As I journey now, on my healing path from acute leukemia to a brand new me, I have this deep desire to share Le Petit Oiseau ~ The Little Bird, from 2016. Be well little bird. My soulbird. I release you now.
Iceland, September 2016
Sitting on a bench behind the summer house I carefully opened the bag I had placed the bird’s body in. There he was, that poor little thing. For a split second, I remembered how I almost had to peel what was left of him off the car, his little heart sticking out very noticeably. I thought for a moment whether I should keep his heart, accept it as a sacred gift. But no. It felt right to bury it with the remains of his body. But I kept his wing. His left wing, which had been torn and dislocated by the impact yet stuck to the car somehow.
As strange as it may sound, only a few days earlier, I had been thinking about us 'wing keepers' and the absurdity of it all whilst I watched two wings of a sea bird I had found swing from a tree in my garden, drying. As I stood there, staring at the wings being pushed back and forth by the wind, I imagined how a giant would find my lifeless body by the foot of a mountain, then chop one of my arms off to tie it around his neck for power and protection.
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What is it I watch myself throw on the fire?
What ‘me’ is being swept out to sea?
What is it I bury in the moist underground?
What ‘self’ is carried off on the wind?
My name
My clothes
My beliefs
My friends
My spiritual paths
My zodiac signs
Naked I stand
By the blood red river
My offering to what is
My past trickling away
Down the stream
My future
Not there to be seen
May only what’s pure resurface
May only sincere expressions of who I am resurface
Sincere expressions of that which I truly AM
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When I began writing this story, initially for Eagle Women Global, the visionary women's sisterhood I founded in 2014, I sensed a longing to be a master writer. To have words sway and play at my fingertips so the tale would truly come alive for those reading it, vividly with each word, each adjective, each sentiment. So it would more likely touch a string in the readers’ hearts. The experience it portrays was so significant to me. To us, as individuals of Oneness.
I called on Su Li, my twin sister from another lifetime to help me. She is always by my side when I write. She may have touched my father’s shoulder when he sensed that Sóley would be my name. I’m sure you see the name resemblance, Su Li, Sóley.
This story not only depicts the unfoldment of an eventful day in the now. Ultimately, it is the unraveling of an intricate lacework of energies and experiences in the present and from the past, doings, becomings, wounds, and weavings. Perhaps, releasing, freeing the future itself.
I was on my way to the store, driving. It was a fifteen minutes’ drive through the countryside. I had left my boyfriend in the summer house we were renting for the week, happy, working away on his computer with spectacular views to the east and south, over the valley, mountains, and autumn-colored slopes. My dog Sara was sitting in the backseat, happy, watching the sheep and the horses through the window, as they were grazing in the afternoon sun.
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In the early hours of the morning, I had sensed how intensely my awareness was tuning into the written creation of that month’s Moon Medicine for Eagle Women Global. It doesn't happen every month, but when 'It' does, the energy emerges with strong intent!
And ‘It’ came rushing in as soon as I awoke and was all about Truth and Authenticity.
This is what I wrote before noon that day:
Yes! That‘s the way it is.
..That‘s the way
Truth
Truth
I‘ll try again...
Truth...
No words to add.
Truth can‘t be explained, it just is what it is. Truth.
The last one standing, as Oriah Mountain Dreamer wrote so illuminatingly.
After ten minutes browsing, or let me rephrase that, after a beautiful walk along the hallways of our virtual temple, the Internet, I‘m moved beyond words by the wisdom of women. I‘m so grateful for our sharing, our creative expression.
We leave our soulful mark on the tall walls of the arched hallways with sacred poetry, our prayers, our philosophy and musings, beautiful paintings, art, and music.
Graced and inspired by each other's beauty we slowly walk from wall to wall, corridor after corridor. Our fingers touching each note, each word, each stroke from a pencil.
The hallways, the different paths within our minds and hearts, lead us to the great hall. The Hall of Truth and Authenticity.
We gaze at the spiraling staircase in the center of the room, which majestically reaches up to the stars, and down into the belly. Into the belly of the Universe.
Whether we walk up or down will simply be a matter of choice, as ultimately the stairs will lead us to the same place. The same sacred space.
…
After I wrote the above and sensed the essence of it, I remember thinking that of course the September's Moon Medicine for Eagle Women would direct my words toward the approaching Autumn Equinox and its magic. That the natural flow would be to share about the great release and liberation the season of fall offers us. That I would write about how harmonizing with Mother Nature's autumn rhythm can help us let go of our past selves, often our conditioned selves, as to move more gracefully into our authenticity.
Nothing prepared me for what happened in the afternoon.
