2021: Come Together in Love

BLOG 97—(present reflections tied to May 2001 journal entries about my healing journey)—The crows flocked to the bare tree branches of winter, and then, within seconds, flew off to become black wings against the clear blue skies of New Mexico. They came as quickly as they left, together, in a rhythm that reminded me that yes, there is a divine order that is always present—even during the hardest times like those we’ve lived this past year of 2020.  

Today, it is Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, and a time in which all of my worries, my trying to manifest, to make life happen, surrendered, into the cool air. There is a way, and it is here, in every moment and breath. All of the insecurities I felt earlier this month, all of the doubts, faded away, as I marveled at the magic that has always been with me and all of us.

I think back to 20 years ago, in the Spring of 2001, when I still struggled to walk, and was locked inside muscles that had learned to grip and distrust life and its gifts. Back then, I had written, “Life grows from the question, from a love for the mystery, not the answer. It grows from experience, not finality, science, concreteness of analysis. Loving something makes it whole.”

Soon we step into 2021, having completed a year in which each one of us has faced the deepest uncertainty about life we could ever have imagined. We have faced fears of becoming extremely sick, stuck, alone, limited, isolated, unworthy, lost. Some have lost so much, loved ones, jobs, security. But throughout it all, there’s a life that has continued to give of itself, and has stood here, still and magical, ready to unveil the mystery of a divine order.

This year, I sent 60-plus cards to loved ones, and in one instance, to a complete stranger. Each card, I painted, shared myself in, and invited a better 2021 for everyone. It felt so rich to do so this time, as if everything during these co-vid days has taken on more depth, more importance. Because maybe each one of us has tasted a bit more of how precious this life we have been given truly is.  

I sent one of my hand-painted cards to a complete stranger, as did many others just because one very heartfelt person had invited me and so many others to send cards to her friend with health issues. Another of my dearest friends told me today that she had almost cried upon receiving one of my cards—I had intuitively decided to send her a painted one that reminded her of a dream she had had and what she had gone through when she had contracted co-vid. Another friend echoed back to me that my card had been magical.

As I watched the crows flying today, I couldn’t help but think of the wonder of this universe…how each action has a reaction, each gift we give produces an echo that receives its beauty in return. Because, like I had written in 2001, “Life grows from the question…from the mystery… from the experience. Loving something makes it whole.”

Maybe this year of 2020, with all of its challenges, was necessary. Maybe it was crucial that we began to let go of the harsh grip we had placed on reality and ourselves, and we begin to trust in the divine order of the universe. Maybe it was time to stop controlling so much, and to finally listen to that deep presence that is the gift we give and receive in this grand place of life.

Here’s a painting I made for 2021. May we trust in this divine dance every day more!

As we prepare for 2021, I am in awe of how we are truly capable of creating a magnificent echo in the universe…each one of us in our small, but heartfelt ways. I am personally excited to bring my new children’s books into the world, and I trust that their gift will make this place a little bit better, as will all of our gifts.

I really believe we can do it, each one of us…sprinkle the world with our unique light and laughter…to make the world a better place. For, I feel that this past year, many of us have learned what it means to come together, to help one another, to love, to remember that this moment is all we’ve got.

So, together, with as much heart as we can muster, let’s make 2021 a year to remember! Let it be one marked by how we came together and chose love!

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, https://www.amazon.com/Child-Duende-Journey-Michelle-Adam/dp/099724710X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=child+of+duende&qid=1608620759&sr=8-1,  is a story of returning home to the earth inside and all around us. It’s now also available in Spanish as Niña Duende: Un Viaje del Espíritu, through the Spanish publisher Corona Borealis https://coronaborealis.es/producto/nina-duende-un-viaje-del-espiritu/  and as Duende: Guardiã da Terra with the Portuguese publisher, Edições Mahatma https://edicoesmahatma.pt/pesquisa?controller=search&orderby=position&orderway=desc&search_query=duende&tm_submit_search= .

Please celebrate the magic of this life by supporting these different book editions. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

92. Let’s Talk about Death (and live 2020!)

BLOG 92— (present reflections tied to March 2001 journal entries about my healing journey)—I want to talk about Death. Yes, Death. That one we whisper ever so quietly because she has become a four-letter word in a world that resists surrender. That resists letting go. That resists dying what no longer serves us in order to maintain the pain of living that we’ve become far too accustomed to.

Yes, I want to talk about She who buries us in her salty sweetness, in her forgiving earth, which holds us in her pungent arms awaiting our renewal as we enter into this new year of 2020. Because she is so worthy of holding us, of teaching us to let go of the old, so we can make room for the new. 

