Marya Mann : Blog : Birthday Youthing, Writing, & Moving Experiences

Birthday Youthing, Writing, & Moving Experiences

Aloha Kakou!

Peace begins with a smile. As I tap out this message to you, the smiling energy fills my belly, eyes, feet, heart and hands. I smile because your birthday wishes have touched my heart.

Grateful for you, your steady friendship, shaking me up with fresh ideas when I was stuck in my own, and for taking my breath up a notch with your passion, rousing gratitude in me, and for the moving beauty of you.

Through you, I feel more of me.

Sending a quick word of thanks, and a bit more. Whether or not you’re moving with us through the Love Continuum Ancestral Healing ceremonies in Hawaii, I’ve spoken with and heard from you enough to know that, like me, you walk in many worlds.Isabel Allende says of her writing, “I open a vein and let everything flow.”

I open a flow and let everything go into the world where it is needed.

I appreciate you opening your mind and heart to the Quantum and Ancestral Lineage Healing, Continuum Movement, and Climate Restoration practices, teachings, and stories that I foster, and even sharing them with others.

It means we are kindred spirits. We share spiritual DNA, the fundamental link as we evolve.

Some people say growing older is mandatory and growing up is optional. I believe growing old is optional and growing up by going with the flow is the imperative.

How do you go with the flow? The 17th century Japanese poet and samurai Mizuta Masahide was going with the flow when he described the crazy optimism required to stay balanced when he said, “My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.”

He framed his tragedy as a gift.

The gift that wants to flow from me to you for my birthday today are two questions, big ones: both have changed my life. What follows that are thoughts about writing.

THE QUESTIONS AT THIS AGE

Here’s the first question, a big one: What is the one personal lie you tell yourself? Is it that you’re not good enough? Is it that it’s too late? Is it that you’re not…abundant, smart, connected, supported, or fill in the blank…enough? These personal lies do no good. Banishing the big ONE LIE that has stopped you above all others will invigorate a new universe inside you.

I can easily point to my lie: that I would never have enough time for making good enough writings, books, stories, and art, poems, dances. This particular book or that song, poem, or painting faced a mountain of perfectionism masquerading as excellence.

The lie made me earlier in life neglect my tales and now I scramble to tell their stories to illuminate our lives and descendants’ lives with joy, forgiveness, and continuity.

It was an ungrounded fear, I know now, because the more naked and present I became with my Soul, the more I enjoyed not only finishing poems, books, prayers, and songs, but I am enjoying sharing them despite “deadlines” and deadly opinions coming before a piece is ripe enough to lift the eyebrows while renewing the imagination and tickling the brain.

I am also starting new writings like {AWE for Peace} and {My Year of Climate Healing: An Earthling Experiment on an Ancient Lemurian Island}. And because they come from a different place than earlier works, more from the scar than the wound, I feel the words as they tease, ease, satisfy, and incite me.

By writing, I am often invigorating parts of myself I never thought I could feel again. Rising out of amnesia, above the layers of illusion and anger that capitalism, colonialism, misogyny and racism have threaded into our social systems, to deceive us, my zeal for truth-telling startles me.

“I am life’s fire planting the seed of truth in your womb, to empower you, and you are about to sprout up green and climb through the noise of modern civilization and into the net of creation.”

“Is that all?” I say wryly.

“It will be enough,” says the zeal. “With your creative flow of attention, we can do anything.”

As a writer, I become a Seer, attentive, one who observes, I am the “I” behind the I. A lifetime of writing slowly reveals the intact me, integrated, with nothing cut off or pretended. It’s all been worked out on the page. And what hasn’t been massaged on the keyboard of my computer and life, is coming into play now. Relaxed, sensing, breathing, and awake to this present moment, writing teaches me to rejoice in the smallest blessings, the deepest cuts, the greatest loves, the tiniest sweetness.

It’s easy to miss the good fortune if we are busy with comparison-mind and happiness-chasing. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable. But it’s much more fun to dance with the Moon of ambiguities, waxing and waning. Life hurts, we grow dark, and the light comes, isn’t it incredible?

There is a cartoon of an astonished looking man saying, “What was that?” The caption below read, “Bob experiences a moment of well-being.” The ordinariness of our good fortune can make it hard to catch, but the magic of really Seeing, and then becoming one with what is Seen, the Seer, and the Seeing, opens up a friendship toward ourselves as well as surprise, the most exquisite divine realities.

