Living the Long Way

Once upon a time I was born at 22:22. It was a Thursday. I was born blue, wearing a corded collar. I’ve always wondered if, even then, I was closer friends with death than life. 

My Life’s Work Gene Key is 49. The Siddhi of Rebirth, so it makes sense. Even at the beginning, I broke into the world with a Phoenix energy. Ashes to blood to ashes again. 

I was raised inside many stories. Some orderly. Some fractured. Some quiet with beauty. Some loud with fear. I learned to read rooms before I could read books. I learned how to listen for what wasn’t being said. I learned how to stay silent while screaming.

There were years when I mistook endurance for devotion, when I believed that love meant holding on no matter the cost. There were years when leaving felt more dangerous than disappearing inside myself. I became skilled at adaptation. At making something workable out of what was given. At walking forward even when the map had been burned.

There were initiations I did not choose. Losses that rearranged my understanding of time. Moments when the future I thought I was walking toward quietly closed its door.And despite trees falling on me, ICU visits, shootings, losing my music, and the pain of an unhealed, unconscious childhood, I always found my way back to the unmapped wild,
to color and pen on a page.

When I lost my soul, my friend, my Kaspian, in 2017, I felt his heart stop beneath my fingers, hearing the roar of an ocean with no shore. And while time has eased the sound, I know I will always hear the waves of us crashing. The sting of salt in a wound I will always tend.

Creativity still found me there, in the darkest places of all.

Words arrived when I had nowhere else to place what I felt. Color came when language failed. The Earth offered herself as teacher long before I knew how to ask. Animals, trees, seasons, weather. None of them required explanation. None of them asked me to be other than what I was. Broken, a slow drip of an invisible bleed 

In every seasons, I have learned that clarity is not always kind, but integrity is. I learned that grief is not a steps to solve, but a portal to walk through. And I learned that meaning rarely announces itself head-on.

It arrives sideways.

Through the body. Through dreams. Through sudden knowing that has no proof attached. Through the quiet insistence that something authentic is waiting,
even if it costs you what you thought you wanted.

The long way around living & dying has taught me how to trust slow over swift.
Silence over speech.

It taught me that not all wisdom is loud, and not all leadership is visible. That some of the most important work happens far from recognition.
That the inner compass does not shout. It harmonizes to the heartbeat.

My stories don't have neat answers with bows tied on them.
But they are gifts, nonetheless.

They have given me presence. Attention. A capacity to listen without needing to fix. A devotion to the intelligence that lives beneath performance. A belief that the Earth remembers us even when we forget ourselves.

The rebirth of my life, over and over, is not about becoming something new.

It is about returning. Returning to the first breath,
blue and uncertain, creative and complete only upon our final exhale.

Returning to the body. To instinct. To creative pulse. To the quiet truth that was never lost, only buried beneath noise and expectation. It is about making space for the untamed, the unfinished, the unresolved. About allowing life to be lived rather than caged and coddled.

If you are here, reading this, it tells me something about you.

It tells me you have walked your own long way around. That you know something about thresholds. That you are not interested in shortcuts that cost you your soul. That you are listening for what is real, even if it asks you to change everything you thought you once new.

Because, dear wild one, we may be bloody, broken open,
lingering beneath the stars in the dark night. 

But we are still here. 

Learning to use our wings and reclaim the claws of our creation. 
And we walk the long way around beside our stories of sorrow and sweetness,
because in the silence between all sound
we can hear the pearl within us whisper: 

Thank you for my perfect life.

xx, Claire