74. Be Still Inside Challenging Times

BLOG 74—(present reflections tied to August 2000 journal entries about my healing and novel writing journey)—A friend recently shared a profound dream with me: she was inside her house and animals began entering in droves, one after another. She became scared as they continued to come inside.

But then she saw a Lion—a wise, divine, and beautiful Lion drawing her away from her fear. Just ask for what you want, the Lion advised her, and she knew in that moment that she had to choose between her fear and the immense beauty and wisdom of the Lion. My friend took the Lion’s advice and her entire demeanor inside her dream changed. She faced the animals, and simply asked them, without fear or doubt, to leave. They did.

While my friend was deeply touched by the message of the dream, it seemed the energy of the Lion and its divine masculine way left its imprint on her soul. She was reminded, as we all need to be—especially in today’s challenging times—that we carry immense power and heart like the Sacred Lion, and that there is another way to be as we face personal challenges, natural disasters, climate change, and power-hungry patriarchal ways determined to kill us all with short-sighted greed.

When my friend shared her dream, I was surprised. It reminded me so much of my own dream of years ago, during the summer of 2000, when I lived in a farmhouse in New England, spending morning and nights healing, gardening, walking, meditating, and being with myself and God in nature. Just yesterday, I had begun writing about this dream, which, although devoid of a Lion, still held a similar message.

In that medicine dream of August, 2000, I was shown a future like today’s and given insight into how we, as humans, need to approach intense challenges in order to unravel the mess we’ve made.

In my dream, I was with Alberto Taxco, an Ecuadorian Shaman I had translated for only months earlier. He was offering healing to several women. As I watched him perform these healings, I noticed buildings falling down in the distance, and a fire raging through the hills of what seemed to be San Francisco. An earthquake was quickly destroying the entire city.

Within seconds, everyone began running through the streets, including Alberto Taxco and these women, with me trailing behind due to my injured hip. A helicopter soon appeared and lifted Alberto and the women into the sky as I stood there, the fire quickly approaching as buildings continued to fall.

What happened next was amazing. Rather than run, I stood still—absolutely still—and breathed the whole scene in front of me into my entire being. I seemed to surrender to it all, no longer needing to run, and instead became one with the fire. With this, the last building to fall did so only several feet away from me, followed by the fire, which suddenly stopped right before me.

Then, the scene within my dream changed to an earlier one, where I had learned about magic. I had been sitting watching a small canary-like bird and explaining to someone that if you can get the bird to surrender to you then you can carry the medicine of the bird with you. In this scene, the bird flew around me and I caught it in my hand without crushing it or holding it too long. It fluttered softly in my hands as it freely surrendered to me. I soon carried the bird’s magic because I no longer needed to chase it.

Carrying bird medicine, and knowing that I held within me the capacity to transform life, I returned to my dream of San Francisco. Those who had fled to the mountains of Ecuador with Alberto Taxco had returned. They were now in San Francisco and gorgeous stars filled the sky where the fire had earlier been.

When I pointed to the beauty that had replaced the disaster of merely minutes earlier, Alberto Taxco began to dance. He then approached me, and touched my right cheek ever so softly as a kind of ceremonial act, while, above us, two shooting stars fell from the sky onto the horizon of the earlier fire. Alberto smiled as he explained that I was the reason the shooting stars had fallen … that I had caused it.

I too smiled and woke up to write down my dream, and to remember, as I do now, telling this story, that there is power in standing still, in being the medicine that no longer runs from or fears disasters and messes of our lives, but absorbs, and holds a clear energy with what is in front of us so we can be the change agents that invite a new possibility of a star-filled night and shooting stars where once a fire may have raged…that in receiving and acknowledging with our hearts and whole beings what is in front of us, and no longer separating ourselves from the nature we are and are a part of, we can transform the chaos and unease of our lives.

Maybe in these challenging times, our place is to stand still and be of divine heart like the Lion… or be the wings of the bird, open, clear and knowing that, without doubt, we create our future, and that we, in our divine humanity, can be the future we envision.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about awakening this divine knowing within. It’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. It can be ordered at a local bookstore as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

61. Divine Order Inside the Dark

BLOG 61: May, 2000—There is Divine Order, I say, with a capital “D” and “O”. I’ve come to witness this clearly during my lifetime. Call it Nature. Call it the Law of Attraction. Call it this world-wide web of energies that makes up this matrix we call life. There are laws that govern life that are beyond that which our rational minds can fathom or express.

