I see the light shine through her eyes sometimes

Unfettered and gleaming straight from her heart

In these moments she flies high in her prime

The clouds in her mind at this point are apart

Seeing her like this sparks a fight in me

To work to be better and do some good

But the storm in her head often disagrees

And pours down, soaking all the firewood

It roils and rumbles and drowns all light out

She thinks she’ll never last to see it end

I’ll ensure her and I make it to the drought

Where flames dry the land and we ascend

Because the sun’s not the only source of light

There’s also lightning to brighten the night

Behind her mask is a web of lies,

a story pushed around and made to disquise.

A million questions but nothing for sure.

A trial and tribulation of a life unpure.

A destiny hatched from a rotten egg.

A successor living that supposed to be dead.

But for as long as she wears the mask on her face,

all her lies are then erased.

I fell in love with my pain I slept with my regrets,

They like my plain face,

When I’m hurting they say it’s a phase,

Perfectly imperfect is my ace,

I see through broken lenses and call it my ace,

My real me is when she can’t breathe in a trance,

Don’t take opinions from the ones that don’t take yours,

They cut you open and call it embrace,

Tell you to think differently then say it’s disgrace,

A world defined by comment sections ; torch race,

The fairy odd parents is life, pretty with grimace,

My thoughts the justice league of my holy place,

Surround yourself with people who make you think,

I still don’t see how that works,

Feels like drinking water with forks,

Overrated is what they say when you change,

Criticizing you for your beliefs and artwork,

Friends turn to foes and pull that smirk,

Like the X-men evolution I accept her irks,

#poetry #freeverse #insight #darkness #reality

#society

Ash got old.

Picachoo died

In that last fight.

The redhead

left with Brock,

He could see

Her sad disdain.

What to do

when you are 30

Wasted your life

training Pokémon?

He has no skills

to trade for cash.

He gets an Uber gig

Loses Uber gig.

He drinks too much,

Crying mainly over

The redhead.

Realizes that it

Could have been avoided.

If he wasn't such a douche.

Sitting with my back against a tall oak tree, upon an ancient and twisted pile of roots, I am looking out into a valley from a cliff at the edge of an old forest. In the valley below, a river runs in a horseshoe bend, snaking through the geology, nurturing the wildlife and flora around it. It’s here, that I can see far into the future, as images paint themselves upon the canvas of the river and the open sky. The clouds make way for visions depicting the answers to the questions I ask the earth.

Bird fly around, the sun shines and the only sound I hear is the wind blowing gently through the trees. I’m deeply connected to the earth, to all the life around me, feeling no separation from the other beings as cosmic energy ripples through us all.

But I’m not there. I’m sitting at my desk at work, in an office full of silently typing co-workers, sitting at cubicles. Occasionally they speak to one another, one smirks, the other shakes their head, but they never stop typing. The phone rings, and I’m taken aback by how rude my coworker can be to a stranger asking a simple question.

“It’s not my fault they’re stupid,” she says.

Something inside my stomach tightens. My boss clears his throat, making me jump in my seat. My anxiety is strong, and I’m drink coffee, which doesn’t help. It’s intended to make me work harder, but the distractions are taking over.

I’m standing in a meeting to pitch the news stories I will pursue that day, when a shimmering blue portal opens up to the side of the room.

“Is this really happening right now?” I’m thinking to myself.

Back at my computer, the Internet browser has slowed to a crawl, bumping up my anxiety. “I so don’t want to be here right now. I hate this job. This work sucks,” I’m thinking to myself, stuck in a negative feedback loop, making my body feel like it’s weeping. Suddenly, my computer shuts down.

I can’t help but burst out laughing! Thank you, I tell the universe. I needed that!

Pretending to be upset by the setback, I fight to get my computer back up and running, when the office manager arrives to let us know the main server needs to be switched off because the entire system has gone screwy. I’m overjoyed.

The deeper I’m pushed into the corporate world, the harder I’m pulled into the spiritual. Living in the city may have been the best thing for me spiritual, in an ironic sort of way. To escape from mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies, layoffs, annual revenue growth percentages and employee headcounts, I’ve turned to meditation, energy healing, psychic readings, calling upon spirit guides, receiving divine messages, prayer, and books.

I hadn’t read a book in years until recently. One day I purchased several books from Amazon, realizing I would read subjects that interested me. My burning desire to become a shaman pressed on my brain, egging me to soak up all the information I could about different types of shamanism, methods, healing treatments, plant knowledge, animal spirits and journeying. The stack of books beside my bed keeps growing, and so does the pile of sage ash by the pheasant feathers.

