Soul Boner

WHAT’S MY STORY (BOARD)?  

An Adventure for Gatas y Vatas

by Nora Kostelnik

My mom used to always say that the world is not made up of atoms. The world is made up of stories. I understand that now. It may be a cliché but for me it’s true, that however I see my present situation determines how my future will unfold. Until the next time I change my story that is…

Back in Seattle where I was born, I had spent a life-time building up a community of family and friends who understood who I was as an artist. Hell, their grunge stories were not that different from mine so it was relatively easy. But those stories don’t work for me anymore because they don’t fit with the physical landscape and social context of my new home. 

In Seattle, moss and six-months-a-year-of-dark-days push complicated and angst-ridden stories out of your soul that the dry dusty dirt here in Albuquerque pares down, simplifies, and laughs at. After nine years of the wind slapping my face and shouting ‘no silly, that’s not the real story’, it turns out that all I needed was an actual story-board to figure out what the next incarnation of my identity would look like. 

Last year when I performed a few songs at the first ‘Gatas y Vatas’ festival, one of the artists came up to me and confessed that she loved my energy and wanted to get to know me. I was crying when she hugged me because I am usually the one who risks initiating such a connection. It felt like such a relief to be on the other side of this scenario. Talk about the beginning of a new story! 

Fast forward and this girl Mauro and I are having lunch, swapping stories about all the art-babies we have birthed and making plans for how we can support each other in continuing to nurture them. Later, Mauro introduced me to hermom Cecelia and we hit it off too. She (magically) happened to be a film-maker and like me, wanted to make a music video.  But I still didn’t know what my story was. I felt frustrated yet working with Cecelia and her editor friend Roberto was easy.

Secretly I confessed to myself the hope that this collaboration would somehow get difficult and complicated like it used to be back in Seattle. I didn’t want to part with the comfort and familiarity my old habits had brought me, even when in the long-run, they were hurting me.  

When I shared this with my film-making team, just admitting it (magically) showed me how the conflict between comfort and growth was part of my new story about addiction. It felt safe to tell Cecelia and Roberto that although I had never been into using drugs or alcohol, Counselors pointed out how picking fights in a relationship is one way to continuously secrete the substance adrenaline from my brain!

After I wrote two new songs about these emerging themes, I drew a picture for each feeling that each part of the story brought up. At first it felt awkward to share my crude stick figures with other people, but my new easy-going and trustworthy team loved it!

For the song ‘Love is a Funny Thing’, Cecelia’s husband Steve who (magically) happened to be a professional painter and drawer, took all of our ideas and made a story-board. That process made us better prepared to take the next step which was shooting the actual video that matched up with each frame on paper. One part of the storyboard has three frames in it. One picture shows me pulling a heart-shaped cake into the oven,  another one shows me pulling a knife out from under my skirt, and the last one shows me slicing open the cake and blood is pouring out! I wanted the visuals to represent my emotional and spiritual surrender to my faith in love no matter how ridiculous it gets, and I’m going to eat it for dessert, for the rest of my doggone life!

After shooting the video for my first Albuquerque-Identified song, I felt confident enough to begin working on another one. It is based on the related fear of wonderful yet silly love. In particular, it’s about how so many of my friends seem to be married to the ‘green goddess’ (marijuana) while I remain in the back-ground,  as a neglected mistress.

My current best-friend (magically) happens to be committed to recovery like I am, and is an artist who helped me to transform my stick-figures and concepts into my next story-board much like the way Cecelia and Roberto and Mark were able to do. The drawings I like best are of a spunky girl in a gi (“gee”) practicing a brazillian jiu-jitsu move on me. The marijuana leaves behind her ears look like hair barettes! Hopefully the story-board, and later the music video itself, will convey my physical surrender to the green goddess, not by smoking her, or trying to keep other people from smoking her, but by my ability to admit that I am my own goddess and can never win or even compete with her.

This last story is one that I would never have been able to believe when I was just a teenager and young adult living in Seattle. I am grateful and humbled by the desert landscape here and I feel inspired and hopeful because of the peoplehere—-people like Marisa Demarco who is putting together an all womens music festival called ‘Gatas y Vatas’ in November.

This festival is helping many of us women artists claim our creative powers. With this power, and a place to use it, I am choosing to heal rather than destroy my dear heart.