During my past blog, I shared a story of what I called “divine magic.” I had requested a place to live in New England where I could heal from years of hip pain, and to my surprise my wish was granted within one day of making it. I needed to move from my parent’s home in New Jersey and go into retreat mode at little to no cost, and the perfect place quickly appeared. That’s divine order…Law of Attraction…whatever you want to call it.

While this kind of magic is the type we all wish for, there’s another reality that plays out in our lives—that is also part of this divine order—which I sense few people really pay attention to. It’s what we call darkness, or unseen energies that may confuse our lives and challenge our notion of reality. It’s what, in today’s world of polarization and duality, we choose to label as the enemy or unwanted, rather than seeing its divine origin and place in our lives.

Back in the Spring of 2000, while I still lived with my parents—and before moving up to New Hampshire to my new home—I had an experience that taught me about darker energies that can hold us back in our lives if we don’t pay attention to them. I was up one night watching the movie, “The Sixth Sense,” the story of a young boy who saw ghosts who were stuck between this physical reality and that of the spirit world beyond this plane (and who carried some kind of pain or unresolved issue during this lifetime that prevented them from leaving this earth plane).

Maybe you’ve seen this movie. This boy with a sixth sense was extremely compassionate and sensitive, and because of this ghosts haunted him, asking him to help them, to release them from their hell. By the time the movie came to an end, I was crying furiously. Why? Because something in me sensed strongly that I was like this boy, that I carried with me one of these ghosts, one that clung onto me during my time of weakness and debilitation. I had been open and vulnerable to outside energies that didn’t serve me, but that needed someone to help them. The result was that I was extremely tired for a long time, and didn’t know why.

In the world of shamans and medicine men, these “lost” energies are understood in the same way a doctor understands that our heart pumps blood. So, intuitively I called up my shamanic teacher (I had never had experiences with this before), and she referred me to a shaman who could help me in New York City.

Not knowing what to expect, I went to this NY shaman and told her what I suspected. Within an hour of working with her, I could suddenly feel an actual energy—the shape of a tall, narrow, older man—leave my body, out my crown. It was the strangest, most real experience I had ever had. Until that day, I would never have believed in such a thing as ghosts clinging onto people and draining them of their energies. I too would have thought this was crazy.

I returned home, and felt I could access myself more easily, experience a sense of peace and calm I hadn’t felt in a while. I also felt compassion for this ghost that had clung onto me, because I knew that he had been helped, that his soul could travel home, so to speak.

My experience back then, and today, is that this world we call “the unseen world,” this place we close our eyes to in fear, is merely energy. It’s an energy that needs to be addressed with compassion and understanding in order for us to be healthy and whole. It is an energy that comes from divine love that has lost its way inside a Divine Order, inside of its true nature that calls it back to source, to love. I too was lost and needed to find my way back to this divine order, as was this ghost, this spirit, which clung onto me.

Today, after years of learning to clear old energies and dance with these subtler, unseen energies of life, I’ve been able to open more fully to love and this divine place that’s here for us to live. I’ve not had to run anymore from my shadow, or the shadow of the world, because I can see it for what it is: love.

Just the other night, I walked with a precious companion onto the desert mesa lit up by an almost-full, pregnant moon. We created sacred space under grandmother’s watchful gaze, blessed the divine love that sought a place to be sung into life, and we too felt it—this place of Divine Order where love returns and all of life becomes a magical, timeless dance of God, the infinite.

I realize now, though, that if it had not been for those darker energies, those places I had to look at, be with, help, that had lost their way, I would never have experienced what I did on the mesa—that divine love that is everywhere, waiting for us to sing it into life.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, which is about returning home to this divine love, is available on Amazon at Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

 

58. Checkmate with Ourselves

BLOG 58: January, 2000—I remember now where I was on the eve of this millennium. Do you? I was in Taos, New Mexico, in the mountains somewhere far away from civilization as the entire world braced itself for what we called “Y2K” (when all computers would possibly shut down, and the world as we knew it).

As we all prepared for a Y2K disaster, I was in the middle of nowhere, drumming in the new millennium with my friend Eric Perry and others. I barely remember that time, other than the fact that I had flown out to San Francisco, CA, from my parents house in New Jersey, to pick up my car (I had left it there a few years earlier because I wasn’t physically up to driving it back East after becoming injured). Eric came out to California to drive my car—with me lying down in the back—on a journey East, or at least halfway to New Mexico, where he lived.

