how I ended up by the fridge eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the middle of the afternoon. Wasn’t I taking a nap? And why was I eating? I started recovery, and in digging into the roots of this disorder, my psyche blew wide the door of memory.

As a young girl, I hid in closets. It was a way to make myself quiet—to allow myself to disappear. By the time I was seven, I’d experienced enough to know that it was best if I stayed as invisible as possible. So I turned to books and immersed myself in story. What was left was my body attempting to process in real time what I was seeing and connecting. Eventually, I just shut her down completely because it hurt too much. I had migraines. My stomach would hurt at random moments where I knew something wasn’t right. I learned the alphabet in sign language, and in moments of anxiety would sign the words, my fingers flying at the speed of light, trying to keep up with the words bouncing around in my brain. My peers saw this and would laugh at me and I would shrug it off, pretending their biting remarks didn’t hurt. When that didn’t abate their teasing, I took to writing the words down with my finger on my clothes, an invisible poem no one could see.

The story was always trying to get out—she never let me go. She gnawed at my edges and thrashed at her cage. Even still, I tried to ignore it for as long as I possibly could until eventually, I disconnected from my body all-together. She wasn’t mine to own anyway, I knew this by the way she was treated. I walked around like a girl made out of air, not knowing that I was allowing for myself to be erased.

So I hit in closets.

My closet.
My mother’s closet.
The pantry.

I would shut myself in our pantry at home and eat spoonfuls of peanut butter, pieces of bread, cookies, tortillas—anything I could shove into my mouth in a short amount of time.

One day, I was in the living room watching television and crying. At school, the girls were talking about how disgusting it is to have rolls of flesh and my thirteen year old self didn’t realize that almost everyone has rolls when they lean over and slouch. That morning, as I was watching television, I looked down and saw a small roll of skin on my stomach and immediately felt their words wash over me.

Disgusting.
Gross.
Ugly.

My mom walked into the room and stopped short at my tears.

“Why are you crying?”

Seeing my mom, I began to cry even harder, aching for comfort.

“I’m fat.” I sputtered.

She looked away for the briefest of moment before turning back and walking past me.

“Then don’t eat the pies in the freezer.” she responded.

The dismissal felt like a knife, and the pain cut deep.

Later that day, I grabbed one of the pies in the freezer and let the cherry sauce sink into my tongue, a wave of pleasure rolling through me. Don’t eat the pies in the freezer, my mom had warned—but the tartness of the cherries mixed with the sweet fried dough begged a different story. It told me that it would cushion the sharp edges of others’ words and hands.

It was a rebellion. A way for me to fight back at becoming the girl made out of air. And in the same breath, it was a way for me to become more invisible.

I didn’t realize it then, but these moments of binging, of finding solace in food, wasn’t just a means to lessen the pointy edges of grief. It was a method of disassociation. The message was clear that if I wasn’t thin, I wasn’t desirable, and by that time my body had felt the hands of multiple people without my consent. It became a double edged sword, because from the time I was a young girl my appearance was scrutinized. Whether it was making comments on my developing frame, showing me the secrets of calorie counting and multiplication necessary to determine whether food was healthy or not, lecturing me about being careful because we just look at food and gain weight, telling me I would be beautiful if I lost weight, or using a trip with friends as a reward if I got smaller—my body was never my own. My purpose was clear: be as small as possible. Do not expand. Do not own yourself.

So I hated anything to do with her. Any moment of recognition. Any attention. My body told me secrets and these secrets brought pain and so in every moment I could I would shut her down or ignore the messages she was trying to send.

Eating became my comfort because for a moment, I felt joy. For a moment, I could quiet the ancestral intuition coursing through my veins that something was very, very wrong.

//

The trickster starts off hungry.

I read this in Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World. Something clicks internally, and a path drops in front of me. Hyde says that this hunger initiates a spark within the trickster that feeds creative fire—a cunning, wise, sideways glance at how to keep their belly full. Fiction is the truth, slanted, I write in the margins next to this paragraph. I’m thinking of Emily Dickinson. I’m thinking of myself. I’m thinking of all of the ways writing and story have saved me again and again and again.

I’m thinking of the hunger that comes from making yourself invisible.

//

In Alice, Through the Looking Glass, we see Alice back in Wonderland, having walked through a mirror to get there. She runs into her friends who immediately tell her that the Mad Hatter has not been himself lately. That he’s going on about something that is impossible at best and proof of his madness at worst. Concerned, she visits him.

“Are you you?” He asks her. It is the question she must answer before he lets her into his home. Others who have visited have come with mimics of their true nature, and you can see the exhaustion and suspicion on his face.

“Yes, yes I think I am.” She responds.

“Of course you are,” he clicks his tongue and sighs in relief. “I’d know you anywhere.”

You see, the Mad Hatter knows something. He saw something—stumbled upon it really—and ever since then he hasn’t been able to shake this knowing.

So he tells his friend, the one he met for the first time years ago and asked if she was mad.

“All the best ones are,” he says.

He tells Alice what he knows. What he cannot prove. How he is desperate for help.

She looks at him, grief filling her eyes.

“But…but it’s impossible. I’m sorry.”

She refuses his knowing. Dismisses it because it reaches across her own understanding of the world and falls off into the realm of this-cannot-be-true-and-therefore-will-be-forgotten. The Mad Hatter explodes with his own rage and grief, kicking her out of his home—but not before we see his bright eyes fade to black and the color on his face shift ever so slightly to a duller shade.

“You are not you!” He yells, but his voice is full of the rage only grief can grow.

//

I’ve always said that when I write, I know when I’ve hit the vein. I feel it. It’s a vibration, or a hum, that starts deep in my chest and snakes around my arms and up my neck into my throat. When I’ve hit the vein, when I know I’ve tapped into something Other in my words, I read them back and tears will immediately form in my eyes. Whatever essence I’ve managed to weave into my sentences bursts from the page or the screen and wraps itself around me in an energy that feels like Truth. Warm, comforting, grounding, protective.

There she is, I always think.

I’ve managed to walk through my own mirror, witnessing the pieces within begging for me to believe in their own impossibility.

I don’t always get there. Sometimes my mirror is cloudy. Sometimes, there are pieces of me who are furtive and quiet, hiding in a closet somewhere, believing that she is best protected if she cannot be seen.

The threads are sometimes loose, mangled, knotted. Sometimes I have to rub the edge of one in between my thumb and pointer, waiting for the release. Sometimes I have to wrap it around my heart, tightening it just so that it knows here, it’s safe. Here, I only exist to listen. Since that class with Dr Cole, I’ve never been one who doesn’t read over her words as she’s writing them. I know. I’m such a rebel. It’s the cardinal rule in book writing: Do Not Read Your Work Until You Are Done. However, I’m always plucking. Always re-reading. Always pulling the threads and organizing them so that I can hear them begin to vibrate against the story, hear that hum of Truth start to weave its way out into the world.

//

Earlier this week, I pulled 8 of Pentacles in my daily ritual. When I flipped the card over to see the energy of the day, I laughed out loud.

There, on the card, was a woman sitting at an easel. Sunshine burst through her windows. Coming out of her canvas, her own imagination breathed into life, was a fox.

//

Alice ends up doing the impossible.

And when she returns, when she goes to find her friend to tell him the good news, he is in bed. His skin has taken on a deathly hue. All of the color and vibrancy and life has been siphoned out of him. He is unresponsive. She leans over him, notices he’s barely breathing. She tells him that she did it. That she helped him. And then, she closes her eyes as a single tear falls down her cheek.

“I believe you, Hatter.” She says.

Slowly, then all at once, he wakes up.

He turns and looks at Alice, smiling. The color is already beginning to return. His hair is popping out of the sleeping cap he was wearing, the white bursting back into a fiery red.

“There you are,” he whispers.

//

The trickster starts off hungry.

When we are not heard—when our knowing is not acknowledged—we experience soul loss. The color vanishes. We shrink into ourselves. We turn ourselves into air.

I was hungry.
I was desperate for someone to believe me.
And yet, I didn’t even know how to explain what I did know—that something was very wrong—and so I said nothing. I continued to shrink. And also, I continued to do everything I could to quell the hunger within. I just had no idea it wasn’t physical.

//

I am Saturn, learning how to be Mercury.
I am the good girl, the rule follower, easing into this trickster skin.

I am no longer satisfied with hiding in the closets of my inner landscape.

My story is no longer thrashing against her cage. Instead, she’s the phoenix taking to the sky, more bird than woman, showing me how to spread these wings of my own.

Saturn, Dreaming of Mercury (pt 1)

I didn’t fail a single paper until I was a freshman in college.

I had spent my entire lifetime waiting until the last minute to write something only to turn it in and get immediate approval. I’d have notes, too. Pressed into the thin college ruled paper, oozing with red ink, messages of support—you should really look into writing, Elora.

I did not know the power of revision because I hadn’t ever had to use it.

And then, the failing grade.

I remember that day with clarity. It was a small classroom. My desk faced the door. I was laughing with some friends when our professor begin passing back our first assignment. It was a personal essay, and I had written about something that at the time felt undeniably true. I didn’t look over it before turning it in; didn’t read over my words to make sure they felt the same way they did when they sang through my veins. I wrapped up the story, stretched my wrists, and shoved the papers in my backpack eager for the praise I knew I would receive.

How smart, he would say. How insightful.
I’m so excited to have you in my class.

I felt confident, clearly. This was not where I experienced anxiety—I knew language, could feel the was she whispered to life within me. Math was foreign to these bones. Logic, too.

I was all feeling.
All heart.
All story.

He placed the paper face down on my desk and when I flipped it over, there were no messages of support. Instead, an F graced the top of the page—underlined twice, for good measure.

This is definitely an F, those lines seemed to say.

I started at it for a moment, thinking it was some kind of mistake. I glanced to the corner, making sure it was my name attached to that grade. It was. My mouth popped open in confusion. If I wasn’t good at this, if I was a failure (as the grade seemed to suggest), then who was I? My entire identity wrapped around this golden thread.

I didn’t know I had to pull it.
I didn’t know I was meant to unearth it.

//

I struggled through the rest of that semester, and found a bit of relief when I moved into the next Literature class. Professor Shelbourne leaned into metaphor—that Greek word that means to carry across. In another lifetime that I could not see at the time, I would one day teach his son, the tables reversed in an odd way that speaks to how time is a spiral instead of a line. In that moment though, he cracked open a door for me: there were messages in stories if we looked hard enough. Kernels of truth buried in words that when squeezed, would emit the sharpest scent of awareness and knowing. If we followed that scent, we’d drop into the thing behind the thing. The both/and of storytellers and myth makers.

