Penance and Peace

I am taking my girl out tomorrow, haven’t seen her in ages, and she hasn’t been to our favorite place in waaaay too long. I said ‘this must be remedied.’

She said “how does it feel to facilitate remedies to people in so many ways?”

“Like penance and peace.”

I love being the remedy. I have drank of the sweet water from that well until I wasn’t thirsty anymore.

I love the lightening that occurs on someone’s face, in their eyes as that lightbulb of clarity turns on, their shoulders when they shrug off that weight when I say ‘baby, I have been there and I can promise it’s going to be okay.’

Brother Matt posted something about how it is of vital importance to spill your guts about the messes we have made. Other people are in the mess and need a way out. Or at least to know they aren’t alone.

As I say all of my truths out loud, and I mean all of them, I feel lighter too. We call this shrugging and winning. The world is enough of a burden without all of us carrying all that weight alone.

I will be forever grateful that I was alive in the time of social media. Not for the cat memes, but for the sense of home I have found in these islands of people who say ‘me too’.

I am the girl who always felt strange.

I thought it impossible for my inner dialog to be ‘normal’. It wasn’t, and for that I am also eternally grateful. I thought myself rather insane. In retrospect and after much introspection… I think we all are, just some of us end up owning it. Especially after we have pushed ourselves to the brink.

Mick Jagger said “all children must go through a period of going crazy, I mean you don’t want it to end in death but…”

I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the quote. I cut it out of a Seventeen magazine a million years ago and it is in a photo album somewhere.

This may or may not have saved my life. Having that permission to be crazy from an adult. A bat-shit insane, talented adult who did enough cocaine to fill my apartment, but still. Permission regardless.

I went crazy.

I did.

I did stupid, death defying, self-destructive things. Locked myself into situations, that by all logic, I should not have escaped from. I am Houdini or the gods had a plan. Or a bit of both.

I am walking, talking, tangible proof that you can be an absolute piece of shit human being and still find redemption.

Rough transition sentence ahead…

I met someone, it’s what I do.

And he’s young, this is also what I do.

I think either by the grace of said gods or however I vibrate in the universal energy of things these young ones I find have evolved somehow. They come to give and take from me and we are well met, always.

Black 19 had spent 2 years in jail, mostly in solitary. Confronting what it was like to be truly alone. And although he turned out to be a little shit, we had that common ground. I had sequestered myself in the middle of nowhere and found out who my friends really were.

The Giant, also young, is a mortician. By vocation he is a death eater. He swallows what we are all most afraid of. Something in him that made him gravitate to that line of work, something deep and profound. So, by default all my dealings with him were deep and profound.

We don’t need men to be “gentlemen.” We need men to do peyote and face their deep cores of emptiness, then return to the village humbled.  ~Alena Smith

I am inclined to agree.

Not just men though, all of us.

This new one came along right after he had hit a really low point and decided to make some changes.

I have no trust for anyone who is straight edge that doesn’t know what it feels like to lay on cold linoleum praying for death, puking, crying and high as a kite all at once.

I know what it is like to dwell in the crazy underground shit filled garage of rock bottom. And it is a long climb out. I know what it is like to be clean for a while and fall right back into that pit of despair.

Rock bottom is the most solid foundation to build yourself from.

“I used to be…” is an empowering statement. It comes when you can accept your flaws and leave them behind you.