Happy Friday ... Today is a great day…
Happy Friday ... Today is a great day ... We begin a new novel titled ~ Eternal Transparent Blue Line and subtitled in parentheses (Trauma and Time Finding Dreams) ...
something beautiful that catches light differently depending on which story we lean into ... A transparent blue membrane ... thin ... always curved ... holding the space between earth ... sky ... and water ... the way a horizon holds without gripping ...
Look at any horizon long enough and you'll notice it bends ... We keep drawing straight lines on a planet that has none ...
Trauma and Time are not opposites ... They find each other the way sediment finds the bottom of a glass after stirring stops ... not fighting gravity ... just settling into what was always waiting ... Our lines curve because nothing true was ever perfectly straight ... The earth turns beneath us even when we forget to feel it moving ...
Prayer is not a barrier ... It is what happens when something meets something else and both are changed ...
For this Oyparaploo life project ... earth ... sky ... and water ... become witnesses ... They watch trauma move through toward stillness ... the way light passes through a stained window without trying to fix the stain ... It does not erase ... It does not correct ... It simply passes through and carries the color with it ...
A straight line is a myth we invented to make measuring easier ... But the truth keeps curving when we're not looking ...
Within the ordinary ... morning ... afternoon ... evening ... the span between midnight and the next sunrise ... something always shifts ... The way a body washes itself and afterward understands something it can't name ... A dream is not an escape ... It is a new arrival beginning to happen ... We enter the curved experience before we know what story we're in ... the way we walk into a room where something important is about to happen ... or just did ... and we adjust to the air without being told ...
Water remembers the shape of what moved through it long after the movement stops ...
Our membranes don't care about walls ... The curve holds regardless ... Thoughts and emotions arrive in soft pieces ... touching each other without permanent locking ... without dependency ... the way clouds pass through the same sky without owning it ...
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Chapter One
When we awaken to something ... the way a room changes when a window opens ... not the dramatic rush of cold air but the subtle shift in pressure ... the way the house itself seems to exhale ... and then we take that to the supernatural ... manifestation attributed to some force beyond understanding ... not dramatically but the way we carry a glass of water carefully up a staircase ... each step a small negotiation with gravity ... the water tilting toward the rim but never spilling ...
A window appears to let light in ... but look again ... the light was already moving ... the window simply stopped pretending to be a wall ...
Take it to the other side ... which is also this side seen with different weight on our shoulders ... Ask what we can do without asking other people ... because sometimes another voice ... however kind ... is still another voice ... and the question needs silence around it to hear itself ... the way a single note needs the pause before and after to be heard as music ... Ask Jesus and or The Divine Source what we can do ... the asking moment is a form of arrival ... the way knocking and entering happen together as one gesture ... not two ...
To arrive at the answers to our most concerning questions ... which may not come as answers at all ... but as a change in what concerns us ... or as the next question ... shaped more like something we can hold in one hand ... This announced itself quietly ... no drama ... just a passage opening and a space changing ... the way dawn doesn't break so much as it seeps ...
We think we walk toward the light ... but maybe the light has been walking toward us ... and we meet somewhere in the middle without knowing who moved first ...
There is no separation between a window and the light that comes through it ... We keep building walls between things that were never apart ... sacred time over here ... ordinary time over there ... but this refuses the plan ... One thing pretending to be two for reasons we forgot long ago ... The way we visit a relative in another city and feel strange in their kitchen ... searching for a coffee cup in the wrong cabinet ... when we never needed to leave home ... The sacred was already here ... in the weight of a glass of water ... in the sound of our own feet on the stairs ...
Not something we find only when crisis strikes and we suddenly remember to look ... but something that doesn't exhaust itself because it is not traveling from somewhere else ... Believing we must leave ordinary life to find something sacred ... we grow tired from a distance we invented ... But if it is here ... in the way morning light finds the same spot on the floor it found yesterday ... then strength is as close as our own shoulders ... which have been holding everything all along without knowing what to call it ...
A door opens inward and outward at the same time ... depending on which room you think you're standing in ...
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Chapter Two
A lot of younger folks are finding their way back to something that was waiting for them ... the way a letter sits unopened until the right time ... They didn't always know what they were looking for ... only that something was missing and it had a shape they could feel but not draw ... Returning to sacred sweating ... The heat in the flesh opens what was closed ... the sweat carries what was ready to leave ... Water leaving the body the same way it leaves the earth ... rising ... becoming cloud ... returning as rain ...
Steam rises and falls at the same time ... depending on whether you're watching it leave or watching it arrive ...