WRITING AS TOUCHING IN

Indigenous ancestors often said with a smile, “Today would be a good day to die.” They weren’t inviting death; they were feeling that since their inner houses were in order, oneness with Nature and the infinite energies of unfolding life flowed through them. So they were unafraid to die, to be dust and ash, immersed in their beloved Dreaming forever — or at least until the next lifetime when they again stretched the spirit worlds into the primordial world and prayed for us.

I touch the evolving current of the Dreaming each morning, awakening in bed, putting hands on my heart, greeting the Sunshine, and saying, “Today is a good day to live!” And I find myself in meditation with tea, a journal, and pen, or at my computer, curious about how the invisible worlds will shape this perfect day, and how my intention and imagination can shape our enlightening world.

You may not even know what the question is, but chances are, you are already looking out for the answers anyway.

Here’s a clue to loving and writing in a sacred life: Looking within is the answer. As we engage in this ancient human experience, each of us inevitably discovers that our personal consciousness is part of a greater field of consciousness.

Then we can ask the second vital question of our time, a question posed by the Kahuna Nui Hale Kealohalani Makua. He is the Polynesian mystic who spent his entire life reminding us of the Great Mystery and its importance in solving the complex problems of our time: The question confronting us now, he said to Hank Wesselman, is, “Have we learned the lesson yet, or are we going to settle for another 2000 years of spiritual blindness and applied barbarism?”

As I settle more into my natural body, aware I am made in the image of the Holy Spirit, perfect and whole, I wish for writing that keeps me settled in my basic goodness, and able to manifest good art, writing, teachings, and friendships, but unsettles me enough to not settle for the blind aggression I see around me and the sacred rage I feel about it.

Having a writing space that feels like heaven, a dancing circle of healers with open hearts, is a good start. But I must sit there. And scribble. And publish and edit and write and scribble and each time come closer to producing electricity through the lightning.

I wish for writing that links up to the lightning bolts flashing in the Sky as Benjamin Franklin and his son William did with a kite, a wire, a key, and a storm.

Sparking more eternal torches to elongate the light across the dark valleys of our species, when they conjured wars, famines, and climate change.

With words, I wish to celebrate both darkness and the glow beginning already in the embers of burning cities. Nature’s Dreaming comes through the glowing embers in the heart, the spirits, gods, and mythic guardians, the pantheon of higher beings that I believe have a human facet too. They themselves feel sadness in the face of human hubris.

Tom Robbins wrote, {Even Cowgirls Get the Blues}. I would add, of I would like to write, “Even Holy Cows Get the Blues.” I would write about what drives us upward, to the joy, the glee, the dazzling brilliance of our fluid resonance percolating in a living cloak of beauty…the field of all possibilities, “beyond right-doing and wrong-doing,” as Rumi says. “I’ll meet you there.”

Writing sparks electricity through curiosity, play, vulnerability, and the resolve to find higher perspectives that reconnects things. We are rooted in more common ground than we know because our powers of forgiveness, relationship repair, and reconciliation have gone into a negative polarity. Isolation, shame, and despair have replaced picking up the phone and calling somebody up to say, “Are we okay?”

When we raise our insight to the level of universal healing light, and realize we’re all going through it. The same thing. Ups and downs and shames and upended plans and restorations of the regenerative forces.

When the light of awareness dawns, we can neuro-sculp with the instrument of language, so that more and more light flows through us. The depression lifts. No more down-in-the-dumps cows. Humanity and compassion can continue shining, which is our job, imho.

Our true nature shines through art, music, dance, the principles of perennial philosophy, shamanic spirituality, Christ and Buddha and Saraswati consciousness, meditations, healing movement forms, and affirmative prayer — all accelerate our evolution, leaning into the future we choose from the regenerating superconscious parts of the mind.

Do you See it? Generations of peace-loving global citizens gracing the Earth. Healthy flora, fauna, water, and sky. Keep the vision; keep the faith; keep the flow.

The writings, drawings, photos, emails, and relationships that lift us up so we can see ourselves and our world are shake-up calls, lightning flashing in varied constellations writ large across the infinite Sky, Indra’s Net now magically embodied in the internet! How is that for creation creating?

