The Wild Years
An Excerpt from Piko: A Return to the Dreaming with some insights from Human Design
This week I’m sharing a chapter of my upcoming book Piko: A Return to the Dreaming. I am deep in the editing process with my editor Norm, whose guidance is helping me hone the book into its best self. I want this book to live its best life! I’ve rushed too many projects into the world out of a need to be loved. This time, I’m doing my best to let my creation itself set the pace. As I am part of my creation, the revision process affects me—I go through changes as the book reveals more of itself. It’s a two-way process. As I change, the book evolves. Doors open into new chambers inside us both, only to reveal new doors we hadn’t known yet existed. I suspect I could work on this book for the rest of my life, and it could work on me, but speaking for Piko, I can say we are both committed, in this lifetime, to embodiment. The words that make this book came to me out of the air and I have channeled them through my hands into physical form. Soon they will have their own form as a book and you will be able to touch them. My hope is that your touch on Piko’s pages becomes part of the book’s magic, and that the spell we co-create causes the stagnant spirals within us to once again oscillate, that the spiders inside the webs wake up and start to weave us back together, fractal upon fractal, spinning us back into looping time instead of the straight lines that always end in extinction. Once upon a time is truer than we think, my friends.
I haven’t forgotten The Art of Spell-Casting offering for paid subscribers, or the other post I’m working on for all subscribers on the nature of circles and lines. I’m doing my best to honor my commitment to my readers, while surrendering to what my creations want from me, which right now seems to slow down and let them gestate. I’m also dealing with an ulcerative colitis flare while working a day job. Aside from you readers, most people in my life off my computer don’t realize how much time I actually inhabit writing. A massage client, also a good friend, looked at me in shock when I told her I spend a minimum of 20 hours a week writing. “If I didn’t have a job,” I told her, “It would be 60 hours, although I wouldn’t be counting.” I could tell she was shocked because she thought she knew me and here I was with this whole other life she wasn't aware of. It wasn’t her fault. For the most part, I keep my writing life separate from my daily life in the physical.
Over the years, realizing most weren’t interested, I’ve kept my writing life secret. I’ve even avoided talking about it if asked. I think my thinking was I can’t possibly explain the depths of the thoughts and feelings I express in a casual conversation, but I’m coming to see that I’ve been hiding, and that I may have not been willing to have an audience in the first place. Being noticed, for a variety of reasons, has not felt safe. Not getting a lot of attention for my writing has given me a lot of strength and shown me how deep my commitment to it is, so I don’t regret this, but I am ready to be seen.
Fun fact: In Human Design, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming is a 4/6 Manifesting Generator with an Emotional Authority. Personally, I’m a 6/3 Generator with a sacral authority, which means I’m really good at plugging away, sometimes to my detriment and others’ gain. I’m envious of the ability of Manifesting Generators to rapidly bring their creations into the physical in spectacular ways, and am excited about my book’s potential with the momentum of a Manifesting Generator coded in it from its inception on April 1, 2021.
I learned from Robin Winn’s book, Understanding the Profiles in Human Design, that with a 6/3 profile I am here on Earth to be a role model for others through trial and error. In other words, I’m supposed to make a lot of mistakes, hopefully grow wiser from them, and pass that wisdom onto others, which I’ve tried to do with Piko. My sacral authority means I’m supposed to make decisions based on gut instinct, which could be another reason why I rush things at times. I’m proud that I’ve followed the guidance of Piko’s emotional authority and slowed down the publication process so that the book takes the required time it needs to come into fullness.
Here’s what I learned from Robin Winn about the 4/6 profile:
The 4/6 has the interesting mix of being the only profile with both lines in the upper transpersonal trigram yet at the same time, they have a personal destiny. In other words, they interact with life in relation to their own personal process.
It’s unusual to think of a book having a personal process, right? However, I feel the truth of this. Piko has its own process, an in honoring that, I gain its trust and intimacy between us develops.
