Jessica’s Guide to Surviving this Apocalypse

 On this second night of the full moon, the last moments in Aries before she drives on to Taurus (my moon sign, my home) I want to share my thoughts on maintaining our RAGE without losing our minds or our humanity. 

1. Stay informed. Look into the abyss. Do not always look away as those who do not understand, in fact refuse to understand, the truth of what is happening on and to our Earth. But, do not look so long that it becomes a mirror. Let us not focus on these evils so long that they begin to transform us. What we see and hear and consume will certainly direct our thoughts given enough time. What we expose ourselves to will focus our thoughts on that and give access to our transformative power perhaps unawares. Look, listen, learn, and then look away. Remember the rage it has imbued in us, then shift our focus so it doesn’t become part of our persons. 

2. Now that we look away, we must spend more time (significantly more time) thinking on “good things.”  Think about such things that fill our cups. Let us spend time in 

   -self care

   -meditation or thought renewal

   -LEARNING. the antithesis of the bondage they request we turn ourselves to is learning-constantly finding new neural connections, always trying to understand more than we did yesterday. 

          +read books. The library awaits. 

          +watch PBS. Mr rogers, 321 contact, Sesame Street, Bob Ross - They raised me. I’m kind and compassionate and open minded and scientific because I got home from school and watched pbs on channel 13. 

         +listen to NPR

         +meet with friends for the exchange of ideas: speak to your forward plans, the things you love, the unspeakable desires you must give voice to.

3. Go out in the WORLD around us and do good. Any good. Shine our lights. Proudly share yourself with the earth you are a part of. The smallest act of good carries untold stories of life in its wings. The smallest act of goodness has a butterfly effect of results around the world. Please do not diminish the power of your light. 

If each one of us shines our unique light (small as it may seem) it will overwhelm the present darkness with its synergy. NOT ONE of us can do everything. And we certainly should not attempt to do so , please don’t try. Instead we should ask ourselves what are our talents, where our are gifts, what are our strengths and passions?  Do one thing every day that reflects the answer to those questions. Let us do these acts outwardly in the physical world. Do good. In the real world. Every day (if you can’t each day -don’t worry, this isn’t dogma - These are simply  my thoughts on survival and pursuing the world we desire). Go forth and be your best you in the world and then go home and rest as much as is necessary. 

4. Move our bodies. We need time on a regular basis to get out of our heads. And into our bodies. It benefits ourselves and it tricks the powers that be and removes our minds from the opportunity to seize. 

Freedom is in movement. As Florence and the machine reminded us “and for a moment when I am dancing, I AM FREE”

This is why we here have all chosen pole! It affords us the expression of our own bodies in our individual ways and manners. Adding our flair and learning at our own pace. Let us dance and sing and walk and run. Head to the gym and the beach, interact with our children and animal friends. Plant and tend vegetation. Hug a tree, hug it for an embarrassingly long amount of time, the older the better - they carry the WISDOM of the earth from ages past into the future. Breathe in. Breathe. Out. 

5. Finally, observe and speak the beauty everything around us. NATURE IS BEAUTIFUL AND you and I and they are nature. We are all beautiful. 

Rage against the machine. Remember we are more numerous than they. Significantly so. We will prevail. 

I felt a revolution in my brain

I felt a revolution in my brain

(Because sometimes you riff off Emily D- everything is derivative … originality is a pipe dream)

It was like a funeral. 

At first

As Pluto (my chart ruler)

Because yes I love that shit 

began to retrograde in Aquarius 

My Sun sign

I felt a revolution in my brain

Like a funeral procession

Celebrating a death

The death of what was

Those things that we will put to death because they don’t serve us at all 

But a revolution because 

Life (how alive and gorgeous and green Atlanta looked from my plane as it descended)

This life 

But resurrected 

A new life

A brilliant free liberated life will emerge from these ashes

I felt a revolution in my brain

As I observed the dying of this night they call day

I could foresee the light that was breaking over the horizon in the not so distant future 

I can imagine the liberation of all of my people 

(every earthly being)

from the lies power has sold them with a money that has no real value 

from the prison that those who believe the lie have entrapped themselves and forced others in

I can see. Please tell me you can too. 

