Spill

Last week, I contracted covid most probably while serenading Dominick the Italian Christmas donkey to a whole room full of lovely humans who were celebrating Christmas and raising money for a good cause. Someone there probably had it and didn’t know thereby passing it on. That’s how covid has been creeping in. I chose not to wear a mask that night even though I always wear a mask unless I’m having a sip or actively eating. But I was recently boosted and my girls are fully vaxxed now and I was excited for the holidays and finding a balance back to community and connection and that’s how this illness has broken so many hearts and killed even more as it creeps in when we are just trying to connect again even when being careful. The shame, anxiety, and fear that creeps in too certainly does not support healing in any way either. I have spent most of my life not one bit worried about what others think about me combined with wanting to share my business with everyone every chance I get! 

So here is how I’m doing with covid’s invasion of my body and my home. I’m fine, y’all. I am feeling like I have a shitty sinus and upper respiratory infection that runs you down and makes it necessary to eat and drink hearty broths and teas while binge watching mystical Netflix shows. So far I have it the worst as Tommy has it but his symptoms are milder than mine. The girls and mama, as of Monday, Dec. 20, have not gotten it. All my beloveds are taking such good care of me, as is my extended community with check-ins, distance reiki, Ubereats gift cards and just all the love. 

That’s what I want to reflect on today. The Love. For me, this illness is an active healing moment in the physical present sense but also in my lineage; for my own ancestors before me and as I become the elder and ancestor for those to come at a threshold that I needed to cross in order to step fully through the fear entrenched in so many of us for nearly 2 years and come out the other side fully healed. To bear witness first hand… I will survive covid in 2021, at age 44, because of the bridge between science and spirit that exists now. It didn’t exist like this for my ancestors nor for yours, and we feel that deep in our core. I have the privilege that I can tell my own story but it is a universal ancestral story regardless of where we came from. The old stories of illness live in all our DNA. Here is the one I am healing that cycles back 120 years to the respiratory epidemic, tuberculosis, or as her death certificate says “consumption” that took my maternal great great grandmother, Ellen Mogan Baine, at age 40. There was no medicine to help them fight the infectious disease that consumed her and her husband, leaving behind my twelve year old great grandmother, Mercedes, to be raised by her aunt and grandparents. 

My contracting a mild case of covid, after receiving all that medicine can offer right now and allowing spirit to work from the other side, this line of loss that started in 1899, is being healed with intention called forth in the throws of my illness and reinforced through the ritual of these written words. In my rest and healing of covid, the matrilineal line of fear, amplified when my own grandmother was born, on armistice day 1918, at the height of the Spanish flu pandemic to that orphaned mother. As a mother myself, I have spent much time thinking about how she brought a child into a world of unmitigated illness while holding the trauma of losing her own mother to another type of unmitigated illness. She passed her fear on, which was compounded by her daughter, my grandmother Julia’s fears for her own beloveds, my mama and uncle, during the polio epidemic that raged throughout their childhood. Fear continued to perpetuate and be fed through my generation when, in 1980, my own brother died at 9 days old because of a slew of micro negligences, both sanitary and procedural in nature, on the part of healthcare workers in local hospitals. 

I was unintentionally receiving very clear beliefs about cleanliness and all the ways you could get sick and die expanded out to encompass all the fears of death you can imagine from a deeply loving and protective family, who had 4 generations of direct trauma around germs, illness, and how these are contracted running in their veins.
It was molding the way I looked at the world as a danger from a very young age as well as the rage I constantly felt when all these adults and their fears were laid upon my shoulders to carry their generational burdens. Even being told to wash the dirt out from under my fingers after playing outside enraged me as a child. Still does. Germs get a bad wrap even before a global pandemic that kills millions, but now we have a whole new generation to be traumatized and often for a very good cause but often very much misplaced and ignored. That is where I am trying to heal my line. 

Along with traceable lineage stories, I carry the simple trauma of ancient ancestors who have succumbed to plague, illness, and devastation at the hands of fellow humans and nature alike. That’s just in my DNA. But we all carry the burden of this foundational pre-pandemic trauma just for being embodied on this earth. No wonder we are all exhausted, judgmental, and constantly afraid and/or pretending like we don’t care because we simply don’t have enough capacity in neither a physical, mental nor spiritual sense to deal with the threads of wounds stretching far back in history right to this very moment where the ever present fears of an evolving two year global pandemic are literally unraveling us. 

But I am choosing to heal my ancestral line and the fear embedded within it as I heal my body from the Covid-19 virus invading it at this moment. Here is how I am doing that work and how you can do it too no matter whether you ever get covid or not. 

• 2022 will be a year where I practice questioning with curiosity and seek understanding without judgment while actively keeping my personal belief systems of community care, radical self direction, and dismantling my own generationally engrained white and human supremacy at the center of my personal work. 

• I am letting go of all preconceived judgments about getting covid even as I wonder about its continued evolution. 

• I can no longer judge others as my own personal history and my ancestral lineage is constantly reminding me that judgment comes back upon me and my line 100 fold. This is not a fear but a fact that I know how to dismantle from years of documenting my own fears and scarcity mindset and bearing witness to the cycles in my own family and in systems far greater than I. 

• I can only take responsibility for myself, forgive, set boundaries, and keep them based on my own soul knowing, sharing the journey with those who want to walk the path alongside me, all the while spilling out love regardless of choices that I don’t agree with. I do not mean condone disrespect or ignore accountability. We can hold accountable, repair, and dismantle while centering forgiveness and love through mindfulness.  

• We all have free will and it’s our own choice how we interact with who and what we know is not centered in love. This is where we get curious. When we know love is not at the core of something, look to see what is and whether it can be traced back to a pining for, a seeking of love, or a misconstrued understanding of love wrapped in fear and scarcity. 

• Seeking to understand the soul’s reasoning for existing in this lifetime and its tie to our work on earth always comes back to one single synchronicity; Love. Spill it out everywhere. You can do that while asking important questions with curiosity, advocating, and actively dismantling systems that are not founded in love but rather some confused warped idea of love that often excludes and holds hierarchy based on that which isn’t real.

• We are all on a journey and our one constant is centering in love. When we love ourselves first, love for the rest is easier. When we release the judgment of ourselves first, then releasing judgement on the rest of humanity is easier. 

• Ask questions with curiosity in order to unravel where love got lost or twisted through the complications of living on earth. Share your discoveries, all the while pouring forth radical love upon yourself, your beloveds, your commitments, and your curiosities. 

Begin here and notice how it ripples out. When you spill out love it creates waves just like a virus ripples out and takes lives. Maybe the virus can guide us to love radically and evolve that love when we notice we are shielding ourselves from it. That is the revolution, y’all. 

So I am following all the community care protocols that center love at their foundation and in doing so I am healing my lineage whose fear was well founded and substantiated through history but is no longer for me to carry the trauma or pass it further down to my direct descendants. And so my survival and my descendants’ survival of the illness that has killed millions in the past two years is an activation for physical body and epigenetic healing forwards and backwards. That is the love y’all. That is my call. I think it is all our calls. When we center love we are building the bridge that will hold space for our descendants to keep on. We can all agree that we didn’t create the mess we are living in nor will we live to see the outcome. But we can activate love right now. Root down. Rise Up. To the revolutions, All definitions apply.