Life is Supposed to be Messy

Something that’s coming through loud and clear lately is the fact that life is supposed to be messy. It’s supposed to have ups and downs and to feel uncomfortable and be boring. It’s supposed to throw change at us we don’t want to have to deal with and things that are scary. And it’s supposed to be full of surprises, both good and bad.

The purpose of life is to learn how to roll with the punches. To go through shit and come out the other side wiser and less afraid. You see, one of our biggest fears is fear of the unknown. And after we’ve been through something and have made it, we no longer have to be afraid.

All of the mess and discomfort can bring growth. It’s up to us.

Some of My Favorite Tulip Photos

This year our local bulb growers are accepting visitors again. And because they are required to limit how many people can visit at once, they are selling tickets by date and time block. So if you’re local, go buy your tickets! This year I find myself physically unable to make the walk around the gardens and fields, so I’ve decided to pick a number of my favorite tulip and other bulb photos to share with you again. The number of varieties, and sizes and bloom times makes for spectacular viewing. Enjoy!

Gallery #1

Gallery #2

Gallery #3

Gallery #4

(Although these are all my original photos and as such are copyrighted by me, if you’d like to use one don’t hesitate to email me at mariner2mother@wavecable.com).

Daffodil Time!

I live in a valley in Washington state known for our daffodils and tulips. And the bulbs are doing their thing. Yesterday, despite having a very rough day, I had to run an errand. And knowing our local daffodil fields are in full bloom and will likely be gone in a week, the lure of a rare sunny day with blue skies and white puffy clouds, attracted me to some regal, bright, sunny flowers. Fortunately, knowing which fields were in bloom, I drove over to the area hoping there would be enough of a shoulder to the road where I could safely pull over.

You see, the entire area is a patchwork of farmland and roads that crisscross and have next to no shoulder for the most part. People will slow down while they’re driving, open a window and snap a few pictures while drivers behind them become annoyed. Or they’ll pull as far off the road as possible, usually leaving 1/3 of the car blocking the road – and these are roads with speed limits around 50 mph and only one lane in each direction. So finding a field in full bloom where I could pull completely off the road felt like winning the lottery.

This year, because of the pandemic the two local display gardens, whose tulips are just barely beginning to bloom, are requiring the public to buy tickets on a specific day and time slot. Historically, when I’ve gone to the display gardens I’ve picked a day when the weather was good and my schedule allowed. Often times spur of the moment. With my unfortunate dearth of energy, I’ll probably pass on the gardens this season. But for anyone new to my blog, I’ve got lots of tulip photos from years past, having been a regular to the gardens for about sixteen years.

Enjoy some sunny flowers!

The classic field shot!

Acres and acres of daffodils.

Yours truly!

While I was admiring the flowers I saw a woman and her elderly mother taking pictures of each other standing in front of the field. After they accepted my offer to snap a photo of the two of them together, they reciprocated, taking my photo. Chatting for a while, I learned they were from out of town and had just come from one of the big display gardens. They were curious about the daffodils, wondering if they were going to be cut and sold as cut flowers, as some of the bulb crops are. But no, many of the fields like this one are left for the blooms to die out and are later harvested for the bulbs. It’s one of the major crops of our valley.

There’s something about standing next to such a beautiful expanse that lights me up from the inside. I could have pulled up a lawn chair and sat their for hours.

Gratitude and Shit

I’ll start by letting everyone know I totally ripped my post title off from a fellow blogger I admire. One of the things he posts about every now and then is just this: gratitude and whatever else is going on. So Eli, I hope you don’t mind a direct steal. But I’m doing it my way.

One of the things I’ve become pretty good at over the past decade is looking at life through lenses of gratitude and positivity. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Pollyanna. I’ve lived more than my fair share of dark times. But there’s always been something deep inside me that tended to see the glass as half full. There’s always been a connection to my heart that despite becoming quite battered and bruised, never gave up the ghost. It’s always been there for me in a clincher. When push comes to shove, I’ve been able to count on it.