How to make a decision

How does one go about making a decision that could change there lives? Does it matter if it changes your life in a big way or a small way? I think that change is change and that sometimes it’s easiest to make the big decision and hardest to choose what you’d like to eat for breakfast. Cereal or eggs?

I think you can apply the same sort of feeling and logical to big decisions as you can to the small ones. Do I desire cereal or eggs? First you begin to think about the situation in a logical way. “Eggs will keep me full longer. Although I did have eggs yesterday” However…” I did just buy a the new Cinnamon Corn Flakes ” Secondly one begins to think about it in an emotional way; you start tasting the food in your mouth, imagining which would satisfy your taste buds and before you know it, you’ve made a decision.

I think the same philosophy can be applied to big decisions. No matter how much we analyze the advantages and consequences, once we taste the right decision, we know it’s right.  Whether or not it’s the more logical one or the decision that is filled with insanity. We usually already know which one is right for us, for our souls, for our future.

Emily Gonzales

greatpoem.tumblr.com

Love Eats

when feeding the beast

watch and learn…show and prove

I figured out a long time ago that love bites. That was high school. You know, that period of time when you are SURE that certain people are lucky in love and that you are fucked-up.

William Gibson can summarize the total wisdom I learned about this concept in one sentence:‎“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, simply surrounded by assholes”.

My less funny, more subtle, and harder to learn lesson concerns the behind-the-scenes area of what Mr. Gibson so eloquently drops in our laps: first make sure, that you are, in fact, simply surrounded by trustworthy and caring people before you diagnose yourself as happy or lucky in love.

I’m currently forty-five years old and have ‘done my time’ in high-school learning how love bites. I now plan to continue doing time, joyously learning how to feed love. Put simply, I eat love for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Every. Damn. Day. 

In order to understand me, I need to begin by describing what I mean by the word trustworthy. That’s a big, big word. Yet with time and careful scientific observation, this endeavor can be pretty simple for me: watch and learn what people say to me in my life and go by what they do. We all know that actions speak louder than words yet only a mature person knows how to walk away peacefully from a situation without resentment when another person’s actions continuously fail to match up with what they say. Yes that’s the clincher. If I can refrain from blaming or shaming a person and walk away from the situation, then I am ready for the next step. (Note: blaming or shaming is happening whenever I cannot believe that a person is doing the best they can at the time with what they have. If I can’t believe that they are in fact doing this, then there is no way in hell that I will be able to resist feeling resentful.)

After I figure out what constitutes trustworthy behavior in other people, then I am ready question myself about my own actions. Does my behavior continuously show and prove that I can be trusted to act fairly and compassionately even when the going gets rough?

When I start answering yes more than no to this question, (because NO ONE answers yes all the time) then I am in fact, putting in the time it takes to attract like minded people. It is not true that there are caring and non-caring people. It’s just that everyone defines those words differently and unless I am clear about how I define those concepts, there is no way that someone else will understand me, let alone have a clue as to how to deliver it to me in the way that I’d like.

Warning: if you do this, be prepared for people who will act out their jealousy towards you when they witness that you are surrounded by trustworthy and caring people. Though these people are doing the best they can with what they have, they sadly and falsely will accuse you of being ‘lucky’ in love and life.

As long as this accusation of luck is believed, then this person can be seduced by the notion that they can somehow avoid doing ‘time’ in  the metaphorical yet very real prison of watching and learning and showing and proving what it means to THEM to act as a trustworthy and caring person.

I know because I used to believe that lie. Now that I don’t believe it anymore, and am happily doing my time, I’m allowed out on parole once in awhile and am rarely called a criminal.

Heck, just the other day I was accused of being a trustworthy and caring person, EVEN THOUGH I was running away from a huge beast, chasing me with a slobbery, hungry mouth.

My 90 Days

Dear diary,

I’ve kissed a lot of frogs and I finally met one that I like as a frog. Im not gonna kiss him for a long  long time, or at least until I can make sure that he really wants to stay a frog.

90 days seems like a very long time not to kiss someone who you have a HUGE crush on. There is a reason it’s called a crush.  your heart, your mind, your ego, your sanity, all get crushed under the pressure of not knowing what the deal is between you and your new frog-friend.

