For Shannon. 

There is so much separation within the pieces but it’s the spaces between the lines that create the whole picture, the whole feeling, the whole truth. I have a way of picking it all apart, a talent at only looking at the imperfection coupled with master hallucination skills to back up whatever pain the separation I’m creating is bringing up. 

I am a ray of light unsplintered, concise in my truth, in my space, in my frequency. Bright as the sun. Broken as the cut-up pink chemtrails. The only thing that the imperfections I think I see really are the deepest parts of my spirit that I came back to this planet for another life cycle to mend. I always forget that part. Every time.   

I am a ray of light so perfect, whole, and complete that the power of my brightness provides the illusion of my body, my face, my shoelaces, a commercial, a magazine, my car, this planet. That is the magnitude of what I really am. I reincarnate over and over and over again to work through the unhealed illusions I have become attached to that life on Earth brings. I accept my challenges (or I don’t, I project them outward and play the victim until I die, then I have to come back all over again and try it over,) work through them, re-meet the ones I love, the ones I learn from and carry on. I am not a body. I am a spirit in a body. That is a daily battle because the unhealed parts of my mind come up and tell me that my body is my worth, my physical reflection is all that matters, and that all I really am is everyone else's favorable opinion of me in a photo. Like if they all think I look better than I feel I’ll automatically feel better. I’ll be better.  

I could hear from another person all day and for the rest of my life how beautiful and perfect they think I am on the outside but that is something I have learned, that I have to do the work to know and feel for myself. Without the work and the growth, it doesn’t exist for me.  I have to write steps because I have a disease of self-centeredness and isolation where I am desperate to separate myself from myself. I have to have friends that are women that I can call up and freak out on so it isn’t all on my partner. I have to do Bikram yoga because when I can see my body in the mirror I realize that the things my mind tells me about it aren’t true. 

I am my higher self. My higher self is me. We both live in the same mirror - this mirror - despite the chaos that can surround us. There is no room for illusion here, only the grace of illumination, the intricacies of the broken being an important part of the whole, and the magic of stumbling on a place like The Madonna Inn. I created it all. And so did we. That it is such an honor to have you as one of my brightest sisters. Someone who I am grateful to look at and know that I AM her too. We are I. You are Me. 

I love you forever. The illumination and life you bring to my work is second to nothing I have ever experienced. Thank you for inspiring I AM and teaching so much about love for myself, the beauty I see in myself - through the understanding of my love I have for you, the beauty I see in you. Doesn’t matter how cracked the mirror is or how many times we haven’t seen what we really are in the past. In the light, we are of the light, together, always.