Life has thrown some real muther-fuckers challenges my way over the past decade. Some were mountains that took months or longer to navigate, like my elderly parents last few years, when after a lifetime of independence they suddenly needed care, followed by their deaths ten months apart. While others changed life’s trajectory in one way or another, like when my son’s mental health tanked and I had to take him out of school. Yet while these things were going on, good things happened too.

Every experience came with eventual wisdom. And there were many lessons learned along the way.

I had become Reiki attuned and experienced a spiritual awakening just in time to help me navigate some of the toughest times. Coincidence? I think not. Using energy healing and learning ways to connect with the unseen realm (often times with help from others) has made life a thousand times more bearable.

Learning how to see the silver lining in any moment has carried me though all sorts of challenges.

The past four years have been without doubt the most challenging time of my life. The pace and depth of intense and constant inner change courtesy of Kundalini energy temporarily disconnected me from this gold and silver braided thread: my heart connection. It’s like someone turned off the tap, leaving it to drip painfully slowly. And that’s not me.

I hadn’t felt like me. The part of me that never changes. The part of me I’ve been connected to since I was born and will remain until I die. I remember my very elderly father talking about feeling like he was still the young boy in New Hampshire who grew up playing at the beach and hiking the White Mountains. Inside he was still that person. But for months, I woke up day after day disconnected from that feeling. Not feeling at all like myself was excruciating. It seemed like where my heart connection should have been was a hole of emptiness for a long time.

And very gradually, things have been shifting over the past few years to the point where finally, my connection to myself feels like it’s coming back online. Feeling happiness, gratitude, and love for no particular reason is creeping back into my essence.

I’m beginning to feel more and more like myself as recent deep healing shifts are walking me further along this intense awakening journey. Sparks of optimism long gone are just barely beginning to return.

Things I’m grateful for begin with my family. Grateful that despite my husband’s grasping next to nothing about my awakening process, he’s still here supporting me as he’s always done, taking care of our family. And grateful for my son who shows me every once in a while that all my rambling about life and modeling things for him is sinking in. Many relationships don’t survive Kundalini awakening.

I’m ever so grateful that despite living through a pandemic that has taken so many people’s lives, I don’t know anyone personally who died. My family, friends, and acquaintances are all well.

I’m grateful that my body is still chugging along, even if it’s struggling a bit at the moment, with all its massive challenges over the past few years. And grateful for the medicines and supplements supporting it until I no longer need them.

And I’m ever so grateful for this blogging space – a place for me to sometimes vent and always share. For the people who come here curious to glimpse my little corner of the world. For the people who feel a sense of community here. Thank you all for reading.

Why Do We Feel the Need to be Saved?

With Easter right around the corner, there are millions of people around the world who will be celebrating their belief that Jesus died to save them and to save mankind. To save their souls. And what’s wrong with that? Nothing, if it works for you. The institution of religion has done a great job teaching and indoctrinating millions that if you follow certain interpretations of teachings and follow the rules, and as someone I used to know put it, if you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you’re all set and will go to heaven when you die. You won’t go to hell. As simple as that.

Where in the world did we ever get these ideas in the first place?

Well, much like so many other things that eventually become institutionalized, what once began as teachings brought here to help us live better lives, became corrupted by mankind’s human condition. I can’t speak directly to the historical events that shaped what today’s religions look like because I’m not well versed in history and especially not well versed in religious history and all of the changes made to religious texts over hundreds of years. But what I’m well versed in is the human condition. Very well versed through my own inner exploration and experiences.

Why do we even need to be saved? Where does this concept or belief come from in the first place?

I saw the germination of this belief during a hypnotic healing session, and understanding how it was created taught me we all have similar experiences, creating a similarly resonant belief. It’s part of the human condition, created when we’re very young.

