Reflections on Aging

I have the gentle earthly face of a grandmother. I am becoming the wise crone. Decades of wear and wrinkles tell their own story; of adventures, disappointments, broken hearts, betrayals, joy, admiration, motherly lines, exoduses, and of course of failures, growth and the tides of spiritual renovations. Unspoken stories of fear, insecurity, selfishness, victory, love, impassioned pursuit, and those confident moments of selfless thought.

 

The experience of a life lived in the ignorance of youth that spans generations. As I say goodbye to the past. As I step into the current moment. As I allow the honest reflection that even in this day of acceptance I am still ignorant, unknowing, questioning, and uncertain. As I seek to follow the dreams of youth – was that such an ignorant time after all? Do we really get wiser, or just tell ourselves we are? Can I make something happen that I could not as a young woman? One thing I notice is that instinct doesn’t have the driving force it once had, or is this the instinct of the older years?

 

With all the information of the digital age, the addiction to the gathering of it, and the need to find the answers of the inquisition that will finally satisfy the internal judge. All the while finding only more questions than answers. With all the information out there at my fingertips, the aching desire of being human is not quelled. Some say the answer is in this pathway, or that religion, or a romantic encounter, or another practice, or in one of the many teachers who speak with authority as if they know for sure what my answers are. Yes, the seeking is as much an addiction as the gathering of insights.

I notice more than ever in my life the need to stay productive, creating, staying busy  toward dream realization, allowing the undesirable…

Allowing the undesirable, settling, devolving into the thing I have resisted my whole youth. And how is this so much wiser?

 

In age the challenge intensifies – to keep from giving up and/or giving in. Of denying admittance to the voices of reason as they spill off the tongues of the imprisoned who struggle in their decades-old search for a purposeful interaction with life. At least that is my experience.

I haven’t walked the earth without fear, and how did I not succumb? By ignoring it, rejecting its power, stuffing it down into the shadows of my heart and soul? Fear prefers shadows where they thrive and grow strong until one day as the unheeded, ignored and rejected terror now takes on a physical presence in the body called the temple of the soul. Fear sometimes expresses itself as anger, rage, depression, dependencies, isolation, addiction, hypertension, physical pain and other diseases. These are worth an honest consideration. Which I must add can also be addictive.

So what is this wisdom of age that we expect, speak of, claim, demand, and of which we are obliged. Is it the stubbornness of holding onto our own personal ideas, the years of gathering evidence in their defense or prosecution? That as we claim experience, it must be our own perspective is one of truth, after all have I not conformed to my own idea of reality to grow ever wiser with each year? Have I not built walls unto myself to better understand a world that eludes my comprehension? Finally walling myself into a set way of thinking, acting, living, perceiving by barricading out the experience of fear, rejection, humiliation, insecurity, and uncertainty that life presents?

I have the gentle tired face of a grandmother. I am avowing the wise crone. Decades of wear and wrinkles tell their own story… Of internal travels to find the self that is not, no matter where I looked, how I sought to fix, what I changed, what shadows I fashioned. And at last being the self that loves all that is this mixed up, chaotic, indulgent, unknowing, denying, resisting, reflective, flawed creation that is me.

 

 

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Eating my Forest

The Long Winter

The long winter… I wanted to earn money for another bike (an older Harley) and I have saved some but not all of it. I’m looking forward to next week when I am home once again without the prison of my own making…

One of my favorite pastimes is spiritual growth and development, deep reflecting, meditation, envisioning what connection to collective unconscious looks and feels like, and what about synchronicities? Imagining that these things are life’s conversations with the divine.

It’s like going to school; you learn and experience in class those things you study but the actualization of what you learn happens out amidst the environment of your practiced field. My field is that nomadic adventure, practicing those things that my imaginings have informed me of what is spiritual truth to me.

Did I learn to listen more and talk less? Did I learn to allow myself to be exactly where I am and not move to fix, change, or buffer that? Did I fall in love with myself more and in so doing fall in love with all other humanity? Did I face adversity with grace and ease and if not do I regret or make myself less for it?

In the busiest moments of working, “trying” to earn that money for this new bike that I want. I lost for a moment the preciousness of my imagined conversations with Divinity. I was back in my own rat race, thinking (imagining really) that if I want this thing I have to work really hard, deny myself and play this game, which seemed to be the very thing that was blocking the flow and it felt like utter darkness in which my bike was hit twice and broken into as well and all within a month’s time. I played this game until I was emotionally broke, nothing more to spend. Then, with some gentle nudging through friends and acquaintances, I was reminded that this is not my path, nor was it theirs.

