© Copyright  manaemedia It's dark and all I see are steps below me. Railings protect me from falling deep into the cold earth. Each step is deliberate. A meditation that takes me deeper into the internal. Each step pulls deeper into the next leaving doubt, fear, and hurt behind me. I pause halfway down to see a small cave to my left. I look into the darkness and see a body barely visible. Sobbing, regret, and pain fill that dark space. There's movement. I walk closer to peer into the black, fighting the darkness to see the person, a man, who is crouched in the space. I see months and years past hidden in there. I feel sick. My stomach is in knots. I'm in a state of anxiousness that is too familiar. My mind is racing with worry. Am I enough? Am I loved? Have I made the right decision? I'm sucked into the pain of that heavy space and although every fiber of my being is screaming to get out, I find myself longing to run and jump into the arms of the soft black spa...

Getting my writing mojo back in the peace of the trees I am reinventing myself again. About a month ago I began to feel a sense of freedom that I haven't felt in a long time. A REAL long time. I had an epiphany. I suddenly realized I was feeding a cycle of hurt that was holding me back. I finally decided to man the fuck up and do something about it. I quit the cycle. It's funny how we like to nurture our pain. But when you constantly feed the pain the wound is always weeping. You will never heal in that state. Salt in the wounds feels so good but sometimes you gotta learn to let it go. Looking Forward I had to make a conscious effort to look beyond the hurt and start making better decisions for myself. It's a very tough decision, but you will never make it to the other side if you never take the leap. The other side can be scary and something completely estranged from what you know, but that's because you haven't jumped. Once you're there, it...

Sometimes when life feels hard I dial back to something more simple. Spent a lot of my childhood snuggled up next to this wood stove. When the cold is unbearable it gives me warmth and hope. I pretty much faded away to nothing. I just disappeared. Stopped writing. Stopped sharing. I guess in a way I stopped living. I was frantically trying to fix my shit. But in actuality, I was in the middle of a maze-like chaos. Like a dying rat bumping into corners looking for the the last bit of food to sustain itself. I took my last breath. Now it's like I'm on the operating table in the O.R. I'm being shocked back into living. I can see the lights above me blurry and intense. I'm beginning to feel the pain from the fractures and broken bones surfacing from the numb. Fuck my heart hurts. I'm bruised, broken, and bleeding. But I'm alive. Barely. So I've experienced a sort of death recently, although, if I'm being truly honest, it felt like I d...