In the Middle of No Where

Where nothing makes sense… in the ‘middle of no-where.’ Like a sailor in a boat with no oars. Just floating at times and other times the boat tossing and turning like the thoughts in my head. The fears rising up like the waves lashing, threatening… to overturn me. To overturn my vessel… what I thought was my solidity.. my purpose, my reason for living.

But all that now feels like nothing. Oh it was something at one time. It was a ‘driving’ feeling of ‘survival of the fittest’.. survival of desperation. Survival of the deepest longing for acceptance.. validation.. reason for being.. a proving ground.. a ‘let me show you PLEASE…’ that I’m acceptable, lovable and worth your time and your love.

It all started with the male who helped to get me growing in my Mother’s womb. Don’t worry I won’t go back to re-hash and victimize myself, although as a small precious little being, I was victimized and brutalized with rejection, emotional abuse, and then awkwardly fondled in a way I knew was not right and that ‘not right’ sunk down into my bones and left a deep aversion to perversion, and awkward reactions to sex in general. My Mother got me and my little Sissy away from this man by the time I was five but a desperate fear and anger continued to run through our households until I escaped at 17. The song by Neil Young “The Needle and the Damage Done,” needs to be re-titled here as “The Father and the Damage Done.” Rather trite really.. ‘needle’ sounds more dramatic and more of a ‘known danger’ in our society but insert ‘Father’ or ‘Mother’ and people aren’t as interested and many turn away and shut down inside due to their own damage done.

Fast forwarding past years and years of all kinds of life confusion and weirdness and of flinging myself into an intense effort to find my place on the stage of life in a gigantic way. I mean, it had to be GIGANTIC! Didn’t it? I had to be on the WORLD STAGE, because it became not enough to just prove to my Father that he could accept and love me. Somehow the desire, from all the YEARS and YEARS of rejection on level after level, became a huge twisted self-centered need to sing it all from mountaintops and make sure EVERYONE could hear that deep hurting ache inside my heart that just wouldn’t leave me alone. I just knew if I could ‘just get it right’ that then.. THEN I could be loved and spew out the volcanic fire that burned in me since I was a child.

The problem started when I begin to realize, I didn’t know how to get it right, do it right, or what the rules of the game were. I thought I knew. We thought we knew but we didn’t and so after 20 years, thousands of dollars and gyrating all over the country and back again, life brought us to a dead stop.

From the ‘dead stop’ until now a slow strange surrender has had to take place as I search for the ‘authentic life’ that is waiting. I don’t quite know what it is yet, hence the reason for the title of this post “In the Middle of No-Where.”  I’ve had to learn to sit down and be still although I’m not too good at that really, which over the last few years has driven me to spend a few thousand dollars on trying different types of schemes that I felt would utilize my talents fully and in which I could feel ‘full-filled’ and joyous upon awakening and facing the day. It reminds me of the first Vision Quest I went on years ago. A group of people searching for ‘their vision’ or ‘a vision’ all head out to a remote place, in my case it was the desert in Death Valley in CA. On the first day out we each take a couple of water jugs and hike out to find ‘our spot’ on the earth where we will stay for 4 days and 5 nights without food, with just a sleeping bag, water and our journals to search for a vision, some sort of answer to our dilemma(s). I was manic, running about all over the desert looking and searching like a mad person trying to find the ‘perfect spot.’ I finally exhausted myself and just sat down. I felt hopeless and sad that I hadn’t found the perfect spot. After I got over myself, I looked around and realized that I had plopped down ‘in the perfect spot.’

The key words in that last sentence are ‘after I got over myself.’ Those words are the key that unlocks the door to the indirect question that sits quietly in the title “In the Middle of No-Where.” I mean everyone wants to be somewhere right? I certainly do. I want to be somewhere in myself first of all that has nothing to do with the selfish ‘self-centered’ need to prove myself to anyone. Who the hell cares!? There is ‘victimhood’ in that ‘need to prove myself to the world.’ Woe is me who just can’t seem to get it right. Woe is me who spent all her money trying to play the game and didn’t know how. Woe is me who had to go back to a day job and not have the luxury of being an ‘artist’ anymore. This ‘wall of self’ that has kept me from hearing my true hearts purpose is crumbling while I sit in that boat with no oars in “The Middle of No Where.”

Now I do not discount all I went through. I do not discount my life up until now as full of mistakes I made, bad decisions, or ‘I wish I would have known better,’ or ‘what the hell was I thinking.’ I know what I was thinking and truly it was an honest desire to do what I thought I had to do to pursue my dreams and get what I thought I needed. Rising up from those flames will be the Soul I was meant to be from birth. Fully fleshed out in a rich experience of a life with stories to tell. With compassion and understanding to give. With a heart that can hear preferably what the silence in-between the noise has to say.

A wonderful guide during my 2nd quest, (yes believe it or not, over the next several years, I actually went on 6 more Vision Quests after the first one), gave me some wisdom about a black ant I had seen while sitting on Mother Earth in my Medicine Circle. This ant was struggling along dragging something black and about the same size as it was. She told me the ant and its burden represented all I had gone through and carry with me in my soul. All the pain of the dark past, all the struggles, all the lessons. We all carry it, we shoulder it within ourselves. It will always be with me and over time it will compost into kind understanding compassion and wisdom for others. Very telling and truly not a woo woo spiritual prediction.. just the basic truth of every soul’s journey on this Earth plane. There is a ‘call’ that one needs to answer and in order to hear it, the time comes when one must climb into sacrificing noise for silence or ‘the call’ is missed.

As I sit here in “The Middle of No Where,” I’ve pretty much gone quiet. Not a lot of movement toward heading backwards to try and make ‘all that’ happen again. I’m working on the surrender that must permeate me from bone marrow to skin surface to the One who has all Power. If I am lost in the noise of my head, a set of desperate plans, spending money on the next possible scheme to ‘make my artistic life’ come alive again in some huge gigantic way, the latest BS drama on FB or on the news, I won’t be able to hear the promptings of my Higher Self… that Muse that is the magic and mystery running her creative bliss through all of her creations. I’ll miss my true calling. I’ll die unfulfilled with horrific regrets. I watched my precious sister die that way frozen up in a bed, 99% brain dead from a life of full on ‘junkie’ distraction. She COULD NOT come back and that was the most painful thing of all. It was over. Kali’s Grace finally said “enough, your ‘cat of nine lives is finished,” and took her home. Watching her die that way sunk into me like a bloody dagger of truth. The truth that I can’t ‘F’ around with my life.. I must get really REAL and get on with listening for my ‘authentic life’ to bring itself to me.

This is my first writing for this HELLACIOUS HEALING BLUES Blog and by the time this Blog is published, possibly the spinning beautiful loving magical and mysterious love of the One who has ALL Power will have directed me into the work it truly wants me to do but for now, I’m staying put “In the Middle of No Where.” It’s actually such a relief to not be forcing myself into everywhere.

Vision Fast Kali

Credits: Header photo by Bruno Miro from Unsplash.com / Desert photo from Death Valley, CA taken by Christina James.