someone asked me recently what hospital vespers means and why i started a blog.

i don’t have a great one word elevator pitch answer to this, because it’s not something i can easily explain.

what i can say is that i’m on a healing journey and a seeking journey. i’m seeking to understand myself, the world, and my place within that world and this is a physical, mental, emotional, sexual and ultimately spiritual pursuit. it is something that will be a lifelong unravelling, unspiralling road of transformation and truth seeking. i do not know what the journey will be or where it will take me or what i even hope to find.

i’m filled with so many complicated emotions and i realize that for many years i swallowed every emotion i had, good and bad, until i was filled to bursting with feelings that felt forbidden and awful. it took someone trying to murder me, a spiritual revelation, and ultimately my diagnosis of fairly severe PTSD and being forced into years of therapy for me to even begin to grasp and understand just how broken and fucked up i was inside, and really, still am.

i guess none of us get out of this life unscathed, and some of us wear heavier mantles and are decorated with more battle scars than others. something something sweet delight, something something endless night, etc.

i attended a sweatlodge ceremony this summer with other indigenous and mixed indigenous women and i crawled my way out of that hole in the ground, eyes burning, tears streaming down my face and threw myself face down into a creek and it was like this primal rebirth and instantaneous baptism. i have not been the same person since then.

it’s hard to explain, of course, as most spiritual reveries probably are. how can one explain the unexplainable? how can i say to you how i felt my spirit transmogrify and shift inside the confines of my chest? before i crawled into that hole, back into the womb of our great mother, i treated my life like a funeral procession because it was. i knew hate and avarice and pride, o, how i knew pride. i knew vanity and shame and anxiety and fear and grief.

i still know these things, of course, so it is this human condition of ours – both a blessing and curse simultaneously for us to know both beauty and horror wrapped together eternally.

but. big BUT here – i feel so much less consumed by these things.

i was able to finally quit something that should have died years before, something i hung onto out of stubborn vanity and god, this desire to feel needed and wanted, to feel like i could be somebody, to feel like someone, you know?

this is a primitive desire in humans, and natural of course to desire love in its infinite baffling chemical horrorshow and yet for me, love is an intoxicating force that has remained for most of my lived experience – something that was only ever conditional, something performative, a transaction.

as a child, i got the love of my mother by performing to a certain set of standards. if i completed these invisible tasks, i would get an intoxicating sip of love and affection, but if like a poor actor i happened to miss a mark or fumble a line, love was denied, acceptance denied, grace denied.

my mother is not guilty in this. she too was on a ration of love from her own mother. how could she give to me something she did not have to give. she could not pour from her own empty cup to fill mine. and while i never got addicted to any of the drugs i did or the booze i drank, i became someone desperate for love and acceptance.

when one is desperate for love, connection, humanity, you become a side character in your own story, always overshadowed by someone else, always putting yourself second to be the best friend, the hardest working employee, the most doting spouse, the girlfriend who doesn’t nag or complain or spend too much time in the bathroom or ask for expensive gifts or refuse sex or get sick. i became a doormat in my own life, a people pleaser through and through, always worried that a boundary i would set, or a word from my lips would cost me the always tenuous thing i wanted most – love, connection, acceptance.

i still want love, of course. that’s a seeking i don’t think will ever end.

but i’ve began to ask of myself – where can i find love? where can i reparent the broken child and the angry girl that live inside of me? do i go through more IFS work and talk to these parts and listen to what they have to say and hear them despite the static?

after i dragged myself soaking wet and filthy out of that creek, i was changed and i began the process of transformation that i still find myself in. and yet, somehow i can’t say all that when someone asks why i started this blog?

so i say something like, “just for fun” instead.

how can i tell them that i’m walking a path to myself in the same filthy cotton dress from sweatlodge, my blundstones on my feet, blood on my hands and in my mouth, and i’m carrying a braid of sweetgrass and as many books as i can carry in my pink fjällräven kånken backpack alongside my cameras and gel pens.

shirley manson once sang, “the trick is to keep breathing” and that’s all i’ve got.

i’ve been thinking about bugs today, and maybe it’s because i found this book about bugs and plants in ponds and i scanned this old illustration of bugs from that 1967 book with a broken spine. i’m okay to be like that book you know – fully broken and full of knowledge, wanted only by a few.

whenever we talk about change or growth or transformation, an apt metaphor is the caterpillar, becoming small, digesting the self to become something else.

we can get alchemical if you’re one of those types of mystics – the alchemical tenets of “solve et coagula” or “bind and break”, to truly create we must first destroy.

or what about the snake shedding it’s skin when it becomes tight and ill fitting, growing larger and wilder into something more appropriate for the climate.

metaphors of girls as insects and growth as another natural force we all cannot outrun unless we simply lay down and die.

mike posner once sang, “i’m not dead yet, in case you were wondering” and i’m not dead yet, in case you were wondering.

truly, i feel more myself than i ever have in my life. i feel more like who i was always supposed to be, this self i was fruitlessly chasing by trying to be someone.

i feel like i got so lost in trying to be someone that i actually wasn’t someone.

not to get all cosmic or anything.

maybe i needed it all to fall apart, and maybe i needed all those hard lessons. in the norse pantheon odin trades his eye for knowledge, and could this be a sacrifice for that?

jesus died on the cross to redeem sin. aslan died in sacrifice, too, but he was kind of lion jesus if you think about it.

what about the athenian youths sent to the minotaur? was i just sending all my previous selves there too so i could appease the hungry maw of want?

was this all just my own redemption arc?

so, no, i can’t explain this blog to you in a way that would be fitting or acceptable to be rendered into a few words. but fuck it, who cares, let’s transform into bugs together and fill our lungs with sweetgrass and prayer.

i love you.