Moving on from Pandemic Trauma
A Poem about Nature
What do you want to make space for in this present moment?
Each of us have different places where we have been through something that we didn’t get the empathy we needed when we needed it. Others didn’t understand or couldn’t relate. Or we didn’t know how to share it in a way that allowed them to empathize. Or maybe they were too scared to speak up and say, “I went through that too.” Or maybe they listen and they are actually of the perspective of people who hurt you, and they feel inner conflict around their own beliefs. Today I was reflecting on some of my pandemic related trauma. I’m not going to go into it here, but instead share a realization I had about my readiness to release it, after expressing in a more honest way than I had in the past to anyone outside my family, how I felt to a a person I had a deep convo with the other day. The person I shared with is a beautiful person but wasn’t able to empathize with what I went through even though I had just given them empathy for their trauma/discrimination on a different topic. I had attempted to even explain how other types of discrimination I have experienced including anti-semitism (FYI if you’re new here, I am a non-zionist half Jew born in a Sufi community who became an evangelical Christian as a teenager and then realized pre-Patriarchal Christianity actually has more in common with the purer aspects of what is called Paganism, along with certain traditions in the East than with what passes for Christianity according to Nicea 325AD.) I realized it is really time to let this go. It doesn’t feel comfortable as an identity anymore, and like the snake shedding skin or the caterpillar turning to goo, I realized, it’s just not relevant to the life I want to live, that I am aligned to live, to stay stuck in it. Also, there is nothing to be gained from it but a loss of vitality. It is a liberating place, even when not fully healed, to hone in on some memory, some felt perception in the body and realize,
“I am ready to let this go. It is not relevant to me anymore, as holding on to it does not serve my life. I fully acknowledge the legitimacy of what I went through and how I felt. I offer myself tenderness, compassionate grace. There is nothing to be gained from holding on this I am energetically in a place to release the energy spent rehashing it in my body biochemically. I am allowed to let go of holding this in my body and my energy field. I am allowed to feel good and to reclaim my energy to focus it as I choose.”
Milkweed & Butterfly: Heroes of Nature
A poem about ways we can be heroes in our lives without using force
Victim and hero are two perspectives on the same occurrences.
Sometimes they are separated by time
Sometimes surrender is more heroic than fight
Because a caterpillar has to become goo before it can take flight
There is milkweed in my garden you cannot see
This the only season in which you may not see it in my yard
Because the seeds have gone invisible
On their way to shooting up
This is actually their greatest hour
The miracle I don’t understand
Can’t see
Wait a few weeks
Those brave little sneaks!
That dared to land from their heavenly floatation
And give in to the gravity
Of soil’s invitation
To rise from the ground up
In Joyous Jubilitation
Just by being to feed the caterpillars
When they are so tiny you wouldn’t even know someday they’d have wings
And that milkweed will give itself
To help them become that thing
It will stand as sentries
Gently waving
Strong
And Seen
Giving and serving
Just by being a
Hero
Milkweed
King
Upon which
Might land
A Butterfly wing
That etherial-yet earthly color of wonder
From the goo
And the courage to go within
To face the battles
Only the Future Self
The Imaginal Self
Can Win
Pollinator
Just by tasting what it finds sweet
It serves all the food chain
Without its surrender
It would never have become
This able to bless all life
Just by coming alive
To its own Sheer Bliss
Each flower
Each Kiss
Lover of All Life
THIS
Love,
AK
