Those of us who’ve come up in households where addiction and emotional instability were the order of the day…we know a little something about grieving. We make a partner of our grief. We carry it with us. Often, we carry it down deep, where it hangs there like a feeling we can’t touch.
But sometimes, when we’re tired – when we’re triggered – it can come rushing to the surface. And when it does, it’s good to simply be in the midst of that…
One of the hardest things to do — especially for those of us who’ve carried a lot of pain for a lot of years — is simply to sit with it. Sometimes that pain shows up as body memories, sometimes as emotions or old stories that seem to rise up out of nowhere.
They can get into our heads, start pulling the levers, and before we know it, we can start acting out into the world in ways that might not be too nice.
And then comes the aftermath…
When’s the last time you actually created something – just thrown yourself headfirst into the process of simple, radical creativity?
There are a lot of videos out there lately, and a lot of people talking about how necessary it is to make things right now—especially at a time when there’s so much turmoil, and so many people who seem to be bent on destroying things.
The act of creation is a balance to that…
“Are you as human as the rest of us?”
“Are you doing everything you can to keep your heart open in a world that seems to be going out of its way to shut it down?”
I’ve been praying really hard for clarity lately. I’ve been praying really hard for guidance. And in that, I’m probably not too different from a lot of us.
A good many of us feel this urge to do…something.
But not all of us are going to be called to protest. Not all of us are going to be asked to bleed to death in our cars or in the snow. Not many of us are going to be asked to write anthems; to energize millions of people.
For a lot of us, that calling is something simpler, but just as difficult. We’re going to be asked to go deep inside ourselves. To find our wounds, and to heal them…
I was talking with my teacher and his wife a while back, and I said, “Y’know, I feel like a hammer that gets hung up on the wall of the garage. If there’s a nail that needs to get banged down, I get taken off the wall, the nail gets banged down, and then I get put back up on the wall and just hang out and wait.”
My teacher’s wife started laughing, and she said, “Yeah, but a hammer is still a hammer even when it’s hanging on the wall.”
And man, that really, put the hook in me.
These gifts that we have, whatever they might be, they require us to live in a certain way. Those of us who grew up in dysfunctional households, who had to learn the skill of empathy – had to learn how to read the room so that we could anticipate what was going to happen next, we know a lot about how hard it is to live in the type of world that we live in today. This is not a place that takes kindly to those who feel. And sometimes we need to disappear for a little while, lay aside the things that get in the way, and just rest…
If you’d like to see more, please check out my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
When I get frustrated and the exhaustion sets in, my skin tends to get a little thin…and it did this morning. I’ve learned that when things get like this, it’s usually a sign that I’m pushing too hard. And so, I need to just take some time and rest.
And that’s the thing: rest is also a big part of this recovery process. Learning to sit. Learning to love ourselves enough to take care of ourselves and to just be…to just chill out, breathe, relax when we need to.
To feel these things; not to numb them out, not to stuff them down.
Because running away from our feelings – stuffing them down, hiding from them, not showing them in public – is a lot of the reason that we carry these wounds in the first place…
If you’d like to see more, please check out my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
As we get older, if we’re lucky, if we’re brave enough – strong enough –
to look at these things from our past, to really, really sit with them, and to examine the consequences as we look out at the wake that we leave behind us through our lives, we begin to realize how we’ve affected others.
And sometimes, the desire to make amends comes about.
Not everybody wants an apology. Sometimes, our apologies are good, true, honest things, and other times, we just want to be left off the cross. But nobody can really do that for us; that’s something we have to do for ourselves.
And so, what’s left, then, is what’s referred to as a living amend:
looking honestly at what we’ve done – the effects of our actions –
and deciding, “I will not do that again,”
and doing our damnedest not to…
If you’d like to see more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
Grandfather Joseph Rael teaches us that ceremony begins as soon as you say “Yes” to it. And I really become aware of that about a week or so before our gatherings occur, which they do on the first Saturday of every month. I start to slow down. I start to pay attention to what’s going on inside me, what’s going on in my environment. I start to take a little more notice of what I eat, what I drink, how I move through my day.
And then, as time draws closer, especially on this last day, it really begins to wind up. And the simple chores that we have to do, like putting an extra leaf in the table or taking out the plates and the silverware, getting the crockpot ready for the potluck after the ceremony, raking out the firepit, making sure that we have enough chairs…all those things that go into it, they tend to become more like prayers…
If you’d like to see more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
As we’re getting down to the last few scraps of 2025, it’s probably a good time to do a little bit of reflecting on what this past year has been like.
Speaking from the perspective of my own emotional recovery – my own spiritual healing – the work’s been pretty difficult, and at times, it’s just been downright exhausting.
But there’s one thing I’ve learned these last many years, and that is, that when you plow deep, you’re going to hit some big stones. It takes a lot to dig them out, but when you do, buried beneath them, you can usually find some pretty good, rich, fertile soil. And that’s definitely been the case this year…
If you’d like to see more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
I picked up a few requests over the holiday, so I’m out in the garage, cutting some Cherry and Butternut blanks, and getting to work on the initial steps of bringing an antique handaxe back to life.
The heater’s finally taken the edge off the chill, and the workshop’s warm and welcoming; it’s the perfect day to be out here with my tools, enjoying the space that inevitably opens up after the blissful chaos of the annual celebrations.
I’m reminded, in the silence of this space, of the feeling of sitting on the beach when the waves have withdrawn. There’s an openness to it; and a deep and palpable grace that only comes from the knowing and accepting of its impermanence…
Bonja the Bodger 