With him, I learned the lure of a trickster.
I just didn’t know it yet.

//

Synchronicity always lands within me like a clanging bell. And this week, it’s been ringing—brushing up against my ribcage, demanding attention, forcing me to pause.

It started with a message that came in the middle of the night. I’d woken up at my cat’s insistence she be fed, but there was that smoky aftertaste of a dream that I couldn’t escape. I grabbed her food and leaned over her bowl, waiting for the plop of food. I had my eyes closed, willing that tendril of smoke to turn into images. I was missing something. Or I had forgotten something. There, in that liminal space of morning, I saw a woman leaning toward me. I saw her mouth moving, her eyes wide with urgency for the message she had to give. Her hands were on my arms.

Trickster. She had said. You must be a trickster to escape the enemy’s grasp.

I knew, in that tiny space of intuition where words are not yet formed, that this was a goddess. She’d come to me before in dreams, and her she was again.

With one eye open to see the screen, I fumbled with the keyboard on my phone. I needed to get this message down before I lost it. I needed to get it out before falling asleep again.

//

A few months ago, I was sitting on the couch in our living room when something to my left caught my attention. I turned to capture the movement, thinking I would see a cat lurking in our backyard or a squirrel performing acrobatics in order to steal the birdseed hanging from our pergola. It was neither. I gasped and dropped my book, standing up without thinking.

“Hey love?” I called toward my husband. “I think there’s a fox in our backyard.”

“A fox?” He asked, confused. “In the middle of the day?”

I rushed toward the back door, pulling out my phone. I needed to capture this—it felt important. The fox turned and looked at me through the window before turning and walking toward something. She pounced, and then started playing with it, before walking toward the shadows and collapsing into the grass for rest.

My husband had joined me then, was watching the animal with curiosity.

“Why would a fox be here in the middle of the day?” He mused.

I knew though.
It was a message.

Be alert. The eyes told me when she turned her attention toward me. Stay cunning. Listen to your intuition.

The next day, I pulled cards.
I pulled Mercury.
And right under that word, was a fox.

//

A few days after my dream with the woman, I am pulling cards again. I open my Chani journal to write down my thoughts, and pause. There, on the page right before March turns to April, a past version of me had written the words remember the fox. Stay cunning. Listen to your intuition. Be wise.

I do not remember writing this message to myself, but there it was—moments in time converging, the message clear. It is here I remember the book I purchased about six years ago—The Trickster Makes this World. I went and pulled it off the shelf and cracked it open to the first page.

I guess it’s time, I thought.

//

My junior year of college, I had Dr. Cole for Poetry. I’ve written about her influence before, how her art saves lives pin that she wore every single day shone into the darkness of my psyche with a pinprick of light. By the time I’d reached her class, my writing had been refined. I’d learned that there was no such thing as a perfect first draft. I’d survived the dreaded Western Civ course that every student was required to take, had read the entirety of Dante’s Inferno, had begun to unravel the ways in which history always overlaps into literature—and vice versa. And it was in her class where I experienced the first request for revisions.

I had written a paper on John Donne and the many personas he took with his writing. It fascinated me—tapping into different energies and signing your name a specific way to reference which John the reader was experiencing. I got a B, but Dr Cole pulled me into her office. “This is good, Elora.” She told me. “But there’s something else here. Keep pushing. Revise it and turn it in to me by Friday.”

I balked, but did as requested.
She asked for two more revisions.

At first, I was frustrated. I felt as if there was something specific she was wanting me to see. Something she could see that I could not. I know now that what she saw was my potential—my own insight into this poet who held such gravitas and nuance. The more I chewed on the kernels I found, the more I caught the scent and the deeper I went. There was a truth here I was circling, like a hound.

Like a fox.

The final paper I gave her was an A. It was the first time since high school that a teacher had written an encouraging note in the margins of my words.

//

In the introduction of The Trickster Makes this World, Lewis Hyde mentions of Saturn, dreaming of Mercury. I laughed out loud when I saw that phrase, a deep resonance clanging through my bones like that of a bell.

It’s me, I thought. As much as I hate it, as much as I resist it, it’s me.

I am Saturnian discipline, dreaming of Mercurial freedom.
I am slow, dreaming of quickness.

It’s why I waited to the last minute all those years. If I forced myself into proximity of rushing, I would have no choice but to tap into the Mercurial lion resting in my 10th house. I did not want the Saturnian speaking. The one with so many conjunctions, holding the scales of justice, and resting deep in my psyche in the 12th house—I did not want those thoughts to reach the light of day.

No thank you.

But the kernels of truth are hiding there, underground. It’s the lion that has the bravery to say the thing, but the fox is the one who must be cunning enough to find it.

//

There is something else here—something tender.

It’s the language of the Heartwood, exposed. And as someone with an intense desire to keep certain things hidden, of course I wait to rush through the writing of things. Because then I don’t have to reckon with the truth trying to be discovered. Then I don’t have to face that those words in that sentence make no sense because it is not the thing behind the thing. It is not rio abajo rio. It is just…there. A dead thing. A no-named thing. A thing with no pulse.

The paper I received an F was a paper about my lore. And at the time, I wrote the lore that was acceptable. The stories I believed to be true because they were the stories that were told to me. There were not the stories backed up against the edges of my inner forest, placed in a chest and locked away for safekeeping by my own internal trickster. If I had read the words back to myself, I would have felt the ways in which they held no pulse and that inner knowing would have keened her demand for reckoning.

But it was not time yet.

And so I spoke words made of plastic, until I knew how to speak words made of flesh—how to pull the golden thread of life, of the erotic, up and out of my throat.

Into the Dark, Unafraid

I am in class for Inner Territory work. We begin to talk of current events, of the world-as-we-know-it ending. We’re given a challenge: what is the world we are wanting to create? If we could build a new world—a world that includes everyone—what would that look like? In my head, I see a spiral. I see women, together. I see images just out of focus—just out of reach. I take that moment a seed and pinch it between my fingers, placing it in the soil of my heart, hoping it too will grow roots.

//

I am reading a book—The Rebel Witchby Kristen Ciccarelli. In this book, there are two factions—two warring sides. As we often see in literature, of these two sides were two individuals, in love with the other. Enemies by name, falling in love with the soul of someone they should not know. I don’t want to give too much away, but at the end of this book people are beginning to question the two opposing sides. People are beginning to wonder what could happen if they built a new world. On the eve of their launch into the world as a third way, they host a party and everyone begins to dance. We read these lines:

It was a world where enemies could be not just allies, but lovers and friends, and most of all, equals. It was a world where no one needed to hide who they really were.

I place the book down, close my eyes, and find that seed buried months ago. I rub it between my fingers, feel the hardened edges as soil gets under my nails. A memory resurfaces.

//

I am 20 years old, lying in the dark in a room at my grandmother’s house. My boyfriend, the man who will eventually become my husband, sleeps in a room down the hall. My sisters are with me, curled up against each other on the full size bed. I am sleeping on a cot. Or trying to sleep. In another world twenty some years later, I will have a friend who tells me that weird shit happens to you at night, Elora. But I do not know her yet, and I have yet to make the connection of how the night curls herself around me, making me her secret keeper. And this night, this particular night, I am feeling the suffocating fear of mortality rise up and settle in my chest.

I’m going to die young, I think.

I do not yet know how to decipher the Truth from the Fear. I do not yet understand the ways in which my nervous system has frozen in place, hiding secrets from me out of safety and protection. If I knew then what I know now, it would have broken me. Instead, all I know is the way my arms feel like lead. The way the pricking of my skin feels like a message from the Otherworld.

I sit up straight, staring into the darkness, as if I look hard enough, I can find that point in my not-so-distant future where I stop breathing. It feels like it could be right now, the way my heart is rattling inside my chest. It feels like, with the heat radiating up my spine and grabbing hold of every vein, I might combust in this room. I throw off the sheets and stand on shaky feet. Walking toward the door, I blink to steady my vision. I just need to get down the hall—I just need to open the door to the other room and feel him by my side. I just need. As expected, my love rests in bed, quietly breathing. I crawl next to him, startling him only for a moment before he pulls me close. I wrap my hands around his arms and close my eyes. We say nothing. He doesn’t ask why I’m there, and I don’t share the thought that just landed right in the middle of my hope for a future.

A few months after that moment, I will be in Idaho in a one bedroom log cabin. I will be sitting on another cot, during the bright sunlit afternoon of summer. I will be days away from 21, where only my little brother will remember my birthday. I will hear the footfalls of my great grandpa Joe walking into the room and collapsing onto the cot next to me. He’ll pull off his boots and look me in the eyes.

“He’s coming over today.” He will tell me. He will say the name of someone I’ve known my entire life. This time, though—this time feels different because there are those pinpricks against my skin again. There is that lightning in my veins—the heat that feels as if I will combust. There is that clouded vision turning black around the edges.

We’ll hear the crunch of gravel as his truck turns through the gate and there will be a death. A before and after. Who I was that night in my grandmother’s house is no longer, because now my heart is pushing me off that cot and out the front door and behind that horse trailer. She is bursting through the seams of my t-shirt. She is yelling at me about danger. I am wiping tears off my cheeks and I don’t remember when I started to cry or why. The gate is wide open, letting his truck through, and a gate has swung shut inside of me—refusing entry.

//

I turn 44 this year.
I no longer believe that I will die young.

I have uprooted this thought in the land of my heartwood, the brambles of my inner territory where wild things grow. This thought remains as a grave, marked in stone. I brush my hands against it, feeling the rough edges underneath my fingertips. I know now the outline of truth this thought was bringing me—the boundaried land of my rebirths. I know now it was the birth of my oracular knowing, and with it, the death of who I thought I was in this life. Since that moment in my grandmother’s home, I’ve experienced a myriad of rebirths, all with the same hint of death. I am a Scorpio Rising with significant 12th house planets—I am no stranger to the ways in which our traversing into a new landscape and experiencing an initiation—a rebirth—requires a death.

And yet.

There is still a particular keening when it comes to me imagining the future. I know now this is a trauma response. I know now this is a protective mechanism of my mind, anchoring me into the present so I can survive. No, don’t go there—not yet. There is a real and present danger here you must reckon with first.