Death has visited me often, especially when I healed from tremendous pain 20 years ago. And she taught me to let go, to surrender that which no longer gave life, so I could heal, so I could breathe new life into my already tired body at the tender age of 30. Death taught me that all the patterns of living I had taken on to survive the traumas of life weren’t worth holding onto anymore if I truly wanted to live, if I wished to dance, if I wished to fly with lighter wings toward my freedom.

“This death is so great!” I wrote back in 2001, liberated by surrender. “Imagine, actually being in this space of not waiting for the world to be there for me—to breathe every ounce of love into this world…to breathe it as if it were my last…to breathe—to finally Goddamn breathe!”

“This death is like having a child (a part of yourself) die in your arms and to carry her around with you everywhere you go because she has given you life. She is what reminds you everyday to cry, to give reverence for what was and is. She is the one who gives us humanity and allows us to deepen ourselves,” I reflected 20 years ago. “I needed to hear that silence between two breaths to look at her, to feel the sadness of this child, to forgive her for all her attempts at love, all her attempts at greatness, all the running that left her (and me) empty because she only knew how to live one way. Then, I needed to give her back to that place of vitality from which she grew, to give her an honorable death, to let go of these old ways.”

Today, on this third day of 2020, I listen for that silence between two breaths so  I can once again feel that freedom of death that came to me 20 years ago. So, I can truly feel that space of silence, that thin, subtle place where one brief moment dies, ends, and prepares us for the next moment, the next breath, over and over again. What freedom it is to let go of that last breath—of its weight, its story, its trauma—so we can make room for the next!

Isn’t it time, NOW, in 2020, this year of clear vision, to make room for new breath and possibility, to surrender to those little or big deaths that urgently await us, to hold us in their salty sweetness? And, to remember that “we cannot truly love until we have experienced our own death, for our fear of life is too strong to truly love until we allow death in.”

So, let’s die a little, or maybe a LOT! Let’s stop holding onto our last breath, which has become far too stale with fear, and let’s walk together into 2020 with new breath, new love, new life! 

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

85. Love’s Responsibility

BLOG 85—(present reflections tied to February 2001 journal entries about my healing journey)—Have you ever traveled deep into your pain, only to discover it wasn’t yours?…only to discover it was love, an immense love you carried for another so fully that you were carrying their pain inside you?

Back in New England, in the winter of 2001, I embarked on a shamanic journey—a lucid dreaming into my body in search of answers—so I could clear layers of pain I had held in my body since injuring myself years earlier. My friend, Carl Hyatt, helped and guided me with this process that revealed such important teachings that ironically resurfaced again here in New Mexico. Isn’t it always like that—life as the spiral of a tree trunk that returns to the same place we’ve been, but further along in time and maturity?

In my Shamanic Journey in the winter of 2001, I chose to travel back to Spain, to the fields that raised me outside of Madrid. I was about eight back then, the same age as the girl, Duende, of my novel, Child of Duende. My intention was to connect with God and spirit as I had done as a child then.

In my journey, the little girl I had been, Michi, skipped up the road toward the field where I awaited her. She was happy, with her hair pulled back like a Native American girl. She was glad to see me. “All right, show me God!” she demanded in the same way she had asked of the fields and skies of Spain back then.

In response to her request, one hundred or more spirits popped out of all the reeds and light-colored grass of the field. The spirits were holding hands, dancing in circles, and creating ceremony in the space. Yet, Michi folded her arms in resistance, resilience, as if not convinced. She could see the spirits, but then said, “So, what’s the big deal? What’s next?”

As I got closer to her, wondering what was wrong, she took my hands and danced a kind of “Ring around the Rosie” game. She wanted to dance with me and her father (my father!). She didn’t want to be alone. She felt powerless and alone without him. She felt that being in the field had no value, that her need to connect with God had no connection with her family and father…that this part of her was not honored, seen, or validated.

In the journey, Michi wanted validation from her father. She felt this part of her that didn’t belong, that was misplaced, belonging to another family. She felt like something was wrong with her in wanting to be in this field this way, in wanting to connect with God, like there was no room for it in her life. She wanted her father to witness this ritual because her father was connected to these rituals, but denied it in her and intentionally cut her off from this part of herself. He was jealous, angry, and afraid that she wouldn’t need him and be with him if she were allowed to be connected to this ritual of the land. More than anything, he was determined to not let her connect to God, to her tribe, to the land, to her power, to her heart.

As Carl and I continued on this Shamanic Journey, something amazing happened, though. I cried a lot, felt the weight that this little girl I had once been carried. Little Michi was determined to have her father by her side, to share her heart with him, but most of all, to carry his pain for him. Her love was so strong that she was willing to die for him. She was attached to her father, to healing his pain and unhappiness because she wanted to be reminded of her capacity to love in the only relationship that seemed to matter. She felt her reason for living was to heal him, to be there for him…that she belonged to him and not herself.