I like this frog because he believes in what I do, lives like I do, and he’s handsome as well! we met at a joseph campbell discussion group. the earnestness in his voice about the power of myth (not to mention the way he sunk his martial-arts trained hips deeper into the leather chair) heated up the top of my head about ten degrees and then simmered down into a low hummmm in my ears.  my eyes started to get wet. when it was my turn to add something to the conversation about how we use symbols and inanimate objects for spiritual quests, i shouted out ‘eye cum’ that’s what i call my tears of joy. i was not aware until now that the room had gotten quiet.

i was focused on charging every cell of my body into a beam of light that would shoot out of my toe and onto his thigh. i wanted him to imagine touching my foot and yet feel the pressure not to, like I did, because we had just met and although we were both living somewhat eccentric lives, there was no way either of us was going to do something as socially taboo and odd as that. yet anyway.

what seems genuinely taboo to me as a woman in a culture that is so obsessed with materialism and sensation without feelings, is to take time, I mean really take some time, to get to know a man before I get in too deep. that is, before we start making sexual contact the priority. hence the ’90 day rule’ as comedien steve harvey calls it in his book ‘act like a woman, think like a man’.

Nora White

Nebulas

It would have been the last strike as she was falling to the ground. All time stopped as her body froze in thin air. Her eyes rested closed and her corpse lay limp in the time between a second. Her hairs stretched to the sky while her head fell through the infinite space between the concrete and nebulas.Dropping, dropping, dragging as the glitters of hope float on by from the tips of those last strains stuck in time. Her late wispy breathe escaping her lips was the final call for life as she fell.

They had tugged at her tears on the plateau of her lashes. They had given her speech away to the asylum. They tore apart her dreams and spit the ice water back. But this was it. This is where it stopped.

Her head crawled back up to those hairs. Her pupils screamed out as to suck that breath back in. Her body lifted back up like a slow rewind. And her finger tips trailed behind sweeping up the last drops of her soul.

And this is where she stood tall, “You can’t take this. No, you will never be able to take this. I will fight not until I die, but until I live.”

Emily Gonzales

God spelled backwards is DOG

growth does not come from being powerful and not needing anyone. growth comes from allowing your ego’s story to drop away. that’s what my meditation was for today, and boy did i do some emotional work with my sensei that echoes that truth for me.

i have been holding on to angry feelings for someone i miss very much. i have been doing this because to let go of the anger would be to let go of the only connection i have left with this person. hmmm. is that really true? im not sure, i just know that it feels true because it feels familiar.

i remember separating from my mother years ago and having the same feeling. yes, i let go of the anger i felt towards her and for awhile my greatest fear came true: i had no connection at all to her and this was very sad. fast forward: i don’t have much of a connection with her now either, yet it is do-able and i feel (mostly) at peace about it. i have found many, many other mothers and am now grateful for the tiny thread of connection i still have with my original mother.

now back to the boy. we were very close for awhile and both of us had many of our needs met by our connection yet i decided to break up with him because i no longer want to be close to people who are choosing to fuel their addictions vs. commit to loving awareness. i know that eventually, when i let go of the anger about it not working out the way i wanted it to, that I will have no more connection to him. it feels just like it was with my mother, and just like it felt when my daddy died suddenly in a plane crash when i was five.

the girl i was when i was ten, wished SO badly to just hang out and smoke or drink with friends *whoa* and just relax. who i really was back then and am now, is someone who relaxes by working on things that interest my mind and body: sharing ideas, writing, reading TONS, dancing, eating, exercising, basically working really vigorously on awareness and being present. lately i focus on an image of a sheep herding dog, for those beings i respect and can relate to. someday i hope to love myself as much as i love them typa dogs. I’d like to know from you, dear reader, who you *wish* you were, vs. who you really are RIGHT NOW IN THIS MOMENT. do you care to share?

the happy ending to my story is that as an adult, my body and mind and spirit remembers the same feelings of fear and anxiousness from when i was a child, yet it is not the same. i have work i can do with many people i trust to heal those feelings and actually build new, physical connections in my brain!

someday i will share more with you about the healing modalities that work for me. in life it seems you must figure out by trial and error what works for YOU. good luck on that. i hope that the stories em and i share here, help to inspire you and remind you that we understand.

in the moments that you are working your truth and feeling great about it, we call that a soulboner. may your future be filled with them.