So it’s no surprise I shut down when approached about what I envision for the future. I didn’t even know my favorite flower until I was 33 years old. I had no idea I could stretch into this skin and provide myself with the expanse my soul so desperately craved. And now that I know the feeling of pomegranates dripping down my chin, I find myself comfortable in the dark. I’d rather hold the lantern for others as they traverse through their untamed wild lands of creativity than point that lantern to my own future and dream of what could be birthed. I am familiar with, intimate even, the process of death.

I am still scared shitless of the Return.

//

There is a theme that has resurfaced for me lately—the one of Alice in Wonderland, dropping down the tunnels, merging herself with another world. It speaks to me of Persephone, and the more I see this nod toward Alice in my day-to-day, the more I pay attention. A few years ago, I woke up with the phrase you are Persephone hanging over my dreamlike state. I balked at first, pushing away the thought as nonsense, but the more I dove into her story, the more I recognized a resonance—a kinship. The spiraled similarities here are still forming, but both of these women know how it feels to drop into the underworld only to return with stories of below.

They lay themselves in their own grave, only to return—rebirthed and renewed. And they return with vision; with clarity of what comes next.

//

I’m seven when I first start dreaming about him. I remember it with clarity. I’m at work with my mom and reading books in the waiting room. I sit on the couch, reaching for the next story that will catapult me up and away from the overwhelming blue of the room. Blue couches, blue carpet, blue walls. I love coming to work with my mom, but I do not understand monotony of color.

I choose the next book in my favorite series: The Babysitters Club. It doesn’t take me long to read the entire thing — maybe a a few hours. Within minutes I’m lost in the world of these characters I see as friends. I look up from the last page and sigh, satisfied. One day, I’ll be as cool as Claudia or Stacy. I know it.

And then I blink and am lost in a daydream that hits me with force.

I’m not sure exactly where I go that day in my mom’s office—it’s somewhere deep where thoughts turn murky but tangible. Somewhere we’re given hints and visions of what’s coming. It feels like electricity dancing on my skin. It feels like the ocean’s rhythm deep in my veins. I inhale deeply and close my eyes, afraid the feeling will leave me.

What comes next is a deep knowing.

I would fall in love one day. That’s what I see: me in love. It’s me and some figure, walking hand in hand, a cloud of rosy lavender surrounding us. It’s the first experience I have with intuition and the feeling is addictive. I stand up, the books falling from my lap. Butterflies cause a ruckus inside my gut, and I walk slowly around the room trying to alleviate the way they tickle my insides, my arms moving back and forth like I’m dancing. I feel like I’m floating, but with roots burying themselves deep in the earth, keeping me safe from falling.

This must be what love feels like.

And he’s out there waiting. I can feel him like I can feel my own breath.

You’re out there, I think. You’re out there, and we’re going to fall in love. I smile and run my finger down my braid. You will be my air, and you will be my roots, and falling in love with you will feel like Truth.

I do not yet know about intuition. I do not yet know about rebirth and the compost of what was—what we must lay down in order to move forward. I do not yet know about the ways in which my own oracular sight will blossom and grow in the coming years. All I know is that this moment is a seed. I place it deep within, in the quiet brambles of my inner forest, and wait for it to resurface. There will be other seeds that join this one. Seeds that are watered with the tears of necessary death. For now though, for now all I know is hope.

//

Here is where my Heartwood is pointing me: the space in the middle of the forest. Because in the center of my heart rests these seeds I planted. They are the seeds of my knowing, of the hidden power that lies within these veins. They are the seeds that were buried out of protection and have rested in the soil of vision. And now they are breaking ground. They are demanding water, attention, care. They are desperate to breathe new life into what was once lost. They are whispering that it’s time to return.

//

I am realizing that so much of my hesitancy to vision cast into the future is a hesitancy to embrace life. More specifically, it’s a resistance of embracing me. So comfortable with the darkness of the womb, I am unwilling to experience that first flash of sunlight—that blinding warmth of clarity. As much as death has a sting to it, so does birth, and I am well-accustomed to the bite of compost but not yet familiar with the stretching that comes with breath. If I were to do this, if I were to let myself lean into that breath, then I would speak the truth. The one buried here in this center of my Heartwood forest. The one that has only known soil and womb, grave and compost.

But your breath is your knowing, Mary Magdalene reminds me. It was she who told me this all those years ago, fresh off my dive into Persephone’s lair. I know now she said this to me so I would be ready for this moment—for that first intake of breath.

I am 20 year old me, looking into the dark and seeing the outline of 43 year old me exhaling for the last time before breathing in something new. Something lasting.

Because all of those seeds I planted are blooming. They are Alice’s garden—her wild roses and lilies and pansies. They are Persephone’s meadow—her violets. They are my rose bush. My petals of peonies unfolding. The shoots of lavender stretching toward the sky. And they all have something to say.

//

I sit in the middle of those flowers, that overgrowth of green bursting with color, and let myself breathe.
I let myself know.
I let myself tap into that oracular vein.

The world waiting, the world I am meant to vision, is just within reach. Shimmering with gold and resting in the belly of the cosmos, she too is a seed. I can see her outline, the makings of a spiraled shell—a Fibonacci sequence of nature and life.

In this world, women wouldn’t have to meet in the quiet, whispering secrets and developing a plan of whether they forgive, flee, or something entirely different. In this world, nature would be our partner and our guide instead of a space for profit—an expanse for data centers that suck dry the land and siphon the life force from the area. Children would be free to live, no longer fearing the heavy hand of a father or the sharp sting of their mother’s coercion. There would be no island with dark secrets. No politician hungry for power. There would be beauty, yes. There would be singing. There would be the scribes and record keepers, the archivers of story, the shamanic myth tellers moving society forward through the native tongue of transformation and change. There would be the mothers, gathering everyone close to their chest. There would be the fathers, lifting everyone high above their heads, laughing with delight at the way the eyes always turn toward the sun. We would lean into the erotic instead of shutting her off. There would be no severing, no cosplaying, no overwriting of matriarchal magic. We would move forward as a circle, and not a ladder. We would rest in meadows and point toward starlit skies.

We would never be without, while never missing the noise of once was.
We would answer the call within our soul, rather than listen for the voice of someone else.
We would allow the return, making plans to receive the wisdom of those who have resurfaced from their pilgrimage.

We would look into the dark, unafraid, and know that the breath we see ending is just another beginning—a rebirth into something new.

The Heart is a Door

The heart is a door.

This is what I hear, what I continue to hear, as I find ephemera for a spread in my art journal.

The heart is a door.

It makes me think of Clarissa Pinkola Estes:

If you have a deep scar, that is a door. If you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much that you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane like, that is a door.

I rip the zine from Mandy Steward, grabbing the phrase I need for a specific area of the page. It reads I am a maven for finding portals. And there, on the next page, resting on top of a picture of a door blooming with greenery and snatched from a travel magazine, reads another phrase: Here was a doorway to climb into a place that held everything I needed inside.

All of these things are why my mind is on another thing—a wild thing that grows roots and begs to be seen. My mind is circling it as if closing in on an outlaw.

The heart is a door.

And I, ever the Alice, laugh off the concern and push wide the door that opens into a territory in which I am all too familiar. I’ve been down this rabbit hole before, have felt the lure of the glowing red path that leads me to unfettered freedom.

I also am particularly fond of outlaws, having the hum of the wild frontier and the blood of my great grandma Blanche in my veins.

Down we go, I think as I hold my breath and jump.

---

Very quickly, I am surrounding by the familiar scent of decay. Things have died here. Things were forgotten here. Dreams, long ignored, shrivel and calcify—their bones left along the path.

I avoid those landmarks, knowing they’re not for me. I have my own bones to sing over—dusty and shriveled and isolated in a barren desert—they wait for me.

But first, this.

I have known I would need to return to this space for weeks.

There, to my left, is the redwood. Taller than the breath in my lungs, more robust than the fear of what might come, she waits.

If I look closely, I can see signs of life beginning to bloom along her bristled spine. At some point, she has been chopped—her fossilized branches lay around us but I can still feel the stories they carry.

I sit at her base, my back against hers, and listen.

She appeared for me in another journey—one where I embraced the inner wild and went to see about a woman with defiance in her name. I was shocked to see the decay, and even more so leveled by the way in which this grandmother had been severed. There was still wisdom here, though. Still hints of life.

Which is why I find myself back in this dystopian landscape where I was told that beneath the death—beneath the decay—was a rich underbelly bursting with vibrancy and growth.

I lay my hands in my lap, circling my thumbs together as my mind wanders.

Would she speak?
Would I hear her if she did?

And then, without warning, I feel her move against me—an intake of breath.

I freeze, afraid that any movement might spook her back into stasis.

“You have come to claim your dead.” She tells me.

I turn my head and rest my chin on my shoulder.

So it’s like this, I think.

I did not realize this would be the result, but looking around me, it does make sense. How could I sing over any of my bones unless I allowed myself to claim that which had already died?

Still, I can’t find my voice in order to respond, so I nod.

“Severing happens to us all,” she begins. “It happened to me without warning. One day I was reaching toward the stars and whispering secrets with the clouds. Before I knew it, there were those who laid claim to the pieces of me they wanted, willing to throw away and forget the rest.”

I swallow, recognizing the similarities to our stories.

“Once this started, it was easy for me to pretend it didn’t happen—that the pieces of me weren’t scattered and wasted. But I could hear them, singing the song that only I know. I could feel them like a phantom limb. I had to accept that I had been severed, but I had not been destroyed.”

“I don’t understand,” I whisper.

“Look underneath the branches,” she replies.

I glance around me at the graveyard of what used to be her canopy. Crawling toward piece nearest me, I bend down so my cheek rests against the soil. That’s when I see it.

Life. An entire ecosystem existing within the walls like its own universe.

I gasp.

“How is this possible?” I ask. “There is nothing but death here. You said yourself when I arrived—I am here to claim my dead.”

“I said that’s why you were here,” she admits. “But that was your reason for being here. It’s not why I needed to speak with you—why you were summoned back into this space.”

I run my fingers alongside her grooves, brushing against the tiny leaves bursting through her seams.

“Did you not notice the ways in which life was already showing herself here?” She asks. “Did you not feel my breath when you leaned against me?”

“Well yes, but…”

“You cannot have life without death.” She reminds me. “Every grave, every bit of compost, is a portal. A womb.”

“The heart is a door,” I whisper to myself, beginning to understand. But still…I shake my head, questions continuing to surface. I push my hands against my chest as if I can keep my own heart from cracking in two, the pain of all these pieces of me craving for wholeness and keening for someone to witness.

