raven0us

Ptsd and conceiving the self legal.

I have worked in trauma my entire adult life. I began being neglected in upstate New York. The youngest of 8 I spent much of my time alone. Observing humans from a little innocent checky smiled child. I watched my 7 siblings choose what they wanted from their life. I watched the lake and the fish in it. Listened to the wind pull the waves and the weather. Beavers came and made homes in our boats. I watched my siblings seizure off the dock into the water helpless. A dock over them. It could be a dream but i remember it. Its a part of me. I dont know those people anymore. My siblings. I can not confirm my life. My story is valid- less. No coraberating. I am what I tell you I am and only I can trust it. As i got older more people talked to me. Asked me questions. Touched my body. Told me I was wrong or right. I told them what I knew of what I experienced. One side. Just my interpretation. How unworthy. You have no right to believe me. No right. I have no right. Rootless seaweed, I float in your putrid lake of distrust and non belief. You tell me, love me. I say, I dont know how. Its illegal not to know how to love. Ptsd and conceiving the legal self. We are born legal to ourselves when ground into the trust that we’re good. You did nothing bad. You tried your best and you are. When you go outside you are safe. This is a birthing. Back into the world. Disassociation comes when we are told we are not ourselves and we are not true. We must know ourselves to be in every moment. A contraction. Much like shitting. Expelling the fear that we are wrong when every moment we have moment we have the right to choose good. In the best interest of the collective. We can always start over as true to ourselves and legalize ourselves. Dissociation of ptsd is being separated from the right to choose. To have choice to choose good. We dont know what to do. Breathe. Feel the lake waking over you. It will not kill you. You are birthing and conceiving yourself legal as a human and good. You gift it.

Again and again, remembering for yourself that you are good. They are no threats when you know yourself to be good. You intend to heal and celebrate joy. Your body. Wrecked by waves. Water rising. Waking waves of you remeeting yourself as the person you’d like to be. Who you choose to know and let yourself be known to. Relax. No one is enemy. Who you choose. Defines oceans. Leagues under and of people. You affiliate and meet yourself in others. You like yourself or you dont like yourself. Both are fine. A mind read is a guess you have about what’s happening in the present moment. About other people. A reflection of you in the lake of people. Oh narcissist. How afraid are you of your depths. Where do you go wrong? Contraction. Breathing. These are no braxton hicks. The head is crowning. You are birthing into meeting yourself again as the person you’d like to know. Reminder. You have an appointment with yourself every moment of everyday. You are whole. A whole lake birthing babies. Constantly. This is exhausting. This living and connecting thing. Am I safe? Have a made the right choices with life? Am I good? You are. I am. Contributing to this whole thing. Communication broke but we’ll fix it. As long as we do. You are safe in the present moment. Sober with yourself. Trusting. Its a cipher. Ptsd.  Estranged from self. No home to go back to. Coming home to you. I remember staring at the lake for hours. Not knowing where anyone was. Just wholey present with every sensation as a new thing every moment. I felt small. Still do. Im just a little lake with a deep bottom. Murky waters. Learning what im made of. Compassion, runs through each of us like a current. We can choose it any moment. Trauma melts our energy bubble. Wide open. Running. Exposed. Not like the days at the lake when it rocked me. When i was perceived innocent and possible. I died too many times in a row. Running on water is impossible. You sink. Down to the bottom no oxygen tank. Just getting sucked down a tunnel. Where is the bottom of you. Wheres your edges. Who are you. Birthing out of the tunnel of the mother. You just walked in! Every time you do is a grown person birthing themselves. Who are you anyway? Legal, safe, grounded, secure. You are the love you chose to birth by breathing  hello present human. Hello me. Hello moment. Here I am.

I admit I get angry. Fairly often. And I dont know where to put it. There are few places that receive it and i get scared. Who do I yell at for all this shit? That pulled me from the lake that anchored me. When I fell in and sunk. Drowned in assumptions of what could happen next if I dont act. I act like I know me. When Im just learning. Who I am to you and who you are. When i cant figure it out I get angry cause I cant feel it. Connection. Conductive water. Birthing mother  breathe. You are creating this whole world every moment. You woman in everyone. How receptive of you. Innocent unassumptive one. Welcomed to the safe home of self by the water where you reflect me.

---

Lungs & grief, on being mary oliver.

It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

Mary Oliver,  A Thousand Mornings.

 

I want to sing out praise for this woman’s life. Talk about guiding. She raised us. Raised the anty of what you could bet your life on. Knowing the place around you down to the experience, story & personality of our leaves. She rips our hearts down and stakes them in grounded like the edge of a tent. Grounding. She is shelter that still connects with the cycles of what we are in. This environment’s temperment. The extention of you in a growing thriving mirror. To bridge this perception in words was an astonishing feat to watch Mary Oliver accomplish. A deep and heavy work. A service. She had lung cancer and survived it eventually passing from lymphoma. To carry grief and translate it through how you live in observation of the nature that surrounds you and remembering it is your symbiotic source of health and stability. She raised health in us. Balance. Reassurance in the self. Centering. Reminding us of our inherent connection and worth. The weight of grief on the chest of a poet is not simple or light. To render the fat of our emotion. Checking and tending it. Slow simmer of redirecting our collective spirits to the succession of regeneration. It wears on the body like a mechanic’s hands or a waitress’s feet. It hits the organs with intensity. Her priority was not her self esteem nor seeking reassurance from others it was a contribution of counsel, of observation gifted.

