The Traveling Heart

My soul was lost, floundering without purpose

Gypsy feet wandered human nature

The Sedona Red Rocks of Arizona

Showed me the intense beauty of desert isolation

Reflecting my sun glared eyes

Sunburned skin – husk of an old life shed

Revelation of the raw and openly scored spirit

My feet turned towards the forest loam

I walk deeply, mindfully, into the Ponderosa stand,

Dripping regrets onto needles that violate

My feet and legs, creating a tenderness

That feels like Christmas morning

I climbed mountains to witness the freedom

Of flight

But found the rocks resistant to my wings

Forbidding me entrance;

With courage forged in the fires of trauma

I ascended.

Flinging myself into the swirl of eddies

That couldn’t hold me

I plummeted into the icy, unforgiving river

Where I forded from embankment to water’s edge

Directionally challenged as I

I fight against the rushing waters

Until I’m exhausted and finally relent

To the inevitable flash flood of grief

It washes me onto the shores

Of the roiling ocean waves

Under a full moon gleaming

In sacred silence

I left immediate footprints of ideas,

Beliefs, and yet more solitude of a different depth

The winds of change hurricaned me east

Lessons abandoned, like me,

At the foot of the Great Smokey Mountains

Phoenix-like, I refused my ashes

Reconstituting in my power

Hear me, my friends, those who feel outside

Those who feel forgotten or invisible,

Those who feel created to endure tribulations

Those who arrive precisely on time

Into my company: exhausted, panting, sweating

Sopping in voracious victory

With reciprocal love we bond

Dancing with wild abandon

Intermingling

Pressing our heartbeats together

In loving embraces

With you I’ve found my way home.

The gray

Mare Martell's avatarMare Martell

(Verse One)

Don’t cry to me of imagined slights

Don’t fill my ears with dramatic fights

You wear your crooked crown based on obfuscated lies

Terrified to pack up your own desecration’s prize

(Transition)

HEY! HEY! HEY!

(Verse Two)

Wash your hands of every wish you made

Pack them in the old musty suitcase

Load it up and remember where you could have been lost

Break open the latches, rusty locks at what high cost?

HEY! HEY! HEY!

(Chorus)

Take a turn on reality’s wheel

Won’t you tell me how you feel

Even though it’s hard to let things go

Nobody wants tickets…to your show.

HEY! HEY! HEY!

(Verse Three)

There is nothing to be done your bones

You must choose your adventure alone

Cascading fury of your self-righteous self-loathing

Stripping down naked of your emotional clothing

(Chorus)

Take a turn on reality’s wheel

Won’t you tell me how you feel

Even though…

View original post 20 more words

Happy Nude Rear!

Here we are at the arbitrary starting line

wrinkling our noses, squinting our eyes

trying to make sense out of life, we vow

temporary compliance with high hopes

and even higher expectations

grasping desperately to achieve the loftiest intention

until we realize, change happens, regardless;

only with work can it be the change we want

Where Women Gather

Where women gather, magic is born,

Stir the cauldron, call the storm.

The power comes to those who need

cultivate the planted seed

self-nurture with Mother Mary’s prayer

Wander round the Otherwhere

Return to home; dig down your roots

Opened womb of swollen fruits

Variety

I keep looking for health with the very doctors who have mutilated my body as much as I have.

Broken bodies reflecting careless youth, poor choices, and forgotten immortality

Tsk! Tsk! Bless your heart! Pledging false tittie allegiance to St. Dolly, while cursing her costumes as bras.

OVERHEARD: He has all the awareness of a goldfish in a bowl.

Ornament stories ring in the Yuletide gay; laughter punctuated with comfortable joshing and jeering like siblings home for the holidays.

Power UP!

There’s a stirring of the cauldron

There’s a turning of the wheel

Phoenix eternally called upon

their secrets to reveal

Humming power from ancient lore

Ascend again, wings born to soar

Thrust of hip, rise of breast

Come my power at my behest

The clock has passed the witching hour

The stars shoot through the night

Return to me my birthright power

My eyes be granted truth in sight

Wrong Door, Right Place 2

This is the link to the original post where I spell out what it’s like in my brain: https://maremartell.com/2019/09/04/wrong-door-right-place/

Something broke inside of me when I was in the hospital. Putting a picture to it makes it appear like a telephone pole sized railroad tie, black with char and tar from the fire. The intensity of the fire had been screaming sirens at me, but I kept limping away trying to protect myself. My defenses, my being, my very existence felt like I was experiencing a transformation on such a primitive level.

One of my favorite ways to respond to people I find difficult, ignorant, or…good lord I’m arrogant, is to pray that their hearts break open with the light of love and that their eyes see the clarity of truth. I’ve been praying like this for several months. I don’t want harm to come to the people I disagree with, so I wrote this to love them instead.

I was talking to my person, Jen while we discussed her life events and our thoughts on it. Somehow we got onto the topic about bipolar disorder which she vocally advocates for education of people regarding mental illnesses.

I shared with her that I suspected something was amiss because I could have a great day until about 3:30 in the afternoon. Then everything falls to shit. I become weepy, irritable, unkind, hilarious, and back to flying high on five projects spread out before me. Truthfully, I AM working on all of them, so there is that.

She asked if I’d ever been diagnosed with bipolar disorder or manic-depressive as it used to be called. I have not but it has been suggested to me a few times.

She got a book about hypomania, what it means, how it felt, and what they would experience. She read through the entire passage and I was on the other end of the conversation sobbing soul truth about the intensity of epiphany. She further suggested rapid cycling because I swing throughout the day.

If this is an accurate diagnosis and is medically confirmed, I feel hope for the first time since the break up with my old self. I mean I really believe that what broke that day were all my preconceived notions about what really is me. It broke me wide open to accept new possibilities that I hadn’t realized before that moment.

Truth, as each of these lost parts of me are fitting their pieces back where they’ve belonged, it’s a giddy feeling. I am discovering new things about me at 51! I’m both blown away with gratitude I couldn’t feel when the darkness overcame my light.

There are so many things that can be attributed to the self diagnosis. You see, I thought mania ALWAYS meant hyper-mania. I didn’t know there were such thing as HYPO-mania. Although technically one isn’t bigger than the other, it’s based on, from what I understand so far, the size of the wave.

Hyper-mania is like a hurricane where hypo-mania is like a tornado. Both are horribly damaging but statistically, a hurricane is more likely to wreak more havoc. I’m a tornado force sustained winds until I run out of air and have to fight to catch my breath because it keeps trying to escape permanently.

I am fine. I found this in my notes from a few years ago when I wasn’t fine. It seemed potent and intense which is how impotent and disconnected I felt.

Epicenter

The battleground created from darkest intent

brought to light with a torch to catastrophize

cobwebs, deceitfully woven to contain fluid knowledge

My personal Library of Alexandria scorched

Idiocracy with a twist of lime and soapy cilantro

I am reminded that I murder in color faces past

When the joke ends and my power returns.

Living in a second hand version of real/altered reality

Knowing that death isn’t inherently sad, it is transition,

makes the difference between knowing and understanding.