The light of truth and freedom 

The light of love

The rebirth of truth and justice 

I felt a revolution in my brain. 

And I am sending this message to you too

So that we can see it 

Feel it

Believe it

Love it

Together

Walk in the freedom before it appears

Love those around you, before they are love able - able to love

Revolve

Revolt

be 

You

Me

Us

We

Reclaim this earth. 

Dreams

 

I have been staring into the abyss for far too long now. I believe that we are here as witness, so for a very long time now I have observed the overwhelming evil that has pervaded this earth. 

White men with their Roman empxre dreams have created the popular narrative of the past decade. We all know what that entails and I’m not using any of my words to add to to the thought content and creative energy that this narrative has amassed. 

I believe it is the job of the artist, the writer, the creator of any kind, it is our job to drink deeply from the creative well and pour out the sentiments into our medium whatever that may be. 

We are infinite and our collective power in our place and time in the universe is endless. 

So,

I’m going to be intentional with my dreams. Beginning by searching for them. Writing them down. Speaking them. Allowing them to change me. To influence whomever they may. Encourage those who may be sitting back like I have been and observing this demise. 

Here it begins.

I don’t want to live in a world where there is inequity. Especially when we have the collective power and the very real available resources to make sure everyone is equitably comfortable if we simply redistribute wealth. Food and housing for all is possible in our lifetime. We only have to stop worshipping the rich and begin holding them accountable to the society they have been siphoning off for millennia. 

No more billionaires. 

No more prisons for profit. No more prisons for just about any so called crimes except the big few felonies. And rich people purposefully hurting the poor. Separation from the community should be reserved for destroyers like Elon and Donald. Those who murder with policy and hide behind the illusion (delusion) of power have killed more than any serial killer we’ve glorified by repeating their first middle and last name along side their nicknames and crimes. No more police in the American sense. It is a broken system built on protecting rich peoples’ stuff and desires. It has broken those who serve it every bit as much as those whom they have been taught to oppress and destroy. And it must go. 

I do want universal healthcare. 

I do want free  universal education access through college. It’s doable and it is necessary. 

I want a simplification of our representative government.  They exist to do what is best for all of us. Not simply themselves. Money must cease to be a factor in our political discourse. It should not be possible, much less lauded and encouraged, to purchase a position within government. 

I want to find a work/action/do niche that I fit properly into. Not one where I squeeze myself into little corners in order to make a paycheck. But something where doing is rewarding and  profitable alike. I want my being and doing to harmonize with one another. Maybe start a collective that is non cult-like chill warm inviting and self sustaining. 

I want my children to be happy and feel loved. I want them to value other living creatures: plants, animals, especially every human. And I’m proud that they seem to be that way. I hope they find something they love or a million somethings along the way down their life path and feel satisfied in their own place and time

I hope this for all the children.  I want children to be nurtured to love themselves exactly as they are so that they can grow up into adults who truly love themselves and love those around them enough to offer them the space to do the exploration of their being and discover and celebrate their individual unique shape. Let us remove the boxes and what joyous beauty may wildly spring up here! 

I want to see a huge reduction in the military industrial complex. Decimate. It. Spend 90 percent of that money on non violent sustainment of our own people.  

I want not only nonproliferation of nuclear weapons but a safe draw down to eventually zero. 

My deepest hope is that we become a people who are content to BE, no longer defined only by what we do, no longer comparing litanies of myopically designed tasks for someone else’s comfort…that instead we will revel in who we are both individually and collectively. I want more singing. More dancing. More reading. More painting and sculpture.  More music. More movies. More sitting outside just staring at the trees and birds and butterflies. More love. 

