Yesterday was Day 3. The thing we call "severe disability" is pretty wild.
I wrote my daily, yesterday, while keeping away from the internet-connected laptop -- preserving my body against the effects of the EMF that can compound my highly sensitive health conditions. I rose to demanding circumstances with alacrity! And wow, I'm learning.
Today is Day 4. I'm feeling a little more fresh, a little more strong, and at the laptop again to finish yesterday's writing (which you'll find below) and include new flows for the unfolding of this new day — the 18 of October, 2023.
My Day 3 & 4 notes here begin as follows:
Challenges do arise. How do we meet them?
With faith and love. With patience. With respect. With care.
With awareness that we do not ever see the whole picture — but we can feel into our relationship with one another to broaden our recognition of what we and others are experiencing.
Every challenge, it seems to me, intersects with the subject of family.
In discussions of business and marketing, I have felt this especially.
Family itself is the business; the well-being of the family body is my livelihood -- inherently.
That's why any work occurs; so the family… our most intimate collective body… can be well, safe, and supported.
When our families are in crisis, we don't want to find the family in conflict with our business. We want to know that our business, by its very nature, supports the best thriving of our family.
Yet, much business methodology assumes the family well-being must be sacrificed for the livelihood. This unfortunate approach fails to recognize the strength and clarity of business that is fully aligned with the strength of family attunement.
And indeed, right now many of us are noticing that the global crisis is also a family crisis — not only about individual families, or individuals' extended families, but about the sense of family care that we broaden to one another all around the planet when we recognize what we have in common.
To care for the planet together, that is an important form of family.
To value diverse voices and lived experiences, that is an important form of family.
Many people who have lost members of their families… and people who have lost their entire biological families… have discovered a powerful sense of family in deepening their connection to the Earth and to the resonance of life energy all around them.
Many people find a compelling family energy in their connection with the greater cosmos.
And many people have great difficulty locating themselves in any kind of family, because of the ubiquitousness of relational trauma and neurological injury.
As the day has dawned this 18 October, I've felt a coming-together of peaces that a long while had been disparate.
Often, you might notice Mayan names for a particular day in the headers or content of my writing.
I got myself through some of the most challenging and life-threatening circumstances I've encountered by following what I've been able to learn of the Mayan calendar — what I found over many years to be a much more accessible system than the Gregorian, for me, for repairing neurological injury — because of its relational archetypes, energies, and imagery.
There is a sense of expansive, greater-than-planetary family there for me because of the ways that following the Mayan calendar… and the refuge from violence that I found near lands ancestrally connected to Mayan peoples… saved my life when all else was lost.
Having studied this to the best of my ability for a decade or so is now a rhythm, a sense of cycles, a familiar frequency. When I notice how much has changed in that time, those rhythms feel even more present.
Yesterday (Day 3), I reviewed vocal performance videos recorded 20 years ago.
The experience deeply nourished and fundamentally shocked me.
I watched myself singing the professional repertory I had cultivated over the course of my musical career and I didn't just see the subtle actions of my physical body. I felt them.
In the midst of long-term rehabilitation from compounded trauma and physical injuries so severe that no professional anywhere knew how to help me address them, the nutrients of contact with these video recordings flowed powerful new understandings into me.
I sang like that before I experienced violence and fled the country. My body knew how to do it.
Did all of that really happen?
And… how?
How did I come to have the privilege of watching these videos?
Because my mother recorded them… kept them… and brought them to me, wanting to watch them with me.
Because I am fortunate enough to have regained my contact with my mother, even after everything that happened to both of us, and to our family.
There is so much to be said about the blessing of my mother being in my life at all after the violence we and our family have experienced.
I'll say more at another time, in another place.
For here and now…
My recognition is that the vibration of honoring my family body is inherently my profession; inherently my livelihood; inherently the most important alignment for the work I do in the world; and perhaps the only reason to have any dealings with money at all, considering how toxic monetary systems can be.
Healing (wholing) my own physical body after experiences of violence has been framed for me as impossible, but those who framed it this way were mistaken. It was assumed I would never sing again; certainly never regain my own professional income; and probably not survive.
Making my body strong and capacious again -- that is service not only to my individual self but to my family.
And that, also, is my livelihood. In the context of the great suffering and destruction all my family has experienced — inherently — it is our livelihood.
I see that gradually… in one way and then another way… one step and then another step… I am achieving these things.
We flow resources and we find ways for the family body to be strengthened.
We build our understanding of family not only in our sense of biological family, but in our sense of the collective ecosystems of living beings we are part of.
We're all here, all connected. You who are reading; I who am writing; and so many others around us who are sometimes near, sometimes very far away.
We meet challenges with faith, love, patience, respect, care… creative vitality… courage for innovation… attuned presencing… relational integrity… collaborative fluency… belief in ourselves, in what matters, and in one another.
We keep time together.
We build blessings.
We tend the body.
A Third & a (Joyously Striving) Fourth