This feeling followed me when thy kingdom came

On the steps of history where love has

Lived and rested, for while every

Thing else changed, he knocks on my door,

No matter how many cuts of chaque ongle 

You will forever dangle past my fingers

It can’t be true for this pain

And joy is like a black rose,

Would I give up my life for you,

I cling to the solo memories of your

Flesh I cannot forget, I will not forget 

A disgrace!, Forgotten would be tragic,

Wipe away this feeling that hence is dragged

You’re flesh fades from this poem,

A salty fabrication of desperation

How could I cry like this, preach like this,

But heaven was once found though the clogged mist

Emi Gonzales

are you to your destination yet?

fuck everyone. i mean. uh. i need to feel understood and it scares the shit out of me to think that you don’t.

my brother and i are very close and sometimes he asks me questions or tells me things that disturb me. 

lately, he asked me why i was in alanon and the tone in his voice bothered me a bit. i felt he was judging me for some reason, so i took many deep breaths and reminded myself of how he cares about me. 

what is most important for me here? why am i feeling hurt? 

immediately, the need to feel understood came up. i made the choice to reach out and write this letter to him, rather than to shrink, put a wall up, and disappear.

dearest brother,
I have been thinking about your question of why do you go to al-anon. it is important for me to feel understood, so I was hoping you’d listen to my response and then when you feel like it, please let me know what you think. 

Mainly, i have felt that most of my life has been spent relentlessly bringing verbal attention to addiction in my circles of friends and family while it seemed that everyone else ignored it or manipulated me into believing that I was (fill in the blank here for judgments). 

I have felt alone, misunderstood, and disconnected for years, even after years of counseling, until I started getting regular non-violent communication experience, and now, alanon support. simply put, my addiction to adrenaline rushes, and co-dependent relationships, had created a life where I didn’t have real friends nor intimate relationships, and i searched until i found what worked for me. 

the most important thing I have learned, and now practice, is that when i deal with my own addictions instead of how I want OHTERS to change theirs, i am then free to connect in a genuine, healthy way with others and myself. alanon works really well for people who have various substance or behavioural abuses in their lives, or if they are close to someone who is actively addicted. In my opinion, our main family, and generations on both sides, have serious behavioral and substance addictions, yet are not actively dealing with it. i have changed my life by focusing on my own actions, and not that of others. when i fall off this wagon so to speak, and try to manage, control, and manipulate the lives of others, alanon really helps to snap me out of it! 

here are the main things that alanon does for me in my life, in greater detail:
1.
You can’t help someone else, if you aren’t taking care of yourself!
When we go to Alanon, the members and the literature will tell you that it is important to begin taking care of yourself. You are NOT responsible for the alcoholic. You ARE responsible for taking care of yourself … whatever that means in your life. You cannot help anyone else if you aren’t taking care of yourself. This is an important part of putting first things first!
2.
Once you have determined that you are going to take care of yourself, your next actions will fall into place. Under most circumstances, unless there is abuse or violence, the program suggests that you not make any major changes in your life until you have “worked the program” for about a year. (If there is abuse or violence, removing yourself from this situation may be the very first thing that needs to happen!!) Working the program means that you should begin to work the 12-steps of Alanon. These steps will guide you in putting first things first.

By this time, you have joined Alanon, decided to take care of yourself, and began working the Alanon 12-Steps. When you reach the 4th step, you will begin to take a “fearless and searching” moral inventory of yourself. Are you honest? Mature? Responsible? Are your expectations reasonable? Are you controlling or manipulative? Working this step, and carefully answering these questions and others, will help you decide what areas of your life you need to work on next.
3.

Talk with other Alanon members, and take time to evaluate your life!
Now that you have joined Alanon, began taking care of yourself, started working the steps, and begun to really evaluate your life, you are probably ready to take some actions, or make some changes … if you still want to. Sometimes Alanon members decide that it is no longer necessary for them to leave the alcoholic. In other cases, they finally have built up the courage to move out! Decisions such as where to live, whether or not to get a job, and how to proceed with your future become much clearer after you have been in Alanon for a few months. Until they do, sometimes inaction is best until we feel comfortable making a well thought out decision.

When you are feeling like your life is crazy and chaotic, and you don’t know where to turn, turn to Alanon and use that program to help you put first things first. This program has helped millions of women and men get their own lives back on track … while helping them to relinquish control of the alcoholic at the same time. Good luck!

Nora White

Amica hunter pictures above.

check out her beautiful art.

http://www.wix.com/amicahunter/art

Check out my new travel blog.

http://flyingsights.blogspot.com/

you can follow me if you have gmail. :) soon i will be going to argentina.

-Emilie Gonzales