More of something new, after all,

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

Woman invented man and called him god and that was our first mistake. 

Ogier gardens

A beauty that I know and love hosted a poetry workshop in the gardens at the local university today. It was a lovely pleine air experience with humans all of whom except for one I had never met before. I’m never fully at ease around new people and this was no exception but I summoned the courage to read aloud a still life poem about grapes I’d written just then in response to a prompt to interact with the fruit she brought and displayed. I was not as brave with the second piece that I’d drafted. Maybe because it felt like a draft. Or maybe because as the shaking subsided from my hands and vocal cords I became more painfully egoistically conscious of myself and how I didn’t fit in and how the words longingly looking back at me from the paper seemed somewhat cacophonous against the backdrop of the sweeter sounds all around. I dunno. 

But I do want to share it. With my worldwide audience of random strangers who meander past my blog (timeless medium of written interaction). And a few instagrammers who will follow the link here.

Cut deep was the call

Here’s the response:

(Cut)

Immediately while she was speaking, asking what deepens or complicates the beauty of this fruit 

(Your fruit)

My mind is cut by the image of the hands that gather these fruits  

Oranges and pears

Pomegranates and grapes 

Specifically in this country 

Especially at this time

Who will gather these fruits 

When they cut off the hands of the harvesters?

Whose hands will stop them from hacking us 

All of us

To pieces

Mine  

Mine?

Mine! 

All of ours so yes also mine 

(Deeper)

I remember the green snappy sour grapes 

Tart and growing in the woods beside my childhood home 

Before

Awareness crept in

A late summer afternoon, I’m part of the woods

Where I was conceived and born and raised 

And loved

And hated

A dream of the fruit itself 

And a nostalgia for that place, those people 

The heavenly scent of honeysuckle wafting all around 

I’m lying on the dirt floor hands digging into the earth

Looking up at the rugged branches of the maples

Marveling at their crown shyness

Almost touching but never quite, gently refusing to violate the other’s space, sweetly whispering compliments across the wind

Reflecting the same image seen in the grapes below  

Clumps of green glinting with the flecks of sunlight 

Holding a symphony of earth’s savors 

There’s a harmony in it and my hands are involved 

This time

 This one goes out to the ones I love 

This one goes out to those I may leave behind. 

I know. You know. The fear of hell?  Of earth? Poverty? Imprisonment? Keeps you from calling it out? I tell you that there is no power on earth (in heaven nor hell above nor below) that can bind you from doing what is right. 

You know what Christ asks if it is possible for  you to do. 

You know 

That he has shown me, oh man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of me. But. To do justly. And. To love mercy. And. To walk humbly with my god.

And when the time was right.

He stood in the synagogue and said 

“The spirit of the lord is upon me 

He has anointed me 

To proclaim the good news to the poor!

He has sent me 

To proclaim FREEDOM to the prisoner

To give sight to the blind

To set the oppressed free  

TO PROCLAIM THIS IS THE YEAR OF THE LORD’s FAVOR

And there in front of them he proclaimed the scripture fulfilled  

I know you know the truth  

I know you know justice 

I know  you love mercy

I beg you to walk in integrity  

You may ,  thou mayst, timshel

Do not let those who say you cannot, mustn’t, won’t, don’t let them control you .

Do not allow yourself to point to the fact that I don’t believe what you do to disallow your god from using a donkey like me.  I believe like you do that truth and love will find a way.  I know that you too  believe in truth and love   

You too can dream of a better future  

One where we feed and house rather than condemn and incarcerate (modern acceptable vernacular for enslave) Ourselves 

One where we allow our efforts and experience and brilliance to benefit

Ourselves 

 

Hatred of ourselves or fear of what consequence we may fall upon  is what keeps us subservient to the rich and powerful 

 But I ask you…what if? And so what?

