On Living an Undefended Life

I’ve been forced into living an undefended life in the past five months. In the midst of repeated visions for twice as many months of my life being in danger, long enough that I’ve come to call all that noise ‘crying wolf’, I was forced into dropping every avenue I’d created for safety.

Let me preface all that’s coming with this: I’ve not felt my life was in danger since April 2024. I knew it was then for any number of reasons that culminated in a federal law enforcement encounter where what I and others ‘just knew’ was confirmed. And by then, I was happy to make myself a target just to be done with years of the same kind of messaging. But For reasons I may never know, the targeted did not meet the targeter.

And I’ve loooooong known that I’d never know safety in the way that others generally do and take for granted. There’s a much longer story about that but it’s one of the reasons I’m perfectly comfortable walking into the fire than running in it’s opposite direction. It used to make my then-husband and dispatch question my sanity back in the day.

And, it feels important to add, that when all this began for me back in 2007-ish, I trusted. I don’t know what it was that I trusted and, hell, it may not have actually been trust. I may have just given myself over to whateveritwas because there was no other way to be, there was nothing within me that could say no, that could consider ‘no’. I hollered I can’t more than once but there was no way to say I won’t.

I’ve written chapters on what it was like to know—flying in the face of all reason, in the face fear of other people’s judgment, repeated abandonment—to JUST KNOW that I couldn’t NOT participate in what was unfolding in my world, unfolding through me. For the most part, I didn’t even try to counter it. I cried, I cursed, I screamed, I begged, I prayed but I kept on because I couldn’t not.

Since I first heard, very clearly, “Wait for God” in November 2023, I’ve been trying to do ‘all the things’ in the ‘right way’, in the practical-lived world and in the speerachul world. Ultimately I gave up the healing work, despite it being my hearts call and the only real connection to love I’ve ever known. I ended up, for a time (a season as someone else called it), walking away from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s work. I put my head down to keep a paycheck coming and pushed my body repeatedly past the breaking point to ‘make it work’ because I could see no other way to pay rent and keep myself in toilet paper and medicine.

I finally broke myself again on Memorial Day weekend or came close enough to it that I knew I wouldn’t recover if I went any further doing something the ‘right way’. I’d lost a handful of hair on Friday and by Monday I knew I wasn’t willing to do that again. Y’all,

I’d been working since I was 12 and never-ever quit without notice until I quit without notice that day. I did so kindly, but no notice or reason given. There was no guilt, no shame, and, in the moment, no fear. I didn’t even consider how it’d all work out. I JUST KNEW that I wasn’t willing to lose another handful of hair, be ignored or taken for granted like that again.

And then. Holyshit, it hit. HOW the actual fuck was this going to work? No one’s buying paintings, no one wants the healing work (despite Jesus’ admonition in February that “This is your job”), no Feds are going to pay me for doing the other work…and THAT right there was how I’d created a sense of safety, the only one that I knew: a steady income from a J.O.B. There was nothing dramatic about it, nothing not-normal, everyone else is doing the thing and the literal rules said I have to do the thing. And then all-the-sudden I’m not doing the thing.

And every single time I tried to ‘fix it’ by looking for a new job, or creating a way to ‘play by the rules’ of the housing-game here, everything within and around me JUST KNEW to not do it. Fuck…I’d try and then watch internal energies respond with ‘you still haven’t learned have you?”

One of the things I do on occasion is go back through my old notebooks and a few days ago I read a message I’d received back in 2022, “Learn to live a life undefended”. Pretty sure the messenger then was Lucille Clifton but I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t even know what she meant when she said, “just live life, Ingrid”—like wasn’t I doing that— so complicating it with ‘undefended’ was, well, complicated. ESPECIALLY when I was living in a place where the repeated messaging heard even by the person i was living with was, “do not say your name” with the implication that a particular neighbor knowing my name created physical danger. Super. Sure. Just live but undefended when defense was the name of the game.

So at the beginning of this June, I was forced into the ‘life undefended’ and pushed, and pulled, and dragged, and commanded into a kind of compliance with God because there was only one way to step into the space where only love lives.

