We Rise

July 31, 2025 / Hermionejh

We say: We do not condone this. We will not cooperate. We will not willingly give our rights – rights fought, bled, and died for by several generations before us who faced a monstrous moment or moments.

The work was not just about them. It was for the future. It was for their communities, their children, and your children, and all of our children’s children – those who will also be asked to meet whatever moment will be presented to them. Their choice is theirs, but our choice is to resist, to rise.

Those descendants need to know that facing cruelty was, and still is, possible. We all give up our lives in the end, and while we hope it will not come to that, we have to be prepared for that outcome. Physical death only comes once, but oppression is a daily death to our hope and to our spirit – and leaves no road map for those who will come after.

Store, sell, or give away belongings. Write a will, instructions to deal with your belongings, and notes to those you love, and to those not yet born who you would want to know and would love.

Courage is willingness to step into the unknown, even when we’re full of fear. Death comes to us all. Maybe we will survive facing the oppressors, and best them, but we defy their demands for us to capitulate – knowing it might be our last act.

This is our moment and our test as a nation, as a people. Our values are being revealed, and so many beautiful souls are standing up in whatever ways they can.

Be brave, be kind, be persistent, and be loud! Huzzah!

Mapped Out

February 18, 2024 / Hermionejh

I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that my body – especially my face – is more and more a map of my life, but it feels that way.

The permanent crease above my left eyebrow lets me know that my quizzical expression is lopsided – it seems my right eyebrow doesn’t care to express itself much. The same goes for my ever-deepening smile creases that have a deeper groove on my left side than my right, and how apt it is for an inner life and outward life often at odds that has left visible reminders.

I chide myself for wanting to erase those lines and creases – my vanity wanting a smooth, un-lined face forever.

I have lived. The years keep going by leaving time’s impression, not really having much to do with who we are inside. We are semi-ageless. It seems like it would be a tragedy to stay the same – never deepening our understanding, knowledge or experience.

I get it that so many would strike that bargain – and are doing their best to keep time’s imprint off their bodies. Half of me wants that too.

Wrinkles do not confer, and should not imply, wisdom, after all – just that we’ve lived long enough for our bodies to start breaking down.

The work to stay healthy and functional seems to fill up more time and can feel daunting.

It’s probably a question of available energy than motivation, but I am more alive when I’m doing things I love, and especially getting out into the woods for long hikes.

As stupid as it sounds, I’ve started understanding how we’re everything and everything is us. I have the same elements as the chair I sit on, the floor I walk on, the metal in the ladle and the clay or ceramic of the bowl that contains the soup I’m eating, that also contains the elements of my body.

I’m not even stoned! But, yes, we are made from those elements too.

This isn’t new information to any of us, but the perception or feeling is different. It feels more visceral now. Is that wisdom? I think my brain just loves rabbit holes.

The minutiae of the outer world has become more fascinating.

I never had time nor inclination much for that when I was younger – not that I didn’t appreciate the beauty and intricacy of the world and the phenomenal unlikelihood and mystery of life itself.

Maybe it’s because I’m no longer preoccupied with raising my child or finding someone to share my time or my life with. I suppose it’s different for everyone.

Maybe it’s also because I feel my mortality more strongly than ever and I want to be here as fully as possible for the time left to me.

As for any of us, my last day here could be today.

It’s like a deadline is fast approaching and the urgency to get get my shit together to have my portfolio or the highlight reel of my time here ready for who or whatever might review it on the other side from here feels more imperative.

That might not at all be a thing, but my anxiety about the possibility is clearly nerve-wracking.

Will they like me? Did I do alright? Will they forgive me if I fucked up the one job I was supposed to do here (the instructions of which somehow got lost) – or was I just supposed to wing it all along – and we’ll all laugh about the big tangled mess I made?

I hope it’s the latter because the worry is being mapped out all over my ever-creasing face.

Love Is

February 15, 2024 / Hermionejh / 4 Comments

Because there is love we exist. Not because of sex, even though that’s literally how we’re here (most of us anyway), but we exist because we form bonds of family and friends. We can even bond with strangers, with characters in books or on film or other mediums.

Our capacity to love never diminishes.

We might become bitter, or angry, or vengeful, but find a way to crack that and love can enter, fully.

Removing love can make us feel broken, incapacitated, but it never ends our ability to love if we had enough love and appropriate touch in infancy and early childhood.

Love is the center of our being and emanates from our heart – which is where our goodness and spiritual connection also stem from.

Love can and has changed the world, and love can save a soul, and heal our entire planet.

We get to choose what we leave in this world. All we can do is pass on our love, and knowledge and wisdom. The rest falls away.

Love is steady and unceasing, but it must be chosen and practiced and remembered.

Choosing love isn’t always easy, but it’s an open invitation, just waiting whenever, if ever, we’re ready and willing.

I Forgot

February 13, 2024February 13, 2024 / Hermionejh

Our brain and body’s super power is perseverance.