When I was a little girl, I sometimes went to bed dreaming of being saved by a knight on a white horse riding in and carrying me away. I remember nights lying in bed, wanting nothing more than to be saved. Yet as an adult, I couldn’t remember why. I couldn’t remember what I wanted to be saved from, until I began using hypnotic regression as a healing tool.

I’d actually forgotten about these yearning desires I had as a young girl until I unexpectedly reconnected with her in the middle of a healing session.

As my hypnotherapist guided me, I was able to see through the eyes of my inner child and then help her see another perspective through my wise adult eyes.

Connecting with my inner child, I saw and felt the little girl in me. She was miserable, living with people who sometimes treated her very badly. Living with a mentally ill mother who attacked her when she acted independently and willfully. She was stuck in a moment in time that kept looping over and over. Still waiting for a knight on a white horse to ride in and save her. She felt so completely disempowered and miserable, feeling trapped, wanting to run away from it all. In fact, I’d tried to run away a few times, but didn’t get beyond our yard. All she wanted was for someone to save her from all this misery.

Bringing my wise adult perspective into the scene, the wise one was able to explain to the child that her mother was not well and wasn’t about to change. Making the choice to give away her power to her mother, to subjugate her will, made life less painful. The child finally understood that giving away some of her power, doing what her mother wanted instead of doing what she wanted, allowed her to survive because when life feels too painful, we die. Wow! What she did was amazing because it helped her survive. She was amazing!

And with a shift in perspective, my inner child instantly let go of her pain and became joyful. She was free from feelings of disempowerment, and free from the desire to be saved. At one point, my inner child perked up and said I’d gone back and saved her. Rescued her. She began to laugh because I’m not a knight on a white horse.

This dynamic of wanting what we want, when and how we want it is part of the maturation process that kicks in during our toddler years. The years of exerting free will in a new and bigger way as we learn how to control our surroundings. And when we learn through repeated experience that we can’t completely control our surroundings, we eventually give up some of our autonomy, our free will. It’s a brain thing. However, in the process beliefs of disempowerment become formed. Everyone who is human experiences this in their own way. You don’t have to have been raised in an abusive home for this to happen. It’s part of life and the creation of the human condition.

The desire to be saved, born of the belief we need to be saved, is hard wired into people as an experience of our toddler years. And all sorts of religions and beliefs, philosophies, have tapped into this.

If your religion has taught you that you need to do certain things or act a certain way in order to “be saved”, understand it was merely their way of getting you to act lovingly and not react out of fear. This is what Jesus taught. What living with Christ Consciousness is about. How to live from a place of love. The irony is, religious leaders, like many parents, have used fear and control as a tactic to steer behavior.

Walking a healing path is teaching me how to see life from the inside out. Deeply understanding the human condition through changing my inner world, where it’s created.

The truth is, when we die the only hell we might experience is one of our own making, and it’s temporary. And heaven is a state of mind that can be touched while we’re still here in human form.

Life Became a Metaphysical Journey Ten Years Ago

Less than a year into blogging about raising a child with challenges, my life got flipped, turned upside down. At the time, all I wanted was to feel rested. All I wanted was to have a child that would go to bed and fall asleep without my having to be with him for usually a few hours every night. My kid took a lot of energy to deal with day in and day out, pretty much solo, and by the time I got my eight year old to sleep I was wiped out. There was nothing left for me.

At the time, life had given me a few peeks into the metaphysical realm and had briefly introduced me to energy healing, but these were blips on my radar. I’ve never really been a spiritual seeker. I’ve never felt that something bigger was missing in my life. Yet I’d had a curiosity about the unseen realm. Not a huge curiosity, but it was there.

