Devoured by Flame

Recently I’ve gotten into Dune Moss. If you don’t know who she is, you probably should. Her music is magical and full of meaningful poetry that take my breath away along with instrumentals that complement her dynamic lyrics and her unearthly voice. It’s like Enya meets Purity Ring.

Music is an enormous part of my communication with Loki and sometimes a song gets stuck in my head on repeat. Though I am also AuADHD and this is a common part of the whole thing there comes a time where certain songs get stuck with me for a reason and this is one of them.

Lately, I’ve been healing from a relationship that was not good for me. It was fairly traumatic, actually, and I didn’t really realize how traumatic it was until I started unraveling it by the events in my life that seem to trigger certain things.

And so, the lyrics to the song “Growing Sideways” feel very apt to my feelings on this.

I have walked this windy path
Sticky thorns still scorn my feet
I really thought I was complete
Now I’m here to rot on the street

The street feeling very incomplete

I was so self assured that I didn’t need to do anything else and that it was everything else that needed to change. Even though I realize that I’ve been told this numerous times that the only thing I can ever change is myself, I also realize that it’s also easy to get caught up in other people’s problems more than my own.

I felt complete in that I knew what I was doing, but if only I tried harder, I could get somewhere with it. However, it only became a way for me to excuse my inability to move past myself and get done what I have been needing to this entire time.

The chorus repeats three times stating

I have lived in an empty maze

My skin is growing sideways

I have given all I can

I am growing sideways

I feel like this speaks to my experience wherein I was feeling like I was trapped in a spiral of my own making. I couldn’t see a way out of it and no matter how hard I try, I keep going back to the same point in the map. It felt stifling, to be honest.

I changed myself so many times to fit other people’s vision of me that I lost sight of myself in the end – thinking I had it all in the bag when I didn’t. I still don’t to a degree, as I’m still here processing all of it and trying to figure out what it could possibly mean. I only can do what I can to get to the next level. And I can only ever be who I am to see who I am not lest I rot in passivity of the world changing around me.

Thought that I would grow like the trees
Standing strong no matter the breeze
Trees can look beyond the maze
Now I’m here to live in the breeze

The breeze unstable as can be

I feel like the expectation of resilience is to feel like nothing could knock me down and to feel invincible to everything. I felt like I should not let things get to me and not be such a brat when it came to doing hard things.

The truth is, however, it has been hard and I’ve not let myself admit how hard it has been until I stand where I’m standing now and recognize that I’ve been putting in overtime trying to get where I am. And the pay is not very good and overtime is not guaranteed. I have worked very diligently to progress on my spiritual path, no matter the cost of it. I’ve sacrificed whole parts of my being to get to the point where I can be made to be of service while also neglecting the parts of me that are still healing from that loss.

While I’d like to stand strong like a tree, I also realize I am not a tree, but rather a house plant that is looking for the sun no matter where it ends up being. Based on the time of year and where the sun sets in the windows of an apartment, the house plant adjusts accordingly to get the better view of the rays. The seeds of a plant also take flight with the wind and scatter along the ground to prolong the life of the plant that can only thrive when other plants are around it. It needs to be fertile to thrive and by being a part of the ecosystem, it needs to also have multiple plants surrounding it.

These seeds will grow at any cost regardless of climate and environmental factors. Some of them will grow between the cracks of a sidewalk and others will fight their way through the vines. Weeds are stubborn and yet they are the best to survive. Loki, actually, is often likened to a dandelion because of this stubborn nature of being what is widely considered as a weed. Necessary and required for a diverse ecosystem, dandelions are very difficult to get rid of once they are around. Whole patches of them pop up in the grass until they are mowed down and grow again.

I am like the dandelion in this scenario, casting out multiple chances for growth and hoping that I’ll survive once it lands somewhere I need it to be. I need multiple variations of these attempts to get where I need to go in order to ensure the endurance of my path and what I’ve been called to share with the wider community.

This required a lot of processing to realize. There is not one single path to take down a mountain, as Loki so wisely told me the very first time he came down to talk to me almost exactly a year ago today. Some of them are harder than others, others more perilous a journey, some have rocks and boulders, and most have a quality to them where I would have to jump down to get to where I’m going, trusting that my feet will catch on the ground and I can keep going.

I have not realized how much I’ve taken His advice this past year in my endeavor to reach a point where I can be united with Him once and for all. In the moment, however, I just thought it was Him reiterating all that He has said to me before, and not new information, but really the poignancy of Him telling it to me there, in a space where I would eventually be trained to be doing what the seer was doing (not in that particular way), is what I needed to get.

There’s multiple levels to everything He says. There’s multiple places I can go that lead to the river at the bottom. I just have to suck it up and hope that I’m taking the less perilous option. And if I am, well… at least I’m still getting somewhere.

I have been sitting on this with myself for a long time, actually. It has been relatively difficult to put into words the experiences I’ve had over the last year (more than a year, but who’s counting?). A lot of the things I feared would happen, happened, and with it, I became resilient in the face of fear and resilient to the people I came to realize were not good to keep.

I am stronger than ever now, however, resilient to all of these feelings of being inadequate and not knowledgeable about what I’m doing. Loki has plucked each finger from the thing I was hiding behind for survival, and forced me to look at it from another angle so I can be more aware of what is going on.

And here I am. Still going and still walking with Him, more sure of my path and my role in this life than I’ve ever been before. I am still my self, in a way. A survivor, a stubborn house plant, a dandelion, a tree that can’t find the sunlight. And still my path and cause remains clear regardless of how I get there in the end.