Little Michi was also carrying an immense responsibility that weighed her down and scared her. She felt overwhelm from the weight of so much responsibility a soul like her felt she needed to carry. She didn’t understand why she had to do so much work. She carried a lot of dark energy that her father had not wanted to give up in order to believe in life again.

As this journey continued, I called in help from spirit. I asked Jesus to help the little girl that was me, and so he arrived and held her in his lap. He told her that she was afraid of being responsible for everything, and that “responsibility is not a heavy thing. It’s light. It’s clean (unlike the weight she was carrying). It was of the heart.”

As Jesus held little Michi, I asked White Buffalo Calf woman, a sacred Lakota woman, to clear the weight from this pain and responsibility I had carried in my heart. She sucked out the responsibility, which was nasty and black like tar, from my chest. She was like eagle and raven sucking out death. And ironically, as she did so, I felt scared, wondering who I was…what was left of me, where my spirit was when the layers of confused self, of attachment and pain I’d so gotten used to, left me.

“Don’t always feel you need to be engaged all the time,” White Buffalo Calf Woman said. “It’s okay to be empty. You need to be empty now in order to receive God. God is here.” She went on to explain that my feeling of responsibility for healing my father stopped me from receiving God, receiving Spirit. That love was receiving the grace of God in whatever form it showed up and not being afraid.”

This journey of so long ago included far more than what I’ve shared. But what’s especially remarkable is that in these past two weeks—during the time in which I had an amazing turnout and strong soulful response to my Storytelling and Flamenco work in Taos, NM (and I felt the gifts of my life’s work echoing back to me—I’ve had pain emerge from my right shoulder (my area of greatest strength). As I’ve been healing my shoulder with my healer Liz Blasingame—opening up my entire body and heart in new ways—I’ve had this immense grief and tiredness of a lifetime (or many lifetimes) come up.

As I’ve done this, Liz has helped me let go of the pain I’ve been carrying in my body that is not mine—to return it to its origin so I can open my heart and truly be free of pain, free to love. Through this process, I’ve felt my shoulder open, my heart open, and I’ve come to terms with how much I’ve really carried that is not mine. Like so many people who are empathic, I’ve come to understand that I’ve absorbed so much pain of the world, rather than feeling it and letting it go…that I’ve taken on the responsibility of the world like a bad habit that has crippled me and made it hard to connect with God, with this bright spirit within me.

During these past days of hot summer in New Mexico, I’ve found myself becoming more still than ever before. I’ve been feeling my soul’s home inside my body, letting my breath and light move through me, while letting go of the weight of the world that is not mine. I’m beginning to trust in a new way…trust myself, trust God, and trust this empty, still place inside me that is home, that is life moving through me with ease.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is my story that rose from my journey of healing and from the lips of the earth and my ancestors. 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

79. The Power of Presence

BLOG 79—(present reflections tied to November 2000 journal entries about my healing and novel writing journey)—Despite the growing cold of winter’s approach, I walked daily in the woods along the ocean at Odiorne Point, New Hampshire. I had moved closer to the ocean after my summer of healing on an inland farm, yet continued practicing walking meditations. My walks were inspired by lessons I had learned during my shamanic classes, especially when it came to working with my medicine body and its power.

My first shift of attention in my walk was from having to be good—or having to do the right thing—to coming from a place of power that was just so. This meant shifting my attention, my heart’s eyes, so to speak (if you can imagine this), to different chakra centers (energy centers) of my body. So rather than walk the way we normally do—thinking all the time and leading with our head—I led with my third chakra (between my heart and my bellybutton). I let my full attention come from this place (as if my eyes and heart were taking in the world from here) as I trekked through hard, sometimes icy paths alongside low-lying trees and the ocean.

As I walked from my third chakra, I embodied the spirit of Jaguar, a power animal that has been associated with this energy center in Peruvian shamanism. As Jaguar, with my total attention in my mid section, I immediately began to feel my perspective of this small forest widen around me. I was no longer constrained by seeing the world from a narrow place of above and below. Instead, my energy and senses expanded to encompass the trees. I felt extremely powerful and alive, and realized how I could be in my power and present, while compassionate and dangerous at the same time.

Throughout my walks, I discovered my spirit body, an element of ourselves that we often lose connection with in the modern world. My spirit body was home, embodied in a manner new to me. As I strolled in this manner, I stepped out onto rocks that jutted out over the ocean and sat down, rocking myself in a state of love. I brought in the image of a small house from across the water, and pulled it into my belly. As I did so, I felt a surge of love, of coming home to my power. Then, when I put my hands on my root chakra, I experienced further love in an almost erotic manner. This continued as I touched my knees, my feet. I was experiencing the act of giving my aliveness to myself. It was truly remarkable!