“It was a very dark and broken house that I came from,” she told Tippett. “To this day, I don’t care for the enclosure of buildings.”

 

She was familiar with being outside of everything. Used to being pushed out and exposed to elements. Used to dying and being reborn into a new thing from desperation. She was seasoned in disconnecting and connecting. Coming back to connecting. Returning to herself. She articulated relationship through stories of ecosystems.

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work,” she writes.

The deficit of peers that practiced paying attention is the sorrow that took out her lungs. She knew how it was needed from her experiences with neglect and compensating for lost painful times. Consideration for context. She gifted us present patience. She was known as earnest. Full with the fury of the now. She projected her self on the earth because she had received such little loving attention from root sources. So little reflection to let her genuinely know who she was. She was rebuilding an innocense she was never allowed through the reflection of the land. She lived and grew on a land bridge into the ocean. Deep great waters taught her to teach us. She was acclimated to severity and harsh conditions. She related to them. They were her relations. Yet she walked us back from our severity to peace and tranquility. To serene waters. Consistent waves of the sound of your own voice in your head through her lens. She is a home to those without one to go back to. Her voice a sanctuary. A ruthless protection of the humane. Talk about guidance. This strong peer.

 

I love her.

In “Spring,” here in its entirety, she wrote:

I lift my face to the pale flowers

of the rain. They’re soft as linen,

clean as holy water. Meanwhile

my dog runs off, noses down packed leaves

into damp, mysterious tunnels.

He says the smells are rising now

stiff and lively; he says the beasts

are waking up now full of oil,

sleep sweat, tag-ends of dreams. The rain

rubs its shining hands all over me.

My dog returns and barks fiercely, he says

each secret body is the richest advisor ,

deep in the black earth such fuming

nuggets of joy!

 

---

agony

pale unpigmented old lace fellow.

egg shell lad.

wan ghostly.

easily breakable, tenuous, shaky.

the fragile ceasefire.

frail raising white men.

believing in a build up of a cliff

stiff

wrong if you believe

naive

wrong if you expect

masculinities

all the promise with no substance

waiting for your disappointment as confirmation

flat faced

rightious

sires white flag surrender

slow

anticipatory resentment.

white men.

my brethren

cold as ice.

wall of silence.

sucking in space with contradicting trivialities

wanting all the attention

the big bang collapses into the big crunch

white light recedes in retreat.

dark matters.

contraction

diminution

fade-out

sitting in the silence of so many loud empty words

hoarding father

stingy

capitulate, brethren

cave in.

*

*

*

once upon a time

for those who hike far for faith and love

a high elevation lake surrounded by douglas fir old growth

giant grandfathers laying down to rest among each other

some standing and living

some lying

huge poppas relinquishing their reign

you could hear the emotions never spoken

of every man you’ve ever loved on the wind

dispersed, disbanded fallen father firs

at close range to the base of their son seed grown

boy grace

*

*

*

forswear fragile white man

yielding brother

give space back

let down obelisks

patch penetration

tend aggressions & transgressions

faint sir.

while still showing up and taking responsibility

melt

be present to your unreliable

make inquiry in mirrors inside yourself

know why

audit with self love

don’t make others be your mirror of positivity

it is a consuming banner to carry

it is not just devils advocacy

brethren

mirror good in others

brathar.

 

 

---

unsettling summer solstice

---

DIARY.

I prefer to pee outside where there is no toilet.

Someone once said to me,  ‘I remember you.  When I met you,  mid conversation,  you squated down and lifted your skirt slightly,  began peeing and continued your conversation of welcome.’

Naturally.

Welcome to an abandoned expanse of settler children.  They play all day with their resentment of their forefathers and how the mines wealth never produced much love nor continuity of family.  With an inheritance of broken oaths to succession, they tell you how their parents abandoned them and how they’re building a culture from nothing. They intuite our species has gained little from repeated thirsty penetration of the earth to quicken our progress or development or betterment of each individual human beyond all other species. The children have seen how our hurry spills over and leaks from the piercings of the deepest caverns of our planet. Residents, families, all the generations of our nature witness and ingest.

Four bear’ers fancied a proclivity to garden.

I prefer wild food.  She isn’t so trapped in other’s owner ship sailing across land bases then. But I rarely eat it.

Preference becomes meaningless when all one can define in a civilization is their own containment. Boundary hungry. I say I prefer to eat wild foods but more I mean I am inclined to meet the needs of my species.  I mean I long to bear with our adaption through time. So though I prefer to eat wild, I tend to eat shit as in dead industrial over processed food which is the fruit of settler legacy, empty of nutrition and nurturing.

Don’t worry.

The gardens were and are innately all places one walks so there is no need for containment or identity or pristige.

You see,  many identify themselves as defending the land.

Some call it a country.

But either way there is a vertical claiming of an individual defense of the earth and her cycles.

When really the land is defending us and we are defending our individual participation within the ecosystems as a species. We are defending our knowledge and ability to be in rhythm with other genus.

We are defending our role of reciprocation to all peices of our whole globe.

We do not have nor need the ability to defend the land. Nor do we have or need boundaries or borders.

We need each other.

We need each other’s reflection to know our place in the entire scheme.

We are the land and in turn her cycles defend and tend us.

Remember always,

The land defends us.

Collectively.

---