What if ensuring my neighbor had a home deprived me of mine  (the fear they instill in us so we don’t advocate equity ) 

But so what? Then there would be two of us side by side on the same road  

What if loving my neighbor as myself required me to love myself despite my ugliness (the learned self loathing of humanity)

But so what? Then you and I would be able to love one another and ourselves more than we could have ever known 

What if the future is so much more abundant than you want to restrict it to because you DONT believe  in you or your neighbor 

But so what? Each step towards faith hope and love  (the greatest of these is love) will gift your future days in ways that you have yet the ability to appreciate. Oh but one day  what a day that will be  

 

What happens in Morocco

 I went to Morocco on a women only watercolor painting retreat. I am no artist and more certainly I do not know the first thing about watercolor painting. But I’ve always wanted to go to Morocco and this opportunity quite literally fell in my lap thanks to a lovely artist whom I’ve known, though distantly and vaguely, since I was a sophomore in high school. 

All of the sun, moon, and stars came together and I was able to take this journey despite the several times it seemed it would most probably become impossible to do so along the way. It was the first hour of the 24 in which the moon appears full and I stood on a rooftop in Marrakech with gorgeous women who possessed intense talent and the magic of the world sang to me of a rebirth I have been experiencing for an entire physical renaissance period, or seven years.  I haven’t just been remade by my own cells’ doing. But I have also realized a different point of view spiritually than anything else I have ever believed or thought. Head heart. Yin Yang.  Black white. He she. The unrelenting desire to describe and define. All of the classification and boxes that we are told we must neatly categorize things within for the comfort and perceived safety of those around us have at long last fallen away. 

As I touched the symbols of my own hard earned iconography, honoring the things that I’ve discovered over 45 years to be truly my own in these present moments, I have a clear moment to reconnaître who I have always been. And while she may change her layers adding and subtracting as she finds new things that are profitable to her and old things that no longer suffice to carry, a core always remains true. In those moments in the spiraling inward Medina, reflecting the infinite creative process inward, even on a subatomic level, a desire washed over me to wrest the power that the violent powerful of the present have used cunning lies and a guise of physical prowess to take from the masses and to restitute it back through any animal , mineral, physical, spiritual, magical methods that I may have at my disposal to the rest of us. 

Many of you who have read and perhaps some of you even enjoyed my blog in the past will likely not have the same interest or appreciation for this next chapter in my life. And that is ok. Scroll on. I don’t think blogs are really a thing anymore anyway. But part of the promise I made to myself in that moment and to the women who encouraged me to do so in that riad was to begin again with the art form that comes most naturally to me me-writing. I return. But in a spiraling outward fashion, recreation of  the self in an outward manner, growing ever larger willing to touch others and encourage them with Magical words to be their best selves. 

I see myself as what the puritans would have called a witch. A woman who is aware of and willing to stand steadfastly in her power. A human who values the human experience of all those around her. I understand that we are made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe and thereby have a mystical connection to everything around us. And each of us has particular wrought curves or bent nature whose arcs intersect with that magic and one another in a divine sort of way. I briefly read through a short historical account of the mathematics that inform sacred Islamic art. It filled me with inspiration as it spoke of spirals and intersecting circles and the vertices these circles created and the connecting of these intersects in order to creat geometric shapes and patterns. As I watched the sun browned hands that create, even to this day, these shapes in the ancient way and breathed in the fragrant spices that are used for celebrating, delighting, bringing pleasure and easing the passing from this life into death, I felt the holiness of the collection of each and every individual there. This isn’t to say that we aren’t all flawed it is to say that even through and because of our flaws we are holy. Perfect. Precisely who we should be. 

My heart was flooded with a desire to encourage anyone I may come in contact with, and especially women who have of late been so beaten down by fearful and ironically powerful people, to retain their power and person despite the echoes of mediocrity to conform to a middle ground that makes those who are not comfortable with their own selves feel more at ease. Encouraging requires courage. How can you imbue others with that which you will not possess yourself?  In the light of that full moon which would later experience an eclipse in a symbol of rebirth and recreation in the hemisphere where I was born and would soon return, courage enveloped me and inspiration danced around me like the shooting stars that raced across the night sky. Feeling an integral part of the every thing and nothing that surrounds us, I freely stand in all of the power that the 45 years of these collection of cells inventing and reinventing her largely feminine and somewhat masculine self and I write to speak to anyone who wants to that you may. Timshel. 

i did not come here seeking redemption

I came to Colorado, specifically to the United States Air Force Academy, at long last, after nearly 17 years. When I graduated I purposefully left the chapel spires in my rear view mirror and never glanced back again. The reasons were too numerous to all recount here, but the gist of it is that inasmuch as an institution can, this one hurt me. To say that I took the road less traveled as a cadet would be an understatement. In fact I didn't take a road at all. I made my own crazy scattered way through that nightmarish maze nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I unapologetically did my own thing. Which was often not the right thing. And while we are being honest many of my injuries at that place were self inflicted.

I came back here not because of or in spite of any of the negative things I associated with what some people affectionately (or not so affectionately) refer to as the zoo. I came to celebrate the career of one of the people who made life at the academy bearable and whose love, compassion, and quiet wisdom were often the only flotation device I had in the rough seas I was errantly navigating. I came to celebrate the 29 years he had spent coaching and championing women's (And men's)swimming at the Academy. I also came as a member of a team whose better members had won two national championships in DII swimming & diving and led to the team's ascension to division one status.

 The festivities were lovely. The reunion was joyous. Seeing all the beautiful faces of the people I loved dearly and unconditionally and they had afforded me the same grace as we bore each other through the years of academics and military training and swimming and life's many trials we all face regardless of the venue; that was priceless.  There was laughter and tears, happy tears, as we reminisced over the past and caught up on what 16-20 years had brought into and out of our lives.

 After the retirement and before the hall of fame event, on The Saturday before Easter, the day Jesus' body lay in the tomb, I ventured back to the visitors center and the cadet chapel at the United States Air Force Academy. As I walked up and looked around I realized the place no longer had a hold on me. Wandering around the path leading down to the chapel observing the scrub oaks that appear to be dead and the dry dusty wilderness teeming with pines and hidden mountain creatures, in the high rare air of that over 7000 foot altitude, I realized that the fire of time had burned away all the pain that i had experienced at that place and left only the qualities that been refined and the unbroken relationships with amazing people I would have unlikely ever otherwise met. A feeling snuck up on me like a whisper that maybe life had put to death all the broken and painful things and what was truly me was day by day being remade from that dust.

 As I stood in the cadet chapel marveling at the beauty of the 1950's modern architecture as light poured into that darkish space through slivers of multicolored stained glass and danced off a cross designed after the fashion of a propellor and remembered the many times I sat in those Wing shaped pews, sometimes seeking, sometimes finding, sometimes just escaping, I believed. For a moment I truly believed again. This Easter what was resurrected in me was an ability to believe. Not of my own volition because I did not come here seeking redemption. But because There is a love that loves me enough to put that belief back in my heart.

 I am not meant to live on the mountaintop. I only get moments of knowing and feeling and the rest of the time I live in the doldrums of confusion about things mysterious and divine. I am beginning to understand that I am also not meant to hold on to those moments for longer than they last. But to live in them presently when they occur and breathe them in drink them in feel them wash over me and then let them go as they ebb and somehow be comfortable in the unknowing that flows in its place. even writing it down seems a little bit like an attempt to hold on to it. To grasp it and keep it. The story of creation and recreation is always being told and retold. It's in science and math and Literature and nature and technology.  It's an old story but it is always new. And for a miraculous moment I am able to recognize its magic. I'm breathing it in. I am partaking in the resurrection.

 This is the story of other women but... On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. 5 In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? 6 He is not here; he has risen!