A False Arrest

art source: anon

art source: anon

Clarity is my noble quest

As I find myself put to the test

Another’s made a false arrest

Traditional connections become compressed

Words are hurled at her behest

They rebound off my bulletproof vest

Discarded bruises, so tender yet

I salve them with my raw regret

Oxygen drains can’t catch a breath

How to mend this temporary death

Or maybe I just hop a jet

And soar to heights; close all bets.

That won’t do, some things are set

There’s no escape hatch, no deep breath

I grant her all her things possessed 

And fling to sea this past-filled net

I keep in mind my life is blessed

I can’t fix things that I don’t mess

So I circle round & fluff my nest

With truth & sins already confessed

Tricia Schwaba, from the archives, circa 2015

Creative Streak Sparks

art source saatchiart.com

art source saatchiart.com

We need your voice, don’t hide in the closet

Your creative streak mines a valuable deposit

In the coffers of the Earth and the great human spirit

Can you feel it, smell it, taste it, can you hear it?

The days of self doubt and tamping down are through

You are needed to help the collective pull through

This sludge of the patriarchal nightmare breaks down

Revealing an equity we’re peacefulness-bound

Bring out your truth, your words, your kindness

Your spontaneous true heart, let yourself find this

The energy that keeps us all afloat 

Must come from dispelling the fears by rote

Say what you feel, dive into that pool

Be free to tell the tale, be daring, be cool

The only way to uncover this prosperous bliss

Is to speak out in tumultuous times like this.

Tricia Schwaba, June 2020

Yoga Closing June 3, 2020

art source: Anon

art source: Anon

“This relationship between the internal and external environment is an intimate one. Survival depends upon a harmonious interaction, in order that our very precise homeostatic limits are satisfied…
In a healthy state the organs interact harmoniously and transform chi into energy states appropriate for the body’s life sustaining functions. Yin and yang are in relative balance, chi freely circulates through the organs, and meridians and nourishes all cells and tissues of the body.” James Hackett

Truth Reaches Out

art source: Ted X

art source: Ted X

Time passes
I can’t find my glasses
I should take more classes
Watch more brothers Duplass’

This apathy scares
I struggle to care
While I take the dare
To repel evil stares

Too much down time
Too much red wine
Too many tangled vines
Too little feeling fine

Truth reaches out
Screams & shouts
What it’s about?
How love lives throughout.

Tricia Schwaba, June 2020

Yoga Closing 27 20

Art Source: Anon

Art Source: Anon

“I don’t know how long I can do this, he said. I think the universe has different plans for me & we sat there in silence & I thought to myself that this is the thing that we all come to & this is the thing we all fight & if we are lucky enough to lose, our lives become beautiful with mystery again & I sat there silent because that is not something that can be said.”"

The Dive Bombers

art source: anon

art source: anon

The brush of his whiskers scratched abrasively at the red skin I had worked so hard to cover up with my foundation as I prepped for this party. It had looked like a red angry demon the size of a dime before make up. It disappeared as the cool smooth stroke of the cosmetic brush made it’s way across and around the inflammation making it barely a blip. I struggled with redness and general inflammation all my life, most likely a derivative of my growing anger at feeling I have to cover up my flaws rather than wear them like badges of honor for all the trials and tribulations I had conquered. But alas, vanity wins and I practice the art of camouflage. A longtime friend and I have been reluctantly amused by, and telling stories of, this man for years now. He and another friend of a friend, a woman, that we see periodically at parties of certain tangential connections, are what we call the dive bombers, where the kiss comes in so hard and fast you have no time to turn, or duck or do the “No you are not going to hammer my mouth because I’m onto you and this time I’m gonna turn my cheek just in the nick of time successfully evading your attack!” routine. I never win. You’d think that I’d have learned after these many years, but somehow it always comes so unexpectedly or so fast, it’s as if they both sit at home planning their strategies, with a chart of the party layout, and a laser pointer preparing their entry level positioning. I imagine them doing a visualization where they survey the room and its occupants, finding cover behind a beam or on the other side of the kitchen swinging door stiffening up their mouth weapons just waiting for me, their skittish prey.

At this current gathering I’m desperately rubber-necking to check out my look in the mirror, hoping my make up is still adequately doing what I enlisted it to do, when in a wave of confusion I am approached by one of the enemies. It is the larger and bulkier male. My brain attempts to fire quickly but his strategy proves challenging. I attempt to divert his missile of a smooch, hoping it will clear my mouth and land on the skin of my cheek, best case scenario avoiding the kiss altogether, turning it into a mere hug, worst case scenario it’s a kiss on the center of my cheek, but nope. He landed awkwardly part lips, part cheek, part demon red spot and with an uncomfortable amount of moisture. Eww and ouch. Shit I hoped my make up was still in tact but I didn’t hold out much hope as I felt a tingling, almost abrasive sensation. “Damn he out-strategized me again!” He pulls away and as I turn my head back to neutral I catch a whiff of the culprit’s surprisingly pleasant citrusy aftershave and think, “Well that’s a plus.” He has a big smile on his face and he is genuinely happy to see me, and I him. Truth be told I love this guy. He’s witty and joyous and I’ll hang out with him all night after that initial incendiary device detonates.

I feel the throb of my demon facial inflammation and scan the room in a paranoid fashion for his kindred hard-kissing soul, the other of the dive bombers in my battalion, the smaller framed female who somehow manages a more forceful smack of the two. And she smokes cigarettes. Blessedly I don’t see her. There’s no reason she would also be in attendance with this particular group, but it has happened before and I have the battle scars to prove it. Despite that logic my paranoia spikes as I make my way to the bathroom to see what damage has been done and whether the repercussions of this battle will require me to go AWOL.

