Come. But Only If You Are Willing To Burn Everything.

What if the path forward is about following awe over obedience? Torch the old rules, it's time to write your own. For those who must walk The Secret Third Way, come with me. Take my hand.

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“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid anymore.”

John Steinbeck

There is A Secret Third Way. It is the way of the way-showers. It is the way that must first be paved before it can be traversed by others. It is the way that must first be felt before it can be seen. This way feels like an unending dissolution and at once, an ever-emerging sacred initiation.

I am bored by the tired ways of the status-quo. I am not lit up by the blueprint that has been given to us. My mother tells me that I was a strong-willed and sassy force at the age of four. She would give me options to help me identify with my own choice and power. She says I was never interested in either option she gave me. I was always more interested in a third way, unnamed and unmentioned by her. A beaming yellow light winking at me.

Some things stay the same, while their contents take new shape. And for me, this is one of those things. I do not want, nor am I impressed by the solid containers of the majority posing as rightness. I do not want those things to be my own. I am utterly disinterested in what has been done before.

In fact, I am so dissatisfied, so uninspired by the lame ideas we’ve been given, that I came here to be a sort of pioneer in my own life. This means there’s a lot of bushwhacking involved. There’s a lot of seemingly ‘useless’ meandering. Many sudden holes in the earth beneath my feet, and bridges to build out of the sticks I can compile in my near surroundings.

There are many moments of anchoring myself into the mantra of “don’t think, just move.” Sometimes, when you are staring into the eyes of a lion, or facing a new day, and you know you have to save yourself in order to continue, it is better to trust the gentle whim of your body, than it is to listen to the conversation about a fearful nothingness revolving in your head. To trust yourself as the steward of your own ship, and no one else’s.

Creating new life is like this. It’s trusting the urge, the nudge, the whisper; and moving in accordance to it. It’s getting really good at knowing what’s for you. And really bad at staying someplace that isn’t. It’s riding the wave to fine tune the kind of waters you agree to co-create with. It’s taking the turn as far as it will go, knowing it is what you have to do, even if you do not know where it will take you.

I am an alive, full-of-desire-pulsing, light-driven, pleasure-motivated, restful, seeking, curious tendrel, delicate dollop, full-throttle-rebel, open-jaw, awe-having, writer, healer, alchemist, feeler, dreamer, in-touch-with-her-yearning, deep listener, storyteller, starter of many firsts, fire igniter, wishful thinker, full-to-the-brim-with-hope, ears full of magic, tender-touching, mother lover, toes in soil, laundering in lavish luxury of self-unraveling, keen-spirited, wonder-eyed, purple-visioned, warm-toned, earth-swept, peculiar princess, indigo onyx, calico-cat-khaleesi, current-walker, tide-turner, sleep-in-eyes-poet, according-to-me, because-i-said-so, good riddance, blow out what no longer serves you, receive-the-blessings-of-abundant-waters-woman who will walk whimsically, wishfully, whole of herself, wholeheartedly singing: We who must walk The Secret Third Way. Come with me. Take my hand.

I feel the soles of my feet be kissed by night stars. I identify myself in the glisten of a wave, and at once I am asked to belong to unspoken rules, systems of oppression, fear and desperation. To a life that I do not adore with every fiber of my being. No.

Where I come from pain does not exist because we are orbs of light without names and there is no separation. But here, on Earth, it serves us as our collective mirror. There is a lot of commotion and chaos belonging to the act of living. A lot of tending to the mere act of existing. A lot of wood splinters.

Just how many times do you think you’ve washed your hands in your lifetime thus far? How many times did you worry about something you can’t even remember today? How many people do something they hate just to get by because they think it's the only way? How many innocent lives taken, just because they can be? How many of those lives taken on their own due to unbearable suffering? Due to a neglect to an inner-knowing not yet displayed in the physical?

In this country, my people are demonized for not having papers. In this country, the existence of brown people is validated not by their existence or ancestral territory, but by the labor they provide to capitalism. My people [witches and warlocks who dream of freedom] are scrutinized for not wanting the white picket fence. My people [Latinos] are scrutinized for trying to have the white picket fence.

I must confess that I have no choice but to go forward into the wide expanse of my unknown life knowing that I was created from the same energy that created sweeping landscapes that take my breath away. That it’s no secret that nature plugs us back into the most true and ancient thing, which they cannot take away. They will try. They will use violence, weaponization, power, conditions and programs founded upon fear with the intent of making you feel and believe you are helpless.

You are not helpless.

You are cut from the same cloth as the most beautiful vision you have encountered. No one can take that away from you. It is who you are. It is your essence. It is your truth. There are bad guys to dislike right now. Many of them. But perhaps they are simply the parts of ourselves that need love the very most. The tender parts within us that we reject, in hopes that they’ll go away. That they’ll disappear forever. They’re not going anywhere. These sunken parts want to be integrated into your most loving affair with life. Then and only then will they become radicalized and then alchemized.

