Hello there amazing and resilient human!
Holy wow! What a ride this last year or two has been, eh?!
For me, for you, for the planet and humanity!
And here you and I still are!
It has not been neat and tidy for certain – and neither is this missive.
It is a tad messy. Bits and pieces… pearls strung on a not so regularly knotted silk thread that make up a human life.
Experience. Transmutation. Becoming. Unfolding.
Joy. Despair. Trancendence. Re-birth.
The mundane. The miraculous.
Tests and challenges.
A true heroine’s journey.
As the Lunar year turns it feels appropriate to reach out and share some of my journey this last long while. Perhaps it will resonate. Be useful.
I have not communicated much the last twenty plus months. I often felt a compelling urge to write to you because I had soooo much to share and also at the same time – nothing to say. I was still held fast in the world of constant shift and moment by moment inner be-coming.
I wished sooo many times as I was holed up in my cocoon that I could simply hop on the phone and have a conversation with each and every one of you. Find out how you are. Ask you…
What is in your heart?
What deepness is swirling about and occupying your mind?
What is the place within your being you keep returning to – luminous, hopeful, distressing?
Where is the spot in the internal landscape that you keep coming back to? Keep chewing on?
What are you dreaming of?
What is the deepest truth you hold in your awareness at THIS moment?
I always want to know the truth as you experience it. Not to change it. Not to quantify. Simply to listen and receive the unfolding of another human. To be fully present for that!
There is such power in this. Such beauty. Generative magic.
I actually went back and looked at how many times I sent a Heroine’s Missive into the world last year. I sent a total of five missives out. Five. That has got to be an all time record low in the almost decade and a half I have been sending missives out into the world!
Once upon a time ….
Right after the world turned upside down, over a three day period, I died. Much was radically stripped and another version of me was birthed. I have come to call this the “Event”.
Everything that has come since has been a fast and furiously deep unwinding, surfacing and releasing of what was not resonant for this new iteration.
Two dear ones left this world shortly afterward and doors, shining possibilities that had been in front of me, shut firmly behind me.
I found myself literally dropped in a strange place, in a strange land far from everything familiar. My body fragile. My mind gone. My being delicate, permeable and new.
Then slowly, oh so very slowly and tenderly a new iteration of Melani began to coalesce. Gained strength. Re-membered her truer, more luminous and radiant Self. What she came here to be and do.
I filled journals upon journals with downloads that seemed to stream almost nonstop – both personal and transpersonal.
I walked the Land. Sang prayers. Faced demons. WElcomed new allies. Followed the path as it twisted, narrowed and went deeper.
I saw the energetic nature of much that has bound humans from being all that they truly are on this planet – as it was excavated and freed within me.
I discovered on ever depeer levels the purpose and pattern that has driven this Soul/Spirit who goes by Melani for incarnation after incarnation.
I refined my skills and abilities. Learned new ones. Discovered more.
Patiently – and sometimes not so patiently – I waited to be shown the next step. Then took it.
I allowed myself to be held in safe, sacred container.
I discovered members of my Soul family.
I spent two birthdays, holidays and vast landscapes of time with no other humans present.
The lingering defenses I did not even know were there all began to fall away, as did illusions and false constructs.
I taught a class with brand new material for the first time in six years that sprang forth with enthusiasm and excitement. The feedback was encouraging.
Immediately, after teaching and sharing I was called back into the land between worlds for more transmutation and realignement.
I moved. Settled. And holy wow! Another year was over, twenty months had passed and here I am. Right now. In this moment.
I cannot say with any degree of certainty what the future will bring. The very thought of trying to brings belly laughter bubbling up to circle and bounce around the room. The unexpected, unanticipated, startling and extraordinary has become the norm.
Expectation, … has fallen away over and over. Living with immediacy and freshness unexperienced before.
Openness, Surrender, Release…
An unfettering, unhooking, a dropping away of defense, pretense and all its insidious, restrictive, camouflaged and deeply rooted ways that have been unconsciously running the show has been a strong tributary and theme of the River running through these last twenty months.
This past year and a half I have lived in the high desert in New Mexico, the watery islands in the PNW. Moving hither and yon, finally settling at the tail end of last year in a tiny cottage in a small town in a magnificent valley in Montana.
It is cold here. The Land causes my heart to sing.
And. Yet…
There is no permanence. If nothing else – these last many years of answering an inner directive have shown me this.
I have no idea how long I will be here.
I thought to myself, as I often have, perhaps I have found Home. A place to settle.
And. Yet. Another rather ginormous piece of inner work came to completion at year’s end on Winter Solstice and any grasping to stay fell away. Again.
I/We all long for Home.
My longing for Home has been strong, stirring me deeply. Asking like the bird in the Dr Seuss book … Are you my mother. Are you my place?