Laughing with my husband and the dog, flinging socks around the living room, having tickle fights and ‘pants-ing’ the dog are a constant reminder of the balance I have to strike between corporate life as a business journalist and spiritual life as a healer and counselor. It’s about joy.

I once heard Abraham Hicks say in a YouTube video, “Do only want you want to do.”

I’ve carried that phrase around in the back of my mind, and it echoes out whenever I am forcing myself to do something I don’t want to do. Clearly, it doesn’t mean don’t do the dishes if you don’t feel like it, or don’t call your friend if you don’t feel like talking today. While that may be part of it, it’s a much deeper reminder.

Don’t do what doesn’t resonate with your soul. If you find yourself forcing yourself to do projects that bore you, working with people who frustrate you or bring you down, eating food you dislike that makes you sick; stop. There’s a reason you’re not happy. What is it? You always already know the answer.

Beating yourself up for being unhappy is like scolding a dog for showing his teeth. He snarls to tell you he’s feeling scared. Being unhappy is a reaction to the discord between your soul and the life you are leading.

The difference between a job and a calling are humongous.

I didn’t know many people in the small Southern town where I went to high school, apart from some of my classmates. Yet, I somehow came to know a local artist, who hired me from time to time for odd jobs including alphabetizing all of his books into a library and posing clothed for paintings. He once held a party, at which I met a man who creeped me out as much as he fascinated me.

He was White Eagle, you could tell by his hair. Thin, yet tall and straight, it was difficult to discern his age. He walked with a stick, not to assist him, though. A string of beads and feathers dangled from the top of the stick. A man of little words, he only nodded when I asked him for a cigarette as a bashful teenager, sensing he wouldn’t judge me. He told me I could have as many as I liked.

White Eagle seemed ancient, while seeming light years from death’s door. He was plainly dressed in jeans and a vest with no shirt underneath. I wondered if he was poor.

Over the years I have briefly spotted him in town, and sometimes on social media. He’s not a man of the town or a friend, White Eagle is a shaman.

If he’s native American, I couldn’t pin him to any particular tribe. He hits the nail on the head in his medicine ways, speaking little, thinking and feeling some of the time, but mostly walking in spirit.

When he walks by, there is no sound, only a gente knowing that a spirit has come or gone. Moving quietly down the sidewalk minding his own business, he could easily step out of his skin, leaving the carbon behind in flesh or ashes and move through to the ethereal, blessing each curse and spilling healing out onto the world around him.

Native Americans and other indigenous people grow up immersed in spirituality, in the connections between plants, animals, directions, elements and the cycles of the natural world with the human experience. Coming to the table as an adult in the modern world is like getting thrown in the pool from the second story and trying to learn to swim.

The doors have been blown wide open, and at times I’m drowning in what feels like my soul and spirit being pulled in a million different directions. The energy of others around me pounds me like the waves of a tide coming in. The spirit world holds my attention hostage, with the dead beckoning me to be their messenger. My teacher told me not to make any more excuses; meditation was the only way to slow down the barrage, and I’m learning to not be a doormat for the spirit realm. Now I take appointments, and I make them regularly. I’m learning to look inward to see outward; a phrase that gets tossed around in the New Age community. I didn’t get it until I saw the proof in the pudding.

Meditation, followed by opening myself up to the spirits for answers, messages, visions or anything else they wish for me to know. I write down what I see, even if I think my mind created an image and drew upon it with associations. I write it down and acknowledge it regardless of its origin. I accept all information that comes across on that blank, dark screen in the mind. Then I examine the information, and research symbolic meanings. You’d be amazed what lines up with reality.

I had a vision of trees, birches to be exact. These have a symbolic meaning associated with the week after the Winter Solstice, ushering in the first of the Celtic calendar. This came to me on the Winter Solstice.

I walk in two worlds, a psychic told me. Another said my obstacles are small enough to simply step over.

Walking along a fence is tricky, you try to balance yourself so you don’t fall to one side or the other. You can see both from there, but can never fully be in one and the other at the same time. This is what it means to walk in the spiritual and real world. The spirit walkers are like grandparents, and I feel as though spiritually, I am still a child, learning to swim. I’m doggy-paddling in the deep end while my spirit animal, the Great Blue Heron, wades quietly, nearly motionless through murky. Teach me to move like you through multiple worlds, Heron.

Walking in these worlds means always standing in your truth. To practice this, I act on every spiritual/emotional impulse I feel, mustering up trust that the spirits won’t misguide me, and that the universe always supports me. My higher self is constantly guiding me towards the greatest good, and acting on impulses never leads me astray.

And so I walk forth into the commercial, industrial world as a child shaman in a business suite.

“Do you sometimes feel like you try to look through people?” asked Ed.

