This video provides some summary and excerpts of the article below. It stands on its own and the article can be read without watching it.

I am sharing these things in the event that they may help you, where you are, on your path. I want to support you in creating possbility for yourself, by sharing what is possible and what can change for you to continue to move toward your purpose.

5 years ago, I left a job. It was, as often choices go, much more than just that particular choice. I had some inklings of where I was going, but mostly all I knew was: not this.

My illusion was broken: that there were structures in place to protect what I held dear. Structures in which, if I followed the rules, I’d be taken care of, and so would those that I loved.

I didn’t understand it all fully at the time, but I knew, it was time. Not this, not this anymore.

I reflect on this choice today, and it was the right one: I feel glad about it. I’ve left over half a million dollars “on the table” of easy, reliable income. It could be in my bank account right now, if I had shoved down my feelings and sat in a chair. To leave such seeming security and stability was, and is, a huge folly to many in modern culture, including my own recent ancestors and my parents. If you’ve known anyone who has worked for the United States government as an employee, you’d know that you’ve got to do something very, very wrong to get fired. Sitting in a chair and doing very little is not grounds for firing. Sit there long enough, and you might get promoted (see the movie, Office Space: it is not hyperbole in some offices).

You see, I did not know what I was getting into 5 years ago. Now, I am digging deeper, having scratched the surface by leaving any type of recognizable path that my parents (and I) could recognize. My Grandmother also appeared confused, disapproving, and occasionally happy about what I was doing. Confused, though the early iterations of my new brambly path looked much like her early life: planting and harvesting, cooking over fire, sharpening tools, working animal hides, living with the weather. 70+ years in a new land makes a huge difference when one’s culture is gone, left behind and scattered throughout the world. The memories are there, the feelings are there…the sense making, though. That part is perhaps gone. So little of life makes sense when you live in the absence of culture.

In the past couple of years, my path has been one of emotional reckoning and healing, and of deep questions. Few of my family and friends seem to really know what I’m doing. I feel sad about that, and not surprised. Clinton Callahan once said (paraphrasing), “In most of your conversations, people should not understand you.” I’ve come to know that this is not because I am trying to be elusive or because I speak a different language. It is because I have experienced things that others have not, and the words that I use have taken on new meaning. Certain things can only be understood through taking them on in all of one’s bodies (could we, in actuality, have physical, emotional, energetic, and intellectual bodies?). Words and explanations only go so deep. Experience is necessary.

The deeper questions:

What is a human life for at this time on earth? What is MY human life for?

Questions that have no static answers, questions that cannot be answered by Google, your teacher, your mentor, your priest, your therapist, your parents. These answers and their follow up questions are only found within.

And yet, what I know now, as I knew then, is that we can’t go our path alone. If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together. In the rugged individualism of modern United States culture, I live often with the illusion that I can go alone and thrive. I can publish this article without anyone’s approval, and, yet, this article has come to be by the influence of thousands of beings, and more. How did I learn to write, use a computer, navigate my feelings and emotions, numb my feelings and emotions, think, eat, drink, walk, talk? From where did the elements come that make up my bones?

The non-human world has been a huge spaceholder for my healing. Thank you. All of you. You have demanded nothing immediate in return and are there, always. Humans have also held enormous space for me. Thank you, all of you.

5 years ago, I had a vague notion of community. Get on some land with some people as the shit continues to hit the fan, and live life self-sufficiently. I did not yet have an embodied sense of trauma and the way that individual and group patterns sabotage our abilities to truly live together. I did not know that I had any “capital T” big trauma (or that comparing trauma between people is not useful). I appeared an excellent societal specimen from all of my university degrees and my bank accounts, and yet the disembodiment that I continue to reckon with had kept hidden the degree to which my very humanness is underdeveloped.