When Eric and I arrived in New Mexico, I helped him decorate his room and we visited Acoma Pueblo, a native village on top of a cliff set up for tourists to visit. Due to my long term injury I wasn’t able to walk  much, but enough to see this village and befriend a stray dog who followed us to our car. After the dog looked at us with longing eyes and a guard told us to take him—he didn’t belong to anyone, he said—Eric, who could barely take care of plants, became a dog owner. We named the little one “Acoma.”

By the time New Year’s Eve approached, the three of us were drumming away in Taos. Despite being out in nature, I remember feeling disconnected—even in Albuquerque where the Sandia Mountains that had once called me were. My body was still struggling to walk, and my soul questioning why I had stopped in the middle of the desert on my way to California almost four years earlier only to break myself and still be struggling. Why had I followed a spiritual call only to be broken and to feel disconnected from all that had initially connected me?

That year, 17 years ago, my father had called me to tell me he would fly out to Albuquerque to drive me and my car back to New Jersey, to my parent’s home.  I accepted and soon my car and I were back with my parents.

It was a strange place to be—in the same place, or worse, than I had been four years earlier. It was only later, when studying with one of my spiritual teachers, Martín Prechtel, that I would understand that space I was in. We’ve grown up inside this “empire,” he’d say, and we’ve learned to live with the empire mind. Yet, he’d explain, there’s another part of us, “the barbarian,” the one who’s wild, free, connected to nature, our nature, that wants to come home.

In a world where we have continuously fled, especially West, there comes a time when we’re forced to stop, he’d say, where we face “check mate.” Neither the Empire mind nor the Barbarian can move as they are in stalemate, seeing the other for the first time and determining how to make peace with one other since both are a part of ourselves (my apologies to my teacher for not sharing this as eloquently as he did!).

As I look back, I see now, that I was in a place of checkmate, unlearning the parts of my mind that had imprisoned me while getting to know this Barbarian part of me that had rarely had a voice. Relearning a way of being, and making peace with what has been, can be long journey—one that isn’t just about this lifetime, but many before, tied to our ancestors and this long earth walk we’ve all made, I later realized.

Today I feel at peace, and I’ve become a beautiful woman who honors her soul’s path. But, I realize that this place of checkmate, this slowing down, and even being stuck for a while, is always with us. We live in a world that demands we keep up while drawing our attention with endless technological inventions and constant marketing. So coming home to the Barbarian part of us, to our freer, more connected nature, requires daily mindfulness. It requires we know that following our soul’s voice is a commitment, and a muscle we must exercise so we don’t become lost inside the hustle and bustle of this empire we live in.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is a story of checkmate, of coming home. Check it out on Amazon: Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

54. I Want to Challenge You

 

Blog 54: June, 1999: I want to challenge you—yes, you, reader of this blog—to ask yourself: “What is my hunger?” Last week, I wrote about hunger, about my hunger of almost 20 years ago, and my current hunger. As I perused my journal last week, as I do every time I write this, I came across a piece of writing on hunger that struck a cord. So, I decided to create Part 2 of last week’s blog. Here it is, beginning with my journal entry from years ago:

“As I write this, I can hear the voices that have challenged my hunger all along,” I wrote in June, 1999. “The voice is that I am alone, that this hunger belongs only to me, and that everyone is quite normal in their view and understanding of the world. This is a strange and pathetic lie that I grew up with, that you many have grown up with: that we have no hunger; that we have no “self” that is incapable of rationalizing the answers to our existence; that we need no answers because we are the pathetic answer that walks this earth pretending to know—pretending to know that we live and die without much more to our existence; pretending that we are not vulnerable, that we do not break, that this world cannot break us and hurt us and teach us to love.”

These words from years ago may seem harsh, yet I grew up in a family where emotions were rarely expressed. My ancestors had fertilized the ground we walked on with potent seeds of stoic strength that they’d grown so they could survive horrid wars, immigration, and challenging life lessons. Yet, this stoicism masked a grief that needed, one day, to be unearthed.

“I intend to speak to those who find my words resonating with them. Otherwise, why read? Art is, after all, this wonderful world in which we can share, express, and crawl out to the edge of a limb and cry out our existence so those who are afraid to climb can see that it is alright, that we were meant to climb, to sing, to explore this world that is only ours right now,” I wrote. “I can’t believe that this hunger is not in every breathing soul that exists—from the Buddha who found peace, to the musician who, with all her might, sings
to us a kind of longing that only a song can sometimes do so well. I have seen hunger in my father’s eyes—in the way he cannot keep still, driving wherever he can to find his hunger sated for brief moments. Or in my mother, in her later years, wanting so much to find warmth in companionship.”