“I feel like I do,” I replied. “I try to pick them apart, I don’t know why.”

“I know I do,” said Ed. “I don’t know why, but I know I do it.”

He leaned back into the wooden chair at his computer desk. He crossed his legs and ashed his cigarette in a stone ashtray.

“I don’t like people that don’t like the earth,” he said after some time.

As he spoke to me about being a teacher, working at the nuclear power plant, and trying to kill himself, he kept stopping. He would shut up for a moment and stare at the small baby possum I was holding against my chest with my hand. She was fast asleep on me like she’d known me forever.

“Idn’t that something? My, I’ve never seen this. She knows you’re different,” said Ed. I figured he meant she could tell I was a female. I assumed she smelled my hormones, and my lover’s hormones on me. Yes, I was definitely pouring hormones from a steamy moment earlier that nearly made me late for this.

It was funny that he told me he tried to kill himself. Not because that amuses me, because it doesn’t. It’s not funny.

It’s funny to me because I told him stories were important. Then I brought up Johnny Murphy, at the Hermitage Retirement Home in Rockingham, who tried to kill himself and failed. He never said how exactly. He lost a lot of fine motor skills but over the years has regained them with the help of music, playing the piano. Johnny was a man with no family. He had unofficially adopted the Thursday morning nurse, who had two children. He said this made him feel like a grandfather. His girlfriend of five years spent her days beside him in a motorized wheelchair. She had some form of mental handicap which I could not identify. She was nice, and invited me to be her guest at the retirement home’s next dinner function. She told me a man would come to sing on their stage, and Johnny would play the piano and the harmonica.

“That’s my singing partner,” she said to me about the singer. “He said he doesn’t sing without me. He said I was his singing partner. When I sing I get glad. It makes me happy. I sing for the Lord, I’m a Christian.”

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why I brought it up to Ed.

Ed’s girlfriend Karen was awesome. She was a writing teacher at a nearby community college. She knew a lot about wildlife. She told me all about possum defense mechanisms and diet.

“They are omnivorous; they can eat pretty much anything,” she explained. “It’s difficult to keep them in captivity because they need to have a very diverse diet.”

Ed seemed to be on the same page as me. He didn’t like people, apart from the storytelling he did on stage at various events, sometimes attracting hundreds of listeners. He spun lies and tall tales and amused you with the fantastic and ridiculous. But at the end of the day he just wanted to go home to his possum and sit in the woods, drinking coffee.

“Dawn, I’m pretty much reclusive out here. In the five years I’ve been here, not more than ten different cars has come down that dirt road of mine. But you’re welcome here anytime. I wouldn’t invite just anyone down that dirt road. I might meet them someplace else. No one comes here.”

I actually found it a little odd when he told me about sitting in the woods at 2 a.m. drinking coffee, waiting for his possum to wake up. Maybe it wasn’t really coffee.

I was raised by parents who believe in having standards. I’ve been thinking for a while that standards get in the way of real life. I don’t have time to judge people if I’m here to write their stories. To get at the meat, I have to go where real people are.

Ed Duke lives in a single-wide trailer somewhere on the line between two cities, but not within city limits. He has several cats, smokes cigarette after cigarette and probably has a drinking problem. But for whatever reason I can’t seem to judge him. Even when he busted open his hand and was bleeding all over what I imagine is one of his only clean shirts without noticing, I couldn’t judge him. I felt a pure friendship, a platonic trust for him. I felt sympathetic towards him, and asked him frank questions. I did what I could to keep him talking because his voice had a deep, smooth quality to it that rolled like boulders on granite slabs.

He was like a mountain, ancient and weathered. I was like a tree, growing and bending to adapt.

Sometimes when I don’t know how to act in a social situation I just pull out the reporter cards and pretend I’m interviewing.

If they are being emotional, I shut up and let them talk. Silence pulls on the heart, and after a while the words come.

There were several times I thought he might cry. He said it was old age that made him stop killing things. Karen and I agreed it was sympathy, or empathy. He insisted on it being old age, but later revisited the topic with tears in his eyes in the middle of another conversation.

“I was sittin out there and I was watching Dude hunting a frog who was hunting a bug. Dude got the bug and the frog got to live.”

He choked up.

“It really taught me something, you know?”

He stood in the trailer’s kitchen, looking out over the sink into the living room where Karen and I sat. He leaned forward, propping himself up with his arms. He talked for a minute incoherently about losing family, or taking them for granted, I’m not sure which. He sunk his head for a moment and was silent.

The possums are his teachers.