We forget childbirth’s intensity, and blunt trauma’s pain. We can remember that it was awful, but not really feel the raw intensity.

Our brains anesthetize us against horrific events. We go numb.

My partner was in a horrible accident that rattled his brain so bad the doctors had to drill his skull to relieve the pressure, and he fell into a coma for several weeks.

The doctors told his parents they were likely saying goodbye to him and to try to prepare for that.

He doesn’t remember a thing about the accident. He remembers leaving for a party with his friends, and waking up briefly in enormous pain at the hospital, only to sink down into oblivion again. The next time he regained awareness, he was being wheeled into rehab where he spent painful months while learning to use his voice after being intubated so long, and to use his body again.

He can only recount what the driver (his cousin), and the medics and hospital staff, his parents, brother, and his girlfriend told him about what happened.

They can barely talk about it to this day without choking up.

Had he died, he would have been in blissful ignorance.

This is my dark time of year. I forgot.

How, you might ask. How, when it happens every year? I can only look at you in silence. I wish I knew.

I think, perhaps, my brain anesthetizes that particular knowledge, which is difficult because I am woefully unprepared every year. It would be funny if it weren’t so devastating.

But this year there are extenuating circumstances. The death of friends over the past year, and most recently a sister, pushed my preparation for this dark time completely out of my mind.

I use my lighter times of year to shore up my psyche, my resolve, and practice my emotional and mental tools I have learned over the past thirty years.

And then it seems to all fall apart in my moment of need – as though I’m fresh on the planet and have no idea what this thing called emotion is or how to handle it.

Maybe I can come up with a safe word or phrase my partner can say to me, like “It’s the fucking trauma, stupid!”

Yeah, that would go over so well! LOL

Maybe “Keep it simple, sweetheart,” would suffice.

Peace, Love, Grief

August 20, 2023 / Hermionejh

There have been better days lately. I’ve been doing my best to fill up the friend-shaped space she once occupied.

We don’t know what, if anything, awaits us after this world, so it’s a crapshoot if we’ll ever meet again. We won’t have eyes to see one another, mouths to talk and share a laugh, or arms to give a hug, but we will recognize each other if we retain consciousness outside our body.

I saw another old friend today that I haven’t seen in years. He was part of our large mutual friend group when we were teens, and I’m grateful he hasn’t radically changed since then. Matured, yes, but still true to his essential self.

After we parted I was hit with a wave of loneliness or sadness that seemed outsized for the situation, but later realized that it was about belonging – and about loss, because my friend who died in May also belonged in our friend group.

It’s kind of silly that I wanted to cling to him emotionally, as if his presence would resurrect our friend, but she’s gone, and no one can bring her back.

We both had places to be, so we left, and I walked myself through the mental patch of grief left in his wake that he really had nothing to do with.

The starkness of grief can trigger my leftover childhood neglect trauma. It feels like standing alone in the midst of a crowd.

My inner peace comes from the center of my heart, because I have no peace without love, but it’s very hard to find the love without peace. Thankfully, it’s still possible, even if it’s only moments.

I’m still in my life. I have things to do and places to go. It’s ok to still be here. It will also be ok when I’m no longer here.

I wondered earlier today if the experiences we have and the knowledge we gain are not ours alone, but are directly feeding or enriching the spirit world.

It might be that that is not how any of this works, but it made me feel like I’m possibly contributing something worthwhile to the whole.

Who knows?

Free To Love

December 22, 2022 / Hermionejh / 3 Comments

I don’t mean to always be writing about a dark journey. This is where I currently am. I just don’t have time for bullshit anymore – if I ever really did.

It used to be important to me to seem like everything was fine. I hid from all except a select few. Like so many of us, most never knew my full story – they got to know what felt safe to tell them.

We grow up knowing the lay of the land, don’t we? If we want to be our true selves, we walk a narrow path. I learned to live in disguise for so much of my life.

While none of us are guaranteed another minute of life, most of us seem to live fairly long lives – in human time at least. Eventually, we have more days behind us than ahead of us, no matter how rich or well-connected we might be.

Maybe we think more urgently about our life’s purpose – if there is such a thing – or what being here means to us. Is there a point?

If you’re religious, the point is built in. You have a structure, and you never have to question anything. You follow the directions, and you’re good – safe in your salvation. Except that we’re often more complicated than that. Faith is tested – sometimes to being undone.

I was never very faithful, but I have always been faithful. A friend once told me I think about God/dess more than anyone she had ever met. It makes me laugh to think about that because I am no friend of deities. I think about it so much because I want to understand it. Who made gods and goddesses? Humans did. Maybe we need to believe. Maybe I need to believe.

But, in what? That some magical being is going to greet me when my body dies and tell me what a good job I did getting through hell?

“Fuck off” is what I will say to that being. It watched me and did nothing? It saw the shit that I and every other being on this rock slog through and thought it was okay to let us slog? Or if all it could do was watch us and hope for the best for us – what is that?