Say What You Need To Say

art source, Joan Armatrading album Lovers Speak

art source, Joan Armatrading album Lovers Speak

Please don’t spend another ounce of energy holding back that which must be said. If you do not say it now it will only lie in wait taking up crucial space as more and more ideas and feelings come up that need release and before you know it there will be a queue of things that need to be said within you and that back up could be trouble for your mental and physical health and worse, you may not have time to say them all.

Turtles & Spirit Guides

art source: anon

art source: anon

The turtles are crashing in to one another, demanding my attention as the winds gust and the gray clouds over the bay threaten to move in and drench the Earth. The 5 wooden turtles are the hanging ornaments on a wind chime that dances in my front yard. They hang from a thin log on varying lengths of jute cord, their constant, intended collisions offering up pleasantly hollow percussive beats. It was purchased, and hung, in honor of my mom who had an unexplained love & fascination of turtles.

I look up Turtle in my Animal Spirit Guide book and see the following excerpts and possible connections — “seek self reliance, slow down and pace yourself, you may have an increased sensitivity to the earth’s vibrations, shield yourself from distractions”. I contemplate the shamanic characteristics of my mom’s favorite creature. They make sense, my mom having bore eight children, subsequently becoming a grandmother to 17 and great grandmother to 18+. She was not left too much time to answer her dominating creative callings. Pacing herself was near impossible, and distractions were constant. Her sensitivity to the earth’s vibration were apparent, reflected in her demand to be in the woods and on the lake every summer. Our ritual of traveling north to escape the city every summer mingled with her need to be closer to God.

Upon random sightings I often consult my Animal Spirit Guide book to see what revelations might lie on the page. While some people find them BS, I don’t and, in fact, I seek out connective meanings in the characteristics of the animal sighted, or dreamt about, and the proposed mystical meaning the animal has historically represented to the seers and the shamans that sought spiritual guidance from nature’s bounty, specifically in animal encounters. I would not say the passages are concretely prophetic, but most of the time they shine a light on an avenue of insight I would not have considered, revealing a strong, sometimes remarkably prescient, bolt of coincidence surrounding my immediate emotional and/or physical circumstances.

My mom didn’t need to know what the meaning of the turtle was to a distant shaman. She was a clairvoyant herself though not many knew this. She trusted she was guided. She loved watching turtles in both, the fresh water north woods lakes of her summer home, and in the waves of the Atlantic ocean that she, for a while at least, dove into yearly around the time of Spring’s arrival. She connected to them on a spirit level and her ability to flow through any body of water with a grace unparalleled made a possible past life camaraderie come alive in my mind.

I have inherited my mom’s draw towards mysticism. I strive to define this life in non-physical terms, seeking spiritual meaning, often futilely, in everyday occurrences. My mom knew when I was conceived, then born, that we were spiritual peers. Because I was a “late” baby I grew up in a different way from my 7 siblings, if only defined by the time I spent with her one on one. Many evenings we sat at the table overlooking the lake, just the 2 of us, sharing a meal discussing how it feels to be a soul in a human body. We covered heaven and what might happen when we leave the physical body. She revealed her frustration with the patriarchal hierarchy of the Catholic church that had formed, then dominated, her God connection soaking her in notions of shame, guilt and projections of what evil may arrive should she not follow their teachings. I knew it was the time of my conception that shifted her. Another baby, but this one would be the symbol of her crumbling religiosity and of her own true spiritual birth. Her connection to God would no longer be defined by another human. It was now all hers.

Some might interpret these conversations too heavy for a young person, but I understood. It was a sharing that I knew was a freeing up for her, a stating aloud that which had before been trapped and festering. I felt the release. For me it was permission to think outside the confines of an organization and create my own distinct connection to the divine. When the number of people in our the house would swell I would sit on the giant boulder that sat adjacent to our house in the trees, hidden from all eyes and I would find calm by watching the lake lap at the shore and my imagination would soar. My appreciation and respect for the random animals that would trot through our yard grew as I began to see them not as things to fear or dominate, but as beings to share the Earth with. I read about the callings of the original Americans, the indigenous peoples of this land and their perspective that animals lead us towards the deeper parts of ourselves, the non-tangible part, the part that has, since the time I landed on the Earth, been my north star.

I consider the wind chime turtles demanding my attention this morning a sign that my mom is with me. She is in the turtles, in the wind, in the rippled waters, the gray clouds hovering and the blue sky beyond. She is calling me to that place deep within, as she has done ever since I can remember,
“C’mon in Trish, swim like the turtles, the water is beautiful”

Tricia Schwaba May 17, 2020

The Woman Wears Gold

art source: anon

art source: anon

I aspire to be the woman wearing gold

Flaunting my jewels they’re a sight to behold

I need you to see that my house it sparkles

I need you to know my neighbors, they marvel

 

For mine is a life that I believe to express

The desired glistening to all who have less

I’m a skilled performer, my humility seems true

Those petty insecurities, they never show through. 

I take the classes, I purchase the goods

I navigate the waters of “want to” & “should”

My desire is power to control and define 

And to slide through life untouched by the grime

 

Inside I am a child, running from my past

The messy house, the cheap looking-glass

That image that now stares back at me

Has amassed her fortress and it has just one key.

 

I stare down my bloodline, it will not triumph

My kids they will soar in their jets, yes they’ll fly off

To exotic locales drenched in fashion and taste 

Keeping struggle at bay ‘til facades fade away.

 

If only this worked, this creative avoidance 

If only I knew that I lived in accordance

With Divinity’s creed and the blessings so pure

Until then, this charade, I will have to endure.

Tricia Schwaba, May 2020