One day when I was perusing the Freshly Pressed WordPress blogs I came across a gal from Maine and loved the title of her blog, She’s a Maineiac. I grew up spending every summer of my life on the coast of Maine, loving it so much I decided to live and worked there seasonally for many years in my twenties. It’s been my heart home. Reading her blog, I discovered we had a few things in common and learned she used a form of energy healing called Reiki on her family, and it really helped her son be able to calm down and sleep. That was it! If it helped her son, it would probably help mine too. I barely knew anything about this Reiki thing and signed up for a Saturday class.

What I didn’t know at the time was that becoming Reiki attuned can change a person’s life. It guides them onto a path their soul planned out before they were even born. And if you’re not on the path or are clueless about it, the redirection can be quite surprising.

After becoming Reiki attuned I went on living my life, not even realizing I was being led here and there. Life took me by the nose and hopped me from one breadcrumb to the next. The Reiki class had been held at a Unity Center and because I liked the vibe of the place I checked out their website. Seeing that a reputable healer was going to be visiting and giving a talk about his work, and it happened to be on an evening when my husband was home and could watch our son, I went to the talk. At the talk a woman gave a testimony to the healer’s abilities that mesmerized me, and while she spoke she looked directly at me. It blew me away and I wanted a session with this man, which I had the next week.

Learning that the healer and the woman with him were part of a Lightworker’s Conference, I looked it up online and discovered the woman was a psychic who gave readings. Long fascinated by people who could do this, I set up a reading with her.

Years prior, after having seen world renowned psychic Sylvia Browne at a large venue, I’d had a private reading with her son that was ok, but he was a little judgmental, condescending, and dismissive. I’ve since learned that a really good reader puts all their personal agendas and judgment aside and brings through the information as unfiltered and pure as they’re able.

As I sat with this woman she was very kind. I don’t remember a whole lot about what I asked, but I remember realizing she could see my entire life. She knew things about my life that I’d kept tightly under wraps for decades. But how did she know? How could she see my deepest shame? I knew next to nothing about clairvoyance and psychics at this point. But she saw me. She really saw me. It felt like she knew me. And the amount of compassion she had for me blew me away. Something energetic happened as well, something I wasn’t aware of, because the next thing I knew something deep inside woke up. A calling to know all about energy healing roared like an inferno and my life was never the same.

Ten years ago, souls connected with me, helping to steer me onto a path I never saw coming. A path of accessing the unseen, energetic world for the purpose of healing. A journey of healing that’s taken me further than I would have believed when it began. A journey of healing that’s still blowing my mind. I’ll never have enough words to fully express my gratitude toward everyone who helped launch me on this journey, those I’ve met along the way, or those who are still walking with me while inner metamorphosis rolls on.

Waking up spiritually and going down a healing path, becoming a metaphysical journey, helped me change how I feel about myself and how I see the world so significantly and dramatically that it could have only happened through energy healing. My favorite form of magic.

Spring Equinox

Today is the Vernal Equinox! It happened precisely at 2:37 am where I live. The sun rose at exactly due east (90 degrees on the compass) and will set at exactly due west (270 degrees on the compass), which won’t happen again until next fall during the autumnal equinox.

Living in a bit of a hollow, shaded on two sides by small mountains, our place can be a bit behind when it comes to plants realizing it’s spring. As much as I love flowers, I haven’t had the energy to plant or tend to any in the past few years, so I enjoy whatever Mother Nature has seen fit to keep alive. Mostly wildflowers. Yet it’s still too early for blooms, as stick-like branches are just beginning to pop out buds that will eventually unfurl into leaves.

My writing table sits beside a large window where all sorts of wildlife pass by, and recently the robins and Steller’s jays have been very busy gathering grasses and sticks for their nests.

Wandering outside for a while in between sprinkles, I grabbed a few photos of plants that adorn our place, remaining green throughout the year. Enjoy.

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Connection

Oh how we thrive on connection. Human bonding and relating. We all need to be witnessed. To be seen and heard, and to have people who “get” us.

