THE WISE ONE SPEAKS

Messages from the Inner Wise One

Throughout my life, a voice has sometimes risen beneath my own. She comes after loss, after silence, when all my explanations have worn themselves out and I am finally still enough to hear.

She does not tell me what to believe. She returns me to what I already know.

For years, I kept many of these messages close. I am ready to begin sharing them now.

I call this body of work The Wise One Speaks.

Come sit.

I do not know exactly who she is.

Over the years, she has come to me by many names: the Great Mother, Gaia, Shakti Mama, the Divine Mother. At other times, she feels less like a presence outside of me and more like my deepest self, my oldest self, the part of consciousness that remembers what the rest of us sometimes forget.

None of those names are wrong. And none of them are large enough.

I know her by the way she enters.

She usually comes after analysis and processing have exhausted themselves, when explanation has reached its limit, the mind has spent all its cleverness…and the body is spent. What remains is a knowing inside…like a burning bright truth that feels weightless.

Her messages come while I am dancing, praying, doing the dishes, or waking at five in the morning with words already moving through me. I catch them on paper or speak them into my phone before they disappear. Sometimes she comes as a single sentence. Sometimes the whole message arrives at once. And sometimes she speaks in questions, because the answer must rise from within the one listening.

She is not gentle or sentimental. She does not flatter my ego or rush to soothe me out of an unbearable reality. She meets me there. She does not divide the world into innocent people and monsters so I can remain untouched by my own participation. She asks me to see what is true, gather compassion for myself, and stop abandoning my own soul in the name of love, loyalty, appearance, or peace. She has no interest in spiritual performance. She is not impressed by how much pain a woman can carry, or by who has the most devastating story.

She is interested in life.

Life with dirt beneath its fingernails. Life that includes birth and rot, longing and rage, devotion and departure, the blossom and the grave. Her allegiance is to the life force…that keeps moving, rooting, shedding, and becoming whatever comes next.

If you have read my work for any length of time, you have already felt her. She is the quiet invitation beneath the words, the presence that turns story toward revelation and calls us back to tend our own souls.

I have resisted giving her a permanent face because she does not come in only one form. Sometimes she is an owl, watchful and unafraid of darkness. Sometimes she is water, or the red earth pressing between my toes. Sometimes she is so vast that calling her a woman feels both true and incomplete.

The first time I knew her unmistakably, I was in the first room I rented after leaving my husband. I had done the thing I once believed I could never do, but freedom did not feel like freedom yet. One night, I fell to my knees in that room and cried for hours, alone and afraid, until I was empty. I had spent years trying to hold together more than one woman could hold, swallowing truths before I knew how to speak them and confusing endurance with devotion. The old life was behind me, but I had no idea who I was without it.

And then I saw her.

She was in the mud, and she was the mud. Enormous and brown, ancient and soft, she appeared as the Earth and as a grandmother at once. The soil was her flesh. The curves of the land were the curves of her great mothering body. I could not tell where she ended and the Earth began.

I looked into her eyes and asked, How do you keep loving after so much pain over the years?

She threw her head back and laughed. She had very few teeth, and the sound came up from somewhere deep, like the ground itself was laughing through her. It was not cruel laughter. It was the laughter of someone who had seen everything and was not afraid of what I had brought to her.

What do you mean, how do I keep loving? she said. Look at me. I am the Earth.

Then she showed me. The cutting, the taking, the poisoning, all the ways we wound the Earth and still expect her to hold us. She did not soften any of it. But then she showed me the water still moving, seeds breaking open beneath the soil, flowers returning after winter.

Do I not still hold you? she asked. Do I not feed you? Do I not send flowers? Do I not make another spring?

Then she gathered me into her lap and rocked me. She held me not as a grown woman whose life had fallen apart, but as one of her children who had finally stopped pretending she did not need to be held.

She was not telling me to stay where I was being harmed. Her lesson was not, Keep taking it. The Earth does not love that way. She has winters, cliffs, storms, deserts, fires, fault lines. She pulls life down into the roots when the season demands it. She lets leaves fall. She allows what is dead to become soil.

She does not keep every form alive simply because it once belonged to her.

What she showed me was that love can change its shape without ceasing to be love.

✦🌀✦ 🌀 ✦🌀✦

I carried that encounter with me for years. Her voice found its way into my essays, meditations, sermons, and teachings, while many of the messages remained private. In January 2019, during that first season of leaving and learning to trust what I could finally see, this message came through.

I thought it was only for me then. I know better now.

Perhaps there is something in your own life you are only beginning to see clearly. Something you could not name before, not because you were foolish or weak, but because you were not yet ready to hold the whole truth and remain standing. Perhaps you have spent years protecting the dream, protecting the family, protecting everyone’s face but your own. Perhaps the life you have outgrown is beginning to press against you from the inside.

I share this message for that moment.

Not to tell you what you should see, but to remind you that you can trust yourself when you do.

Messages from the Inner Wise One…

S̐E̐E̐ A̐G̐A̐I̐N̐.

Things have to change. You are suffocating within the consequences. You’re full to the brim, my dear.

The years of not dealing with things as they came up, of not speaking your truth, of swallowing the lies to save your face, his face, her face, their face.

Without emotion and without judgment, can you plainly see it?

Can you muster up compassion?

For yourself?

Not them, but for you.

Don’t fix them. Fix you.

See again.

See clearer now. See what you couldn’t see before.

It is okay.

You CAN take it.

You can have this clarity and still stand.

You can SEE this now.

Can you not cling to the pain?

Can you expand your idea of love?

You can see things as they really are NOW because you have the strength to hold these things instead of running or freezing NOW.

You did not have the capacity until NOW.

You can ground yourself.

This is real.

You can trust this inner stability.

Let the old dream go.

This is your choice, and this is in your realm of power.

This is your birthright.

Dream your own dream.

Then bring it to life.

See again.

Dream again.

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