“How do you walk through the grief though? How do you continue to believe in life when it feels as if everything around you is ash?” I glance around me again, sighing at the desolation. “How do you take these pieces and make them live again? How do you make them whole?”

“You do it by understanding that your magic, your life force, your very existence is not dictated by what others have deemed as true. You run your finger alongside me skin and tell me that you do not feel the exact same hum of life that you feel when you look at all of my pieces?” She pauses. “You stare at my expanse and tell me that you do not see the ways in which I still bend toward the pieces that have been cut from me?”

I look around me, taking in the landscape again through new eyes.

Instead of desolation, I see wild.
Wild growth.
Wild and unencumbered life.
Mossy and earthy and whole in its own right.
All of the pieces, working together, creating something beautifully unique—with her as the center.

“You say you are here to claim your dead so that you may sing life over your bones,” she begins. “But what if there is life already waiting for you to learn your own language of wild? What if all you have to do is walk through that door of creation and bring all of your pieces with you—believing that every single one of them holds meaning and magic?”

“Even the severed pieces?” I ask.

“Especially those.” She replies. “Do not belittle any hint of wild you taste on your tongue—for that is a message from parts of you longing for freedom. Follow their lead. Sit against those liminal spaces just as you rest against me. The answers are there for everything you need to know.”

Her voice begins to quiet, echoing against my skin.

“You are whole, my love—even in the severing. The pieces of you call out not for healing but for you to recognizing them. See them. Love them. That is why you claim them—you are calling back every ounce of magic and power and knowing that you possess. You are walking free and wild with all of your parts in tandem. You are a universe, don’t ever forget that.”

I am about to ask more questions when stillness envelops me. I know then that she’s shifted into slumber and our conversation is over. It’s in that moment a glow appears on the other side of her trunk. I walk over, curious. This wasn’t here before.

But wasn’t it? A thought surfaces.

And then I remember. I did see a glow in her trunk, and nearly walked over to see, but had been distracted by the pieces of women who came before me wailing on their path back to submission. Their grief and fear, too much to bear, pulled my attention toward them and away from the way the light pulsed with mystery. I follow the light, shining in the dark, and come face to face with an entrance to a cave within her walls. I step forward, gingerly, propelled by curiosity. What I see stops me in my tracks, the beauty too much for me to understand.

You are a universe, this grandmother had told me. I didn’t understand what she meant until now.

Because here I stand, in the middle of a cosmic view with nebulas and shooting stars and a galaxy revealing colors I’ve never seen, the hum of her magic and power and life pulsing around me. I laugh out loud, knowing this too is a portal. This too is a door.

And so I jump into her expanse, taking all of my parts with me in the rebirth.

Special thanks to Stephanie Greene for leading me in an Inner Territory Journey where I met this Redwood Grandmother, as well as offering the Wild Soul prompt exploring where outlaws roam.

Maplines of Story

The heat is pressing in today, inching closer and closer to 100 degrees. It’s March, but it feels like July. And my mind is on last summer and the ways in which my creativity and capacity took a hit.

Back in May, I was talking with my best friend. Women are a Dangerous Magic was weeks away from being published, I was weeks away from starting a new role at work, and my creativity was beginning to claw at my insides—begging for release. She’d been feeling the same clawing sensation, and had been writing short stories to satiate that inner fire.

Slowly, a story took shape in my veins.

“I might have something too.” I tell her. “I think I might try and write it.”

I didn’t tell anyone about it. At first, I approached it tentatively—like a wild animal. I thought I would publish it under a pen name. Completely separate myself from the mix; allowing room and space for the story to expand how it needed to unfold. May turned into June, and I started my new role at work.

“You sound different.” My women would tell me in response to voice memos.

And I did sound different. I heard it too. I felt calmer. Safer. There were so many reasons for this: getting out of a toxic environment, tapping into my creativity again, watching my latest book sprout wings and fly—June was, in all honesty, the best month I’d had in a long time. Every day I’d come to the page and every day the words would fly out of me. The story was showing herself to me but most importantly, I was having fun. I was playing with my muse and in response she was giving me ample room for inspiration to grow. Not only was I writing this novella, I had other ideas for other books. I was thinking to myself perhaps I need to create a publishing calendar. Perhaps I might actually have stumbled into a flow here.

And then the floods hit.

All at once, it was as if my flow had been siphoned.

But I knew the culprit. I knew it by the way it twisted in my gut and kept me caught in its snare.

//

Nine months later, I find myself finally writing the final words of this particular manuscript.

In this story, Olivia, my main character, is taking the long road home to reclamation. She’s lost herself along the way—letting go of love, letting go of her roots, letting go of her purpose. Instead, she finds herself settling. She’s returned home, but works at her best friend’s bakery. She also is still with her fiancé who she knows is cheating but can’t prove it. She hasn’t sang in years, can’t remember what it’s like to capture lyrics on paper, and is running from memories that haunt her.

And then her ex walks in the shop while she’s wearing a disaster of a wedding dress and such is the catalyst for her return.

She finds herself, through a lot of tears, and remembers what it’s like to believe in something bright and beautiful.

//

There were so many moments this year where I honestly thought—honestly believed—that somehow the words had left me. So many conversations I had with myself and my women where I struggled with the frustrating truth: when I step away from social media, when I allow myself to respond to Source vs the environment around me, when I get quiet and do the work to clear my channel so that I am receiving the words I know I am meant to share and not a reflection of someone else’s creativity, THAT is when the words return. THAT is when I feel most myself. And yet (there’s always a yet here, isn’t there?) what makes this so convoluted is that social media has been the de facto way that author’s get the word out about the books they’re writing.

So if I stay on social media, and engage, more people know about my books and perhaps I’ll gain more traction.
But if I step away from social media, and focus on writing what I know I am meant to write, eventually I tap into flow and my focus turns razor sharp. My intuition feels fuller—more robust and clear. My channel more alive.

It feels like a simple solution, but also, I am now breaking free from decades of scrolling. Muscle memory is a thing—and so is distraction. To say that it has taken a ton of grit to trust myself and these stories is a severe understatement. Especially with the constant noise of the horrors continuing to persist. It’s 8 of Swords energy. I know this is a web of my own making. I know the culprit is the blindfold I’ve placed on myself, and the trap is me getting lost in an endless scroll. With that scroll, a wall surfaces between me and my creativity. I cannot see the story anymore. I cannot hear the characters anymore. Everything is a fog.

And so when I find myself spiraling, when I’m lost in the sea of anxiety and endless breaking news, when I am overwhelmed by the ways in which those in power are following through long-held patterns of control and abuse—I kiss the wall.

//

I first hear the phrase kiss the wall from Stephanie Greene. She says that sometimes, there are places within us that grow hardened as a way to protect. Sometimes, a wall forms because we are not ready. We are not yet trustworthy with that piece of Truth that has been hidden. And so we wait. We listen. We kiss the wall. We show love and care and remind that part that there is no expectation, only presence. And even this, even waiting for the story to reveal itself, requires consent.

And so I wait.
I kiss the wall.

This looked like showing back up to my forgotten manuscript in January. It looked like purchasing a Brick so I would be locked out of the social media apps on my phone. It looked like letting go of the tight grip of control I had on what I should be doing as an author and I let my intuition lead this Leo Midheaven to where the Sun peeks behind the clouds. It looked like blogging again—letting my thoughts unfurl in a spiral.

It looked like reading through what I had written and allowing the story to show me where to go. I lay my hand on the wall keeping me from my story and I wait for the breath.

This paragraph feels wrong.
This chapter feels too tight.
There’s more here this character isn’t saying.

Slowly, I remember.
Slowly, the story begins to breathe again.
And like my character, I am thrust into a place of reclamation.

I am let through the cracks. I can see the expanse of this particular landscape and I know where to pencil in map lines to my soul.

That’s what writing is, anyway. Carving out map lines to your soul, letting the characters speak the Truth you might be too afraid to whisper, and trusting that the world you’re creating is leading you further in, deeper into your inner knowing.

//

I pull a card this morning as I process what to write today. It’s 3 of Wands. Believe bigger, the card says. And I think of these past nine months—a full gestation cycle. Birthing this story and creating something new, a series of novellas that center on a found family. Some exiled, some hiding, all reclaiming parts of their soul that have been lost and forgotten in their individual ecosystems. But together, they’re creating a mycelium network of care. A pulsing, breathing, organism of community. Inspiration is here, the card reads, but don’t forget to rest.

I laugh to myself, the reminder an echo of truth I’ve heard over and over again the past few years.

With rest, comes clarity.

There has been clarity here. A deeper knowing opening up and gathering me into her arms. A resting place.

There are other map lines I have yet to draw. Other landscapes where I know I must kiss the wall in a different way—show the story I am here, I am waiting, and I am ready.

It’s March, but it feels like July. The world is still on fire, but so is my creativity.

I let the fire burn, lighting the way in front of me.

The Cave of Alchemical Awareness

In her essay on Enchantment, Lisbeth White speaks of awareness within alchemy:

All succesful alchemy requires three elements: (1) a substance to be transformed; (2) a container to hold the alchemical reaction; and (3) energy. In the case of inner alchemies, the container to hold the transformation is awareness itself. Our attention, and how it is held, creates the very container for change.

This is why there is such power in following our creative obsessions, those relentless curiosities. Our awareness—our focus, our attention—becomes the vessel in which the possibility of a new knowingness can arise.

Our awareness ushers in our knowing.

//

My writing has never been linear. Instead, the stories and words loop around themselves in a spiral moving inward, closer and closer to the True Thing. It’s a fibonacci sequence—a coiled snake protectively wrapped around the clarity I’m moving toward. Sometimes, I get too close, too quickly. I rush the process, spooking the Truth into a deeper hiding space, safe from my excavation. Other times I hover, the awareness inching deeper and deeper into my sinew, until I am feeling the heat of knowing so intense I have to be the one who retreats. I am learning what it looks like to wait. I am learning the blueprint of my inner territory.

//

When I was a little girl, I hid in my mom’s closet. Dark like the womb, her scent permeating off the clothes around me, I would push myself back behind the sweaters and scrubs and rest my back against the wall—my feet peaking out from behind the fabric. I would sit here for hours, my mind full of new worlds and possibilities. Her closet was where I learned my poetic leaning. Her closet was where I was safest from the monsters that lurked elsewhere. I would rest in the silence, stories filling the space around me like golden threads, and I would weave them together—creating something completely new. When we moved, my mother’s closet turned into my parents’ closet and my cave of safety disappeared. It was large—there was space. But it wasn’t my expanse. It smelled different. I couldn’t go and hide and disappear; couldn’t close my eyes and weave something new into existence.