As I sat near the water’s edge, parents walked by, warning their children not to go too far out on the rocks where I was. One unusual girl, though, was eager to walk out onto the rocks where I sat, and her father, less concerned about the danger, urged her not to interrupt me. Upon hearing him, the girl, who had already approached me, stopped in her tracks. “Forgive me for not acknowledging your presence,” she said to me in the most remarkable manner. Surprised by the demeanor of this girl of no more than ten, I told her that I was fine, and to come by. She came forward, free as a bird, with her father following her.

I remained on the rocks watching as this father and daughter team soon returned back to shore. The girl’s father lent her a hand as she jumped off the rocks onto the earth. She seemed independent enough to move without his help, but she gracefully accepted his hand with a “Thank you, father.”

The whole scene felt like a special omen. The daughter had been like an angel visiting me, confirming my power, acknowledging my presence and how I could remain in a place of compassion and gratitude no matter how powerful or independent I was. It was as if the little girl had been me in that moment.

Like a spiral that comes back around, the lessons of that experience at the ocean of twenty years ago seems timely today as well. Most recently, my sisters came to visit me in New Mexico so the three of us could share time together after my father’s passing. While our visit was rich and full, I was left feeling emotionally stuck and disconnected from myself after they left (I had returned to the role I had played as a child in my family). As the youngest who drummed to a different beat than they did, I felt invisible, as if my unique gifts didn’t matter.

In reading my account at the ocean of years ago, and the story of the little girl who acknowledged me in my power, I understood the medicine of years ago. I had learned then what it meant to truly be in my spirit body, to expand into myself fully, fearless, powerful. In that instance, I had discovered what it felt like to be home, to be love, to be alive in a true way. The little girl and her father had acknowledged me because I had embodied myself fully. I was no longer invisible.

In listening to the lessons that spiraled their way back into my life recently, I saw that I needed to once again, step back into the medicine body that I am, this light that is me. I had fallen into a role that wasn’t me, and I had become invisible, even to the little girl—to myself—who would have been ignored this time given the space I was in.

But now, when I was able to acknowledge me, and remember, once again, who I was—spirit embodied, home, and powerful—those emotions that made me feel small and invisible had no room to be. I returned to that place that I had been on my walks—that space of no longer having to do the right thing and merely coming from a place of power and love that is just so.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about discovering duende, the spirit of the earth that we are that resides inside us. 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

78. Weaving Peace with my Luminous Body

BLOG 78—(present reflections tied to November 2000 journal entries about my healing and novel writing journey)—Three months had come and gone on the New England farm during the summer of 2000. The long days and nights of healing, walking, meditating, gardening, dreaming, and connecting with God had come to an end as had Monday poetry gatherings, swimming pool extravaganzas, and shared time and feasts  with Jean’s family and friends on the farm.

By late August, the poets had moved inside to share their musings beside the fireplace; Emily, Jean’s 13-year-old granddaughter, was preparing to go back to school in Boston; and I was trying to figure out my next move (after all, I had come to the farm to heal my hips for a summer, and now my official retreat was complete). Emily and I had grown closer over the summer (she sometimes sat next to me as I meditated, hoping to find peace in her life), and I had gone from walking a city block with immense pain to walking three miles easily. I had also written more chapters of my novel and had completed sessions of Reiki energy healing with my shamanic teacher (I had healed much of my physical pain with her help, but I had also discovered ways in which she had abused her power with black magic, and I had called her on this).

By the time New England’s cooler weather swept us out of her farmhouse devoid of heat, Jean’s family and I were making plans to return to “real life.” Even Jean’s cat, Tristan, whose beautiful black coat glistened from all his adventures into the summer wild, would return with Jean to Boston’s wealthy Beacon Hill neighborhood. His coat would lose its sheen and he’d revert back to living a rather dull and matte life along with all the other city cats.

Uncertain of where I would live next, I was grateful when Julie, one of the summer poets, offered me the chance to live with her and her husband, Bill, in Rye, New Hampshire. They planned to spend their first winter in the Dominican Republic and needed someone to care for their home and cat while they were gone. I would also share their house with them before and after their journey south, so, when summer returned, I could, once again, be with Jean on the farm.

Julie and Bill’s place was a beautiful two-story older home with a bright yellow bedroom on the second floor and a livable big attic space for me to reside and play in. When there, I continued my treks through the woods, but now I walked paths along the ocean, with lower lying trees around me and a cooler ocean breeze. I also maintained my meditation practice, shamanic classes, novel writing, and tracking my dreams that were my medicine for unraveling my soul’s physical pain.

