BLOG 90— (present reflections tied to March 2001 journal entries about my healing journey)—What is power? How do feelings of powerless impact our connection to each other and the earth?
As a child we don’t 
know what power or being in our power means. We come into the world needing food, water, love…all the basics…and we rely on those who raise us to provide these necessities so we can grow strong. Some of us are more fortunate than others. I see many of my students come from families who nourish them well, yet others struggle to grow in what seems like an asphalt of a childhood.
As part of my journey of healing from pain, when I lived in New England in 2001, I had to look at my own feelings of powerless. The pain in my body and my unconscious need to not “be well” masked what I soon saw as my inability to feel powerful and strong inside myself. As a young adult in her early thirties, I had to face my own feelings of inadequacy that I had developed as a child and find my own power.
“When someone takes your power away as a child, doesn’t let you be wild—to cry, to scream, even fight some if needed—they are taking away your connection to life,” I wrote in 2001 in my journal, reflecting on what happened to me, and happens for so many of us (whether intended or not) when we are not given the room to experience our own nature as children. “When emotions are not acknowledged, it takes away a piece of our humanity and our connection to the earth… our natur
al connection to the earth. It cuts us off from source, like plants attempting to grow from above the ground.”
“Our wildness, our expression of ourselves, is our earth voice,” I added. “We are the energy of the earth. She is mirrored in ourselves. We cannot be civilized without the wild. The light without the shadow will destroy us.”
Today, as we live through immense climate change, extreme politics and societal tensions, I think it’s important we learn to become fully empowered, to be our authentic selves…not just a cog in the wheel, an element of production, or a number in a system. The earth needs us now, as we do her, and it’s time we believe in our unique expression of life. For we are here to care for her, for that which sustains us, and not continue to give our power away to those “in power” who prefer to separate us from each other and the earth. We must reawaken our own roots, to belong, once again, to the earth and all that makes life grow.
But how do we come home to our true power, our tr
ue selves? How do we stop giving our power to others and stand inside ourselves with love?
We begin by being honest, in facing our fears and those people or energies inside of us that once denied us permission to express our voice. And then we listen—as I had to do during years of healing—and make room for that unique seed inside us to grow and find its connection back to life and it’s blessed place in this magical matrix.
My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is a story of returning home to the earth inside and all around us. It’s now available in Spanish as Niña Duende: Un Viaje del Espiritu, that’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page or at www.michelleadam.net. It was soon be published by the Spanish publisher Corona Borealis and the Portuguese publisher, Edições Mahatma. It can be ordered at a local bookstore or directly from me (for those outside of the U.S.) as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video
se you here with me. In several weeks, though, I imagine I’ll feel your presence even more. That’s when my mother, sisters, and I will be traveling to Buenos Aires, Argentina, staying inside your apartment tucked away inside the old quarters of your city. It once lay above the empanada shop that smelled of oven-baked dough wafting up toward your place, and then the hairdresser’s where I replaced, with decent hair color, that horrific henna hair color that made the top of my head look like a carrot—and which you kept touching to make fun of.
talking to the drivers and everyone else we met. “Isn’t this city the best city in the world,” you’d tell the taxi driver. You’d sit there in the back with your little black bag you carried everywhere, beaming with joy for your childhood homeland you had returned to.
es became the gift that opened you to love. I adored how you talked to everyone you met; how you let things go that weren’t important; how you didn’t care about things being perfect anymore. What had become perfect was your giving heart, memorable dinners with precious friends of your childhood, and your unbridled passion for small things (like that ice cream you loved at Adan Restaurant—the one topped with champagne and lemon!).
my passion for living this moment, this breath, this spirit of life that is only given to us for this brief moment. I hope you can come, that you can see me, that you can see and feel all of us honoring you where your heart had learned to open so big in your last years of your life, at home, in your Beloved Querido Buenos Aires.
This is so much what happened at this past Thursday’s Storytelling and Spanish Guitar and Tapas event I had at my local library with Ronaldo Baca, a Flamenco guitarist, who played guitar as I shared my story of passion and love for the Spanish land and culture that inspired my novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit. About 45 people joined me and Ronaldo Baca, who had chosen to collaborate with me because he, too, understood and shared the depth of love I had for the Spanish land and her soul that “raised me.”
spontaneous, raw, creative passion–that I felt a great of wave of gratitude come over me. I then told the story of the earth’s spirit, the soul of Spain, and that place within us as a child that is so alive, and full of imagination and room for spirit to rise within us. It was a sweet, honey-filled way to honor Equinox and the first day of autumn.
–that we may have carried as a child…and to live this once again.
Michelle Adam 