In my mind then, I had a pretty good, easeful life because my parents always provided financially for me, and they were generally “there for me.” But, having done no “healing work,” or really having any sense of what that was as they raised me, they could not support me emotionally and help me to become a human being. Generally, they did not allow me to feel and understand that it is normal to feel, or that I had come to this Earth for a particular purpose that was beyond a job category. Think with your head, make decisions that way. My parents helped me to survive, and I am grateful for that. I do not blame them. My parents parents did not/could not support them in the way that they needed. This is what generational trauma / ancestral trauma is. It is not vague and nebulous, it is real, and you know it when you’ve felt it. It cannot be grasped only by the mind. Things are changing now that I know more of my (hi)story, of why I am how I am (or was), and I assign no blame to anyone. My life is my responsibility.

This writing has meandered and I did not know where it would go. When I let the words flow, connections are made in the letters and lines and paragraphs. At 5 years since I left the job, I am starting something that many people would recognize as a job. I’ll be at ZigZag ALC in Asheville, North Carolina in a few days. ZigZag is a place where kids have significantly more autonomy over what they do than I experienced when I was a kid in any school-like setting. I am one of the spaceholders for that very thing to happen - I am a part of making the space of possibility for them. I go there not to heal my own wounds, but to hold space knowing about the influence that adults living in the absence of an understanding of their obliterated culture have on young people.

What is a spaceholder? This word shows up with a red underline in Google Docs, meaning that it is not in the dictionary. Many people are confused when I use the word. A spaceholder is a “new” concept, at least as far as dictionaries are concerned. A spaceholder stays with another Being or group while they go through their process. They do not judge, they do not force, they do not make moral judgements, they do not say what is right and wrong. They do use their feelings to navigate space, so that they do not hurt themselves or anyone else, and help the other Beings to do the same. They have some sense of what is in front and/or behind, and so can serve as guides.

This is what I seek to do for myself and others: to hold space. Things like meditation and nature connection and yoga and listening and music and art and writing and dancing help one to hold space. Learning how to feel allows one to hold space. If it is not ok to feel angry, sad, glad, or scared, then one cannot hold space. Thus, I live in an oversociety largely absent of spaceholders. The space is held by blaming the boss, blaming the government, blaming your spouse, blaming your parents, blaming the teacher, blaming the “bad” people, blaming the internet, blaming, even, the system.

At the end of the day, there is no one to blame. This is Low Drama, and it is not life. Living is not being a victim, rescuer, or persecutor. Living is taking responsibility for one’s life and living it. Living is creating situations where there are not winners and losers, where winning is happening all around. Easier said than done; I’m working on it.

In my family and in my small town in New Jersey, people tend(ed) to talk quickly and loudly, make jokes, interrupt each other. My Grandma once said that it is “what Italians do.” I have a suspicion that the shadow and unconscious purpose of these actions are to not allow space, to not hold space, to avoid responsibility for what one is feeling and doing in one’s life.

I write all of this to myself, and to you. To reflect on a small piece of what is present in me now, 5 years after taking a sharp, angular turn from a path that I was not actually choosing, that I discovered as I slowly woke up.

5 years later, I’ve lived in many houses and different stretches of land with many different people, been across this continent and to another, and, just as importantly, discovered new continents in myself and in relationship with others. Relationships have ended and began; many have changed.

My relationship with myself and the parts of myself have changed, and continue to change. I was at Florida Earthskills gathering last week. I took a place in spaces called “Writing Down the Bones,” and “Tracking the Self Through Art.” I started acupuncture this week, and will start somatic therapy next week. The layers continue to unfold and I’ll continue to share here.

Here is a song I am covering - "The Ground Don't Want Me" by Josh Ritter. It is imperfect, like this article. It marks where I'm at with my guitar playing and my singing voice together. I have a voice, it is unique and it says things a certain way, just as my psyche expresses, interprets, and holds space in a certain way. We people are unique and one, at once. The great paradox of human life is that when we know ourselves, we know everyone, and yet every person is more or less unknowable. This is what I’ve learned. My understanding and categorization is just a placeholder for the fear that I feel when I realize that what I thought I knew is not true. It is just what I thought was true. Sometimes it’s useful, sometimes it’s not.

Until next time,

Matthew

PS: check out the “other beings and their creations” section of my website. This is what I used to post on Facebook about: finding and working with guides in my life and want other people to know about.

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