During a late morning in mid-November, shortly before I would attend the next Shamanic class in Mount Washington, I woke up in my new home with the most unusual experience. My body was being pulled into the earth by a force beyond me—or at least beyond this body, or energy body, that I am and had ever experienced prior to that. I literally felt my body weaving energy threads in all directions. A lot of energy was moving through my legs and I was grounding and pulling this force through my tailbone to weave luminous threads around the tension that existed with my shamanic teacher (and Reiki practitioner) and her teacher who had both engaged in darker shamanic practices and would be teaching the next workshop.

As I tuned into this process my body was going through, I felt my body producing a kind of Despacho, a Peruvian offering (gift), through a ritual weaving of peace. I could literally feel my body’s luminous threads, traveling through the earth as the roots of the tree do, and drawing a luminous peace sign in the room where the class would take place! I had never experienced this before, but imagined with all of the healing and opening of my body I had done in the past months on the farm, I was now accessing my spirit’s medicine.

That morning in November, as I lay in bed, I felt my body inside a space of total possibility and awareness of my capacity to heal or transfer anything with my energy body. I only needed to ask for it, through my energetic and loving intent. I was love, and my spirit, when acknowledged inside form, was pure love. This love was light that can manifest anything by loving itself.

That morning, I also discovered more fully how we all are connected deeply to luminous threads that weave through us and out into the universe. If we tap into this reality, and stop limiting our reality to what we just see, we not only heal ourselves, but this world, one thread at a time, resonating from the love that we are.

Today, as I work as a writer, healer, and teacher, I am reminded, time and time again, how important it is to acknowledge this part of myself—this part of me that is sensitive and empathic, that picks up energies around me, and feels the world that my spirit, my physical/energy body wishes to bring healing and peace to. There are times I may not even realize what I am doing as an empath. When I become disconnected this way, and don’t acknowledge my gift, I can get real sick and run down (as a healer friend of mine recently pointed out. . . We are busy trying to bring peace and balance to situations without realizing the energies we take on that aren’t even ours and later cause us pain).

Years ago, before I got injured, I used to run from one place to another, moving, running, accomplishing. But now, no matter how much I try to do, there is a voice that is my body, my wise spirit body, slowing me down, bringing me home to this deeper wisdom that I am. We are all luminous energy bodies that weave love and light through the universe. If we can get that…really get that…we can weave a world of peace inside ourselves and together as earth beings on this precious earth.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about discovering the Luminous Beings that we are. 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

 

77. This Tree Grows Roots in Winter

BLOG 77—(present reflections tied to September 2000 journal entries about my healing and novel writing journey)—I used to walk along the forest path that lay across from the New England farmhouse where I lived in my early 30’s during my summer of 2000. Almost every day—when I wasn’t in too much pain from energy sessions intended to heal my hips—I walked the woods, learning to open my heart to life.

It was a meditation, a healing practice, a lesson in receiving and breathing in life beyond the pain that limited my mobility. I began with one hundred feet in early summer, and then, step by step, I reached three miles at summer’s end.

When I began this meditation journey, I soon realized how easy it was for me to not feel, to close myself to nature and life around me. Inner voices, thoughts, and tightness in my breath surfaced easily, and I could feel how much my emotions of the past blocked me from being present to the trees or anything else. Yet I listened, bowed to the forest and breathed in a kind of Namaste in order to open my heart despite my limitations.

During one of my walks in late September, I reflected on my earlier years growing up in New Jersey, where my family had lived after leaving Spain. I had been eleven back then, and it had been so hard to connect with the forest and earth that surrounded our house. The trees felt too still for me, too heavy and dark, closing in on me in comparison to the wide-open desert lands I had so loved in Spain. During those years in New Jersey, the forest had represented the density and disconnect I had felt in my life back in the United States.

As I walked the woods in late September of 2000, I was once again reminded of how the forest had been a place of restriction, of not being able to move from and with the emotional pain of my past that had now taken physical form. “The trees were not an escape or a source of love back then because they were like me, stuck with being with what was, of being where a seed had first been planted,” I wrote in my journal during that summer in New England in which I had chosen to be with my constriction I had carried for so many years.

The forest became my place of healing, of learning to open my heart to everything and no longer try to escape. It became a place to feel my fear of rootedness, of relationship, of intimacy. I felt the betrayal I had carried in my heart, the deep distrust in others I had held as a teenager, and that unsafe place of being rooted with my family and having nowhere to go.

Ironically, that day I walked in the woods in late September presented me with three snakes along my path. One of them literally blocked the path and seemed to be saying, “Don’t go any further—be with what you are sensing.” As I did so, I began to feel, for the first time, that I didn’t need to fear being rooted anymore.

“I can be rooted in myself and be safe if I stand for myself no matter where I am, “I wrote in my journal back then. “The trees are a great lesson in going deep within the earth and also reaching toward the sky. It’s not about moving forward. It’s about moving upward and out, into the darkness and light inside one being, one breath, and I can feel protected and lifted inside this space.”

