It was a wild spring and summer I tell you. And I am quite a different person now. I completed two long-term life goals, one took ten years, the other seven. I finished and then presented my thesis to a generous panel of shamanic teachers and community members. I studied the delicate yet lion-hearted art of unraveling curses with a renowned elder. I was publicly humiliated, defamed, and blacklisted by a now former community. I let some friendships from that community sunset and others I threw into a sagely fire, requesting that it purify the relationship, and am sitting still in the unknown of what, if anything, might be on the other side. I rope bottomed for several classes a dear friend was teaching. I learned the Wheel Of Consent body of work and went to one of their play parties. I released about 300 ladybugs into my living room to feast upon the problematic pests on my houseplants and they are benevolent roommates now, flitting about like they own the place, because they do. 

On purpose one early morning, I became a savage creature for a time, melting into the landscape of cedars, moss, and ferns in the back nine of the retreat center I was assisting at. Undomesticated and communing with the older-than-old great great great grandmothers of wisdom, wilderness, and world – this world to be precise – and during this time I did not shew the few insects that crawled upon me but rather let them tickle the tiny all-but-invisible hairs on my skin. 

The grandmothers sang to me and taught me some of their after-fertility wisdom, which I’m still in the process of translating. Female humans and toothed whales, like Orcas, have a whole second life post-fertility. It is not lost wisdom per se, but most certainly obscured by the obscenity of Brokenhearted Society pressing its nasty overgrown toenails ever deeper into our everyday attempts to carve out a meaningful and beautiful life. 

Who the heck am I now? I can’t go back, as that version of me no longer exists. I’m learning how to connect anew, how to reconnect to what remains, and how now do my satisfaction and affinity fires want to be stoked? It’s an internal and external inquiry. A “yes and” investigation as well as a “no but” one. 

Yes, I value connection and consensus truths like sunrise and gravity. And, I’ve learned that spin and weaponizing victim-as-identity identities can seemingly be all-powerful intoxicants that effectively pull one away from sunrises and gravity. No, I do not value the seductive trance of the drama triangle. But, I tried my best to shapeshift myself and my actions into the empowerment dynamic all while my heart was breaking. Yes, I walked away from the ask to sacrifice my accountability-to-self. And, it turns out that stepping into that self accountableness meant that the delicious carrot was wisdom that had previously been obscured to me. No, I will not sacrifice my heart in order to remain part of a group. But, I will accept that grief and proficiency are part of the consensus truths I mentioned above. Yes, the younger me’s who made those 2 life goals feel sated in completing them. And, I’m crafting new goals that feel equally just beyond my current reach the way the others did so long ago. Yes, I’m in a spacious betwixt and between transitional phase. And, if I don’t craft fresh connections and reconnections, will I not end up further away from my shiny new self as a result? No, I do not remember how to tie single or double column knots across a forearm or pair of calves. But, I know people who do and who would readily refresh my memory.

With the new standards of the Wheel of Consent I can more wholeheartedly say no to rape culture. But it turns out that being able to say no in this new way means I’ve had to become further incapable of going along with Brokenhearted Society. And that is its own new exploration of reconnecting with myself.

As Alder’s green leaves receive Autumn’s yellow kiss, and flirt with orange and red, I turn my heat back on and take these “yes ands” and “no buts” to my yoga practice as well as my masturbation practice. 

The masturbation part feels easier somehow than the yoga. The only hard part of masturbating lately is that I’m more single than I’ve ever been in my life and every time I jerk off I face the crushing loneliness and fear that this might be it. I might now be too long in the tooth, set in my ways, picky. Am I too unwilling these days to make concessions to be loved, I wonder. I really don’t like being so single and my masturbation practice can feel like a nag and reminder of this, even though it’s not supposed to be. But I can connect and reconnect as long as I surrender to the grief, which is challenging but not the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.

Yoga in a nearly half-century old body is a whole other beast. It’s also grief-filled and mixed with letting go of all the things I knew about myself that either aren’t true anymore or have addendums now. Overnight I became intolerant of practicing in a room that was hotter than 85 degrees, something that simply was not true in a younger body. I try to arrive early enough to class to set up near the window and be able to relish the fresh air flow. The hypermobility of my joints and connective tissue that used to make me look like I knew what I was doing in a yoga class, even if it wasn’t true, creates a wobbly feeling now, like my arms or legs might just fall right off in any given pose. I’ve realized in the last months that for all these years, I was letting my joints stop me in asanas, not my muscles, so I’m relearning as if I haven’t been practicing for decades. A shoulder, hip, or wrist will randomly come out of socket sometimes or I’ll wake up the next day in pain and wonder what I did to feel run over by a truck. 

Connecting, reconnecting, and the basic tending of my wildness as well as my everydayness takes courage and authenticity. I don’t need to be a paragon, or heroic performer,  but rather to learn how to continue enjoying the body I have, exactly as it is, and exactly as it’s not.

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