The room in which you feel like an alien is also the home in which the truth of your heart is actualized. The feeling of being ‘other’ is an invitation to be different. Feeling like you don’t belong is a long lesson in learning that you do, because belonging isn’t something that you do, it’s who you are. The lag in your reality is the loading page to a more aligned server. The art you neglect or suppress is the answer. The self that cries I am not enough is the heart that knows it is whole.

The man who tells you that you are too much is just the woman within you that knows you need more room.

The man who tells you there’s only one way is just the woman within you who will create the way with the barriers to entry that she has been granted.

The man who tells you that they are going to destroy you and your livelihood is the woman within you who will stop at nothing to be more alive than the systems that try to oppress her.

The man who leaves you for your love of God and questions is the woman within you who accepts her divinity as a gift to create worlds out of her oddity.

Sink your teeth in. The revolution is just beginning. A new day is here. And it needs you angry, hot, done, eclectic, shining, black-sheep, visionary, other, wrong-doers, erotic-lifers, spendthrift, lit-up, know-they-were-meant-for-more, wilded-out, queer, left-handed, orgasmic-feelers with more unanswered questions than answers to lead the way of light for those in the dark. Even if the ones left in the dark are the ones who hate you. They are sad because they do not know how to recognize their own humanity in an orchid. This is why they cannot see the light. They do not know how to recognize it in their own reflection yet.

They are the ones who need you embodied in your pleasure the most. Your pleasure is the river that quenches desert thirst.

I am married to stillness. No man or woman can own me or keep me. I am the mountain and the stream that flows through the valley. I am both the soil and the rain that falls between starlight. I am eternal, in a moment.

When I fall for the illusion that I am temporary; I fall for the illusion that I must make what is temporary eternal. When I believe that things can be separated into tidy boxes of Good. Bad. Evil. Holy. Worthy. Unworthy; I suffer.

I burn all of the boxes to create the ashes where beautiful sirens will be reborn as creatures with wings that fly above broken systems and falsehoods that lead us far from our heart’s center. It’s time to come home.

The boxes sing catchy lines that become earworms and then handcuffs. The first box is the one that tells us to first be pretty and then be chosen. To be seen and not heard. To appease to the majority in order to survive. The next box is the one that tells us to make being understood central to our liveliness in order to have a place in the world. That belonging means you fit in. The next box tells us to be surrounded by people because that must mean we are loved, even if we are not truly known. The next box tells us to compare our lives to those around us. To see what we are missing, and expand on it. The next box tells us to follow the herd. To follow the crowd. To follow the rules. To follow the order of corruption.

The next box tells us that you have made it when your life looks like a carbon copy of what they told you to make and have for a life, on the surface it will appear full. You will know you’ve made it when nobody questions your choices because they are the choices that were expected or asked of you. The next box tells us to blend in, to be small, courteous and dim the fog of our light.

And perhaps my least favorite of the boxes, (and there are many) is the one that claims that the final destination is the whole point. That it is far more important than any pause or question that you may find on your way there. As if curiosity were a distraction. As if feeling were a waste of time. As if presence were some sort of means to an end, instead of the portal to the infinite now.

To that and to them I say, have it your way. I’ll have mine.

I will continue to burn every piece of untruth you have given me and I will use it to fertilize the grounds upon which I will create my trailhead, which is the first of its kind, because I am the only one equipped to walk my path, because it is my own. And if I were to listen to what anybody else has to say about it, I would have slowly created a life out of disingenuous attempts and fear in the name of playing it safe. In the name of being accepted by others first, and by myself second.

The funny thing about creating a life out of self preservation is that you keep yourself protected from the very things you desire most. It is law.

The great teacher of Separation disperses itself into billions of plays on light! One is the fictitious liar who tells you that your dreams are absurd. That your yearning is frivolous and unnecessary. That to want goodness is greedy. Another is the specific outcome you think you need in order for your existence to be worthy of celebration and fulfillment. Another is hate. Another is hiding beneath the covers of an empty life that isn’t yours.

The great teacher of Separation is here to teach us about our wholeness by showing us the obstacles we create to differentiate ourselves from it.

I am at the part in my own story where I am working as a server at a restaurant even though I know I am meant to do something different with my days. And though it serves its purpose, and for that I am grateful, I know that my authentic mission is more abstract, large, expansive and ever-changing. I am an artist in the corridor. My day job does not dilute my authentic expression or purpose. But my heart calls out to me from the other side. It tells me to meet it. So I reach out, and I feel the gap. The Great How. I lean in. A nod to the safety net. I thank it. Trusting in it, like the first bird brave enough to fly the nest.

Sometimes, The Secret Third Way feels like the weight of the world on my personhood. When really, I think what I feel is its magnetism. It’s the other side, beckoning.

It is what calls upon us to create it. It is the empty space full of room. It exists only because we do.

There are many who prefer to exist in the old way, but the old way has never offered me respite or reprieve from the incessant call that comes from within asking me to birth a new world. A different way. A harmonious and long walk home.