I long to drop roots. Get my fingers in the soil. Cooperatively grow a garden, a small orchard, raise chickens. Watch things come to frution. Co-create herbal magic with the plant allies. Write. Share. Ceate. Work with clients. Enjoy community. There are things you can do with roots that are not so simple when rolling along.
I equally listen to and long for the call to take me wherever that voice inside calls me next.
I have also come to experience that Home is rooted inside.
Perhaps all places are my place as Home is ever-present within me. It is larger than one small plot.
On my last birthday lightning struck a large Juniper tree right in front of me. Flames shot high into the sky. The sky opened and rain drenched the parched desert. I danced in awe and took it all in.
A summer spent facing once again the specter of my mentally ill mother almost seventeen years after her death in the most excruciating, intimate, inescapable way. Learning deeper levels of what has run Never underestimate the power of the mother and her effects on the psyche.
Being led to a beautiful, lush, green, alive with wildlife bubbling spring of an oasis in the middle of barren desert. A green Stone Being asking to re-home with me. She turned out to be a Grandmother Stone – holding the energy of Oasis. Hope in the midst of despair. She has become a dear and precious ally.
Learning about archetypal energies. The alchemical mysteries. Studying and first hand experiencing the deeper workings of the human psyche. The deepest reaches of the Shadow. The magic of this is a gift I have been waiting my whole life for.
Lying down, powerless to the process my body and Soul demanded of me. A month in bed. Between worlds. Rising again – altered.
Traveling across the country still weak. Tender. Loading a one room life with my beautiful son’s help into a trailer and driving it through back road New Mexico, Utah, Idaho into Montana.
Resting now in the Bitterroot Valley.
Taking time to look back. Consciously assimilate this last turning. Or two.
What am I yet holding onto?
Where are the places of activation, friction and tension? The mirrors supporting me to see deeper?
Where is resistance tugging on me?
What is the origin of resistance?
Is it intuition? My animal body getting my attention? Something deeper, more shadowy wishing to be surfaced and heard?
How has it served/ supported me?
How did it facilitate my journey to this moment?
How has it limited me?
Is it ready to be crosed over?
What is calling me forward?
What brings excitement?
Where is purpose calling to me?
What Big Dream is alive within in me?
What brings me joy? How can I experience more of that?
What does my heart long for? Am I capable and willing to say “yes” to it with every particle of my being?
Sitting with and acknowledging the immense courage it has taken…
To unwind. Release. Parse. Welcome back. Presence. Bear witness… To hold the unbearable tension of two opposites as they rest within. To Every. Single. Thing… that arises. To sit with it until the opening.
The acceptance arrives.
To “see” the profound unseen world at work In all if this and believe what my inner eyes have show me.
To go so far off the beaten path there is no longer any recognizable road. And to keep going. Listening. Following. Dropping inward. Because the outside narrative has no answers for me and has become non-sensical.
To Trust.
Even when the despair was thick as mud. Sucking. Sucking. Stationary. Stasis.
When the storyline coming on fast and furiously from the outside is all fear, survival, lack, caution, division, battle.
Even then… coming back … sometimes second by second, moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day. Always coming back. Back to the unmoveable Truth that is alive within me. You. All.
Holding the tension between two opposites. And then Peace arrives.
This is Inner Alchemy. PhD style.
This is what I came here to do. I signed up for this. I am a willing participant.
No half measures here.
These last 20 months… this new lifetime. New Melani.
I have perhaps learned …
There is no arrival. No final destination. We don’t ever make it. No “one and done.” We don’t reach a place where Nirvana reigns. At least at this time – on this planet in the midst of a global initiation.
I believe we are here to shake things up. Challenge the status quo inside and out. Free ourselves. Embrace and welcome ALL of ourselves. Be ALL that we are in this human container.
Getting muddy is required.
So is singing, dancing and laughing, even howling at the Moon.
All is well. Hope is eternal. It wells up from the desert of despair if we are patient and listening. The Land taught me that.
The answers are never outside me, or you. Ever.
We need the support of others to witness and hold sacred space for our transformation. We are not meant to do this alone.
Coming Home is to ourselves, to the Divinity within, to the infinite potential inside, no matter what Land claims us.
I am not alone.
Neither are you.
We are in this together.
Wishing you a blessed and fruitful inner and outer harvest this Year of the Water Tiger!
As I complete this missive, it is snowing. What a beautiful soft benediction.
P.S. That new class I shared last Autumn? We begin again in March. There are four spots left. Is one of them yours?
“Right now, this very moment, deep in your inner being – is something steadfast and unmoving. Something holding you. That IS you – an intrinsic unseverable aspect of you.
Beyond personality. Beyond right or wrong. Beyond known and unknown. Beyond words or comprehension.
Breathe decidedly into that, lovely.
Do this with me.
Rest in this. Let it magnify.
Keep coming back.”