So I turned inward, constructing a cave of my own.

//

For the past 16 years, I have had a word carry me throughout the year. In 2019, that word was alchemy. At the beginning of the year, I thought it would be a year of magic. 2018 had been my year to rise—and like a seed pushing through the soil, I realized just how much grit came with finding the strength to get through the dirt and compost in order to bloom. If 2018 was the year I rose, perhaps 2019 in all of its alchemical properties would be the year I would burst into leafy and colorful growth.

I held this belief in my fingers, rolling it around my thumb and pointer as if sanding the edges of something sharp.

It wasn’t until December, when I was writing at a coffee shop on a sunny afternoon, that I fully understood the meaning of the word that had found its way inside my veins—particularly the piece that in order to partake in an alchemical transformation, the thing you are alchemizing is completely dissolved to create something new.

Unknowingly, I’d entered into a chrysalis of my own making. It was needed—but dissolution is never comfortable and often brings the pain of letting something go that has grown attached, calcifying with age.

I was still in the womb. Still in the dark. Still in the cave.

There would be alchemy here—there would even be clarity and awareness.
But I had yet to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays on my skin. I was not ready for this—I still had grottos of my inner territory to discover and the result was exactly what White predicted: with this additional clarity and awareness, a knowing was rooting itself deep into my bones. As the dawn of 2020 started appearing on the horizon, I was not the same person I had been 365 days before.

I was new.

//

I tell my best friend that it feels as if I am in the cave beneath the cave. This isn’t necessarily new for us. My women and I often send the signal that we are deep in the cave and when we do, we know it’s for multiple reasons.

• Wait for me at the entrance, like Ninshubur waited for Inanna. If I do not return, come find me.

• I am currently in the midst of creation. I will return; I just need to time to myself to birth something new.

• I am in the process of excavation. With Hecate at my back, I am traversing the underworld for pieces of my soul. Like Persephone, I will return with pomegranate stained hands and a deeper awareness of who I am.

This moment, when I tell Melissa that I am in the cave beneath the cave, is all of these things.

I haven’t been on social media much lately. I can’t. I tiptoe into the conversation, my head on a swivel, but the noise is too verbose—too glaring. The Truth on display for everyone to see and gawk at, I am aware that a new state of freeze is taking over the collective. We cannot move or act because we are in shock. We are in shock because what we felt to be True has been proven. And now that this proof is being shared widely over and over and over and over again, we are waiting for something to happen. We are waiting because something has to happen. We are waiting because surely that something, whatever it is, cannot be done by us.

//

I have this vision of a group of women in a circle, their backs to each other. Each of them have one hand holding the woman next to them and with the other hand, they grip a lantern so they can see in the dark. They are in the cave. Writing and images line the walls and every so often luminescent dust, glowing in the light, is loosened from the space above them. They are whispering to each other, their words full of magic and memory and power. They are waiting for the threat that is coming—the threat they feel in their bones.

But they are not afraid.
They know the dark because they are the dark—they are intimate with the landscape of this particular womb.
They are waiting, but with the knowing that they are the hunted turned hunter—and now is the time for which they’ve been preparing.

//

I am off social media because I want to remember.
Because I need to remember.

The hum of ancestral knowing has reached fever pitch since the beginning of the year, and I think of Joy Harjo speaking of the act of memory—how quickly we forget when we’re not willing to open our eyes and watch. How quickly we’re distracted. How effective they have been in making sure we have everything we possibly need to keep ourselves small and pliable and stuck. How our ancestors are whispering truths to us if we’re willing to listen, but how we cannot listen if we are allowing the voices of others to drown them out.

How now is the exact moment we must be aware, so that new knowing can enter our veins, and the alchemical process can transform the world around us into something beautiful—our pomegranate stained hands molding a future where caves will no longer be necessary for protection. Instead, we’d use them to commune with each other—weaving the golden threads of those who’ve gone before with the Mother who birthed us into being. That way, this time, we wouldn’t ever forget.

Kindling for Truth

It was a field trip day, and for my small private Christian school, that meant either three things: going to the symphony, visiting the nursing home next door, or walking a few feet further and spending the afternoon at the skating rink.

This day, we got to skate.

My mind wasn’t on skating though—not really. My mind was on him. My most recent crush, and a year ahead of me, I knew he would be going as well. We’d recently formed a casual sort of friendship with him being in band. I also knew his mother, who sometimes helped around school, and for the most part they felt like a normal family. Her, a quiet and submissive woman. Him, a quiet and observant 7th grader with whip smart sarcasm.

So my mind wasn’t on skating. No. It was on the thing that happens at every roller skating event; the thing so many of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s recognize: the couple skate.

Rumor had it he was going to ask me.
Based on the nerves tumbling over themselves in my gut, I very much wanted this to happen.

So when the time came for the couple skate, somewhere in between playing four corners and a chaotic rendition of the Hokey Pokey, I sat on the carpeted bench with my skates jutting out from underneath me, waiting.

I can’t remember what song was playing—knowing the time period, it was probably I Swear or some ballad by Boys II Men. But the opening notes rang out on the speakers and I could feel my heart in my throat.

Would he ask me? Was this another trick of some sort?

I never saw him engage in the cruelty of some of my peers—the relentless laughter at the expense of another was common place and usually stemmed from the other girls my age. I’d grown up with them, some of them since elementary school, and the lore we shared was ripe with hurt feelings and backstabbing actions. For me to worry that this moment was another one of their schemes wasn’t off base.

I’ll never know if he actually planned on asking me, though—because right as the song began and people started pairing up and gingerly stepping onto the rink for their turn at coupled bliss, a shadow filled my vision. I looked up. One of our teachers, a middle aged man with a receding hairline and slacks too big for his frame, was leaning over me—his hand out stretched.

“Would you skate with me, Elora?”

A small smile played at the corner of his lips. There was a look in his eyes that made something inside of me shrivel up and hide. I swallowed, desperately looking around for the boy. He could fix this. He could interrupt this particular nightmare and it would make sense for me to turn down this grown man, hovering—waiting.

Something shifted in the air around us and I could feel this man’s body stiffen because of my hesitancy. Fear sliced through my thoughts, making everything dull. I had to answer him. I had to acquiesce. I had to let that small piece of me that had chipped away by the look in his eyes hide for the moment, now exiled in the recesses of my memory.

“Um. Sure.”

I took his hand, my own palms sweaty with nerves and embarrassment. It was seconds before people noticed and began to laugh, pointing at us.

“Ohmigosh look! Elora is skating with him.”
”Ew, Elora. Didn’t know you liked older men.”

No one stopped him. No one stopped me.
There were other adults present, and they smiled and pointed and laughed alongside the students. But for them, this was a grand gesture. An adult reaching down and lifting up a bullied girl.
A 40 something year old, holding the hand of a girl barely 11 years old, and skating in circles to a love song meant for couples.

I did not know I could say no.
I did not know how to say no.

By this time, my body was very much not my own. I’d been sexually abused by family members and neighborhood friends. My body had imprinted the touch of others, and many of these memories wouldn’t surface for another 30 years. To this day I will feel the hands of someone else—or suddenly feel the suffocating weight of another body on my own but have no anchor of memory to solidify the experience. It’s all somatic.

Which is why my heart tried to beat out of my chest when I felt the threat of this man standing over me.
Which is why I said yes, when everything within me wanted to scream no.

I tell this story to my therapist. I frame it as one of the memories that have recently resurfaced in the wake of the Epstein files being released. I have not gone searching for the contents of the emails or truth of what happened to these individuals, but social media is full of ad hoc posts that contain the most triggering instances of reminders. So it’s no surprise I’m circling back to moments where this systemic approval of pedophilia ran rampant within my childhood—where I was victim and prey.

I tell this story, pausing in between sentences because even now this memory brings a certain nausea with it. And as I am telling it, I watch her face. I watch her mouth curve into a smile. I watch her eyes take on a gentle, approving gaze. She thinks, at first, this moment is sweet. She does not see it immediately as the inappropriate engagement of a grown man with a little girl. Her, an abuse survivor, siding with the perpetrator. I pause.

“This is not something sweet. This is something that has caused me distress every time I think of it. I can feel my body separating from my mind and the disassociation begin. I can feel the somatic clues that something is amiss: a rapid heartbeat, heavy limbs, cloudy vision. He was a grown man. I was a child. This is not okay.”

Her face shifts imperceptibly, but the damage has been done.

And I think of all of the ways we have been complicit.
I think of all of the girls who saw that smile and assumed they were the broken ones—the messed up ones—the ones who made something out of nothing.

//

Twenty years after that moment at the skating rink, I am sitting at my desk. Because of the work I do with a writing community, I am constantly on Facebook. The sun is shining through my office window and the fan above me whirs its steady rhythm that sometimes reminds me of the crash of waves. I see a message come through, and without thinking, I click on the notification.

I am a friend of ______, the message says. I know what you said happened. She told me all about it.

My skin turns to ice and immediately I am hyperventilating. I do not know this man. From his picture, he looks to be in his 50s. His message seems innocent enough, but there is a certain malice to his words that rake over my body. My story, my trauma, is just that: mine. And to have a grown man drop into the inbox of someone he does not know to brag about knowing feels disgusting and cruel and malignant in nature. Without even thinking, my fingers start moving on their own.

Who are you? I ask. Why tell me this?

His response is immediate.

I’m a friend of _____, he repeats. And she has told me how devastated she is about these allegations. About what you said she did. I work with her, and we talk all the time.

He is a threat, and my body reacts accordingly. I slam my laptop shut, pushing against the desk to stand and create distance from those words. He sought me out. He heard my story and searched for me. I do not know him, but he knows things about me—about what’s been done to me.

I burst into tears and run to the bathroom to throw up.

//

In a recent post, Meggan Watterson shares this quote by Audre Lorde—

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my nose holes – everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!”

In her post, she states that for her, the world ended when she read the contents of the Epstein files.
This is the correct response. The world should end for all of us when we realize the ways in which childhood has been preyed on by so many powerful figures. For many of us, the world has ended time and time again when the hands of those who should have protected us decided to use us instead.

She ends her post by lighting the bonfire of her words with this kindling—

I believe Mary. Which is to say, I believe survivors. Which is to say, I believe in myself.
At long last, I have returned my faith to its just place, my own body. My own sacred knowing. My intrinsic, inviolable worth in the world.
One by one, and together, we will know our power.