Most recently, my father’s hunger was there until the very end of his life, days before he died, on February 23, 2017. He longed to walk, to try one last time, as his legs gave in below him. He longed to join us for a toast and dinner at the table, to be a part of the life. He longed for peace from pain, for some understanding, it seemed, of what awaited him after life. My family and I all longed to be there with my father, to feel the tenderness of his final weeks that had been absent many years earlier. I longed to be there to help my father transition, to breathe every last breath with him, knowing each one could mark the end.

As I sit now, alone, writing, feeling the reality of all that has passed, and of my father who is no longer here, I wonder about this thing we call life. No rational mind, no preset ideas, no justification for my father’s passing—at 79 years old, and no earlier or later—can change or ease this reality of life and death. Despite all I’ve learned about life, and spirit, and all that passes, I still ask myself, “Why?” “Why does all life leave its form to become something else?” “Why do we, as humans, have to feel loss?” There’s a hunger in that. There’s a grief. There’s a stark reality that life is so immensely precious, and that any denial of our hunger to live this life as fully as we know how, now, and no minute later, would be a lie toward life itself.

*My novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is a story of following this hunger home. Check it out on Amazon: Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

 

 

Honoring the Unseen World of Our Ancestors

10/30/2016--Like a soft, subtle breeze that inches her way into our lives, bit by bit, increasing her intensity and presence, the darkness of winter arrives. The moon rises to light up the cooler nights and we begin to celebrate an inner world, an “unseen” world that, ironically, in the darkness, may be easier to glimpse, to experience than in the bright light of summer. (Note, this writing is a break from my regular blog story)

At this time of the year—of ghosts and goblins of Halloween, and spirits taking form inside our imaginations—I shared my novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, with a group of mystery writers and readers. It was fitting to do so since my novel sprouted from an energy akin to this time of the year. My novel came from a place of inner journey, where the sun hides, or so it seems, as it creeps down, into the earth, in the early evening, and lights up a place inside of us (inside the earth that we are) that longs to come home to itself. My novel celebrates this inner world, this “unseen world,” which we often call the spirit world or that place from which all life emerges.

Tomorrow’s celebration of Halloween also honors this unseen world. It originated from the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (“sah-win”), a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and a time in which the ancient Gaels believed that the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead overlapped and the deceased would come back to life and cause havoc such as sickness or damaged crops. The Christians, who gave this holiday the name of Halloween, were also celebrating “hallowed evening” or “holy evening,” as a time of honoring the holy; and those who celebrate Dia de los Muertos recognize their ancestors, and those who have walked before them, making a place for them to visit from the “other world.”

After sharing Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit with an audience of thirty earlier this week, I began to feel the leaves of my abundant summer falling to the ground, preparing the soil for new life in the Spring. It was a challenging week for me, and for numerous people I spoke with. But rather than get upset or push through this energy–in the name of progress as we are taught to do in this culture–I listened. I invited friends to gather in ceremony to intimately honor our ancestors and all that has come before, and to prepare the soil for the Spring.

My reaction to the change of season, and my internal seasons, is so different from years ago. Then, when my soul, my life, urged me to slow down, I resisted. I didn’t know how. I pushed through it, injuring myself, hurting myself, and eventually got to a place of writing my novel because I could no longer ignore that which was unseen that wished to speak.

So rather than be like the person I was, I invite you to be with the seasons that we all are, and honor this time of the year for its gift of life and death, of seen and unseen, of blessing that which has come before so that Spring’s soil sprouts a blessed harvest.

*My recently-published novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit is on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Child-Duende-Journey-Michelle-Adam/dp/099724710X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474233011&sr=8-1&keywords=child+of+duende  or at www.michelleadam.net

39. My Wings Circle Around Me in Love

WHEN WAS YOUR LAST SURREAL MOMENT? 

BLOG 39: August, 1998—Four months had passed since living with my parents in a small house in Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ, a community far away from Oakland, California, and New Mexico, where I had been for several years.  Two years ago, I had left New Jersey, from my parents’ earlier house, to go out west, to discover my wings, only to injure myself and return to this place of family.

Suburban life had always been a challenge for my free spirit, but it had become even more so since   traveling out west and experiencing the openness of the land and sky there. But now, Stefan, a friend I had fallen in love with and had danced with before traveling out west, was visiting. My parents were out of town, and being with him again was like being drunk.