I know I’m not alone in this. I think part of the reason why it feels so very critical that I listen to the call is that it is far greater than I can truly know. It is beyond me, and still, encoded within me. And I don’t even really know what I’m saying, I just know I have to say it. I know I have to say it because it’s coming through me now. And that must mean that someone on the other side is ready for these words, and to join me in them.

You know if this is for you, because you’ll feel its resonance stirring brightly within you.

There is A Secret Third Way. It is not the way your parents did it. It is not the way the majority who surround you does it. It is a way that you have never seen done before because it is yours. Nobody else in the world has been asked to rise the way that you are being asked to rise. And it’s okay if you feel like you stick out like a sore thumb in a crowd of identical pinky fingers. That is a calling all on its own and you must listen to it or it will eat you alive. I promise.

I know because I feel it gnaw at me whenever I look away.

It’s simple. Many of us come here to disrupt the flow to create a new pattern. Many of us come here to confuse the masses. To ask questions that may sound themselves like answers we have yet to consider.

Many of us come here to be given the gift of solitude so that we can face only what is visible in our own quiet confrontations and no place else. To stare directly into the unconscious. The corners that many will never turn toward out of fear.

I am speaking to you from my desk, pushed up against my lilac wall. The desk that calls out to me every moment of every day when I am not sitting at it. And I didn’t choose this. It chose me. I am asked to unveil myself and bare my naked truth to whoever may find it, and just because. I have no choice but to trust this calling. And to do so without expecting anything else from it, only knowing that it will be there for me every morning and night. Will I be there for it? Will you?

I must not insist it grants me some grand conclusion, and I must allow it to mean something. I must not insist that the incessant call will stop, and I must allow it to guide me with every step.

On paper, I am a waitress at a cafe living in an eight bedroom mansion in my hometown. In other words, the shoe does not fit. In my heart, I live in a different time zone. And I am learning about what it feels like to squeeze into a lemon that isn’t right for you. How it requires you to hack off true parts of yourself in order to have a vehicle. The cost of sacrifice when it is out of alignment. Every moment of devastation is an arrow in the direction of something that sits gently, and true. The subtle gift of discomfort. How a known thing does not ask to be understood, because it is felt. And when it is denied, there is the mirror that stares back at you. Sometimes all it asks is to be acknowledged by you. It pokes because it wants to be noticed.

Fix? No. Become empty space for what is meant for you? Yes.

I refuse to trade my authenticity for company, so most nights I eat dinner alone. And sometimes I run into my first love’s mother at the coffee shop, and again on the bike path. She hugs me every time. She asks me if I have found my people here yet and I tell her no, and that it's okay. And suddenly, I am transported into my seventeen year old body. The seventeen year old body who loved that nineteen year old boy and his mother. I still love his mother.

My seventeen year old body didn't know that it was okay. That it is okay to not know where in the world your people are. Or where in the world you are.

She didn’t know that one day she would find them. That she would discover herself in a new place. And that some of the people she would meet along the way would come to leave. That she would leave too, many times.

She didn’t know that one day she would meet the girl she dreamt about in her journal first. The one she would hold hands and giggle with about magic. She didn’t know that one day she would get in a van with five unassuming strangers, one of which would become her dream come true. Her best friend, sister, Person, maybe lover in an alternate universe.

And then stranger once more.

I didn’t know how many years later I would sit quietly, living inside of the vision I have of myself running along the shore under a purple-orange sky. Gathered around the smoke of a bonfire, surrounded by the people I love who I didn’t know when I was twenty-five. And I will be wet from being splashed by ocean waves, but I will be warm, because I kept going.

I kept going when it was just me on my own. I kept going when I was a waitress who dreamt of something different. I kept going when the bridge was all I knew. I kept going in my hometown and I finally accepted it as something more than a punishment from my past.

You enjoy its subtle haunting now, like a premonition from the future. The body of water that insists on holding you. The green trees that sing to you. The blue-grey speckled rocks that sustain the weight of your body. How they remind you of your tendency to love after love. And now you sit on your porch in the morning sun reading East of Eden. The same John Steinbeck who lived in the cabin where you once lived when you were nineteen. And then again, when you were twenty-two. It was then that you fell in love with a boy who would come to leave you so that you could meet yourself again. You are no longer who you were when you loved him. He may remember your laugh, but he will not know the way it sounds. He may remember the questions you used to ask, but he will not know the way you live in your answers.

You are not in a hurry like you once were. You do not resist what presence has to offer you, for it is always a gift. You know it's all a matter of divine occurrence and perfect timing. One day you will pack up this purpled room. You will take your apron off, and you won’t put it back on tomorrow. You will be sad to leave it, even though you always knew you would. And you will continue on your way to more people and places you do not yet know, could not yet dream up, but have felt every day of your waking life. In the silent pockets of dusk that embrace you. In your soft palms. In the smell of liquid-sunshine. On the quiet nights you wondered how like a constant hum. In the tears of joy wept for eight days and how no one noticed. In the tedious, slow mornings dedicated to a future you already know as yours. And one day, you will identify yourself in the glisten of a wave. In the way it arrives at its shore. This is the only way. This is the way it has always been, because it is yours.

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