I read these words and felt the the spark of her bonfire light something within me. I read these words and was reminded of my own so many years ago: write fire and watch the world catch the flame. I read these words and a knowing rage filled my veins.

Enough.

I have had enough of those who belittle or diminish the story of those who have been devastated by another drawing maplines across their skin to claim.
I have had enough of those who hear the laughter of comedians talking about being aroused while holding their infant children and say that “there has to be a deeper context here.”
I have had enough of my own words being caught in my throat because they’re anchored by the stones of fear and shame.

From here on out, I echo Watterson in her benediction. We writers howl and heal porcelain bone, but only when we are brave with our truth—even when it’s scathing and especially when it costs everything. I am done placating men’s behavior because they’re just being nice or it wasn’t meant that way or you’re being too sensitive.

I am sensitive because I know.
I know because I have experienced the way a moment will be exiled and regulated as do not enter, the memory lost to the ether.
And now is the time to call our exiled parts home—to let them know they’re safe.
They do not have to come, but I am building a bonfire out of the words I’ve held inside, sending out the smoke signal of awareness.

I am here, and I believe you.
Which is to say, I believe in myself.

True Name

I've been seeking places of power in a land who can’t remember her own name

She lives
just barely
just weakly
a too slowly, too softly
heartbeat

fading quick
dissipating as I try to listen

And beneath Her dying things 
lies a boneyard 

Do you know the feel of land that has seen bloodshed?

Holy or unholy and 
you feel them both

Sacred and the gross darkness 
overlapping

Some land redeems its power
naturally
through fresh lives birthed on it, lived with it

This stolen land is not that. 
These trees are not that.
These rocks are mostly silent 

only the cries of the innocent
murdered and now
buried beneath her soil
ring out with hard truth 

we have been sold a lie

these handcuffs are not golden 
as we believe them to be
hated but 
accepted, acceptable, necessary

We cannot refuse to see
they are cheap brass tarnished
nickel turned green no
not made for our skin 
suffocating our humanity

For they know
we will stay chained if 
we don't know we are o(su?)ppressed 

if we think only the Other is in danger, not 
our family, our friends, our neighbors, 
our own souls 

if we hate our lives but believe 
what keeps us trapped

if we fear change, so we remain
complacent, compliant, complicit

The truth is

Our hope has felt mostly lost
but
what the they forgot is
what we must remember

Injustice breeds revolution 
and their market is now saturated
with it

We have not been the heroes of this story

we are an enslaved people 
to a broken system
only perpetuated by our own unwillingness
to believe what the rest of the world already knows is true

war is the machine of old men
wielding stolen power
to satiate unquenchable avarice
using the alchemy of our willing submission
to turn our blood into their gold

the oligarchs have consumed this land
and in our fear and apathy
we have helped them

No wonder She can't remember who She is
no wonder we can't remember who we are

And yet...

I can taste it
the thinly woven thread
still there beneath the longing
in the faintest wisp and whisper

Weshallbefree
Weshallbefree
my heart picks up the rhythm
Weshallbefree 
we shall all be free

and it is here I find what we seek 

life will return if we 
cultivate it, fight for it
reclaim it 
T O G E T H E R

so we
street corner protesting, neighborhood patrolling
feeding each other, protecting our neighbors,
singing songs of resistance, speaking truth to power

Hear me now, America
as I speak to this dry, dead, bloody boneyard
within us and without
calling

remember yourself, land of wonders and beauty
remember ourselves, people of joy and strength
remember freedom’s call to “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses longing to breathe free”

our hearts restart with courage 
our bones reknit with peace
our flesh resewn with grace

standing together we
dismantle what was not actually built for
most of us

hand in hand we remember
the true power of this land is found 
in us, Her people

By Melissa Hawks

Awake and Alive at the Death of Social Media

Something happened
when our world became smaller
and our lives became expansive.
Our gathering deemed a threat,
a shift began to happen—
a rift.
A separation.
Our attention spans turned
into gold—
bespoke currency of this particular
gilded age.
What’s real and not real mixed
into a 30 second soundbite,
reposted x5000
and just inflammatory enough
that our dopamine centers sparked
with new energy.
New energy sourced from stale energy.
New energy sourced from a mimic.

Forget Arab Spring,
let’s talk about the colors for spring—
color theory and
what shades you should wear
that bring out your natural beauty;
the beauty purchased from brands
positioned to send money to those who control
like puppeteers—
grabbing land and children and women,
their greed a vortex.
A black hole.
But only a few can wear black—
be careful it doesn’t wash you out and if it does
here is a new filter you can use
while we capture your face
for future surveillance
and control
because we the people is actually
a misnomer.

Forget lessons on how to blow a whistle—
instead enjoy this visit from
men in suits,
asking why you said what you did
in a space you thought was free
but has only ever been free
for a select few.
The world has grown so small,
we watch a father carry
his headless child
knowing that we paid for this.
That purchase—that beauty staple—
that coffee—that capitalistic urge to have more and do more and be more and TAKEMORE
created the monsters
ushering in the dystopian age
that has always been working and churning
behind the veil.

Forget connecting with like minds
and imagining a new world—
forget organizing.
Instead, check out this trauma-informed-thirteen-step-process-to-create-your-very-own-course-and-make-your-money-from-your-phone.
Shhhhh....
do not cry for the child
or the woman
or the people
or the land.
Raise your vibration to 5D,
know you are separate—other.
And you can show this by wearing the exclusive t-shirt expressing your awareness
for only 49.99
Who needs regenerative ideas—new ideas—fresh ideas—
when others can tell you what to think?

Our heads have been in the Cloud,
when we’re meant to have our hands
in the mycellium.
The underworld.
The pathways of soil and roots
leading us to collective liberation—
whisper networks that carry
on the wind.
We’re witnessing the choking gasps
of a system meant to connect
that has been turned into
a egregore for profit
meant to distract
disconnect
disassociate
But we can fight back,
listen for that voice on the wind
instead of the face on the 9in screen
dig our hands into the earth
until we reach
eachother

The Spiraled Roar

Originally published on Substack in July 2025

“I’m probably going to have to mind map this,” I tell Melissa, my best friend, over a voice note. My mind has been orbiting around disparate thoughts for weeks now, but I know they connect. I feel into the way they bend and sway in my mind, hoping for clarity. This is why I’m sending her a message. I need to find their connective tissue.

I do mind map. I begin with what feels central, and then move from there, my frustration growing because everything—and I do mean everything—feels interconnected. Before long, I’ve created a veritable conspiracy board, arrows pointing and swirling across the page toward their targets.

Why doesn’t this ever work for me? I write in the margins. I feel more tangled than before, my footing unsure. And then it hits me: I’ve never been one to outline or plan when it comes to writing. My words form spirals vs straight lines, and in order to find this flow I have to allow them to fall as my brain rushes to keep up, forming connections as the sentences turn into paragraphs. I’m like this with the characters in my books, the plots that reveal themselves on the page, and my life.

And so I do what I always do: I start to write.

I’m scrolling through TikTok when I see something that makes me pause. It’s a video on Scorpio Risings and the contradictory nature of their Leo Midheaven. Not every Scorpio Rising has Leo in their 10th house, but this Scorpio Rising does and alongside my 12th house stellium, it’s one of the pieces of my chart that befuddles me daily. It truly feels like oil and water, at least to me—and I also happen to have a Leo stellium. Being seen should feel like second nature.

But being seen terrifies me.

I think of the ways in which I started sharing myself online. How my heart pounded every time I hit publish. How I slowly became more comfortable with peeling back the curtain into my psyche until things crashed around me and my entire foundation—what I thought I knew—fell like the Tower. I tried to write about it. I succeeded for a good while. And then one night I was on the phone with a family member and he said, “hey so you might want to be careful about what you write about online. People might think you lived a life of turmoil.”

As if that wasn’t true.
As if him warning me about this wasn’t indicative of the very turmoil I was parsing through on my blog.

I’d been skirting around the topic for months—how I had recently had memories resurface that knocked me off kilter. I never mentioned names, but it didn’t matter. The people these posts were about had read them with their own filter of history and knew I was talking about them. And so, the warning. I’ll never forget that conversation. I’ll never forget the way the sun tried to break through our blackout curtain we had over the window or the way my heart started racing out of fear or how our dog’s tail thumped rhythmically against the wall in anticipation. I caught her gaze and she sniffed and fell against the ground on her side, almost as if she heard the conversation and was categorically dismissing the admonishment. I sat down next to her as I finished talking on the phone, my hand on her side feeling her breath move underneath me.

In, out.
In, out.

It was a reminder. A benediction.

A few months later I’m edging against the truth in another blog post, but this time it’s not about family, but about the church where we’ve been partners since before these memories resurfaced. I’m writing about shame. I’m writing about how words mean things. I’m writing about elders in the church saying that those who’ve experienced sexual abuse should and would feel shame and guilt about their abuse—and subsequently, we’ll need to have conversations with them around repentance.

I’m in a gospel counseling class.
I push back, horrified at the suggestion that those who’ve experienced abuse will have to repent of anything related to the violation.
My words are unheard, and so I write, and so comes another warning.

Like before, I don’t mention the name of anyone. I don’t specify that my story is about church. All I share is that I’m in a class and given the writers on the board of that particular site, it could have been any Christian university in the world. It doesn’t matter. I have messages from friends and women within the church who are worried about my heart. I’m called names like divisive and accused of making up lies so that I can clout chase. They demand I take the post down. I refuse. They say words like libel and responsible. I am invited to coffee. I walk around in a trance, triggered once again, my limbs numb from what my nervous system fears is an impending attack.

I don’t know until later that I am already in it.
I don’t know until later that what I am feeling: the racing heart, the blurred vision, the brain fog, the heavy limbs—it’s textbook C-PTSD.

It takes me at least a month to be able to even think about writing on my blog again.

I’d forgotten about these moments until I started seeing sound bites of the contradictory nature of Leo Midheavens.

“It can be hard for you to be seen,” the person says into the camera, “because you have wounds around visibility.”

I laugh to myself.

Oh, I think.

Because it’s not just the examples above. It’s being celebrated for my leadership only to have it turned on me as a threat. It’s pursuing my dream of fostering a writing community only to be labeled a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

It’s having the same amount of Instagram followers for a decade—even though I’ve been doing everything my peers in the publishing industry are doing.