Things got even more interesting when I read more in Winn’s book about the 4/6 and discovered that people or creations with this profile are “not necessarily here to be impacted by people but are waiting to impact people.” She goes on to note, “The remarkable 4/6 Profile has the possibility to be a role model and leader that impacts a large network of people by living true themselves. Friendly and generous, their wisdom opens vistas and alters people’s thinking.”
What are you waiting for, Piko? I’m sorry it’s taken me two years to as you that. Please communicate with me in a way I can understand what you need in order to be the impact you are destined for. If we aren’t ready for you, I’ll accept that, but please reconsider. Maybe the whole world isn’t ready for you, but some of us are here and we want to learn from you. Show us how your personal life is affecting our transpersonal destiny. I realize it must be hard living like that. If that’s a burden, let me share the weight. Let’s disperse it by letting some of it trickle like a spring, or even a leaky faucet, to a parched desert or mouth or soul, that really needs it. Whatever you decide, I’m here for you—no matter what.
On that note, please share, quote, or re-stack this post if you’d like to help me gain visibility, and of course I’d appreciate your financial support through a paid subscription, which costs less a month than Netflix. Horrid comparison, but sometimes you just have to put things in perspective.
Enjoy this excerpt from Piko. If you’re interested in the ideas explored here there’s a book recommendation at the bottom of this post that inspired my writing about the wild twin and a link to Robin Winn’s book where you can begin exploring Human Design if you’re not familiar with it. Thank you for being here. Thank you for seeing me. May we all be blessed by the running water of sweet words.
Chapter 9: The Wilderness Years
In 2007, after ten years of year-round living on Block Island, I boarded a plane and landed in Lima, Peru. This may not sound like that big of a deal to people who get around. Before I barely left Block Island for ten years, I was one of those people. At eighteen, the summer after I graduated from high school, I flew to London on a one-way ticket, ended up as an au pair in Paris for nine months, hitchhiked from Barcelona to Brindisi, and spent a truly bacchanalian month in the Greek isles before AIDS when everybody was on the pill. I returned to the United States and went to college in Washington, DC, where I lived into the early 90s, striding drunken miles home across the city through the “bad” neighborhoods.
I probably should have been afraid. DC was the murder capital of the US in those days, but I wasn’t. I remember watching my shadow stride down the sidewalk, backlit by streetlights, and thinking nobody is going to fuck with me. A guy even told me that once. “If I was going to jump someone on the street it wouldn’t be you,” he said. Back then, I took things like this as a compliment.
In reality, I was just lucky. I made it unscathed despite making many foolish and horrendous choices. I may have looked confident, but inside me was a jungle orchid dropped in a desert with no idea how it had arrived in a place without water. Driven to flower by the green pulse within me I begged for water to stay alive and took whatever drops the sky deigned to grant me. My middle initial “D” didn’t stand for Denise, but for depression, so familiar it was part of my name.
I was so unable to conceive a future I didn’t even know I was missing one. My days consisted of working in a bookstore and getting drunk with my friends at night. I dreamed o the next party where I’d meet the dream lover who would adore me forever and then I’d get a book deal and live happily ever after. No wonder I was depressed.
And then a small box turtle poked its head out of a pond ringed by cattails on an island 13 miles out to sea. The turtle looked up at the low-lying clouds, heavy with rain, and blinked. The blink happened at turtle speed, what we’d call slow motion. It drew its lids down over its eyes, paused and rested for a moment in darkness, and then lifted them just as slowly. There was no rush, no eagerness, no expectation. Nothing looked different—the clouds were still there, low-lying and ready to release their life-giving rain, but the whole sky was different. Though I didn’t know it, that turtle was my anchor—a piece of my soul outside my skin’s limits—and it was calling me.
I didn’t hear it. I was much too hungover. But my Dad came to my rescue, driving down from Connecticut to DC and swooping me and my cat Bea up and transporting us to that island where the turtle had blinked, where my family had owned a summer cottage near that cattail ringed pond, and where my mother once led my brother and me down to its edge to release a box turtle that had wandered out of the water and onto our lawn.