Some of them did not grow up with these ways ... They had to find the thread and follow it backward through hands that almost let go ... They asked the Elders who asked Mother Earth ... because some questions are too important to answer alone ... and some answers only come through voices that have been listening longer than we have been alive ... The Elders did not give advice the way a manual gives instructions ... they gave it the way a slow river gives direction ... by being followed ... not by being explained ...
Body remembering what human consciousness forgot ... The way your hand knows how to catch something before your mind registers it's falling ...
And then the preparation ... not just physical ... the heart of hearts also has to be made ready ... the way we clear a table before setting it for guests ... making room for what is coming ... And then the fast ... no food ... no water ... three days ... The body becomes quiet enough to hear what has been speaking all along ... What was noise becomes silence ... what was very quiet becomes a voice ... That sound ... familiar ... like a song we knew before we were born and forgot on arrival ...
Hunger turns the body into an ear ...
Humility arriving ... not as a feeling but as a fact ... The way ground meets us when we stop climbing ... Doors that were there but felt like walls ... now recognizable as gates ... They were never locked ... we just kept pushing when they opened inward ...
Grandparents did this ... children will do this ... hands passing something to hands ... the way minnows pass through water without stopping to ask whose water it is ... No one owns this ... everyone borrows it and returns it changed ... The key is ritual ... not repeated because it is required ... but because each repetition wears the path deeper ... the way a trail becomes visible by being walked ...
Which is its own form of fasting ... letting go of every other direction to walk one direction fully ... These young people grow wings that are made for return ... not escape ... able to move between worlds without abandoning either one ... And then find the route to the Higher Source ... the name doesn't matter ... passages open anyway ... waiting for someone to approach them the way water waits for thirst ...
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Chapter Three
Winter owl symbolism screech ... Transcribed wild human speech ... Someone conjuring out loud about ancestry ... land ... and spiritual composition ... Now ... let us walk through what we hear ...
A leaf falling upward with an eye that is occasionally blinking ... It falls again like a snowflake on a very still day ... downward this time ... but we are not absolutely certain that it ever stopped rising ...
A half-naked celluloid speaker is making a significant claim ... that everyone is indigenous to somewhere ... not just the peoples we usually label Indigenous ... but all of us ... connected to specific sacred soil ... lineages ... A seemingly common statement that arrives almost too simply ... the way profound things do ... slipping past before we have registered the weight ...
Now ... rain falls in columns ... then we notice queued cavalcades standing and winter fuzzy tailed gray squirrels rushing up to examine them ...
Then four most internationally notable prophets get invoked not as religious doctrine ... but as ancestors ... immortal figures who planted seeds long before any of us arrived ... There is something very tender in this ... the way a good listener hands us names ...
Now ... Moses River flows left ... and the upside-down banks slowly move upward ...
With a pivot ... The natural and supernatural are not separated here ... they are wonderfully woven together ... the way an old-world grandmother's voice sounds in the middle of a task we learned from watching her hands knead dough ... Prophets and Other Spirits are not just distant figures from texts ... they are protective presences that have accompanied ... Which is stranger ... that they exist ... or that we have spent so long pretending otherwise ...
Mother earth's Seasons turn clockwise and counterclockwise ... depending on whether we are oak tree or acorns ...
The phrase we can see and feel how they have been with us communicates experiential knowledge ... We notice ... not believe ... The children being kept ... the ability to differentiate ... ruminations occurring while washing dishes ... not proclamations from a worship house pulpit ...
Thank you is how we end conversations we're not entirely sure we began ...
We communicate all of this the way smoke communicates fire ... You don't get the flame handed to you ... You get its residue ... its shape in the air ... The listener receives what the speaker releases ... both changed by the passing through ...
Reading is a spiritual act ... Listening too ... Both move in more than one direction ... toward remembering ... toward a forgetting that doesn't need to explain itself ... toward whatever was waiting before we arrived ...
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Chapter Four
This is an interpretation of someone speaking from deep inside trauma work ... the kind that leaves marks ... Tide pool holds still ... Look closely ... It is the ocean that stopped moving around immediate grief ... We have just returned from a funeral ... someone we listened to and tried to keep safe took their own life ... Holding this thing that is too hot to set down ... Snowflakes fall upward from the ground ... the ground lowers itself away from the snow ... Everything moving in directions we did not expect ... We thought we were providing safety ... It was not enough ...
A spider web vibrates ... the spider is still ... the wind is also still ... something else is moving ... This is what it feels like to sit with someone holding a story they haven't told yet.
Geography of harm ... Everywhere we have worked ... places where children were hurt ... East coast ... teen sexual assaults ... countless arrests ... Detectives naming what most look away from ... This country is layered with these locations ... They are still here ... The floors remember ... so do the ceilings ... the walls ... the windows ... the doors ... None of it forgets ... Buildings outlive the people who hurt and the people who were hurt ...
