Clearing the Air

Onnaland. Onnaleigh Sweetman came into my life when I was 15. She was 14. This woman's life is an SNL scene. She is art personified. Deep house yoga downtown is where I met up with her after a couple decades of being apart. I took Charly to an outside venue to meet this fire dancing rave actress. She defies survival while doing your make up to match your eye color. She laments Marie Kondo-ing her burning man Rachel Zoe stylist wardrobe. She has a pole installed in her east airport apartment. I adore this woman. We went to the premier of the movie Handshake. Written by Devin Shupe. (the first and last name...come on universe). Onna played an adept defense attorney. Not a Marcia Clark persona, rather a futuristic siren of justice distracting the real issue with her feline eyes. 

A couple of days before this movie I had a long sleeping dream of a play that I woke up from lauding as brilliant. Despite my resolution not to tell Andrew any more of my dreams I just had to tell him about a dream I had that if I had the time I would write down and call it creative genius. The interweaving of present knowing future, past informing future, the end scene with the drain! The literary critic in me woke up from my dream as if I had just read a work that lit me up with passion and questions. A few days later, I sat in the movie Onna was in and watched as the plot line of the dream I had was being played out on a movie screen in the Orleans hotel in Las Vegas. It had already been written.

What used to be de ja vu has turned into my dreams happening in real life. To what end? Usually to let me know I am exactly where I am supposed to be at that moment. Yet, mid movie as I was watching the time knowing I had to be up early for training to assist local first responders in domestic abuse calls to assist the victims of such while the police assist the perpetrator. The automatic need for sleep had arrived. Cue scene in movie same in my dream. This is where I am supposed to be. Magical. 

Being a literary critical reader morphed into case law and stare desisis reader turned into metaphysical reader. The training with Safe Nest to respond for domestic abuse victims was humbling, triggering and healing. As the other women in the training expressed as well. It is a cycle. It bleeds all over everyone. It bled all over my oldest children. This is where religious pain diverges in the road to domestic violence pain. That first marriage of mine was absurd. I denied I had suffered trauma. I was a Gen X 90's baby of the Woodstock '99 era where we burn the whole music festival down with the candles the adults gave us. The 90's in America was like the wild Wild West with mob ties. I had no mental health talk, no plant medicine, no internet or cell phone. I had the Mormon church at 8th and Franklin, the OG strip club, Luv It's frozen custard, $.59 Taco Bell menu and Warehouse Records on Las Vegas Blvd. The war on drugs was a war on plants in order to advance a political agenda of the government.  My generation got opioids, alcohol and religion. If you wanted information in the 90's you had to get a ride to a library and actually read a dewey decimated book to look up medical studies of LSD on PTSD? I went to a book of romantic poetry, the dancer Isadora Duncan and Lois Duncan the writer (I didn't see synchronicity in my childhood, blind child!) in my one hour at the library because my brother had a short battery life on the library. After getting married in the temple in 1995 most my programming told me that my eternal companion's mental and physical abuse was par for the course and to put my head down and keep going. I left the marriage because of an intuitive/literal kick, but I kept going with the mental programming I had. What a sucker I was! 

The Netflix series "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollen came out at the same time I was called to bring plant medicine to other people in the hopes they could address their healing in a way that was helping others. I tell my clients to watch that series. I am out in the world committed to a calling of the use of plant medicine as healing, but YOU ALL! I have not reached a state using plant medicine where I can journey and heal. Maybe Mother Aya and Ibogane is needed, but really I don't want to eat any more plants in an attempt to experience that for myself or for what I see clients experience for now. Maybe if it lands at my doorstep in a dream then happens in real life will I show up for it because that is how picky it gets these days. I didn't dream it or have an ear ringing about it? It is mostly a pass. Bring me a Winn Dixie bag full of money and maybe. Until then the process is grounded in no accelerant of plant medicine, rather living according to my intuition to lead me to the paths of awareness and change has to suffice.

Back to domestic violence. That beast knows no religion, no race, no boundaries. Size and gender are of some consideration. Victims of abuse abuse. It is not a scape goat or excuse it is a call to the victims of abuse to change. I am hesitant to say that the life contract my kids signed up for was in full knowing that their portal into this life was all that I was at that time, but I say it. My contract was to be the woman that lived through that and et al. The deep knowing that I chose this role in this play for a reason informs the days. My soul family was probably around me before this life like "you got this girl! We got you in a few decades of earth time girl! Only feels good if it hurts girl!" and I jumped while Charly was like "I see you in a few and good luck suckaaaaa." into a blissful childhood with my mom and brother, but with the genetics of a mystical father who's family who suffered mentally and physically. When I talk to my mom about some of the stories of her experiences with my dad's family it floors me. Hexagon spell casting herb grinding black magic dark family. So much darkness after the questionable death of my dad at the hands of his "family" I told them to never contact me or my children after Metro Police told me they felt it was a homicide but had no proof. Why a homicide? Did dad slip and fall at his friend Terry's house? Doubtful. Fremont Street gold, gold chain on unbuttoned golf shirt car dealer Terry Bedford and Kim Brown, my cousin, had been named as my dad's beneficiary, as they fed him pills and slandered Vana. My dad suffered another traumatic brain injury on Mother's Day 2012. He sent me a bouquet of flowers in the morning "To A Good Mother." on that day, and that afternoon I got the call he was at Sunrise Hospital brain dead from a fall injury and two days short what his Blackberry had scheduled on the Tuesday after he was in the hospital, 2 days!, "appointment with Stu Baskin hid trusted financial advisor "change beneficiary back to Vanessa." Like an attorney he was still keeping meticulous calendar notes in his Blackberry, but could not drive to get food or insert a catheter on his own. So he asked me to do both. I only agreed to one term of that contract. 

That was May of 2012 that my dad passed. He passed Everett who was born in December of 2012 with a solid Wharton's knot in his umbilical cord. So often, on the rare occasions I saw my dad, he advised me to go to Wharton's school of finance to live in the vague and nebulous trade of a stock broker. I did not heed that advice based on many reasons. However, if Wharton's means having a child like Everett, that knot may have deprived him of oxygen for a said about of time for the net net to be a child with autism , then Wharton's it is. 

The physic abilities I have coming online now is orchestrated to come in at this time. I worked in past lives to have this dreaming component to my life, to have access to this liminal space that has been there since I was a child. It is no longer a conundrum wrapped it an enigma. I get to be that "crazy" mom, aunt, grandma, lady that grounds myself in adult children's needs, kid skittle experiments and DV victims. Thanksgiving dinners and family. Whoever resonates with such will, those who don't have their own journey. Glennon Doyle and her cheetah metaphor is for her collective, Weslie Christansen's story of metamorphosis and "goo" phase is one that is being had for the majority of my women friends and gives them some validation. This seems a bit different of a story of hermit phase...my hermit phase included a waking vision of me seeing my 7 year old friend drowning (which he did in real life), my Everett cracking his skull (which he did in real life), and wake up or Ezra will be in a car accident that will break his neck (which he didn't). Wake up. Wake up to this hologram. (Prince knew. Kanye knows,) My story is one of remembrance of why I in fact have never felt at home on this earth. It is not my home, but I have a soul contract I agreed to in order to be alive at this time. My soul tribe are in phases of remembering and, like Clarissa said at the end of Mrs. Dalloway, "It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was." Or Heart of Darkness last line...or Ms. Lauryn Hill.