Shaking off the city off like a tranquilized and tagged fox, I landed on Block Island full of bravado and slipped into the summer worker scene serving tourists drinks and coffee. I was hot, smart, and a poet. I could party. Most people liked me. There were ghosts following me, but I managed to push them away. Sometimes I even ran from them, jogging home from the bars intoxicated by the aroma of blackberry blossoms and beach roses rising up out of the marsh below me while the moon smiled down on me, licking his lips at the coming feast. The moon isn’t just a harsh mistress, he’s also a husband, one you don’t usually know you’ve married until you are called to find your own light.
Back and forth was my motion for the next few years—six months of Block Island, six months wherever someone would let me crash on their couch—the Big Island, Colorado, New Mexico, New Orleans, Vermont. The winter I turned 30, on impulse I decided to stay put. On impulse I mean my bags were actually packed and I told my ride to the ferry I wasn’t going. I had been planning to move in with a friend in Providence, which means guided by God. Instead, Providence told me to stay on Block Island.
I needed to let winter have its way with me. On a 9.75 square mile-thirteen miles out to sea island with a population of 900, an island cruise—an entire loop around the island—took 15 minutes. Everyone knew everyone and if they didn’t they thought they did, and felt free to make up a story about your life for their own entertainment. Some of my friends chafed at the lack of anonymity, but I never minded. I felt safe on Block Island. Year after year I walked, rode my bike, partied in the summer, wrote in the winter, fell in and out of love, visited friends and relatives in the graveyard, and made friends I will have to my dying day. I thought I would never leave.
The first few winters were brutal. I lived alone in the attic apartment of an old inn closed for the season. The inn owners were my employers, I worked for them running the inn in the busy season, but they were more like fairy godparents, putting up with all sorts of shenanigans from us chambermaids. In summer, I lived out back in a barn that was considered prime housing on Block Island where most of us workers got booted from our winter housing in actual homes to dwell in shacks, boats, basements and barns so our winter quarters could be rented out for thousands a week. In winter, walking past the empty rooms to get to my door, the ghosts of a hundred years of guests watched me. Most days my only social interaction was walking downhill to the post office at 4:30 in the dark to ask for my mail at the counter. When I got a PO Box I didn’t even have this small pleasure. There was one bar. One grocery store. The library, the only indoor refuge. The winter it closed they moved some books into the produce bin at the grocery store. This was before the internet, before Amazon could drop off anything you wanted at your doorstep. Browsing those produce bins for something to read was a ritual that kept me from completely disintegrating, the books themselves kept me stitched together enough to survive the depression by weaving me into someone else’s dreams.
I want to say it was unbearable, but it wasn’t. I survived. My body kept on living without me doing a thing besides feeding and watering, even though I kept doing my best to abandon it by getting stupid drunk and continuing with my reckless ways.
One late October afternoon, heading toward the West Side, driving too fast past the graveyard, something burst in my brain, an aneurysm of pain. The thought I just want this to be over pulsed so bright, for a moment, it took away my vision. Driving blind, I sent a wordless prayer out to the nothing I believed in. Take me away from here. Relieve me of this body.
Someone heard me. We had been moving toward each other before we were born. In the dark, the place where we go to forget the light, we had once known each other. In the dark, the place of re-membering, we curled around each other like twins in a womb, unaware we’d ever be parted. We slid from the dark when it was time, spiraled back into the light that blinded, forgot each other.
Is that why life was so painful? We’d lost track of each other? My wild twin, my soul’s mate who had shared that primal darkness with me. My Jeep was shooting down the road now, wheels spinning so fast there was no way I could stop—collision was the only way. Please, get me out of here. I just want this to be over.