After doing a lot of intense healing around living with a deep, dark family secret, I’ve begun sharing it with my family. With cousins. Sharing things anonymously, or somewhat anonymously online is easy for me. But sharing my secret with people who’ve known me my entire life – or thought they’ve known me, is scary as shit.

I didn’t create the secret and I’m no longer willing to keep it solidly cloaked in the darkness of shame and fear. It’s time to speak my truth and air it out. Let the light in. Why now? Because I healed to the point of needing to take steps to separate myself from my abusive older brother, which involved a legal procedure so I no longer share jointly inherited property with him. And because some of the property is also shared with a set of cousins, I let them know the “why” of the change. I needed to no longer be forced to be tethered to my brother.

Sharing my family’s deep dark shameful secret with other family has been for the most part positive. What I mean is, I was afraid to share a part of my childhood that’s long gone, yet has played a huge part in my life. It was banished to the closet of “yea shall never speaketh of this” decades ago. And for decades I didn’t. I was afraid that if I spoke my truth I wouldn’t be believed. How could something so big be kept such a secret? Or the truth would be so uncomfortable to hear that people’s ears and hearts would close. When someone’s reality is shattered or shocked, the first reaction is denial.

Part of why I didn’t even think of telling was for years I blamed myself for all the bad things that happened to me. I blamed myself for being molested. I thought it was my fault that my brother bullied me and did things to me that no child should ever have done to them. Because my brother was never caught in the act, and when I was little and complained about him to our mother, she didn’t do anything much, the only logical explanation was it was my fault.

I also blamed myself when my unmedicated bipolar mother took out her insecurity masked as rage on me. Why else would your mother go ape-shit on you? You must have done something to deserve it, right? I didn’t know she was mentally sick until I was sixteen and she was hospitalized for the first time. And even then I didn’t really understand it because no one talked about mental illness. Once again, no adult saw my mother verbally assault me, so no one realized this was going on. It wasn’t a secret that I was told to keep. In Mom’s case it was more of just how things were.

Screwing up my courage, a few weeks ago I wrote a three page letter to a cousin who’s about a decade and a half older than I, telling her about the dark family secret and about my healing journey. Because we grew up on opposite coasts of the country, and with our age difference, we didn’t grow up knowing each other well at all. But the summer after I gave birth to my incest-conceived daughter and gave her up for adoption – all kept very hush, hush to the point where even my younger brother didn’t know – my parents flew me across country to spend about a month with my West Coast aunt and uncle. I guess it was my reward for having spent the previous summer locked away in a home for unwed mothers.

By this time, from all outer appearances I was a normal fifteen year old teenager who was interested in things like boys, hair, and clothing. My aunt and uncle, almost a decade older than my parents were so welcoming and loving. I traipsed around after my uncle as he tended his avocado trees, and hung out with a neighbor girl just about my age. My aunt and uncle took me to Catalina Island on their sailboat for a few weekend sailing trips. And I got to spend some time with their eldest and only daughter, staying at her home near the beach. Because I don’t have a sister, it was really nice having an older female cousin to look up to.

Other than that summer, the only other time I regularly connected with my cousin was after her mother died. We stayed in touch for a few years with regular phone calls. And as can happen, life got busy for us between work and raising our families, and phone calls dwindled.

The letter I sent to my cousin detailed my healing journey: healing from relationships with both my mother and older brother. I spilled the beans about my having been molested, impregnated, giving birth in secret and giving up my daughter for adoption. And then I waited. I waited to reach out again because I’m well aware that it takes time to process shocking news. The day she read my letter she called. Reconnection.

As I saw my cousin’s name on the caller ID and answered the phone preparing myself for whatever reaction she had, it turned out that I was the one who would end up processing shocking news. She already knew. She’d known since the summer I’d visited. I was bowled over.

After telling me how she found out I was simultaneously pissed off yet relieved. I was pissed that after my father swore our entire family to secrecy, someone very close to him who knew, told my aunt. My mother never even told the secret. Both my parents took it to their graves. But that’s how secrets can go. You never really know who knows.