Tree rings spiral inward and outward ... the tree grows them from the center out ... the saw reads them from the outside in ...
These stories created unimaginable pain ... moved from person to person through behavior ... sometimes ended in someone deciding they could not live anymore ... If we cannot hear them we cannot do this work ... But hearing requires staying safe ourselves ... so we do not cave ... Building connection ... so wounded teenagers can trust us ... to tell the deeper stories ... The ones about those awful people and terrible places ... waiting ...
Moss grows toward the light and away from it ... depending on which decade we are talking about ... Direction is a story we tell after the growing is done ...
This is where it gets beautiful and practical ... We did not walk in with clipboards ... We walked in with what the shore gave us ... driftwood ... biodegradable fishing string ... rocks painted with happy faces ... careful ... lovely work ... Branches to break in half when feelings need somewhere to go ... Cords tangled on purpose so hands have something to unknot ... Art assemblage first ... words after ... We gave these young people something to hold before we asked them to speak ... It is what it is ... not a metaphor for anything ...
Specialists walk in wanting to label the problem ... They have diagnostic categories ... names for what they expect to find ... But naming is not listening ... Naming before listening is its own wound ... We ask the child to perform their pain for our framework ... instead of letting them show us what happened ... slowly ... in their own time ... their own way ... with their own tangled string ...
A seed falls ... earth rises to meet it ... or the seed is still and everything else descends ... Either way ... something gets planted so that something else can grow ...
Sitting down in the sand ... reciting prayers ... sharing inner stories ... Walking from one moment to another ... talking until details emerge in their own time ... or not talking ... just being there ... This is relational work ... slow ... emotional ... the kind of work that asks everything ... The adult has to hold unbearable things without caving ... to take the horror into their own bodies so the teenage child does not have to carry it alone ... Institutions do not know what to do with work like this ... It will not give them metrics ... It will not scale ... Spirits ask us to sit with children who have been failed by every system built to protect them ... to stay when what remains is the only thing left to offer ... to believe that presence alone is the best medicine ...
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Chapter Five
This is about someone speaking from inside approximately four decades of healing work ... the kind that requires sitting with what most people refuse to face ... Let us walk through what can be heard ...
A river carries sediment downstream ... but watch long enough and we will notice the riverbed rising to meet it ...
A woman approaches after watching a film about massacres ... but she is not a descendant of victims ... Her ancestors were the perpetrators ... She is trembling ... weeping ... asking ... How do we heal our lineage? ... This is not a question most healing frameworks anticipate ... We build systems for those who were harmed ... But harm travels in all directions ... It does not stop at the edge of the wound ... It lives in the lines of the hands that made it also ...
Roots grow downward ... unless we are the soil ... then they are reaching up ...
The practitioners realized immediately ... Shut your mouth and listen ... Forty years of work and this remains the foundation ... not fixing ... not explaining ... listening ... The woman did not need answers ... She needed someone to receive what she was carrying ... Some things can only be set down when someone else agrees to see them ...
Rain falls into a lake and disappears ... or the lake rises one teardrop at a time ... difficult to say which ...
When practitioners allow their eyes to well up ... they show others it is safe to cry ... This is not performance ... It is modeling ... The first tear shed in a room gives permission for every tear that follows ... Group work heals because the group sees itself reflected ... Someone else's grief makes our own less strange ...
A forest fire moves through ... A year later ... green sprouts ... The fire is still there ... underground ... becoming something else ...
The courage to open what is unspeakable ... For decades ... they named what happened ... massacres in the streets ... and people looked at them like they were insane ... because naming atrocity out loud violates an unspoken contract ... We agree not to speak of certain things ... We shake hands on censorship without shifting feet ... These practitioners refused ... They said ... Yeah ... This stuff really happened ... and the room would go quiet ... The quiet of something finally landing that had been falling for years ...
Seeds do not rise ... they crack open and let the rising happen through them ...
Once the massacres were named ... people asked ... What else happened? ... That is when the sexual violence emerged ... It is always there ... underneath what we are willing to acknowledge ... The body becomes a site of war in ways we do not want to know ... But it already knows ... Healing is just the knowing catching up ...
Tides go out ... tides come in ... Or maybe the shore is breathing ... pulling the water close ... and letting it go ...
The community started asking us to come in ... after recognizing that we were finally willing to sit with the truth ... Healing work does not knock ... It waits until the door opens from inside ...
Healing is about naming the pain ... working at the depth of the pain ... not around it ... not above it ... at the depth ... This is simple to say ... almost unbearable to do ... But somewhere in that unbearable is where the elder woman's question lives ... How do we heal our ancestors? ... as if the past could still be tended ... as if lineage is not a line but a living thing ... still breathing ... still waiting for someone to finally say what happened ...