Today, at the beginning of winter here in New Mexico, these words seem to resonate strongly. Isn’t this the time for us, inside this darkness, to listen to that place inside where the seeds of spring are sown? Now is no different than that summer in New England so long ago when I wrote that “the roots and the darkness are the stories, the dreams that become realized in the light. The soul needs darkness to dream, and light to realize itself.”

This past weekend, as I sat with my love, reflecting on what we wanted to call forth in this New Year, I began to feel, more than anything, my desire to sink into that still place where winter offers us her cold fingers, yet warm hearth. I felt called to return to that place of dreaming, of meditation, of listening, so insights become the roots of the tree I am …the roots that, in springtime, will help me grow new branches reaching even further up toward the light.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about discovering, inside the earth, the spirit that we are. 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

 

 

76. Spirit Walking, Spirit Waking

BLOG 76—(present reflections tied to August 2000 journal entries about my healing and novel writing journey)—Last Sunday I gave a talk at a healing fair where I asked people to inquire into who they really were. Who are we beyond what we do, think, or how we’ve learn to act? I invited listeners to travel through their life’s stories as if they were water that changes form over time. I wanted the audience to experience what it’s like to be with one’s life and self as a fluid, ever-changing life force, rather than a solid identity imprisoned by judgment and beliefs.

What inspired me to offer this kind of experience—to be something beyond our limited sense of self—was something I was introduced to more than twenty years ago. That was the first time I had gotten a taste of who I could be. Yet, like so many of us, I struggled for far too many years to unravel the past, the false sense of identities, fears, thoughts, emotions that made it impossible to be like water or anything fluid and life-changing.

When I lived in New England on the farm during my healing summer of 2000, I began to discover this place of limitlessness, of freedom, and flow. My dreams shifted from ones of fear and fright to teaching dreams of possibility. It seemed I often dreamed of a snake, and during one specific dream, I saw a serpent that tucked its body into the shell of a turtle. It drew itself close to me as a lover and began to nibble on my arm as if clearing the old, bit by bit. Slowly, like the turtle, and with immense attention to detail, this snake nibbled away at my past and made room for the person I truly was.

The snake helped clear the way for dreams that soon showed me the possibility of who I am, and we all are, as spirits in bodies. I began to dream much more consciously as I felt, for the first time, my spirit body walking outside of my physical body. Inside my dream, I could tell the difference between my physical and spirit body. With the latter, I was more present to sensations, to the sensory experiences rather than the mind. My mind was there to make sure my spirit was protected and monitored, and ultimately came back to my body, but as my spirit body I got out of my own way and felt the deliciousness of everything. There was no analysis, just pure experience, and I was able to shift my attention from my spirit body to my physical body whenever I needed to (or as some may say, return to my physical body).

During one dream, I traveled to my old neighborhood where I had lived as a child. Before doing so, I was asked where I was going, and I said that my body would stay in the room inside that dream, but my spirit would journey back to my childhood town. What happened next was amazing. I began walking inside the room to get momentum so I could fall back into the scene of my old neighborhood. As I gained speed, I lost balance and felt I was sliding down the floor, under the table, and back out. I witnessed that there were different patterns inside each state I was in, and that the one I was going into (my childhood town) was circular, like spirals moving to the center.

“Yet,” I wrote in my journal back then, “because I was traveling through two thick layers of reality, the effort or balance I needed was too great, and the circles broke into a checkered reality that lay behind the circular one.”

What I was shown back then during my dream was that we live in multiple realities at once and can access all of these. We can move from one reality to the next if we are centered enough, if we are able to maintain a certain equilibrium or speed. And these different realities show up like memory centers that are not in our physical reality. We travel to them through flight, through the body’s release of the ordinary.

Today, as I read again the lesson’s I learned during my time of stillness and healing, I am amazed at how timeless they are and apply to my life now. We run around so busy these days, with so many of us longing for a more peaceful and meaningful way of being on this earth. We work hard to connect with ourselves and each other, or to even know who we are inside this extremely material society.

What we sometimes forget inside all this noise, though, is that we are fluid like the rivers, oceans, rain, streams… we are ever-changing. Our spirit moves in and out of our body, travels and lives in multiple realities, and is much more powerful and life-affirming than we have been taught to understand. We are the change we long for because we are fluid, we are spirit, and we can manifest that which we long for on this earth.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about embodying fully the spirit that we are. 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

73. Giving Thanks for My Life and Work

BLOG 73—(present reflections tied to August 2000 journal entries about my healing and novel-writing journey)—Long days and nights of summer mist; consistent poetry workshops on Mondays; daily walks in the woods, every day with more strength and presence; evening feasts to cicada rhythms with visiting family and friends; swimming in the pool; tending to the garden; and meditating, healing my hips, and writing my novel’s story led to a special  moment on August 18 on Skimmilk Farm in New England…

Jean Pedrick and I at Skimmilk Farm (photo of a black & white picture taken by Carl Hyatt in 2000).