Stefan and I had choreographed and performed a dance together at Omega Institute, a holistic studies center in Rhinebeck, New York State, and while we had gotten very close physically, we had never become full lovers or been in a relationship. He had come to New York from his hometown of Montreal (his parents were Haitian), and although we had become intimate through dance, he had chosen to maintain an element of tension between us that had pulled at me painfully, even when I was out west.

Now as he visited, we went into Brooklyn to see his Caribbean relatives, who were so warm in their touch and way, that I wished I could stay with them longer. But then we went to the ocean, where the piercing grey, blue sky that covered the sand and ocean merged with the orange ball of sun descending in the sky. It seemed everyone just sat watching the blue crystal waters of infinity melting inside the sunset.

Nature wrapped herself around Stefan and me for these brief moments that erased time, with even the most hurried stopping to observe. “It’s not surreal, it’s very real,” said Stefan as I mentioned to him how surreal it felt. I agreed with his words, yet there was something surreal in that this moment didn’t belong to us alone. It was a collective experience that moved through us inside a dimension that made no distinctions, had no direction to go, no beginning, no end. It was a kind of “now” that erased even presence itself.

As I sat with Stefan in this magical place, I realized that my love for him, or my feelings of in-loveness that I had held onto for so long, had no future, no life beyond these moments. Together we shared a spark that lit up the space between us. But, it was time for me to take that fire and openness I had experienced in the west, and cool those aching parts of myself—the hunger and fear—inside the clear blue skies of the East Coast, and come home to magic within.

So grateful I was for these days with Stefan, for I was able to close an old chapter, and feel my wings circling around me in love for a more mature life of reciprocal joy.      

WHEN WAS YOUR LAST SURREAL MOMENT? 

*My recently-published novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, shares a story of coming home. Check it out on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Child-Duende-Journey-Michelle-Adam/dp/099724710X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474233011&sr=8-1&keywords=child+of+duende  or at www.michelleadam.net

A Journey Below the Sea: an Excerpt from Child of Duende

Duende sat on rocks that jutted out over the sea into the rising early morning mist. She waited for her furry friend to show himself as the sudden wind wrapping its arms around her, tapping her with its long, wiry fingers on her back.

Instead, hundreds of birds trilled their chorus of songs into the much louder waves that broke against the rocks, and Duende, wanting to make her presence known to her friend, joined her own whistle with nature’s song. Within seconds, the sea roared a fierce fountain of water toward the sky, releasing a haunting sound that made Duende jump back. A deep, wide, eternal longing, pulling its anchor into her heart and down toward the seafloor, enveloped her, then echoed against the rocks.

“Duende.” She heard her name coming from the depths of the sound. “Duende.” She turned her head in either direction, trying to see or place this voice that resonated from another world. Her friend was nowhere to be seen. Instead she heard, “Come inside.” Where? Duende thought. Inside where? By now the birds had stopped their chanting, or at least Duende could no longer hear them. She stood frozen, her hands clenched, her eyes wide with wonder and fright, inside the warm morning.

“Here,” the voice responded, lifting itself into a high-pitched sound as a large hand rose from the sea’s fountain. Duende shook in shock. “Come on,” she heard again. She continued to look around, smelling the air and sensing for that presence she had become used to. But there was nothing. Just this voice repeating the same request.

As the hand descended into the sea again, Duende closed her eyes, finally letting go of expecting the same as before, and summoned her knowing. She cleared any fear or doubt she may have had about this voice and hand, and let herself fall deep into the vast body of water. She knew how to let her spirit travel in ways most children or adults never understood. When she arrived, he was there. Her friend was waiting.

“Duende, I like your name,” he said slowly, through a gurgle of water and wind, as if he were the sea, but not the kind the girl was accustomed to. His voice came from a deep, dark place, like the longing of a whale’s cry that Duende had heard echo against the rocks and reverberate inside her. “Come with me,” her earth spirit friend said as he faced away from her while turning his long weblike feet toward her, moving the opposite direction she expected him to go.

… An eternal hole opened below them, clearing the soil and sand around them, as the center of the earth sucked them closer and closer, accelerating their journey…“You are going home,” her friend suddenly whispered as they accelerated through the earth’s layers. “Home.”

CHECK OUT MORE OF MY NOVEL @ my newly designed Website: www.childofduende.com or www.michelleadam.net or go directly to Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Child-Duende-Journey-Michelle-Adam/dp/099724710X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462419536&sr=8-1&keywords=child+of+duende

*My regular Blog will resume soon! I hope you’ve enjoyed this momentary glimpse into my novel, Child of Duende.