The name Le Petit Oiseau, or The Little Bird, is important, as birds are a deep love of mine. You see, when I glimpse little birds, when I sense the presence of our little winged ones, who with their delicate fluttering between trees make our every day just a little more pleasant, I sense Spirit so strongly within and all around. Divinity, Oneness, Grace. They remind me of the reality of our existence. To me, they’re little messengers of bliss, bounty and beauty. To me, they represent Spirit. They are my soul on wings of love.
A beautiful golden hummingbird graces the cover of Songs of Anu ~ Poetry from the Heart, my first poetry book I published on Amazon. And then ‘Le Petit Oiseau’, The Little Bird, is the name of a book I’m writing. Perhaps this tale is it though. I know how it ends, so I may not want to continue with writing it anymore. It may have reached its essence, its freedom.
So you see, little birds as common as they are, are profoundly precious to me.
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I kept driving and passed even more sheep and herds of horses. Beautiful and curious life all around. A couple driving a rental had stopped by the side of the road. The woman was crawling under a fence to get closer to a group of horses. The man stood next to the car, snapping photos from a safe distance.
In my mind a continuous flow of words circled around, the same ones over and over again.
What is it I watch myself throw on the fire?
What ‘me’ is being swept out to sea?
What is it I bury in the moist underground?
What ‘self’ is carried off on the wind?
It was almost like I was undergoing a psychic surgery. It cut deeper than removing the pains and fears of my ego. It went beyond that. Ego itself, my personal self was at stake here. Not its pains and shattering image. Authenticity had been the roaring road signs, now Truth was driving the car.
As we drove onward on the road, smoothly cutting the air, new words emerged..
May only what’s pure resurface
I sensed the depth, the truth and the prayer in these words and one more time I recited them, but this time out loud in awe!
May Only What is Pure Resurface.
Then, as abruptly as a bolt of lightning strikes, the car driving toward me on the opposite lane and a precious little bird crashed right in front of me!
I saw how the impact smashed the bird open. His little feathered body spun violently in the air, then hit my front window and bounced off. How awful! How awful and horribly symbolic at the same time!
I was in shock and started sobbing instantly, trying to keep my eyes on the road with one feather sticking to the windshield, soaked in blood.
With tears running down my cheek I passed the site where I had almost lost my parents in a car accident two years earlier. My dog jumped into the passenger’s seat next to me, and tried to lick away my tears. It took all my might to keep focus and keep on driving as I had a car behind me driving very close.
Grief and symbolic meanings took hold of me for the remainder of the ride to town.
I prayed that the bird had died instantly and thought about all the dead little birds I had been seeing for the last few years. One after the other, and one particularly significant as its body was a mystery.
I had been sitting high up on a tree-covered slope close to my home meditating and breathing in, and bathing in, the beauty of ‘Spirit runs free’ – That No Thing, No Body can capture Spirit or bond Spirit, that Spirit is free forever, eternally and infinitely… That Spirit is the Great Animator. Then as I stood up I saw the body of a small bird lying right behind me on the grassy ledge I had been sitting on. Ever so close, just a few inches from my own body.
I wondered how that could be as I easily could have sat on the bird when I found that particular spot for my meditation, but I had not noticed it when I got there.
That experience truly moved me and I had soaked in its meaning, its message for a long time afterward. During the hike, I had been deeply admiring and loving all the little birds who were keeping me company up the hill. Hiking with me, one step after the other, one wing stroke after the other.
Are little birds perhaps increasingly falling at our feet? Helping us to remember Truth?
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I reached the little town, or village more like, but I didn’t want to go straight to the store. My face was all swollen and I just needed a moment. I drove a bit further on and took a left turn down a winding road that led to a small parking lot on the north shores of the lake the village is named after.
When I was stepping out of the car, fastening Sara’s dog harness, prepping her for a walk, I sensed how firmly it pushed, the question about how deep I was willing to go with this experience. As it was, I was standing by the beautiful lake that had served as a backdrop, or rather, that had once played an important role as the silent wise witness in a difficult yet transformative drama between me and a friend of mine from the past.
Memories flooded my being, memories that extended way beyond the circular edges of the lake. To my peculiar amazement, the thoughts stirred up nothing, and then simply dissolved into nothingness. Like they had nothing to hold unto, so they simply vanished. Very calmly.
I picked the blood-soaked feather off the windshield and placed it in a paper pocket, folded from an old receipt I found in my jacket. I drew a long breath and started walking, with Sara by my side, her ears raised in excitement, accentuating the symmetric bounce of her ear flaps. Tail wagging.
Everything was so tranquil. It was an overcast day, but to me it was a beautiful bright autumn’s day. The wind was quiet, and I loved how serene the surface of the lake felt to me. I sat down on a bench and made peace with what had just happened. I closed my eyes and held the feather close.