… that special night I finished my novel, which back then was simply called Duende. This 80,000 word manuscript began merely as a short story with no goal other than to follow the hunger that lay inside my aching body back in 1996, yet four years later it became my novel. I let out a sigh of amazement as the stars filled the skies on that August night on the farm. And not only was my novel finished, I was also healing my hips and beginning to walk again.

“Last night I finished Duende,” I wrote back then. “I completed my book at about 2 a.m. and then sat in front of my mesa, my altar, taking in the message and love of Duende, the spirit that rests in my bones, that is my bones, wanting to speak. As I wrote the last pieces of my novel, I felt the hunger, the altogether chaos and wildness of that earth-honoring self that I was, that we all are. I sat with that part of myself that surrenders to knowing, to truly understanding; that stands in the middle of the jungle, in that space of not separating from the jungle that is my body, that is myself, crawling its vines, its seemingly chaotic and random living through me, through us…that part that doesn’t try to figure out and dissect what is (for that will kill us), but surrenders to not knowing all the answers; because to know it all would be to separate ourselves from source that is so much bigger and vaster than ourselves and

Jean Pedrick and I at Skimmilk Farm (photo of a black & white picture taken by Carl Hyatt in 2000).

yet is ourseleves as well. To contain this vastness would be to kill ourselves, to destroy the very part of ourselves that yearns to fly and live and truly taste the truth of our existence. This, I felt, was the duende that led me to write my novel and the very story that wished to teach me and others about an essence of life that we all have access to.

Back in 2000, I thought I had finished my novel, yet there were many more layers and chapters to write. I don’t regret any of the lengthy process of it. Not one bit. Not the years with several agents who shopped my novel to big publishers with optimistic reviews but no takers. Not the years of rewrites and further rewrites. It all became a part of a journey home to duende, to this spirit inside me that I continue to celebrate every day. The end of my novel then, and the publication of my novel more than a year ago became, in essence, the beginning of my true, fully-realized life.

Today, as we celebrate Thanksgiving, I stay home nursing an intense cold. But I’m grateful.  I am grateful that the life I live now comes from deep within me, that it comes from my spirit, my essence coming first in whatever I do. There’s a sense of peace in this, a sense of knowing there is nowhere I need to go, that the richness of each moment is here, inside me, and around me. If I honor my creative spirit and surrender that which guides me in each moment, all will be okay.

Photo of a photo taken by Carl Hyatt in 2000.

A few weeks ago, I also offered a Shamanic Writing Workshop with Burt Kempner, a fellow author, and remember feeling gratitude for having completed a successful class. At one point I was with my partner, Gorky, and he was sharing with me how wonderful the class had been. As he said these words, I began to cry a sense of recognizing that I had come home; that I was doing my life’s work on this earth, even if it was bit by bit as I worked a so-called day job. What a gift to be with someone I loved and to share in the harvest of all that I had worked so hard to become!

On this day of Giving Thanks, I give thanks to the fact that I not only published my novel (after completing it 20 years ago!), but that I can share my work and my life’s passion with my partner, family, and friends, near and far, who have seen me grow into the person I have become (and thanks to those who dropped off Thanksgiving food to me!). What a blessing to be surrounded by love and also be guided by a vaster universe that weaves its magic through me and all of us!

Blessings to you All!

Give a gift of magic, spirit, and returning home with Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, for these upcoming holidays! 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

71. When Were You Last In Love?

BLOG 71: (present reflections tied to July 2000 journal entries about my healing and novel-writing journey)—“When’s the last time you were in love?” an Argentinean man asked me at a party I attended about three months ago after returning from his country. “Yesterday,” I said, half in jest.

Far from satisfied with my response, this man who, shortly afterwards, would become my new love, asked again.

“You mean, when was the last time I was in a relationship?” I inquired.

“No,” he said. “I really mean . . . when were you last in love?”

I never answered him that night, and when I think about it now, it was for two reasons. First of all, I wasn’t ready to divulge my life’s love story to a complete stranger. More importantly, though, there was a kernel of truth in my answer. Had I not been in love with friends, with this sacred journey of life of the past years, especially since publishing my novel, and sharing my passion with others?

Hadn’t I also experienced this place of “in-loveness” on and off throughout my life, and especially as I really began healing from my hip pain at the New England farmhouse during the summer of 2000?

Back then, I had worked so hard to let go of immense pain, so many unconscious layers of emotional and spiritual weight, that, when I was able to surrender to spirit, to an essence that connected me to the larger life around me, something amazing occurred. I fell in love—in love with life’s aliveness inside and out.   

