Its been a number of weeks since my last blog. I wanted to take some time and process some incredibly difficult areas of my life. By holding off of writing it seemed a way in which I could remain devoted to my internal private process without interruption. Holding the trauma of my life required focus and privacy. I did not know how much space I would need before I could begin writing again.

It has been at least a few weeks and seems longer with the depth I have traveled. I have gone down into the deepest caves of despair, lack, scarcity and feelings of being unable to live or exist in this world. The feelings of not making it here adding to my lack of will to live! I had to reach this end of life, this utter emptiness, void, and nothingness. As I awoke day after day in this with nowhere to go except to sit here, I wallowed in self pity, immense sorrow and grief and having nothing to live for. Suicide entered, ways in which I could vanish from this horror of a life. And knowing that I could never take my life in the depths of this despair. Understanding enough to know that I could not leave that imprint here with my daughter and grandson, my sisters/tribe, friends and family or with anyone else who might come to know of me! So here I was trapped in the deepest of sorrow, despair beyond, and with what seemed nothing ahead of me worth living for. I was there for a number of months, going to sleep in it and waking up to it! As time passed, space opened, I began to accept this fate. I learned how to hold this massive depression all the while feeding myself each day, keeping my home clean and organized to the best of my capacity and taking the best care of myself I could considering my mental and emotional health.

It has been the hardest times of my life these past 4 1/2 months and throw in also having to find a new home in this market! I spent days, weeks and months wallowing in absolute bleakness, without answers to what is perceived as very real challenges with money, having enough and how I would afford an apartment with what I have coming in. On top of a diagnosis of breast cancer and dying being imminent so imposed by the doctors and western medicine. Its alot for one person to hold. And I have held it most times feeling like I had no choice in the matter. Until oneday, one moment in this path I began to feel some life, creation, something other than this bleakness. It began as a slow leak like a tiny pin prick puncture in a tire. Little by little this creation energy began emerging from deep inside. I allowed it, held this too without needing to do anything except be with it, my teachings from the depression I had just been through. Without planning, jumping ahead, trying to make this creation energy into anything other than creativity I integrated patience, allowing, and full acceptance of what is. My past was full of jumping off wherever I was to somewhere else in the hopes that this would finally be it! Be it? What the hell is it?

I am exercising a muscle that hasn’t had alot of workouts. This muscle is ‘accepting what is without trying to change it’ into anything, just be! I feel this is the source of all creation, true consciousness, AWARENESS! There is nothing clouding the present moment and this is where I feel most attuned to God that I have ever been! So in the beginning when I received the diagnosis and just got out of the hospital I was desperate, afraid, terrorized and lost. Frantic to not DIE!!! And then I spent months with death and dying. People visiting and reaching out because they thought they should connect because they thought I was dying. I spent months in other peoples grief, sadness and potential loss of me. And then I began the work of accepting death. Finding peace and an excitement in my death became my mantra and mission. As I stretched myself farther and farther into this, sitting with the grief, perceived loss of life, never seeing my daughter, grandson, sisters/tribe again as Dana Lynn the heart break turned to insanity, to anger, to rage, confusion, nothingness, and an emptiness you cannot imagine in your darkest hour! I fought it, I lost, I fell, broken and disheveled, weeping, waling, screaming and sitting in a quiet so thick you could cut it! Forced to be here, exhausted and unable to distract. Face to face with the story of death in a culture so terrified of its end that it doesn’t ever learn to live fully. My story from almost 5 months ago was ‘Dying to Live’ and through my process I have released so much, transformed mountains, felt the deepest of loss imagineable in this form. My lack of will to live still visits and now I have a new path and that is ‘Thriving to Live no matter where I find myself. If I must visit the darkness again I will work my hardest to thrive in it. If I am in my creativity I will work my hardest to thrive in that. I have realized in it all of this that no mater what comes calling to visit I will work my hardest at ‘Thriving to Live.’

Thank you Roxanne Dostie for the image in this blog.