We rush to share illuminations and bask in the glow of lightfall on our shoulders, hair, and eyelashes. Sometimes, all we may get is the thunder. Darkness. Unknowing.

But often, writing opens up another door. And a poem arrives, full-blown.

THE WORD-FLUTE

“When the word-flute is flowing and the throat is open,
Stories and visions unfurl fresh from the sea of stars inside me,
Combing through my dreaming hair, I untangle the claws
of opinion, agony, and the privilege of writing.

Taking dictation from the Spirit is a holy gift.
While writing, I am the Seer and the Seen
because writing is a prayerful embrace
by the Great Mystery and I am the Beloved, being whole.
The mystery understands me, even if no one else does,
And animates a new creature – a poem, a song, a letter, a chapter.

I am pure gratitude as stars fall into my hair,
Stories of the ancestors perking up along my spine,
Feet that want dancing, pain that frowns, the burdens they carry.
In the time- mirror, I face their suffering, lift their troubles,
take them on as my own. By sharing our loads,
we lighten each other, past and present.
The future shines in the same time-mirror
as the past. Bright genii blossoming from cosmic seeds
Burdens feed new spirit gifts so honey climbs through.

I am the Seer. Writing is the seeing.
You are the seen, but you are also a Seer.
As we See we write about all that we have lost.
Writing saw me through more deaths than I want to remember.
Writing saw me through more funerals before the age of 14
than most people get to attend in a lifetime.
My great good luck! As a writer, it was pure gold
that I would never wish on anyone.

I even attended a funeral in my mother’s womb, so grieving,
weaving with motherhood, innocence, and love at death ceremonies,
all stitched into the pre-and post-embryonic tissues of my pre-verbal brain,
my child’s heart, full of joy, hope, dying, and writing.

There is nothing like death to focus the mind and crack open
the writing egg, pour forth the juices of memory, drown in
sensory delights, indulge the tears, soften the fears, and awaken Seers.
Writers get to fall flat in the Facebook of it all, and then we earn the greatest gift of all,
Of letting it all go — to feed others, to feed healing, to feed fires,
to feed the spirits. Getting it all out there, diving into
dreams holding amniotic codes for tomorrow’s poets and healers.

On the page, we paint with the colors of rainbows,
blood and tears, Medusa’s sisters’ hand-me-down eye,
a Van Gogh ear, the half-mad Vision of Hope, the Ecstasy.
Creativity. Wholeness. Giving birth to tomorrow.

Realized by Marya November 24, 2024

DIVINING THE DIVIDE FOR YOUTHING

As in all things, there are polarities of qualities and experiences. There is a vigorous dance between the breathtaking privilege of writing as a way of life, in one polarity, and the push to publish at the other polarity. To help shape the new world in ways we are capable of, along paths that I want to see us grow as human beings, I want to be among writers, artists, and mindful leaders who live in the soul. That is a dream coming true.

We are Earthlings on the brink, holding onto the handrails of our Mother Earthship as she heaves and flows, in the throes of both birth and death. Through writing, we read the signs and melt the charred residues of yesterday’s bad decisions, making pleasing sounds that don’t spare the truth but inspire the {Spirit of the Great Heart} (another great poem title, or a song…oh, I think it’s already a song by Johnny Clegg. A great song btw).

To say that I am writing as a way of life means that my life is more about the deep dreaming of the mystic than finding the right word. I explore invisible worlds because they are rich with insight and felt awareness to me. I share their Dreaming, becoming permeable to spirits that are here for my power, protection, and support.

All others, we repel back to their source.

Because writing is about tending the dreaming, I respect it as a sacred space for sacred stories to find me at my journal or computer, devoted every day, lighting my candle, setting my shamans’ table as any priest, priestess, medicine-maker, or kahuna would do. Writing is a spiritual effort, balancing the elements. Finding not the way to impress or convince or sell something, but the genuine way through.

And if that can be entertaining and fun, all the better. We’re growing and learning as we go.

That’s creation creating through us. Always jokesters at heart, our spirit teachers, inner healers, and animal powers will play games or give us pains to wake us up, so if you hurt your knee, you might ask what you are needing or kneading. Are you needing to kneel more?