It’s barely hitting $100 in royalties for my books even though I’m literally talking about them all of the time on social media and have invested money in marketing campaigns.

It’s watching others do less, but get so far more in return.

It’s knowing that this post will probably either be lost in the algorithm or somehow be ostracizing in how it’s received. And I don’t mean for it to be—but somehow, that fear always inches closer and closer when I’m sharing a piece of myself online.

And that fear, when left unchecked, can be hard to swallow.

I tell Melissa in my voice message that there’s a through line in these disparate thoughts about social media. Maybe that’s the spiral—my place in it all. “Sometimes I can’t even hear myself think because I’m so focused on everyone else or getting my thoughts into a digestible sound bite,” I tell her. She agrees, and invites me to consider what that might mean.

She’s had her phone in airplane mode for a few weeks now and tells me she doesn’t even miss it—that she used to do this often in order to ground. “I’m so much less anxious,” she tells me.

And it makes sense. I feel it too as I try to extricate myself from the machine. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know how it will remotely help my book sales. But I know something has to change.

I pull cards and am reminded in no uncertain terms that I am not here to do things like everyone else; and that when I try, that’s when I begin to feel stuck.

The 8 of Cups stares back at me, inviting me to that different way. I sit in the quiet, the blinking cursor in front of me, and wait for the words to come.

Magic has always been with me

Magic has always been with me.

I’m four, and climbing the cushions of our couch in order to stand on the top, eyes peering down toward our carpet. I breathe once, twice, and then it happens. I smile. The tingle rushes through my hands like electrical currents and I close my eyes before taking the leap.

I’m seven, and at the dentist. My mom works as a hygienist assistant, and I’m spending the day with her at work. I’m in the waiting room, reading the stack of books I brought with me to pass the time. I stand up to grab the next paperback when my vision blurs and my breath catches. My chest feels like it’s expanding ten times her size before the energy courses through my limbs and I blink back into focus. In that moment I know: I will find love. I feel him like I feel my own blood, pulsing in my veins. For a brief moment, the veil lifted and I saw everything. He will be my air, and he will be my roots, and loving him will feel like Truth.

I lost the feel of her for a while. From the time I was about eight until just a few years ago, the whispers would appear out of nowhere but nothing like the memories of when I was younger. The heat in my hands, the way my very being would vibrate with knowing — she would brush up against me only to have me blink before she disappeared, leaving me wondering where she went. But she never went anywhere, I was just spellbound.

Magic has always been with me.

Twenty years later I’m driving home from work and I hear something that serves as a key to my psyche. The door unlocks and she drops into my chest, the Truth knocking me sideways. She takes my hand and leads me into a cave.

Further up and further in, she whispers. And I know the descent will take me deeper into my own awareness — my own gifts. I grab a lantern and open the door, and then take a step down. My initiation has begun.

Meggan Watterson says that magic is a rebellion. This much is known, given the historical context of the word and the way hackles raise when it’s mentioned. But she also says that so often we rely on the mundane because what we aren’t told about our magic is that it’s a direct reflection of our power and that’s a lot to process when we’ve been fed the lie that our power is in our own weakness and submission.

Awakening the dormant power lying within feels a lot like rebellion to those of us who relied on others to tell us what to do and how to be good. When all along, that Voice has been inside of us. All along, she’s been there waiting for us to climb the mountain of our comfort and smile, waiting for her reveal before we take the leap.

Magic has always been with me.

I feel her in the way my breath quickens when I’m about to speak a truth. I feel her in the way the fire lands in my hands when a message is coming up and out before I can even censor the words. I feel her in the whisper of intuition that happens in conversation. I feel her now, in the way my chest constricts before expanding out out out into the ether of knowing. I blink, and she stays. I breathe, and she deepens. The fire in my hands and the Truth on my tongue — she has landed in between my ribs, settling in to her home.

There is No Limit to Love

“She asked me if you still love Jesus.” She tells me this, quietly laughing and rolling her eyes. She’s rolling her eyes because to her, this is a ridiculous question.

I wrinkle my forehead.

“Why?”

She shrugs.

“Apparently she thinks you worship the moon now?”

I blink, confused.

“Is this because I posted the picture about Mama Ocean and the pull of the moon?”

“Probably.”

I rock Jubal a little bit more, lost in my thoughts. Something about the question, and family members talking about my faith behind my back, rubs me raw. I suck my teeth and take a deep breath, trying to shake it off, but the feeling persists.

It persists because I know the truth. The question wasn’t really does Elora still love Jesus. The real question — the unspoken one — was does Elora still believe the same thing we do.

And the answer to that is most assuredly no. But I stay silent and I listen to my sister talk about the rest of the family and the things I don’t know that everyone else does. I stay silent, and listen, and fall back into the pattern I know well — the role I’ve played my entire life. Somewhere deep inside, I know this behavior comes from the little girl who realized quickly that acquiescing is so much better than questioning. I learned to speak in code from an early age because nothing was safe — even my journals were fair game and read on occasion, the discipline and grief and interrogation coming quickly every time my private thoughts were made public.

So I turned to metaphor.

It’s almost as if I’ve always been an outsider, even though our roots are tangled together.

//

I used to speak in code, but eventually I learned how to speak my truth. I practiced it often, spilling my words across the page, and learned how to articulate the feeling that wrapped around my gut just so. I pulled threads and pushed my hands through the dirt of my psyche and did my best to write my way out.

But then he told me to be careful what I put online, because others might think I lived a life of turmoil as a child. I think back to this now, having a few years of separation, and I laugh at the glaringly obvious deflection. Once again, what was said wasn’t what was meant. What was meant was don’t write about that online. If you write about that, I will have to reflect on my own involvement in this trauma, and I can’t look at myself in that way. I’m not ready. You speaking truth is threatening the family dynamics and so we need you to be silent.

And so I was silent.

For almost ten years, I’ve said nothing.
For almost ten years, I’ve censored myself.

But I cannot do it anymore.

And if this means unrooting the family tree, then so be it.

//

Do I still love Jesus?

The truth is I’ve never loved him more.

You tell me that he was always with me, but I already knew this. I felt him in those darkest moments. But I also felt her, and I had no way of knowing who she was until recently. The Wild Mother, Mary Magdalene, The Tower — the names she’s whispered to me in the quietest moments have been numerous. She is the one who helped me break free. She is the one who helped me see that while I was not alone in the moments of abuse, it does not negate the fact that those who should have protected me did not; some of them even perpetuated the pain.

She points me back to Love, every single time.

And so when I pray, I tap into the elements. I pull in the earth and fire and water and air. I look to the North and the South and the East and the West and remember all over again that there is no limit to Love. I go to the space in my mind where the waves crash against the shore and Jesus pulls me into his arms and kisses my forehead. I listen as he tells me it was him who sent Mary Magdalene to me. I watch as they introduce me to Morrigan, a protector with a crow on her head. And I let the tears wash down my cheeks as I feel them anoint me.

“Tell them I sent you,” Jesus says.

I feel the fire in my hands and in my chest and the breath in my lungs, the Spirit rooting me down to the depths of the ocean and I know that I know that I know…

it is time.

The Unknown Waters of Truth

I have a question for you.

What if you let it all go?

What if you made a list of all of the expectations you carry around your neck and set fire to the lies that burden you with shame? What if you finally stood in your power and who you know yourself to be creatively?

What if you let your own inherent magic shine through for everyone to see?

Does this feel threatening?
Impossible?
Scary?
Tempting?

Of course it does. Growing and taking the risk of stepping into our true nature feels like the biggest leap because up until now, we didn’t understand there was an internal compass that would show us where to go. But it’s there, and it’s showing us our True North in a way we cannot deny anymore.

You’re being asked to let go, and heal, and breathe in something new.

This is the energy for the week.

You’ve been spellbound for so long, unable to use your voice or harness your intuition without the voices of others reaching in and telling you where to go. It’s time to release. It’s time to unravel the Truth from the fray.

And only you know how to decipher between the two.

Here’s the catch: until you do this, until you release the grip of safety and belonging you have wound so tightly in your fist, your creativity will continue to sputter in and out of consciousness. Until you take that breath and let it all out — the residue, the toxicity, the filtration of false beliefs — you’re not going to be able to truly access your inner knowing or the Creative Voice that belongs to you alone because you’re breathing in someone else’s air. You need new air that’s not filled with the dusty remnants of another’s creativity and insight.

It will feel a little like stepping off a cliff and a lot like diving deep into unknown waters, but you were made for this moment.

So claim yourself, love.
Claim your power.
Close your eyes and breathe deep the scent of your own alchemy. Notice the way it expands around you and fills the places you thought were lost.

Burn away the lies and the expectations that have weighed you down for so long and believe that the bigger magic you were meant for will find you because She will. She will find you because She is already in you.

Do you hear Her?
She calls to you now.

Breathe in.
Breathe out.

And so it is.

A Grenade to the Chest

I’ve been restless all day.

Yesterday, hit with a wave of grief, I went under for a spell only to resurface today wondering about this new landscape I find myself. Somewhere inside, there is a piece of me still curled up in the fetal position — waiting.

For what, I don’t know.
Probably relief from the incessant knocking of a heart ripped apart.

There is a memory that keeps popping up in my head. I’m in high school, and attending a private Christian school located in a church. I frequent those halls more than I do my own home, and this week is no different. In fact, It’s a week I’m there even more than normal because there is a voice coach who is visiting the praise and worship director. He’s giving lessons, and because I am part of the worship team at school and church, I am there and listening to his instruction. It is here I learn to sing from my gut, blowing out the air and feeling the notes in my stomach rather than my throat. I’ve been singing for at least five years now, and in a few summers I will be traveling with my high school worship band across state lines and meeting people who will change my life.

But first, this memory.

I’m in our living room, pressed up against the wall. My mom is sitting on the couch, glasses on and a Diet Coke in hand. Her eyes reveal her exhaustion, and I know she’s about 30 minutes from calling it a night and walking upstairs to sleep. My dad though is lit from within, his eyes sparkling.

“Sing it again, honey.”

I glance at him, finding my breath. I open my mouth and let the words fall out, finding my rhythm. It’s a worship song I’ll be singing for the church in a few weeks.

Shout to the Lord, all the earth, let us sing.

He leans forward and touches my stomach with his hand; I watch his hand and tighten in advance of feeling contact. I drop the notes, feeling them expand in my chest, centering in my lower gut. My breath rushes out and he raises an eyebrow.

“Good. That was good.”

I smile, basking in the praise.