Someone wiser than me kindly informed me that ‘love and fear cannot exist’ in the same place and followed with, “Here’s how I can help” because he believes, can feel even beyond my own sense of purpose and definitions, the truth of me even if neither of us can fully explain it.

Trust, trust, trust is repeated as much as create, create, create. And everytime I try to create a sense of surety, the guarantee of known-future, that something, somewhere, someHOW has got me, I’m told, “Don’t try to manipulate me. Do not limit me. You cannot imagine how this unfolds. Don’t force. Allow, allow, allow. Let resources come to you. Don’t push”. A universal Stop sign is thrown up when I suggest options for God, because I’m kinda handy like that: How about a fundraiser? What if I just get a part-time thing? What if I advertise paintings? What if? What if this? What if that? And, then, because I’m me, “Why not?”

One of the admonitions, as a way to break a poverty-induced and make-it-all-work behavioral system, is to “stop doing the math”: stop subtracting from what’s available to make sure there’s always enough. At some point, all of us have done it. It’s been a years-long habit for me. I’ve Got X, if I spend Y, Z is what’s left, a personal kind of algebra. “Trust in what you can’t see” said six different ways to Sunday for months, since last February.

And Then, yesterday showed up. After a nearly 7 mile hike, I had a limited amount of money available and what was in my head was the math and the need to make sure that today was covered. “Do not think of tomorrow. Tomorrow’s not your business” I mean, what? Then He added, “Pleasure. Get what brings pleasure.” I’m sorry but I’m about out of toilet paper. Insert universal eye-roll. “BUt I at least need a bag of salad for tomorrow” No eyeball but clear direction: “Focus on pleasure for today. Right now, right here”.

But….like what?

So the short version ends with me getting a Marie Calendar Key Lime pie that actually brings pleasure for a couple of days. I look at the last roll of toilet paper and raise the right eyebrow in a silent, “So how’s this going to work?” And I’m reminded that that’s not my concern. I’ve got bigger concerns that are not to be hemmed in by creating any sense of surety, or any idea of safety that I think I need.

Trusting is a wild ride. Giving oneself over, leaving any feasible, imaginable idea of self and need and desire is a daily, sometimes minute by minute, breath by shaky breath, process. There’s a reason that I cannot see, even when I go back through the words, The Word undistilled by my arguing, and demands for partnership and pleas for dignity and humorous yet humorless, “I’m not the boss of me”

And so I’m called to lose my mind, allow myself to be subsumed, open my mouth or let my fingertips fly and speak the unspeakable outside the 99 ways folks are comfortable with the god-thing.

Lately, the direction has been to tell the personal story, tell the unfolding beyond the ‘normal’ ideas of the spiritual and the limitations we give—bless our little hearts—to creation’s and God’s expression. To not seek perfect, to not remain silent, to not defend myself in any fashion.

I’d never really considered it in that way. I’ve had fleeting glimpses of ‘why bother’ but never thought of the choice not to share all of this as a defensive move—at least recently.

I used to have gobs of videos up but after I posted about being attacked by MMIW perpetrators in 2021, I started getting ‘you know they eat the babies for their spiritual powers’ type messaging and didn’t want that kind of energy into my spaces. So, in my baby-out-with the bathwater fashion, I took it all down and gave it all up.

Being pushed back into this kind of sharing, though, feels oddly right even as I am consciously aware of the noise and how the lack of engagement fuels loneliness. Life is just weird, I guess, because here we are.

Undefended, knowing there’s no opposite within me to counter love beyond that which we create. That I created. And, it was only ONLY as I typed that last sentence that I can see the global personally and bring what I’m brought to teach others into my own way of being. oh…

This is wild, y’all. And life is weird. And, yet, here we are. Pie on the counter, Last roll of toilet paper and something that looks like trust and not thinking about what tomorrow is going to look like. Two nights ago in dreamtime, Our Lady of Guadalupe, reminded me that “Someone else has the ice cream covered. The peace, though, is Free to have.” So I watch as the room for peace and curiosity and faith and expands to hold only the love.

And in that is less room for not saying no and more for ‘yes, let’s’.

Peace in, kids.