When this way of experiencing the world and the word began unfolding for me in 2009, I didn’t tell anyone what was happening other than my therapist. When I walked into her office after having my first vision, in broad daylight and in my car door window, and said, “Am I going crazy?” she had the foresight to turn the question right back to me: “Ingrid, are you going crazy?” “Well, no! But what in the actual fuck is going on here?”
Who else *could* I tell that I was seeing things they couldn’t, hearing things they wouldn’t and having conversations with God? Even she, the therapist, couldn’t offer any insight when I told her that He’d showed back up in my kitchen, again while I was doing dishes, asking me how I would define myself? I mean, who does that? Who asks a question like, “How will you define yourself?” and then leaves without offering an explanation, or at least to dry?
My response: “What the fuck do you mean?! I’m just Ingrid!,” as my dog wondered who I was hollering at because (this time), he had nothing to do with my ire. What kind of question *was* that? What the hell was wrong with being me? Why did I need another definition? That was about as dumb as Him coming through and announcing without fanfare, through my own mouth, “Before there was, I was.” Really now.
I didn’t know then that in a few months, I’d get fired from a job. I didn’t know then that after becoming jobless, I’d start healing people and animals, curing disease and despair; that it’d take 300 job applications and one botched interview for me to realize that I was looking for a job so that others would not judge me as they judged others.
‘Just Ingrid’ cried a lot in those days. Bitched and cursed a lot, too. Every opportunity for foul language, I let it fly as if sending a verbal middle finger to the confines of ‘being spiritual’. But, in all the turmoil, I trusted fully the moments I had that, by all other accounts, should have been frightening. I trusted everything except how people would judge me, bring me back to not-enough of what they thought I should be. And, silly me, I thought that God’s question was also one that resembled ‘you are not enough as you are’.
When people described seeing Archangel Michael behind me, had visitations of their own Masters, realized their own wings and had deeply spiritual experiences when I was doing nothing more than sitting next to them, there was no need for trust or fear. There was nothing unusual in these experiences to me. Even when they inspired awe, they felt as natural as breath. I feared nothing—except what others would think of me (and asking for help). Would they think I was crazy or just a little weird? Weird enough enough to walk away from or to deny help? I mean, my own father did, so what would others do?
Within all the books and resources that presume to tell us how to ‘be spiritual,’ there were no models or a framework I could contort myself into to make myself or my work make sense to anyone else. As much as I tried to massage what I experienced or the experience of me into the ‘spiritual’ lexicon, I could not. I couldn’t answer, “Who are you *exactly*?” when someone other than God dared ask me. And, even then, what was wrong with ‘just Ingrid’? Just me as you saw me in that moment? Why did my expression of All Things need another name or an explanation? Why wasn’t I enough as I was? The idea became, to me, a symbol of all the things we don’t take at face value; how things aren’t enough for us as they appear. Right in front of us.
Then there was the time someone said, “I don’t think you really know who you are.” What the hell? Of course I do! But still, seriously, what do you mean I don’t know who I am? I know who I am. I mean, I’d been told who I was, had the experiences of becoming who I was, and though I couldn’t see how to bring myself into this world, I knew it, I *knew* who I was.
I was starting to understand why God hisself would ask me how I would define myownself. He didn’t need the definition but everyone else sure did, to make me fit into the box that made most sense. I tried to answer in poetry and prayer and was guided on several occasions to more fully bring myself through in writing. This is one of those occasions. I’ve laid claim to myself, but quietly, because even in the surety of the Knowing and guidance from the Great Conductor, to claim that loudly felt like a death-knell.
I’ve said more times than can be counted, “We don’t know until we know” about life-stuff. And thought I’d lived by that. And I thought I knew me, certainly I knew me, right? I thought I knew until the world smacked me upside the head and sat me down for over a year, nose put to the chalkboard of my own life.
The liminal space of the past 14 months, where I have trusted little and known even less of what was ahead, has culminated in a transition into the definition of who I was created to be. What I knew, just *knew* when I was introduced to the limited version of what I thought the Christ was in 2011, has come full circle. When the Word was breathed into life through me with the only lens I had available, I truly could not know who I really was. I really did not know who I was. My measuring stick was not big enough.
On Thursday, while on an acupuncture table, I was touched by the Great Conductor again. I laughed in the moment I told the acupuncturist that I was an instrument he was tuning. I did not laugh when, in the next breath, each atom within me was expanded to receive the fullness of who I am, to be poured into—again—with the power that has no comparison. I was stretched beyond the skin, the mind and ways that I’ve been, pushed through into the space of no barrier or boundary between me and the definition of who I am. I am not ‘just Ingrid’.
The day before, after sitting two hours in the National Cathedral I was told, “This* is the change. The presentation of yourself as the Word to the world. You are birthing and being borne witness to. The power of your truth is hope that the greatest love is real. You offering yourself is the mechanism. Paint like you mean it, heal as you move, move like each step is new. Allow, receive, see…the gifts, the glory of trust, faith, freedom. Breathe now. What was is no longer. Go with confidence in your strength, grow your faith by watching, listening deeply. Hold your own, though loosely.” There was no hollering back this time, no argument to be had.
God’s question to me all those years ago was not related to me being ‘not enough’. God’s question to me was to bring me to the point of realization that I was bigger than I thought I was, that I ‘just’ wanted to be. I wasn’t ‘regular’ or ‘normal’ or ‘just’ anything. I was made purposefully, poured into Being, this body filled at each turn to bring me into the space that I was meant to take up. To create the space in which I could be filled and fulfilled into which Creation had made me for.
I went to the acupuncturist with a request to release what identified itself as a repressed memory, one that I presumed to be from my own childhood. As I was flooded with God’s orchestration, the awareness that that memory was not mine from now but from long ago became clear. What I *thought* was mine from now, wasn’t a memory from my childhood but one from eons ago, one from lifetimes before life and time were connected. What I thought was mine, was not all mine. It’s been shared by women, every.woman, ever since this memory took root as ‘the way things are’.
A long, long time ago when we were something else not quite unlike we are now, there occurred the Original Wound. Not unlike the idea of Original Sin (because it *was* that) but not confined in the way we want it to be, the Original Wound is the singular act that separated woman from man and subsequently, through that, introduced man to power, pleasure, and the need to fuel greed.
The Original Wound is the *first* rape, the first time a man violated the space and place of peaceful union to take what he wanted. The reverberations of that singular act have since echoed across humanity and time. In one moment, man severed himself from woman. He severed himself from The Mother. In that one moment, man realized that force could bring to bear the desired fruit: sexual release, control, power. What was unleashed has included stolen peace and plundered beauty, the breaking of land and people, and the prideful use of fear for gain.
I have returned now as the bearer of the Original Wound. I have been redefined for you to see, in a way that is recognizable, that Beauty and Love are real and right and exist outside of ‘just’ anything. There is nothing to be taken for granted, judged as ‘mere’; that without contorting its nature to make sense to you, the deeply sacred is revealing itself to you always, in all ways. In front of the mirror, at your door, on the ground and in the beating heart of every being.
One of the echoes in my blood is the pain of that individual wounding then and its connection to the pains of the collective wounding now as they come to the fore.
And I have been remade into the Repairer of the Breach, the Healer of the Wound, the Balm and the Messenger of our time.
I have never been ‘just Ingrid’.
I have been the Returned, the Repairer all my life.
I just didn’t know it until now and I am duty bound to tell everyone, to not hold myself back, despite any fears of judgement.
To be called into one’s Holy way by God hisself and the others who guide and ignore it is to deny the Holy way of all of us.