I Am A Woman Who Has Lived

Today I woke up waving a white flag.

This is written by a woman who is tired.

I have traveled this world for a decade, collecting experiences–experiences of sleeping on rice sacs in the back of a pickup truck headed to camp in the mountains of peru.

Experiences of hitchhiking with my first green waterlogged surfboard down the dusty roads of Costa Rica, catching a ride with man who told me he once locked the man who robbed him in his house for 3 days.

Experiences of heading to secret point breaks in the blackness at 3 AM with a film crew.

Experiences of being taken into a woman’s home in Thailand when I have been ill for 3 days and the local boat does not come–laying on her matted floor, while she sits above me–watching and taking care of me for a little while.

Experiences of driving 30,000 km across the Outback of Australia sleeping in an 86 Toyota Corolla, sleeping under the stars and showering with melted cooler water under the red sun and termite dunes.

Experiences of living off $5 a day, heating a black coffee with a petro gas burner as I scribble the first things I felt defined me as a writer.

Experiences where I moved from my my bubble, Edmonton–where I grew up with the same faces and names and had the security of being known to a cabin in the middle of the woods on The Sunshine Coast of British Columbia–where I learned to cut kindling and stock a wood stove. To survive a wet winter that held the grey of loneliness I had never experiences–where black bears tore the sides of my cabin off with its claws, and cougars are found hunting people in broad daylight.

Experiences where I have been afraid, and experiences where I stayed. Stayed and invited lost kayakers to share my home–stayed and found that aloneness is not loneliness, that aloneness is the healing that we need to love and be loved by this world.

Experiences of grief–grief that slides me down to the white tiles in a Kitchen at 10 AM. A grief so loud that my screams echo into suburbia like plates crashing as my heart wails and wails.

Experiences of courage–spending years searching for my father, reading my mothers journal, sending letters and photographs, following clues that lead me to an email from a woman from an Osho meditation sanctuary that tracked my father down from his Sinnyasin name he was given in 1988 in Puna, India.

Experiences of sitting teary eyed and afraid asking questions like, “Why didn’t you come? How could you have a daughter and not want to know?”

Experiences where I stood in the shit that shakes like thunder in the back of my hearts hurts and stared into it, without faltering.

Experiences of feeling my calling, where I didn’t tell it to come back later or to wait but where I threw myself into my passion and created a life that sustains me.

Experiences where I have been free–drank the rum, sat by the fire, looked into the eyes of an Italian man who played my legs like a harp and brought me an espresso so strong the hair of my soul stood back.

Experiences of skinny dipping in Central America with phosphorescents so bright and strong that when I raise my body from the water they fall like fireflies from my breasts, my back and my fingertips.

I have fallen asleep in the ash of a fire, tangled in kisses and unpolluted stars and woken in a tent beside humans I shared magic with and woken to do handstands for the sun as she stretches her pink rays for a new day.

I have been caught by life, and by lust and by travel and by my vocation–sternly and strongly by my hair and I have followed her.

Experiences–experiences, experiences.

I am a woman who has lived.

I am a mover and a shaker–I am taking over this world.

I have found my passion and am riding it like a freight train to Georgia and each day the noise that it makes gets louder and louder and louder.

I am a woman who has learned to forgive–I have spent a decade punching pillows, working with coaches and healers to move through and make peace with everything I decided about myself that wasn’t true. To unlearn what we learn that harms us.

I am a woman who has learned to teach–to love, and to hold and to heal.

I am a woman who has collected all the experiences I need, and who now is looking for the experience of being the fixation and point of passion by a man who doesn’t want just another experience.

Darling, I have enough moments to keep you listening for a week—being present is beautiful but I don’t want to be captured for a day. I have been captured for many days–by this life, by this world, by lovers.

I want be captured by you.

I want to share myself with someone who has a full life–and yet whose passions include me.

In a large way–in a way where the vision of me waking up in a house full of light, windows and white walls and a clean white bed. Black coffee with steam steaming and slippers falling and a tail wagging and you, sitting at the table. My jeep in the driveway and our lives powering ahead, but our hands intertwined with a knowingness that this experience is the experience we choose after all the rest.

Yes, darling–that is what I am signing up for next.

I feel quite tired, by meeting men who want to share merely moments.

A moment isn’t enough to keep me anymore–I have had the moments that are deep and intimate and sweet, where we stretch our bodies and souls and laugh until 4am and wake close and eat hard boiled eggs and black coffee’s and stare lovingly at each other and then kiss each other goodbye as your curls leave the hotel room and I am left alone.

Those aren’t the moments I want to keep, or the men I wish to love.

I am tired of loving to let go, and letting go to be present.

I am tired of overcompensating, and over giving and over loving to make these moments something to hold on too.

I am tired of choosing half available men who are happy to have all of me given to them, and happy to keep none of me after I have poured every inch of my honey into their mouths.

Just because I can, does not mean I will–anymore.

I could love you with a mountain of love pouring inside of myself and I can see the potential in men who are the lightness of joy and laughter, but yet lack everything to know about accountability and making a woman feel safe.

I love them all–for I see the light in all of them, and none of them need to earn it because we are all beings of light and I see where they have yet to stand and where they have stood and I love them deeply for it all.

But I am learning that sometimes men need to earn their seat at my table.

They are not all kings–they are knights and I am not even asking them to fight–I am pouring them wine and serving them a feast.

But who is loving me?

Who is scouring this land looking for an animal to hunt to feed the Queen?

Who is holding her head at night when days are long and she is tired?

Who is bringing the flowers, and showing up with eyes hungry to hold her not for a moment, but for this whole life?

I am here to be kept, now.

And not for a night in yours, or two–or for a week.

No, please hear that I am tired and we could have a beautiful experience but an experience that expires like dusk with crickets roaring in the purple dusk is not what I lust for anymore.

A man who is still there after weeks and weeks apart, with a lust and a passion to love me through the night–that is the keepingness I seek.