The beautiful thing about coming out and sharing my secret is the reconnection that’s happening. Reconnecting with family at a new and deeper level. I’m quite geographically distant from my family, so periodic visits every few years usually means catching up on what everyone’s doing, how the kids are doing, what’s going on work wise, and that sort of thing. Or peering into our lives through social media.

It’s truly a wonderful thing to be seen and recognized in a new and different way. Not just as the second to youngest cousin who used to work on ships and is now busy being a mother, but as someone who’s been through some real shit and has not only walked through it, but who is walking a healing path and is using it to elevate their life.

I feel fortunate to reestablish familial bonds that many people who grow up in dysfunctional families either lose or walk away from.

I Did a Thing

Almost eleven years ago I started blogging as a way to reach out and share what I’d learned as a mom to a kid with a few diagnoses related to developmental delays. To share what I wish I’d known about my son. To possibly connect with and help another mother going through the same thing because I felt quite alone in mothering a child with language delay issues and Sensory Processing Disorder. And then life took a spiritual turn. Not even a year into blogging I experienced a quite unexpected spiritual awakening.

The way I viewed my life and the world changed. And a passion that had lain dormant awoke. Once I discovered the incredible power of energy healing and intuition, I had to know more. I wanted to know it all. And when life steered me down this road less traveled, my blogging shifted a bit. It became a “Mommy’s gone spiritual” blog.

The trek down energy healing and spirituality lane took another road less traveled just four years ago when something else within me woke up. Once again, quite unexpectedly. This time it was Kundalini energy: an energy of creation and inner change/movement. For me, the past four years have been a time of deep inner transformation, healing layers upon layers of energy blocks. Healing things in my unconscious mind (working intuitively) and body. As my perception has shifted and changed, I’ve let go of so much that’s held me back in life, like fear, anger, and grief, allowing me to live more and more in a state of observation instead of judgment, optimism instead of fear, and compassion in general.

Although I’m still very much in process, I was invited to share my healing journey on an intuitive friend’s YouTube channel and Facebook Page the other week. Because friends I grew up with and haven’t seen in years, and contemporaries of my parents who’ve known me my entire life don’t know this spiritual side of me and don’t know I went through some very dark things during childhood (because they were kept very secret), putting myself out there this publicly was a bit nerve-wracking. And I did it anyway. A did this scary thing and I hope you enjoy it.

The thumbnail photo you see is of my amazingly intuitive friend Natasha Venter. Through her Angelic Clarifications website, she offers her gifts of clairvoyance and mediumship to help guide people through the challenges of life. She’s not only a naturally gifted intuitive, able to perceive the spirit world her entire life, but she’s trained with the best and teaches about things in life she’s navigated herself. In my life, she’s helped by giving me a clairvoyant perspective of things I wasn’t able to see, and has helped me heal using guided meditations.

Life Clarifications with Natasha Venter

Being in process of dramatic inner change has been four years of addressing inner separation from spirit, that manifests in my life as all sorts of emotional upset and pain: big-time stress. And what that looks like in human terms is working through a lot of things that have left me running to my old coping mechanism: food, chronically having very little physical energy and muscle strength, needing more sleep than usual, struggling with the ability to focus my mind (so I can do things like read), and sometimes struggling to put two words together. So, as you’ll see, I’ve become quite heavy again. But I know the weight will go as my energy and focus returns. And fortunately, talking helps me focus, so there was only one glitchy brain-drop moment.

As much as my relationship with food and my body (weight) has been a constant focus throughout my life, I now recognize this challenge as being a vehicle to help get me where I am today. It’s been a spiritual growth mechanism. Isn’t spirit amazing?

