Old ways of being and seeing our journey are no longer working, crumbling even,
around us.
Let us find a new way.
Let us use the magick…of re-membering…to open a road together.
Let us look deeply into where we’ve been, where we are and why we’ve come here.
Let us breathe new life into the story.
Let us open a new way,
At this crossroads,
Together.
.
I woke this morning, with this poem running through my mind. It is a first attempt at describing the work I want to offer in service to others, a way to verbalize the many strands of the web that wants to work through me. It is an offering called Re-Storying, and it seeks to help people look at their stories, especially stories around illness and shadow, and to see these stories in a new, more empowering way.
It has taken me a long time to feel confident enough to say I have something to share that will help others, not because I think I am a horrible person, but because I still struggle. Something in me feels like I somehow have to be perfect in order to be qualified to assist another through their darkness.
But I’m not perfect, and that’s okay. That’s the old story I am breaking free from, my own crossroads. Of whether to keep hiding what I’m here to give because I haven’t reached some sort of Holy Grail…or to step forward with my heart’s longing to help and to see what my perfectly imperfect life can lend others in their search for wholeness.
What I do realize is that I have taken a life that is filled with typically shame-inducing experiences and have managed to re-story it into one of deep initiation and sacredness. I have written about this in my memoir, Food Memories, but I have also spent the past twenty years actively living out and believing in that re-framing. I have chosen to not let the cultural projections of what I’ve been through, including even the Recovery culture, deter me. Don’t get me wrong…I have fallen over and over again into forgetting who I am and what the hell I’m doing here. I have wept and doubted myself and my attempts to re-member myself, my true story, in the sheer intensity of the projections that sought to tame me.
I am not perfect. But I do feel that my journey, and that imperfection is incredibly sacred. And that is what I think I have to offer, helping others find that in themselves no matter where they are in their life process.
I am Letting Go of the story that I am confused. I am Letting Go of the story that I don’t know what I am talking about. I am Letting go that I have nothing to offer. Or perhaps, it is indeed that I have Nothing to offer, that beautiful place of sitting in the not knowing and finding magick arising from it. I am Letting Go of the story that even Nothing, silence, presence is somehow unfit to offer others in their time of need.
Perhaps, like the Phoenix rising, there is a new story within me that desires to be told. One that includes accompanying you, and the remembering of your equally amazing and sacred journey, together. Even in these incredibly crazy times, can we find a way?
Let us open this road, together.
*Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I’ve referenced for this post, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:
Letting Go 