Music sustains my life so much. All winter blending 2017 with new 2018, and on into the spring, I have walked down the roads of Lopez Island with music in my ears encouraging me to continue pumping my legs regardless of an aching knee, sensitive state, or weather. Lately I have been listening to the Indigo Girls, music from my teens and early womanhood. I have been connecting to this identity, as I was very cut off form this growing spirit and independence inside of me throughout my life. Reaching past the doorways of several psychotic breaks has proven challenging, as they have come to my compassionate understanding to be shamanic deaths. When we go through a shamanic death, we enter a new life. We truly die and are reborn. As many know, seeing through to past lives can prove challenging. Also the transfer from one life to another can be traumatic and we carry and resolve this trauma into our new life and we resolve this beyond the veil of our death. I have had to learn to integrate and heal my many adult lives to see through several doorways to the very important developmental time when I was developing my individuality and becoming the woman I am today. I believe during this developmental time, the choices we make are very important. The interests we have, the dreams we foster, shape our lives in incredible ways even if it is only through our dreams and subconscious. One of the things I spent much time dreaming of, was a life full of music, and the music I chose to listen to during this time was very influential and important. Cat Stevens and the Indigo Girls are among these bands. I also had access to my father’s record collection and finally inheriting this collection in 2016 was a long awaited desire; to hold the records once more that shaped my life.

This Indigo Girls and another band that I remember from high school that I have on my iPod today, Freakwater, both have very deep and poetic lyrics that can carry you to places within your imagination. I value this in music as I am a poet myself. Ani Difranco is also an amazing poet and was very influential in my young self that searched for a strong spirituality and identity that would make a difference in the world someday. Cat Stevens always represented being a healer and outspoken in the world.

It is 5am, and the light is entering the sky. It has been an intense time astrologically, and I have spent much time nurturing friendships young and old as well as journeying deep into the mysteries of my twenty year relationship. I have been learning about and understanding gender and sexuality pertaining to my own journey, my husband’s identity, that of my friends, and in order to better understand this potent generation that is blossoming “beneath” me. I am finding freedom in the growing letters of LGTBQIAA+ and though it is a lot to wrap the brain around it is proving very illuminating and eye opening as well as liberating to discuss and research the delicacies and intricacies to the many genders and sexes that exist in the world. I myself am a Bisexual woman and my husband Intersex that defines himself as a man. It is true that we appear a cis-gender couple, but that is not the truth at all. I have always known this on some level though I put being a member of the Queer community far into the back recesses of my life and consciousness. There is more to learn and digest, but I do believe there is meaning to the exploring and expanding that this generation is doing concerning gender and sexuality.

So whether it is music or sexuality, these were important journeys that I was on when I began to struggle mentally at the early age of seventeen with anxiety and depression, having recovered from and survived an eating disorder, and was headed toward my first psychotic break at 18. It is important for me to rediscover my identity and heal these fractured parts of my being. I am grateful I am able and free to journey and heal this way in my current life.