Inner Child’s Voyage

As I began to unfurl the mystery of life challenges, setting sail on inner voyages and journeys, I met whispers in the wind and howling gales. Plying my way through inner straits and open ocean, with at first a small crew to keep lookout, haul on the lines and follow the chart, lighthouses of love and support kept me off the rocks. I never knew what the weather would bring, be it calm seas, whitecaps, or deep swells, but there was always a fleet to bring libation and sustenance.

The thing about these journeys was they didn’t always go smoothly. In fact, the threats of ending up on the rocks was constant. Thick banks of fog hampered visibility, and becoming becalmed and immoveable did happen. The one constant was following the wind. Keeping the sails full, whether I was beating up into the wind, running close hauled, or plowing with the seas, winds behind me, the force of nature pushed me along. The wind moved me while the rudder steered until I was led safely to harbor and home.

Working with the wind takes seamanship, training, and experience. You can’t just jump onto the deck of a windjammer or any smaller sailing vessel for that matter and expect to make it from dock to dock without knowing how to tie a bowline, half hitch, clove hitch, and a handful of other knots. And you’d best know how to handle the sails in all weather conditions.

Once I was fully provisioned and safely out of port, my journeys followed waymarks, but instead of points of land and navigational buoys, I followed feelings. At the beginning of the voyage they sometimes got rough when the winds whipped up, but with a sound hull, we plowed onward. Every voyage had its ports of call where I came face to face with my inner child.

Peering through a looking glass, I saw not forward in front of me, but into the past. I saw past journeys of being stranded or dashed upon the rocks. I heard the wails and cries of the wind as my inner child was left behind. As life abandoned her. I saw her curled into the fetal position, cowering in the corner, and raging against the world.

Attempting any rescue, there are precautions that must be made. Once I spotted the girl in distress, I had to approach with care and openness, and coax her to share her tale of woe. As she was able to once again engage her voice, which had long ago been silenced, I began to recognize her messages of pain.

That’s not fair.

You left me. You abandoned me.

There’s something wrong with me.

It’s my fault.

I’m broken. I’m defective.

I’m fat. I’m ugly.

I’m used goods.

I don’t trust you.

Looking through a child’s eye view, the scope of their looking glass is very narrow. They only see what’s directly in front of them. They have no depth of knowledge or experience to recognize that the swirling on the surface of the water means fast running currents beneath.

When they’re caught in a tempest, they don’t know enough to reef the sails or even lower one or two. They plow along until the sails begin to tear and flap uselessly in a gale. Or their rudder breaks, leaving them victim to the sea. They don’t know about rationing supplies when winds leave them becalmed offshore, extending a voyage by weeks, and they wither away.

They just don’t know. And what’s worse, they don’t know that they don’t know.

In so many ways, the child inside us becomes stuck in their journey. Stranded on the rocks. Waylaid by a storm. Left adrift by equipment failure. But they’re never completely lost to us. They’ve just detoured a bit, becoming stuck in eddies, circling endlessly around and around singing their songs of woe, going nowhere.

Once I came upon the little girl and heard her tale of woe, she was comforted by knowing she was no longer alone adrift. Witnessing her became her lifeline. Seeing her and acknowledging her pain buoyed her. Knowing she was no longer abandoned, left adrift, often times all it took was teaching her how to mend her sails, or bringing her a new rudder.

From time to time, when my block and tackle didn’t have enough purchase for the task at hand, divine assistance did the heavy lifting. Like magic, my inner child let go of the anchor around her neck, slipped loose from the granny knots binding her hands and feet, and spit out the dry hardtack gagging her. Once freed from her shackles, I saw the little girl morph in front of my eyes as fog rolled away revealing the entire horizon, and her spyglass widened, now able to see not only the waters right in front of her, but down through the depths as well.

Once mired down by her own beliefs, set on course with new sails, a keg of rum, and confidently singing sea shanties, the girl became a woman able to take on whatever came her way. Her hull clean of barnacles, lines tight, the compass pointing true, and with her crew by her side, she could now take on the world.