What did we gain? What is the place that we are going to that being “honed” through being alive will be useful for?

I don’t like being a pawn.

My mother thought that we’re all goddesses and gods creating this world as we go.

Roger Ebert’s last words or sentiment stayed with me. His wife said he wrote a note to her that this place is “an elaborate hoax,” or that “it’s all an illusion.”

It’s all an illusion.

What does that mean if that is true? Can you jump off and that is okay? None of this matters?

If I leave now, my son will be sad – I think. He has a whole new family now. A much better one that anything I could ever give him.

His wife’s family lives in a beautiful house on a bay of Lake Champlain. They seem to have what I wish I had had.

My son does not visit me. I am not complaining – I am noticing. I’m noticing that his preferred place is a place I would also prefer. I understand that it’s also his wife’s family home, and that is what they do – which is good. I am happy for them. I’m just saying that my absence wouldn’t be life changing.

It would be, of course, in some way. My mother’s death was life-altering for me, but my father’s death was not.

I think there was, and remains, a trauma bit left about my mother – something that my brain wiring connects to something so deep I honestly cannot describe it, but I think my son and I are clean and free from that. He does not have the trauma wiring that I have.

What a huge accomplishment that is, says my objective self.

Mostly, being free from myself is what’s important to me. I don’t know how to do that yet. It’s a work in progress. What’s important is not dragging this weight around after I leave my body (if I retain my consciousness). It’s all in my brain. And if it isn’t, then it’s all in my consciousness.

I thought that I was supposed to do something memorable in this world. But most people never do. We just live.

For the few nanoseconds (or way, way less) of eternity that I was here – if there are ever psychic archeologists – I want them to find the vestiges of love left where I walked, and lived, and was. I want them to discover that my love emanated out into the universe in a network that continues on and will never fade.

Rainy Monday

July 12, 2021 / Hermionejh / 7 Comments

“Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.” from Rainy Days and Mondays, Carpenters, 1971 album

I wish I could empirically know if it is my mother’s spirit that I feel in certain moments like this morning when I heard her voice inside me say “what a rainy day,” as I looked out over the tiny garden this morning.

Her voice came unbidden. I wasn’t thinking about her in that moment, but I’ve been thinking of her since.

Are there gardens wherever she is – if she’s anywhere at all anymore?

There must be gardens, because she’d create one.

Doesn’t all our creativity speak to something beyond us? We dream, and plan, and build. We create worlds within worlds – aquariums of fish sometimes replete with real or plastic plants, old time scuba outfitted people, little plastic treasure chests, or practical items like miniature caves or structures where the fish can swim through or hide.

There’s Biosphere II in Oracle, Arizona – a town I once briefly lived in – where a dreamer designed and built a sustainable living environment for when we have thoroughly trashed this one (as we seem unable to stop ourselves from doing).

My mother was curious about everything. She pondered life’s mysteries, and whether we continually recycle into flesh beings – or whatever forms we might take in an endlessly diverse universe.

I could and did talk to her about anything, and while I still have my scholarly and philosophical friend who also ponders the extraordinary, and the mundane, my mother’s voice is silenced except for memories, and a few video and audio recordings.

But maybe her voice isn’t silenced. Maybe consciousness resides outside the body. Maybe my mother has just changed form, and carries all that she gained from being on Earth with her – willing her thoughts into my brain once in a while?

It’s frustrating that I can’t know for sure, and it feels like searching for the roots of truth in mythology.

I once read that God(dess) is an “unknowable essence,” but has sent, and will send, messengers throughout all time to tell the rest of us why we exist, and what It hopes from us.

My mother once read me some other sage’s words: “Why do you seek God(dess)? Does a fish seek water?” I don’t know the author of those words, but they often sustain me.

I sense my mother’s smile and encouragement too, and that will have to suffice.

Time Slipper

September 10, 2020 / Hermionejh

Existential angst. Unanswerable questions – classic configuration: who, what, where, when, why.

Especially why. To what purpose? To a purpose?

Accidental? By design?

A soup of elemental goop, dividing, evolving, adapting – created the world we’re currently in?

Preposterous?

Yes and No.

The question has become: “does it matter?”

We get to determine what matters, and what to do.

I heard Jane Fonda say she is a repeater – and I realized that I am too.

I am a light receptacle. I travel the helper network, and have found so many others along the way.

There are other networks, some flashy, some dreadful, none as lasting or strong as ours – and we’re open to every single soul, forever.

It’s not really that “we win”. That implies competition, but it’s just a journey home.

I grieve for those who won’t make it home for a long time. I’m going home after this life is done.

In the meantime, I’ve got light to spread as I slip through this time.

Making A Way

Remembering To Breathe

Purpose

Mapped Out

Love Is

I Forgot

Peace, Love, Grief

Free To Love

Rainy Monday

Time Slipper

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: