Bee-ing, simmering old coals, learning from lizards.

Things I want to say about being a busy bee, resting, letting things be. There's an infinite Google doodle game live today for Earth Day, and it's fun, but also kind of exhausting. You guide a bee to pollinate many, many flowers, and it's hard to keep up. After awhile, you're led to a mandala where you get an educational fact about bees, and {most importantly} you can rest.

I am so tired, even though I've been getting enough sleep. My body is weary from processing so many old stories. And though I know I am pollinating future flowers by gathering the data now, it feels disheartening because all week I have been struggling to feel able to do external things, to feel like I can make progress. It's also hard to make words come out, because I want to write about the process. I did write a whole post yesterday about working softer for the Rain Blooming blog. Currently feeling frustrated because it feels like I am externalizing pieces here and there, but they're not coming together yet into a whole.

Pulling wool feeling out of my ears with the gadget that sucks pressure out of headaches. Power tool buzzing outside. Am I in Seattle? /sarcasm

It is hard to feel like this because it's how I felt so many days living in the Northwest, struggling to be okay even though I couldn't think or do anything. Alia says to be with myself, to try to feel into inner tugs, and know that even working softly I may need to overcome a bit of inertia, but it's okay if I'm following the inner pulls towards what wants to happen.

There are things I want to say - about living through a pandemic and revisiting everything I have learned from chronic illness about making it through, day by day. My mao tells me that the world is getting ready to want the things we have to offer, that we're creating. And to trust that things are happening at the right pace, even when it doesn't feel like it.

But I want to cry with frustration, being inside this numb blank woolly feeling, while knowing with this sort of awareness external to my agency that there is so much that I want to do but it won't go. I'm pushing again. Let me try to talk to the numbness, feel into it. What are you? What do you need?

It tells me that it's trying to process the intensity of everything that has happened to me, that it needs me to be very patient and very slow, that it has things to teach me.

I cradle the hurting place in me that screams at me to go faster. I tell it that I know it hurts, I know this feeling state doesn't make a lot of sense, that the incongruence of thought and ability right now is super painful. I tell it that it's doing so well, and that I'm proud of how it breathes and tries to be okay with what is, to undo the conditioning that tests its limits.

Under the surface, I can feel grief. And I gently disarm the inner critic who has learned to resist grief, to apply labels of "too much" and "this again?". I invite the grief to arise as much as it needs to. It's tricky, trying to feel into this grief - it's like a shy animal that retreats. Like the lizard we found in our apartment this morning. It ran outside and hid in the shadows of the balcony. When we tried to grab it, to take it back down to ground level, it retreated into a rain-hole and I saw it from the other side of the balcony wall, poking its head out of the rain gutter, its little tongue darting out. That's how my grief feels. Maybe this lizard is coming to teach me, today. Maybe it's teaching me about lying fallow, about befriending the place in me that feels skittish, hermit-like. Actually, the tarot card I drew today was the Hermit. Well then.

Trying not to judge my writing, the stream of consciousness. Sometimes I feel so non-cosmic in what and how I process my day to day, compared with the two of you - especially you, Isabella. I have been struggling to feel like I can meet you in the esoteric web you're aware of weaving with maos, and I've been feeling guilty about not replying yet to your post.

But I think I need to find a way to honor the fact that I have unwittingly been in retreat this past week, inside the dome of symptom flares and intensive trauma healing. These threads go back so far, they pull at ways in which my being shut down when I was 7, 9, 12, I don't know. All I know is that I am trying to consciously be with, for the first time in many years, these subtle gradients of pain and depression and fog living.

(I guess this is my version of working through the dark place right now, the way it's manifested concretely in this life for me.)

Puttering around. Writing and planning bits here and there. Making little foods. Just finished eating some stir-fried kale and celery with Momspice and a few smoked oysters over rice. Already feeling hollow again inside. I've been so hungry all the time, and it's not really just for food. There's so much I'm craving, have been craving for so long. I'm missing my home, my roots, having a conversation with Jess about trying to trace back our indigeneity. Breathing with all this complexity. Sitting in the 80 degree heat that is San Diego heading towards summer. A deeply quiet, hot day, simmering things inside like a wood stove or maybe a dragon.

<3 Tessa