Picking Up Little Pieces

this footage is actually from last June when i first moved into this home on the Santa Fe River.  To see photos and story of this broken glass go HERE, currently working on a video of this event as well.  Interesting how a year later the imagery from this spontaneous moment is still meaningful to me.

3 AM smaller pieces to sort through

Its 3am smaller pieces of self shattered, trying to pick them all up but they are practically sand. 

I woke to the sound of the wind, pretended it was the ocean and the windmill squeaking the whales calling to each other, me.

I only just went to bed at 1.  I had been holding tight to a writing assignment for class, instead of drinking myself into a stupor.  Writing not here on this blog but for this class has been a way to put the pieces together, but they have been big pieces, that I keep rearranging slightly like my photos of Mr. Red, never quite satisfied with the outcome, same pieces over and over again, they were all that I had to work with, trying to make a story of it, to make sense of this life of mine.  Now I have shards that I wasn’t aware of before, I don’t know yet really where they are from, but a deeper place I hadn’t shared yet. 

How many times can one shatter, is it like cats with 9 lives?

But this time is different than others,

This time I have friends I could call.  One friend too sick to be with in person said, “I’m holding you so you can let go.”  And I felt it, I could feel my friend really holding me from across the river in another house, I new she new my stories and even though we have shared different stories there are human themes, I see it in her eyes an understanding. So when she said she was holding me, I could really feel her, like know one has ever offered me before, no lover, friend or parent. 

And it’s different this time because I have this dog, this dog I have resisted, told myself she needs more than i can offer, that I’m not a good dog parent and i don’t have the energy for this.  And today somewhere in the middle of the shattering, that started a few days ago with a crack, I stood and cried as she sniffed so gently another dogs piss on the end of a chamisa bush, she was just so elegant and careful in that moment with taking time to smell.  And it reminded me of how my body is also telling me to slow down and threatening me with a break down, adrenals, thyroid, and hormones know longer functioning fully on their own.  So I let the tears flow and took time to feel my heart crack open to her, my dog Laska.  This was a different kind of crack, but maybe I needed the painful crack to feel this expansive crack of love.

And then I could feel Laska reaching out to me just as tentatively as I have reached out to her, and there we both were in full discloser of our fears and woundedness, being enough for each other and agreeing that together we could figure this out and maybe sometimes it wont be easy and will actually suck, I’ll be mad and disappointed and she will be rebellious and disobedient, but now we have said it is ok, we have seen each other with honesty, our faults and great beauty. 

In these shards I feel the wounds of my past lovers and the wounds we inflicted onto each other with our false projections.  And under those shards are older smaller pieces the ones that have been deeply buried under my skin in the grooves of my mind so I can only see through wounded glasses what is safe to see, not the truth that hurts.  These broken pieces of glass that have become part of my skin so I can no longer feel the pain they originally caused,

till now. 

Somehow they all fell out, lying scattered, exposing holes they left behind, now I can feel the betrayals I have experienced that feel like I’ve been raped, but I have no memory of being raped.  I want to blame myself, somehow I caused these betrayals, my “no’s” caused these responses that can throw me into a kind of shock, so that I become numb and can no longer believe in my “no’s”. 

The walls of my home no longer feel thick enough to protect me. 

I find myself running in bed like my Laska does sometimes in her dreams, now I too am running.

But her small ruff paw finds me and keeps me in place, as I have for her. 

And it’s different this time, because I did say no and believed it.

And it is different this time, because I know all these events of these last few days are being held and guided by the spirit of a hawk that showed up behind my house with a wounded wing asking for help and so we helped her, and she told me then big changes were coming but I didn’t know it would be like this, and I don’t think it’s over yet, like a earth quake the big shake and crack is done but I’m waiting for the after shocks still to come.

And the hawk taught me how to teach Laska to stay in the boundaries of the river bed close to my home, so now every morning, and we must do it every morning else she forgets what the rules are, we walk the boundaries and I make it clear where it is safe for her to express her wild self, and I make it clear that she has a safe home to return to. 

Somehow this daily walking of establishing her boundaries is not just for her, but for myself as well, the walls of that River Bed yet again giving me shelter.

And for now I put it all to rest, I will lie down in the sun drenched warm sand of the riverbed that smells like dog shit, and I will rest while my dog goes sniffing.