“I feel last night was the beginning of surrendering to a feminine energy within me that had no fear,” I wrote in my journal in July of 2000. “I began letting the universe take it from here.”

In surrendering, in letting go of knowing where I was going or where I had been, and finally  trusting a force within me and greater than me, I was able to fall in love. “I felt a smile and wholeness within all of me, like being in love,” I wrote back then. “I felt a real grounded, solid fullness that replenished itself.”

That feeling of in-loveness followed me for days. I could feel the earth moving up my legs, sensed how she fed me, and helped me center and expand far beyond the limited places I had lived. During those days, I found myself looking up at the sky a lot, at the billowing clouds, breathing an immense love deep into my heart. The flame within me also reached out, fed the world around me, as I received the holy of life.

During one of those mornings, I heeded a call to go to the ocean. There, I lay in the sun and sand, listening to the waters expand their waves toward me. “It felt so sensual. Everything filled my heart, my solar plexus, with love,” I wrote in my journal. “And when I went into the ocean, it was amazing. I was in love with the water as I swam freely, floating and watching the big sky. The people on the beach were also so magical, especially the older couples watching the children from their chairs. Everything connected me to a feeling of love, of light, of fullness and fluidity with life.”

As I look back at this time in 2000, when I had worked so hard to feel life again, to be in love as I had once been as a child (as we all are at some point), I can say that that time may have been my first adult encounter, at age 31, with really being in love. Sure, I had experienced in-loveness before that, but this was at a much deeper level.

As I reflect on the past, I think, maybe then, three months ago, when I met my Argentinean man, it was honest for me to have answered “yesterday” about when I had last been in love. And maybe it’s also accurate to say that, if asked the same question again, I would give the same answer today.

After all, after more than three months of being in relationship, I can honestly say that the love and in-loveness I’ve felt has only grown. And what I’ve learned from that summer many moons ago, and from my most recent relationship, is this: love will ONLY grow if we can let go of layers of fear, of false selves we have become, and surrender to spirit, to life offering her gifts in magnificent ways.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about awakening this love 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

 

70. Falling Apart in our Hands

BLOG 70: (reflections from July 2000 journal entries tied to my healing journey behind my novel)—The thunder rolled in, across the fields of high grass, along the old New England road outside my window. It arrived at where I sat, in front of my mesa, my Peruvian altar. Hail followed, and wind that soon turned into a vicious summer storm of late afternoon.

I had woken up late that day from a night of immense energy moving through me from yesterday’s energy healing session and was only able to fall asleep as the birds began to sing in early morning. When I did sleep, I sunk deep into dreams that unraveled the restlessness in my body.

In my dreams, I went up in a helicopter, and, at the same time, played with a helicopter in my hands. The little helicopter suddenly broke in my hands as the bigger one began descending, seemingly without engine. I prepared to save myself by rolling out of the helicopter as it touched the ground, before crashing. But it landed smoothly and I just walked out.

I observed the dream within the dream, realizing that there was no reason for me to fear crashing because the helicopter in my hand was not holding me—I was holding it and the helicopter holding me would land us both. I sensed that my own creation could break, but my life didn’t depend on my creation one bit as much as it did on the larger helicopter of life that is spirit, God, which guides us in our journey forward in the universe.

I felt a peace that came with knowing I could trust my own creations and choices in life to be held by the larger hand of spirit. Wasn’t life like that, inside my body, where a thunder rose from underneath my pain, to only reveal a peace thereafter?

As I sat meditating, listening to the storm, I surrendered to it. I allowed the storm to be my body releasing all that sought to hail and thunder to the surface. At one point, I even lay down and allowed my heart to release its unease, its restless, ancient, unnecessary creations through my feet. And then it happened. A silence—the eye of the storm—took over.

This soft, silence illuminated the darkness of my room lit by a few candles as light broke through the storm. Without seeing its source, I felt it filter through the clouds and trees, landing on my mesa, my heart, my room. It was as if the light were everywhere, even inside me, as an internal light took over. I sat with the stones of my mesa—yellow, red, jaguar—and inside the silence, gave my love to each one. The calm that entered my body was like none I had ever felt.

With windows closed and house empty of sound, the absolute stillness was breathtaking. It came as a surprise—a deafening stillness that had nowhere to go but be felt by my entire body. All the breathing and releasing of my pain, of the storm, had found a center of stillness. In riding the storm, I too had arrived at stillness as the light shone from within that had always been there. It just needed to be shaken up to release the anger and noise that had covered it up.

I truly understood, as in my dream, that there was peace in the center, in the place where God, where spirit resides, holding us, even as our creations fall apart in our hands.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about awakening to spirit 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