I think of this moment tonight as I give into the restlessness and grab our dog’s leash. I need to walk. Whether I’m chasing something or running from something I don’t know — but I am hoping that putting one foot in front of the other under the fading colors of a night sky will crystallize something for me.

No one tells you about the way grief comes in and washes away everything you knew, reorienting your place in the cosmos. Prior to yesterday, I laughed off related topics. Nodding and shrugging my shoulders. My therapist would being to tip-toe around the issue and I’d sniff and quietly bring up another situation.

Sure, I would say. Who doesn’t have that trauma?

I never once mentioned that in order to talk about it, we’d have to accomplish the impossible because ask me anything about it and my words completely disappear, my mind and body stuck in a trauma response of freezing for protection. But then memories come crashing through my mental sky and I feel myself readying for the flinch — knowing the devastation this will bring. Maybe if I close my eyes and turn my head it won’t hurt as bad? But it still greets me, first thing in the morning, and I collapse in our closet and shove a towel in my face to quiet the sobs.

I feel them in my gut, blowing out the air and gasping for the words to describe what it feels like to have a grenade explode in your chest. Instead, I find myself picking up the shrapnels across my memory, each one a piece to a larger puzzle I’m not sure I want to complete.

Caught in a Web of Your Own Making

Sometimes, feeling stuck isn’t because of an outside force.

Sometimes, we’re caught in a web of our own making.

And this can look like backing ourselves into creative corner and refusing to see (or hear!) the direction our story is going or we ignore the very real intuitive nudges that come for us in the heat and magic of creation. We get stuck. Even though we know the direction we’re going, even though we can see the destination in the distance, we’ve caught ourselves in a sticky situation and can’t get out because we’re pretending to not know what we really know.

That’s the Creative Energy this week.

So how do we get unstuck? Well first, you have to acknowledge what you are pretending to not know. You have to dive in head and heart first into the reality that there is something in the discomfort of starting over in order to salvage the story you’re meant to live. What signs have you ignored? What messages have you received?

It’s time to be honest, love.

You have to look for where you’ve honed in on a single element, forgetting the rest. You cannot allow the fire to rage without also acknowledging the waves that wash everything away, showing us what remains. You cannot truly find your essence if all you’re doing is walking with your head in the clouds.

We need temperance.
So where are you resisting equanimity?

Every story of rebirth first begins with death. Maybe it’s time for you to leap. Maybe it’s time for your journey to the Underworld to begin. Who knows what you might discover if you finally lean into that intuitive nudge.

Sundays with Maggie, vol. 2

Lost you in the border town of anywhere
I found myself when I was going everywhere.

Listen to Back in my Body here. 

I realized the other day that I haven't been to a dance class in almost two years. I've danced, sure. I've even taken part in a number of online classes. But this morning as music filled my senses and I found myself moving my hips to the beat, I recognized the absence of clarity I used to feel when I made it a habit to consistently let everything go except for how my body reacts to music. 

When this was the norm, I finally understood what it meant to be in my body. 

Even then, I hesitated with certain moves. I doubted my own ability to let myself go and be in the moment. I knew, intuitively, how to do the moves and what it would look like and feel like to allow my body the fluidity, but narratives kept whispering in my veins, ones about the breadth of one's body limiting the ability to truly move. 

Until I started taking lyrical classes. 

I'd seen the video with Galen Hooks' choreography where the dancers poured every ounce of their soul into Bishop Briggs' song River. I was in awe and felt the tickle in my chest — my intuition prodding me to try it. 

I need this, my body whispered.

A few months later, I saw River on the list for lyrical dance and signed up with no hesitation, and the class proved my theory that emotion and story can be built into dance. 

I also realized that the more I embody myself, the more I allow the movement of energy to run through and release the stagnant pieces, the more creative I am in writing. 

Creativity begets creativity — every time. 
It also helps me heal.

"It's my job to go out and see the world and report back — to feel things fiercely... 
And it's my job to be present." 

- Maggie Rogers, Back in My Body documentary 

One summer I was on my way home from work and Back in my Body came on my playlist. I felt the tears come immediately. I was heartbroken, but hadn't really allowed myself to fully feel the extent of what this meant for me and where I needed to go next. This song, already instrumental in reminding me the importance of embodiment and being true to what I'm feeling in the moment, brought me back to my body in a way that was immediate and with an intensity I hadn't felt in a while. I cried the entire way home, and then snapped a picture so I could remember. I realized I hadn't been present to my own grief, I simply moved it away - pushed it aside for later. Knowing full well later wouldn't ever really come. I wouldn't ever welcome the reckoning. 

I never do.
But it always returns. 

A Meeting with Mary Magdalene

It’s early — or late — depending on how you view time.

I’ve been dealing with bronchitis a few short weeks after recovering from a sinus infection that turned into pneumonia. I’m tired of coughing. Tired of hearing the rattle within my chest. Just tired.

But I wake up coughing, and after taking a drag from my inhaler, I find myself jittery and awake. I do what most do these days when faced with insomnia: I scroll TikTok.

I stumble on a video of a woman in the woods, in front of a massive tree. Something about her smile has me pause the scroll. As I listen to her message, I feel my heart rate quickening.

This video was for me. It’s too coincidental to not be relevant and the messages are clear.

I close the app, sit up in my bed, and breathe deep once, twice, three times.

I call all of my power back to me now, I whisper.
I say it again, and again.

In my mind, I see tendrils of gold flying toward me and embracing my limbs. I’m glowing, my sacral on fire. I feel the fire in my hands and I smile. I know this invitation. I’ve come to recognize it as part of my magic.

I activate the power lying dormant within me, I say. My voice echoes on the air around me and I feel a chill down my spine. My hands tingle.

That’s when the meditation begins.

I find myself at the beach I know so well, the cottage to my right, the beach grass swaying in the breeze and lining the path. I walk my way toward the water, my feet feeling the sand beneath me. I assume I am headed toward the cottage with the redwood tree in the entrance, but instead, I see Him standing there leaning against the cliff.

“Hi.” I whisper.

He smiles at me and takes my hand.

“Hi, love.”

“I’m tired,” I lean my head against His shoulder and He kisses the top of my head.

“I know” He says.

I stand up then, facing HIm. I feel my chest rise and fall with frustration and I open up my arms waving around me. Suddenly, it’s as if everything I’ve walked through has come up to the surface and I feel the confusion and fight the disassociation. His eyes study me, always kind, always a hint of a fire hidden in the depths.

“So…what am I supposed to do with all of this? How am I supposed to move forward?”

He leans in and pushes some hair behind my ear.

“Tell them I sent you.”

I swallow. That seems like a tall order, and I feel myself shrinking all over again.

Surely you don’t mean me.

But He does. I hear it in His voice, and I know this version of Him. He continues, telling me I have targets on my back. That others are beginning to notice my power, and that they don’t like it. He takes His hands and outlines my field of energy and I feel contained.

He looks at me again and His eyes are blazing.

“They will not reach you, though. You are protected.”

We sit there for a moment, studying the waves crashing against the shore, holding hands and resting in each other’s presence. And then I hear footsteps and look up, seeing her walking toward us, the red robe blowing behind her. She’s smiling, and beckoning me toward her.

I look at Jesus and He smiles, nodding toward Mary Magdalene.

“Go, love. It’s okay. I sent her to you.”

So I walk toward her, noticing a fire burning. She sits next to the flame, and reaches for my hand. She tells me secrets of my lineage — of the ones who circle me and provide protection. Of the ones who are meant to witness. Of the one who is my mirror.

“You have been a fierce protector of so many people for so long — now it’s time for you to experience that for yourself. The power within you is awakening, and within that power is a need to rest on the ones who can hold you.”

And as we named the ones who are in my circle, I saw them in my peripheral vision begin to circle around us — their skirts and hair blowing in the wind, the thrum of magic channeling between all of us, like golden threads weaving in and out and connecting us.

A sacred circle; a chord of three strands.

And as I scanned the areas of my own energy needing a dose of that golden threaded power, I heard her whispering over me your breath is your knowing.

When Grief Comes to Visit

I wake in the morning with the familiar heaviness bearing down. It was a night of little sleep, so I lean into the exhaustion. My son is up, and wanting company in the living room, so I rub my eyes and grab my robe and tie it around my waist and pull it as close to my skin as I can for comfort. Once he’s settled, I whisper that I will be back, that mama needs to write.

I do not tell him what I need is to cry.

I do not cry, but I do get words out in my journal that won’t ever see the light of day. The heaviness lingers.

Words are spells, dear one, I hear as I spill myself on the pages and I remember. The night before, I saw something pass about a woman putting her daughter to bed and holding her close and murmuring, “you are so easy to love” as the breaths deepen and sleep takes over.

Ah. There is it.

I move over, give space for Grief, and offer a small smile.

“It’s been a while, friend.”

I run myself a bath, the steam rising as the water collects. I opt for the bath bomb I’ve been hanging on to for a special occasion, complete with a crystal marked for healing. Seems appropriate. I sink into the heat, my breath catching and serving as a reflex of the tears waiting to release, and I clear my throat. I scroll through the meditations and land on one I can’t move past, and press play.

The tears come, then. Welcome, aching, cleansing, heaving. I cry so hard a contact falls off my eye. I fold into myself, wrapping my body in the tightest hug imaginable.

I know, I know. It hurts. I know. I’m here.

I learn all over again how to mother the wound.

The ache doesn’t disappear. I don’t magically bounce out of the water ready to tackle the day. In fact, the ache eases into the next day, and I sob while watching TikTok videos about our inner child and continue while attempting downward facing dog and cat-cow. There is no saluting the sun this morning. There is, however, a little lion using my tabletop pose as an opportunity to give his stuffed zebra a ride. I smile through my tears and whisper thank you before quietly asking if mama can have some space.

I walk through my day as best as I can, most often wrapping myself in some type of blanket or sweatshirt or protective outer layer. I clean the boxes and books piling up on our kitchen table. I finally take the stack of mail and throw away the coupons we’ll never use. I do all of this while Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ blesses me through my AirPods, reminding me what happens when women sing over each other’s bones. I tend to my plants, pulling off the dead pieces and greeting the new buds and thinking to myself how this simple gesture, this simple care, is more than I’ve received for most of my life.

The tears come again, and I let them fall. I make myself some lunch and drink some water and turn on the Maggie Rogers’ album I know by heart and begin to write.

I start to sing, feeling the vibrations in my bones.

Come awake, love.
Rise up, dear one.

Further up and further in, I am becoming Someone new.