You see my truth lives in that world of imagination, that the Unseen forces will meet me and supply what I need for “the journey of spirit” (as Scotty so well puts it). This annihilation of soul in exchange for the collective imaginings that money is somehow the pursuit of all pursuits and needs to be in the forefront of everything else was the driving force of my misery, and winter of dark.

Once I gave that up, money began to flow. I accepted that maybe I wouldn’t get enough for the bike this time around, but I could get some now, later and build upon it without engaging in the dream of the planets monetary systems. And divine imagining returned, my soul rested, my mind created, my spirit given permission to live by imagination.

This, of course doesn’t mean to completely remove myself from the current expression of our collective reality, it just means to spend more time in pursuit of what matters to me, what feeds my particular journey. The long ride, the tent in the wild, the conversations with other beings (human and otherwise, I like to converse with nature) along the way, the kind listening of others’ stories and the telling of my own.

As a Holistic Health Practitioner and ordained minister my desire to walk in the space of healing, to be ready and available to meet that responsibility as I go is my challenge and hope. That I will meet the people that forward my personal goals as they apply to the collective awakening to love, that I will recognize the moment of synchronicity and follow these signs, that I will live in the threshold between this world and the unseen world that most of us have a feeling exists. That my path will lead me exactly where it needs to produce exactly what I need in my contribution to earth and others…

The balance between the material and unseen usually tips towards the material, the needing to engage somewhat in the current monetary system, fitting in, that human requirement to be accepted and a part of, the loneliness of heart when standing alone facing what is in the shadows, not knowing the outcome. The natural desire to share oneself fully and deeply with others; intimately, honestly, authentically, transparently, emotionally, and spiritually often illuminating its own necessity, and thus being interpreted by my ego as impossible to actualize with a haunting deficiency, my constant companion.

Putting this out in words is my susceptibility, it gives access to others who may judge where I fall short or even for holding these ideals, my total and absolute hippified weirdness, the differences, and the position that I don’t fit along the same lines of belief as others who may be quite attached to the impression that they hold the truth and it isn’t in line with my own. So here it is, my transparent dreams on a platter, served hot from the oven of my imagination, the main course of my nomadic purposing, spiced with my own experience, some may hate the flavor, some may crave the taste, but it is out on the table and open for discussion over its ingestion.

 

Peace

 

Spotlight Student piece

I was recently asked to be the quarterly spotlight student at my alma mater, I really like the way it came out so I am posting it here, besides I really do love the school I went to and this is an incredible honor for me, a gypsy nomad hobo type.

I converted the pages of my little contribution into images and here they are. If unreadable the link to the school newsletter is here: IPSB Newsletter Piece

Radio Interview with Adventure Rider Radio

• http://www.adventureriderradio.com/adventure-rider-radio-episodes/2015/12/17/michelle-hope-the-motorcycle-gypsy

The Validity of Everything

The warmth of the summer breeze was an invitation to bliss as my dog, Two-Lane and I rode out of South Carolina after my daughter’s tender wedding. Filled with the love of having all my children in one place and spending these precious moments with them the invitation needed little encouragement.

Solo riding is the time of internal reflection, slowing to my own pace, and marveling at the precious moments of connection with others. For the most part I just chatted with people here and there, listened to their dreams and stories of travels, as the sight of a dog on the tank of a packed up motorcycle often sparks a memory or dream in another. This richness is beyond what any disbursement of greenbacks has ever offered.

After a 2-year hiatus in San Diego, CA for an exercise in holistic expansion, I’m back at home on the road, every night looking for a safe place to sleep. The fearful tension soon melting into gratitude for each sanctified piece of ground granted to a woman and her dog living on the highways of the Church of the Free Spirit.

And I exhale…

On the road again, where I told myself while in school that I would put forth the effort to see how to incorporate massage as a viable means to support myself. This is it… I had worked for vendors at a couple of Rallies already and made enough to get by, but that isn’t what I was looking for. My dream is to make massage my ministry and travel in faith living off the donations of those who receive this healing touch my teachers so beautifully demonstrated to me. This is the passion and call that feeds me, and this is what I will do.

It gets scary; the questioning that maybe my dreams are not feasible, especially when reality presents itself with the challenges of the world’s perception of massage therapy.

Massage therapist are an educated bunch, requiring national/state exams. Our education includes anatomy, physiology as well as an understanding of pathologies and how they are addressed. I understand how the muscle attaches to the skeleton and ways to possibly release pain or tension associated with this. We are not “happy ending” specialists, or “rub down” techs. Personally I have over 1,100 hours of training with experience on over 100 bodies. This is what I face, am I complaining about something I cannot change? Maybe, but I think part of my path is to educate people on the benefits of healing touch…

And I am still in school in a sense but now I learn how to create enough trust in a short time, quickly educating people about the healing benefits of what I refer to as body-work, create a working relationship so people can experience this alternative option to healing from the current system, and even to a deeper experience of body/mind/spirit.