I’m a firm believer that you have to find your vibration in the world. The world around you is composed of vibrations moving slowly, quickly, all speeds, making matter. There is always a perfect harmony to be achieved. Some people find their vibration in an airplane, while weaving, meditating on the back deck or fishing. The woods give Ed his vibration.

“People don’t know how to listen to the trees anymore. I can hear them.”

I remember the first time I found a vibration I liked. On the car ride to and from school as a child we would leave the village and drive through farmland through a forest to the Army base. Just before the forest there was some property that had a pond on it. I can recall seeing the fog change over the pond, seeing the vegetation change during the seasons and over the years. And one blue heron. He came back year after year. Perhaps it was a different heron each time, and perhaps there was only room for one at that pond. I’m no scientist, but as a child I was fascinated. I could feel that pond inside me. I could draw that place to this day. I would have dreams about creeping up on the heron in the fog on the opposite side of the pond and scaring him off on purpose, just by startling him. I would stand up among the reeds, and frogs would slip into the water. And sometimes the blue heron didn’t get startled.

I pride myself in being able to match most people’s vibrations.

I can connect to anyone. I can relate. There are few I cannot relate to. Ed feels like he can relate to me. Yet I’m a 23-year-old girl and he’s a sixty-something-year-old man.

He had a stroke a few weeks before. He said he can’t use his right hand as much anymore. I wanted to cry.

He likes to make people laugh. He’s kind of a clown. So even when he’s serious, he’s still entertaining. It’s hard not to laugh sometimes.

When I want to cry, I give a small giggle instead.

He gave me a book by a writer he knew that did well. He was a North Carolinian Thoreau, and his book was called “Coming Out of the Woods.” Ed seemed to think this man could get me published if I wrote something good.

IF.

“If you ever need some place to just get away, you can come here,” he told me in all seriousness, tilting his forehead down to me and raising his eyebrows. “You don’t even have to get out of your car if you don’t want to talk to nobody. I’ll leave you alone. Hell, you can get out of your car and walk butt naked across the yard and won’t nobody see you but The Lord.”

I told him I believed that each interaction you have with another being should be a positive one, because if you have a negative reaction, it will somehow affect you.

“It might come back to you right around the corner. It might come back to you long after you’re dead. But it will.”

He has a tattoo on his arm that says, “Acting or Reacting?”

What is it called when you do both at the same time?

Channeling?

We are channeling an experience. How odd that we should project this into TV. Someone saw how fundamental this part of the experience is to the human species.

We talked about TV. We talked about light and the effects of being indoors, away from the sun.

“That’s rock and roll right there, huh?” he said about his TV in the corner. It was a silver box that sat on some kind of wrought-iron farm equipment. This man was more interested in having his portraits taken with an antique chamber pot than having a nice TV or even a computer for that matter.

I wonder what “Coming out of the Woods” is about. Right now I can only think of going in.

On my way to Ed Duke’s house I got lost. I got lost on the way home as well.

The world is not enough. But it is such a perfect place to start, my love. And if you’re strong enough, together we can take the world apart, my love. People like us know how to survive. There’s no point in living, if you can’t feel alive.

Several months went by in silence from Ed. I often wondered how he was getting along, in the woods by himself. At some point he called me and told me he was taking a road trip with his possum, to do some storytelling. Then a few more months went by.

One morning I received an arrest notification from the Sheriff. Ed had been arrested for assault on a female and intent to kill with a deadly weapon. According to the arrest report, Ed had chased his girlfriend into her own home and pistol-whipped her and threatened to kill her. The news startled me and his mug shot made me want to cry, although I couldn’t. Perhaps the disbelief held the tears at bay.

Ed is in jail under bond until his hearing. I don’t know if I’ll hear from him again, the possum rehabilitator, the man who begged me to write his biography so he could take his life and have something to leave his daughter.

I’m just a 25 year old young man trying to accomplish anything I️ put my mind to. But Being confined in household where mom is on 6 different medications, suffers from depression of loosing her children’s father to another woman .....and loosing her oldest brother to cancer. Your hope starts to deter

When you come home every day to seeing your mother hooked up to an oxygen matchine surrounded by a household full of junk & still managing to smile at me seeing if I’m ok. Your hope starts to deter. ........When your spend hours and days searching for apartments so that you can be happy in your own space quietly .. but get denied multiple times due to stupid reasons . Your hope starts to accomplish .

When you bust your ass to get everything you and you still end up with the short end of the stick... your hope starts to deter

But it’s times like this where you have to realize that this where your hope matters the most

It’s times like this where you become resilient

It’s times like this where you have to realize ......just because this is your current situation, I️t does not have to be my final outcome

It’s times like this where your hope should not be deterred ......... I️t should determine how you rise from your struggles