From the moment the bird hit the windshield, I knew.
From the moment I woke up that morning, I knew.
From the moment I took my first breath, 37 years ago, I knew.
I knew that Life itself is Truth
With all its ups and downs
With its joys and difficulties, colorful beauty and bleak melancholy days. With its Grace and wonder, enchantments, magic, toil and grit.
That each present, each now is our most precious jewel. But, with ‘the now’ being in an infinity loop with the unknown, it is the fear of the unknown that keeps us suffering. That is why we grab onto all kinds, things, stature, beliefs, even religion, as to soothe the fear of the unknown. The fear of the dark.
When we, the divine human beings we are, realise WE CAN SEE IN THE DARK, we’ll break free.
To truly understand what this means, and I mean understanding it truly and deeply, as an experience, not a knowing, opens up a whole new dimension to us.
It slows down the continuous now we humans experience on a time continuum as past, now and future, and allows us to instead experience ‘the absolute’, the frequency of the heart, on a daily basis, yet within our human bodies.
‘Having’ is a concept of the relative world. A concept of our personal selves. Who we truly are is clothed in our personalities and ego selves. It is our ego selves who feel pain pertaining to our lives on Earth. ‘Being’ is infinite and pertains to the absolute.
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The playground of our personal selves is The Relative. In our 3D world, everything is relative to something else. That is its nature, to identify or understand by means of comparison.
Relativity enables people to differentiate between concepts. Which is essential for us to stay alive! But, one of our lessons as humans, is to train our minds, ironically, to differentiate between what is real danger and what is not.
When is life simply unfolding? Isn't ‘the great unfolding’ the everyday world our essence breathes life into?
Our external reality, is time-bound, conditional and limited. Finite. Measurable. Ultimately a schoolhouse. Our essence existence is infinite. It is just so hard for our human minds to fathom the concept of the infinite. Of something with no boundaries. “So what’s behind the boundaryless then?” It asks.
What is then even harder for our human minds to fathom is that the finite, and the infinite are one and the same.
Recognizing ourselves, our essence, as infinite, formless, unconditional, is the transcendence. It is the death of our small egos. This realization then supports us ebbing and flowing as a single wave, and fully completely embody Spirit, in this world, within the Earth’s realm.
We allow Spirit to Animate our moves. As essentially we are Spirit. We are not only human, we are also the clockwork that operates this machine, this body, our personas, personalities.
We are no more the Spirit either, as we are both in this life. We are not either, or. We are both. We are the clock and the clockwork. We are the acorn and the tree. We are the ocean and the wave. In this life one does not exist without the other. We are the Spirit and the Body. We are the caterpillar and the butterfly and the essence of that life form, which transforms, transmutes, lives, ascends, dies and is reborn.
Ultimately we ‘do’ and ‘have’ in the relative, but we ‘are’ in, or let's just skip the ‘in’.. We ARE the absolute.
We have our personalities, our personal selves and egos in the relative. Almost just like having on clothes. In the absolute we are not separate, we are One, we are the Divine. That is our essence.
Trying to BE within the relative causes much pain to us. We constantly identify and condition ourselves with matter, ideas, forms of all kinds as we are terrified of the unknown. Yet as soon as we see it, see the fibres of the form for what they are, we are free. In the end all goods are of the ‘current’ kind. Perishable. We, our essence, is a constant.
Life is a constant current.
There are many ways to interpret and understand this. That is why we have so many religions and means of attaining spiritual clarity. All spiritual paths are basically belief systems, i.e. built on or around sets of beliefs about things, energy and their function.
Belief is a human creation. Nature has no belief.
Unfortunately, or maybe not, the truth is often obscured in the interpretation process. Obscured by the mind trying to understand. Making sense of the unknown. Ultimately on a human level to differentiate to stay alive.
Nature has no belief systems. It simply exists within, or as reality. The direction east, the color red, the number 13, the medicine of the owl .. all these are interpreted and understood differently by different people around the world.
Even the elements, the seasons and the phases of the moon have different spiritual meanings to different people. Underneath the meanings and the beliefs is Reality in all its glory, expressions of life, truth channeled in different forms. It is us who give them meanings and attributes.
And that's all good, as long as we play with it, don't cling to those meanings and derive a sense of identification from those.. as essentially when they will be stripped away, as they will be at their appointed hour as they are only perishable fiber, then, where will you find your naked soul? What is Universal Truth to you?
Ultimately we’ll have to take a good look at ourselves and ask us what drives our doing. Is it the longing of our time-bound ego selves to grow?
What really drives our actions? Is it love? Is it a desire for worldly goods? Is it the longing to be of service? Is it the longing to enjoy this Eden and live well? Be there for others. Enjoy Life!