And sometimes it has worked and sometimes I walk in financial insecurity. But it is all still a part of actualizing my dreams. Expanding my horizons, listening to the wise ones who offer solution, service, and advice. Of staying true to my purpose, that this is by donation, that this is gift, that this is spirit, that this has heart and meaning thus it must thrive within my small world. And even in the face of fear of poverty, the heart wins, the person who can’t pay gets as much of my attention as the one that pays much, this must stay true.

And the people who cross my path, who touch my soul, who contribute to me in ways beyond measure. These are the people who believe in my dream for me and lend a moment, a word, a referral, an offering; these are the people who keep me on the path of my dreams. The only reason I can continue through it all.

And this reality… I am in San Diego for the winter getting ready to go to work at a massage spa so I can earn enough money to further grant my heart her dreams. And this too is valid for it will afford me my second adventure into my dream of holistic healing. On my packed up motorcycle with a dog on the tank, come springtime when I again; with this past year’s lessons, expand my horizons and get closer to the realization of my chosen life path.

This Created Life

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The sourcing of my soul this morning arose in the sound of a perceptually passionate pheasant, cackling, and crying in the field near by; reminding me that I would not have witnessed this primal display of nature if it weren’t for today, this day, this campsite in Montana.

Wandering and wondering around this great state for the past month sometimes seemingly aimless, but not really for how is life ever aimless? Even in the moments of silence, boredom, loneliness, and feeling lost remain the highway signs and supportive whispers that escort us back to the awareness of our current state of consciousness. And where else is there?

After a solid two-year hiatus from nomadic road life completing a dream of holistic health education, the road called. I left in February wondering if this was really what I wanted, the doubling of fear, how to make it all work with this new education of which I invested so much focus, energy, and dreams. When would the release from the long months of studious single-mindedness come, how would it come, am I crazy? Questioning the reality that I choose, the one that calls to me beyond the habitual thinking of my domestication, my youth, my culture…

Waking in the wilderness, sleeping under the stars, riding where the heart leads, not knowing the future, not knowing quite how to make money as a healer on the road…

And I do not lack for food, I am clothed, I am moving, I am finding those who symbiotically desire what I offer. And I am phenomenally fed emotionally, physically, financially, and spiritually in this miraculous process of faith.

Practicing “yes”. Yes I will listen, yes I will speak, yes I will stop, yes I will go forward, yes I will accept your contribution, yes I will give of my own, yes I will write, yes I will allow art to express itself through me. YES, I will live!

Life emanates richness. I can’t find all the words to talk about the great people I’ve met and places I’ve camped and the soft voices of the land. Those words will come later; this story is about a moment in solitude that delivered a deeply silent message.

I had a visitor one night…

Since Two-lane is the one with the keener senses – we have an agreement to honor his alarms. So his growling brought me back from a rather deep sleep awakened with a questioning, “What is it?” Trying to see through the silhouette of shadows on the tent wall, “what is it?” as Two-lane increases his intensity… Looking out the screened door I am looking into the face of what I think is a wolf, it came to see me, not aggressively or fearfully, it was just there and as Two-Lane attacked it from inside the tent (which means lunging with a vicious growl into the tent side) it turned and trotted away. I spent the next day questioning what I saw. But whether this was wolf, bear, or dream doesn’t matter to me. It sent a message, which can illuminate this present moment of awareness. In the questioning itself reveals a message that insinuates a distrusting of my own perceptions and intuitive impressions.

I don’t know how much I dreamed or whether it was young bear or old wolf as I was told that a young bear was seen within yards of the spot I stayed (and yes wolves do live close by), what I do know is that I felt merged with the land and the ride grew ever more connected. This was experienced, and this I must trust.

What comes next is not my concern, I don’t know the future but by continuing to ride forward on this road and keep open to this experience called life then I am living creatively. When I dull my senses with ideas, expectations, remembrances of past joys and future fears then the experience is a different one (not wrong just different). Life is, as we know, an experiential journey and this is all there is of it. All journey is valid, all encounters are as brilliant as I perceive them to be. Whether it is doing laundry at a Laundromat in the middle of the desert heat feeling miserable, laughing at a goofy dog traveler, opening my heart to the land and others, escaping the rain and hail, feeling lost, empty, and honestly allowing emotion… no matter what it is, this is my life, my created life and I am in love with it.