In all the time of writing thousands of couplets and poems, screenplays, stage plays, , novels, non-fiction books and online syllabi, collections, notes, visionary journeys, dreams, and during my time as a journalist, literally thousands of features & articles about artists, eco-builders, spiritual teachers, and organic farmers, my aim was always to capture the Living Experience of the person, event, and /or the authentic life that inspired me, how they gave more life, love, excellence, and honest effort than most people.

Like the Sun, the cultural and ecological pioneers I wrote about in my early years on Hawaii Island never wavered in their empowering glow and presence. They weren’t looking for the divide between us; they looked for the divine in both of us.

Like they didn’t care who you were – they believed in you. They believed in me. That’s what enlightened people do, I realized. They put forth so much light it bounces off of us and gleams back on them!

In all that time of playing with words, dancing with the divine, meeting fascinating people and asking every question under the Sun, I never noticed that only one little letter separates two quite opposite words: Divide and Divine. Until I wrote the sentence two paragraphs ago, “not looking for the divide…they looked for the divine.”

The N becomes a D and the world splits apart. The D becomes an N and it comes together again. My feature subjects shared the gift of shifting themselves, and others as a consequence, from the divide to the divine.

Simply looking freshly at something, two words, through writing, unearth a truth about the human experiment with fluid resonance, language, meaning, story, and myths that shape us. The relationships that bond us into heart coherence —which like smiling is scientifically proven to make everyone healthier and happier – can only grow as we reflect on our lives honestly and thoroughly, and writing invites us to reflect on what we’re sensing and feeling.

It costs nothing but gives you everything at your fingertips. What a gift!

We are literally “youthing” not “aging” when we affirm fluidity in our writing, movements, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. The way we see things changes things. When we transmute the roar of negativity into positive energy, we are regenerating true vision. As we learn to enter into the rivers of bio-cosmic intelligence, observe subtle wave changes in brain, heart, and body, and listen deeply, a wider and deeper stream of creation opens up.

EVOLVING WRITING

Beneath the volcanoes of Mauna Loa and her brother Mauna Kea, a quiet revolution is taking place. Is it a writers’ revolution? An evolution? A procession of individuals moving from the Divide to the Divine
We are the embodied caretakers of the ancestral streams that interweave the universal threads through this unique place, time, and timeless dimension.

Our Polynesian Ancestors told of an Ancestral Grand Plan that would guide us when we are ready to listen. The plan is a multi-dimensional structural design for refreshing our global roots and cosmic intelligence.

For starters, think of it as a teal blue light filled with ancestral information from above you, that reaches into your crown, eyes, mouth, throat, and heart, and down your spine into the Earth.

The light calls us to feel and possess all the rainbow colors. All our contents are stirred to remember with the weaving of the rainbow waves. The tender, wild, wise, and widely smiling planet loves when we are tuned in and the loom of love is showing us the way. Feel Earth’s joy that you are feeling alive in Her.

The wind strums rhythms in the trees and the limbs sing, reading lead sheets growing on banana leaves. Tuning into the birdsong, the ocean is chanting and every undulating wavetop is crested with light from the Moon, and the lapping drumbeat at the shore resonates the heart of the sea into a sound wave running along the river’s edge near where you live. The music reminds me of our mutual movements, the holographic rendering of you being in me and me being in you and how we resonate when we fully engage.

I feel you reading this. Hoping that you feel that magic of your surrender to creativity, in some way, at some moment, feeling creation moving you: a lake evaporating, mists rising to mountaintops, falling as rain, with lightning and thunder, flowing in rivulets and canyons and back into the loving arms of the sea.

That’s writing, for me – in short, a {Loom of Love in a Sea of Bliss}. Aha! The title of another chapter? A poem, a symbolic journey location? A spiral through time….and the beat goes on.)

Isabel Allende says of her writing, “I open a vein and let everything flow.” I open a flow and let everything go into the world where it is needed.

Writing moments are moments with you, my friends, readers, exalted souls, artists, writers, shamans, yogis, wave-riders, you who chose this adventure we share together. I am so grateful that you are in my life, weaving our loom of love.

Please write me back with thoughts, questions, and generative ideas on how seminars, sessions, and writings can serve you. May the Love Continuum nourish us all!

Look for details on our Love Continuum Winter Solstice Ancestral Healing Movement Intensive on Saturday, Dec. 21, 1 – 5 pm. Mark your calendars, dreamweavers.

Sending flowers from the field of all possibilities!

Mahalo nui loa!
Love, Marya