heal is the mountain and the climbing of it

When I am learning something, the bones of it come first. It takes much time and practice before there is an entire body. Here are some bones, waiting flesh.

Heal.

Here is what I know of it today: Healing is the climbing of a mountain. It is taking one step and then another. It is acclimating to new environs with more or less oxygen to fuel the breath. It requires more, then less, then more again. It requires focus. It requires will. It is both a process and my relation with the process. It is a cycle. It does not exist as a thing to obtain, but rather as a living, breathing practice.

Soul is a place, the fertile lands of psyche. I am a cartographer, mapping it. When I come to terrain that I've made legend, beasts in their own right, I do not hand over my power like I did when I was a child. I have consciousness now. I have tools. I have new ways to relate. Instead, I acknowledge the ways I mistakenly confused my experiences as fixed truths. I bow to these experiences, and to my child-like relations with them, as the mountains they are. Right now, I am climbing many mountains, mountains of my rage and shame and grief and control. I am unafraid of them. If they exist in the place of self, then they are just a fraction of it. I call upon all other fractions, including the wise and the compassionate, and slowly, deliberately, we climb step by step. Together, we heal so that we may reclaim our psychic lands as a whole.

Heal.

Always follow the root. The word heal is from the proto-germanic khailaz, 'to make whole.' I am the sum of all my parts. Wishing rage to go away will not make it so. The only way I see to integrate its knowledge as another fraction of self is to climb the healing mountain of it. In the heart of healing are a stubborn choice to lift all the lines of separation that exist in the psyche and a practiced belief that I am worthy of doing so. Healing is a love letter to myself, to humanity, to my planet, to the people and lands I know and love, and to future generations. In this lifetime, in these oceans of self, I choose to clean and keep these waters.

Soul is the place from which everything I create is birthed from. Healing is the mapping of it consciously. Doing so allows me to consciously create and co-create in the external world. It illuminates choices. I learn to reclaim my power from my internal beasts as I learn to work in my communities to eradicate external forces of harm. As above, so below. Climbing the mountains of my psyche teaches me how I might relate to the mountains we climb collectively, ones of white supremacy and capitalism and patriarchy and all other forms of harm that cut deep wounds into the lives and bodies and psyches of all people, but for the people of the global majority cut deep deep    d   e   e   p    wounds, and for many people fatally so. Collective relation is the antidote, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it (thank you, leader).

Heal.

Follow the root and find the paradox. The word khailaz is from the proto-indo-european kailo-, 'whole.' A paradox: I am both making myself whole and already whole. I am both healing and already healed.

Soul has known life in the body. It collects experience. There can be many, many wounds in the process of living. But my soul is not the entirety of who I am, in the same way that my body or my personality are not the entirety of who I am. I am also spirit. My spirit is my wholeness, the sum of all parts. When I climb a mountain in soul-terrain or dig a hole or find a cave or swim a river or trudge a storm, my spirit is the collective we I summon, that aspect of self that is already and always and all-ways whole.

In the psychic lands of soul, there can be many slivers of self in need of heal. Spirit is the self that is heal.