Out of the dusk, not quite night or day, a deer leaped in front of my Jeep Cherokee and surged uphill into the graveyard. I missed it by a hair’s width through no action of my own. I hadn’t even had time to shift my foot to the brake. In the rearview mirror I saw its twin—another deer followed her sister up into the graves. If I had struck them, we might have all died, but they passed around me like a river. My hands were still on the wheel.
You might think I just got lucky, but when I pulled into my driveway with my hands still shaking on the steering wheel, I knew it wasn’t luck, but grace that lifted my Jeep in its waters for a few seconds, spun me around and set me back down on Earth with the memory I would track down for the next seven years. I had two wild sisters. Some might think I had saved them by not hitting them, some might think they had saved me, but nobody saved anyone. We remembered each other, how three of us were one in the dark without longing for the light, enveloped in a great heartbeat. I began the long, slow climb out of the Underworld on my human feet.
I wish I could give you a clear timeline of the journey, but it didn’t happen that way. I walked alone in virgin snow after storms that shook the house until I found the trees where the cardinals hid from the wind. I followed deer tracks down dune paths that stopped at the edge of the ocean and swam in all seasons, even winter when the shock of cold rattled my bones against each other loud enough for me to realize they were still holding me up. Year after year, from the maple kitchen table where I wrote, I watched a harrier return to hunt by day in the thicket. It took me a couple of years to realize it was the same harrier. Without making a conscious vow, I realized I was in a committed relationship. I undertook a serious study of the craft of poetry-where to break the line, how to open a heart.
Eleven winters in, the snowy owl I’d been hoping to see for years showed up on my doorstep. Facing the field in front of the house, its neck pivoted completely around on the axis of its white-feathered body. Yellow eyes bored through my pretenses and excuses. Claim your life, they seemed to say. When it turned its head to face away from me, I knew I was free. Block Island, known by its original inhabitants as Manisses, Island of the Little God, had released me.
Am I still in the same story? That’s the first thing I think when I come out of my reverie. Yes, I am still here, inside the park gates just on the other side of the Great Wall in the Pu’uhonuanua o Honaunau, the Place of Refuge. Big Papa and Crabby are here, though I can’t see them. The birds—ulili and auku’u—are here. One stalking the shadows, another showing me I’m right on course dashing through the air on a sweet cry that expresses the pure love of flying, even though it knows one day the ground will claim its feathers. The stones here are black and sharp, closer to fire than the smooth quartz pebbles of home that crack and explode in the fire. I know this from times building a sweat lodge on Block Island, where it was a challenge to find stones that could sustain the heat without shattering. The heat used to terrify me. The darkness even more. Now I have come to this place where the land is much closer to fire. It lets me sit upon it without being burned, though sometimes when I’m not careful it trips me up and I end up with a gash on my leg I need. I’ve seen a lot of stupid haoles with staph infections. Antibiotics can’t cure everything anymore. We are in times whose rules we don’t know yet. It’s time to begin asking questions that acknowledge we are in unknown territory, instead of puffing out our chests and pretending we have an answer to everything, which gives us the right to take what we want.
Imagine if every potential colonizer asked, Water, what do you want? Little fish and crabs and The Queen of the Pond, you silver goddess, what do you want? What would our planet look like if every person who’d ever left their home with the intent to conquer, possess or impose their beliefs on another place asked these questions, listened, and respected these non-human voices?
There is no time for subservience. Leave off asking for forgiveness for being an ignorant and sloppy human and get on with it. The water is waiting. The ancestors who crossed oceans in thin-hulled ships that could have been punctured at any moment, who respected fire because it could burn the ship down and who watched candles respond to their anxious breathing—would they make it across—they made it. We are the results. I am the result. I have crossed over. I have wings. I can fly. I have a boat. I can carry two:my love and I. I am my love. I look around and know the water is listening to my heartbeat wondering when I will finally sing. There is no one else in the boat with me, but I’m not alone. I speak.
Courting the Wild Twin, Martin Shaw, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020.
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
You are a beautiful steward of story! Thank You for sharing the woven wisdom of your journey and the guiding kinship of nature.