What we allow to spring forth into feelings or matter by the hands of our personal selves, is the channeling of the formless into form, an expression of the unmanifest.
How often do we allow that expression to be colored by selfish means? By the illusion that we aren’t already that which we seek? Longing to be more, bigger, greater. … Than who? In the eyes of whom?
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Essentially we are the Divine in ecstatic motion. A Divine Being. Can we be more than that?
When we find ourselves as active messengers of spiritual concepts, be it through teaching, writing, performing, painting or through any other form consciousness finds to express itself through us.. We, the humans giving the concepts voices, we can oh so easily get trapped in the greatest trap there is. The identification-with-form-trap, where we start to believe that this is this and that is that.
We get wrapped up in ourselves, our mission and purpose, and we don’t see how big of an illusion it is, the personal self hanging with a death grip, trying to hold on to some importance, as it is delicately clothed in all things ‘spiritual’, ‘spirituality’, and ‘good intentions’, hidden under, what we sincerely don't believe is our facade, but when brought into the light, is exactly that. Extra stuff! Fluff.
We may start believing in our story, that this is what we are here on earth to do, that this mission defines who we are …...and ultimately we have become a walking contradiction to our sacred message.
But that's OK. It is All OK. Until we realize this, what is, is. And therefore the design of the divine. Like everything else.
I would say when our personal self is mature enough to know its looks and things, stature and beliefs have nothing, nothing at all to do with who it truly is, it can go play with all these things.
Being brave enough to see the forms and patterns our personal selves have so diligently constructed around us, smashed, obliterated, opens up a whole new dimension where we’re not the prisoners of form and patterns, our belief systems, and our minds. We aren’t free within this dimension either. Because there is nothing to be free from. There is no relativity. We are love itself. We’ve found ourselves beyond (polarities).
Pure creation flows in our human veins. Divine impulse moves us to do and play, to create with the matter of this world. To manifest, to weave and to unweave.
Our elemental life in this human incarnation has the potential of both creating and destroying.
What is it I watch myself throw on the fire?
What ‘me’ is being swept out to sea?
What is it I bury in the moist underground?
What ‘self’ is carried off on the wind?
May only what is pure resurface
May only sincere expressions of that which I truly Am resurface
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I walked out of the store with my see-through bag. Milk, bananas, eggs, honey. Already missing Sara, looking forward to gazing into her deep brown eyes again, and cuddling those gorgeous ears of hers.
I stepped into the car, turned the ignition on, and then noticed that the guy in the car next to me was trying to get my attention, saying something through my closed window. I rolled it down and heard him repeat: “There’s a smashed bird stuck to the front of your car. It doesn’t look too good.”
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If you knew you would die tomorrow, would you hold that grudge?
If you knew you would return to formlessness tomorrow, would you still be concerned about your self-image in the eyes of others?
If you knew you would die tomorrow, how would you rejoice today?
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After I returned from the summerhouse, what followed was a week of weirdness.
I cried and sat, and lay, and stared out the window. No-mind. Sat motionless. Almost no feelings. No nothing. I was one second away from deleting all my social accounts. I mean, why bother with social media? There was no purpose to anything. I felt formless. I was formless. Nothing, No-thing, made any sense to me.
My boyfriend held me. He let me be. Let me linger. Assured me he was there though. Support. I knew I needed that. But I hid. Wanted nothing to do with nothing or no one. It was such a strange feeling. It wasn’t even a feeling. It was nothing. Nothing held me together. No fiber somehow. Still I knew I was there. I just didn’t know what to do with myself. Or how to be, how to be an ‘I’. My sense of self was like a fluttering translucent butterfly. Almost not there, but still I was there.
My sense of self was like fleeting moments, with constant new beginnings, yet constantly fleeting moments. Somehow no beginnings and no ends, yet, each moment was there, a breath. Breath by breath. My hands. Strange things. Face. Why a face? No purpose. There is only energy. Waning, waxing. Increased in a smile, decreased in a frown. That's why we have a face, right? Gosh, I was being obliterated. Tiny particles floating in the air. The air that was all, yet nothing.
Then... warmth. A warm sense, a warm feeling started growing in me.
…
Slowly but surely the fibers of my being started re-weaving themselves back together, but I was changed. I wasn’t afraid anymore. I wasn’t fearful. During that special week when my fibers had been floating around me unattached, almost non-existent, the tiniest cosmic seed had managed to find its way, through essence, into my momentarily non-conditioned heart, and plant itself there in peace. The ground of my being, as porous as it was then, as wet from tears as it was during that time, provided the perfect conditions for that seed to sprout. It was the seedling of an evergreen. The evergreen of Trust toward life and the divine.
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