100 Days of Morning: Writing my way from death to radical, loving change.

The Story Behind '100 Days of Morning' -

On a cold, wet, winter’s morning, I got a phone call…

‘Our dad passed away at 4am this morning.’

Unbeknownst to me, my father had been dying in a hospital bed hundreds of kilometers away for days, weeks now. On the 19th of July 2012 he drew his last breath. What a difference a day makes…

In shock, I started writing. I didn’t want hugs or condolences so much as I wanted a clean white space, a deep well of words, and a process that emptied me of the torrent of things hurling themselves up from the storage rooms of my psyche.

I started writing, and I didn’t stop. I wrote every single day for 100 days. This book is those 100 days.

It was by far the largest, most consistent, most intense and most conscious creative and healing process of my life.

It changed everything.

I kept to no conscious storyline. I wrote what presented itself to be written. In moments of overtired, emotional haze, I wrote myself to peace… Or exhaustion… Or both.

I wrote about how it felt to meet an entire side of the family… at my father’s funeral.

I wrote about my mother and her death when I was 13.

I wrote about death in a dozen ways. I let my zealous mantra of ‘You will die one day’ change everything.

I wrote about sex and love and sex and money and doing the work that is in you to do.

I quit all of my other projects.

I began to redefine myself.

I became willing to let go of everything I had if that’s what it took to live my ideal...

In moments, I found my bliss like never before.

Deeper.

Clearer.

Stronger.

More expansive.

More loving.

It was a 'write of passage' like no other.

~~~~~

100 Days of Morning

Writing my way from death to radical, loving change.

Gabriella Salmon

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Gabriella Salmon

http://www.gabriellasalmon.com

(This book is also available in print.)

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

~~~~~

Dedicated to my mother, Anita Jo-Anne Salmon, 
and my father, Brad Love. So much grateful thanks for your truly inspired act of creation.

~~~~~

Table of Contents

I was having a lovely morning… Then I found out my dad died.

Yes, actually, I DO want to talk about it.

A daughter reborn.

100 Days of Morning…

She who has faith the size of a mustard seed...

This morning I was grated and now I am greater… Or something like that.

To spell ‘miraculous change’.

If words could save you, I would write forever.

Nothing to do but show up.

Tonight, I will sleep like the living.

With my eyes wide open, I walked the plank…

A single story.

Here I stand with my empty rice bowl.

This too shall pass… And this… And this… And this…

Mark me as ‘Untouchable’

Even a snail moves…

I’m more than a bird, more than a plane…

A Million Times Grateful. (Thanks Mum!)

Batman’s Pink Mumma

Flap those wings little butterfly. (Every authentic relationship changes everything.)

Power Surge!!!!!! BA-ZING-GA!!!

Revelation of the day – How to be wealthy.

Dark Nights of The Soul

Want me to teach you how to fly?

The Grateful Rested

If you can’t see it, it’s because you’re not looking for it. (A.K.A I’m brilliant!)

Closed for Maintenance. Please Come Back Tomorrow.

Free Radical!

Dear Love, change me. Forever and ever. Amen.

A body to love…

I give it up.

I said ‘Yes!’

Seriously dude, SERIOUSLY?!!!

I went on a boat! A.K.A ‘Living the life!’

Fell off my wagon. Skinned my knees, bruised my ego.

Forgive them; they know not what they do.

I am here. Here is OK. There will be new things in the air tomorrow.

Like a boss!

It can wait…

Let’s get naked… With our clothes on…

Actually, I’ve already got my ‘A-Team’.

I, alone… It gets lonely.

Hello fear, I see you…

Guilt Trip. Apparently I bought an around-the-world ticket…

Remember this day.

Resounding thumps of changing internal landscapes!

The glacier, it melts. Amazing thanks.

The Mastery of Love

Gritting my teeth… no more.

Tangled swings and manic monkeys.

Gratitude Tuesday. And I get to tell you some of my fears...

The King and Queen of Weird. And Love… Always Love.

Halfway. Tomorrow I will be further than I am not.

Uncomfortable nakedness.

Love, I am wanting.

Spin, Spin, Spin…

Raphael: The Archangel of Healing.

I am feeling vulnerable today.

Let there be MIRACLES.

This sacred corridor.

Love, Freedom, Joy.

Surrender or die.

Yes, I am intense.

Just below my guilt, I find my fear…

There is power in the exhale.

Love makes me breathe out. (And I’m friends with God on Facebook! Ha!)

You are not ‘normal’.

The Death of Competition

Grateful Freedom.

Grateful Freedom (Part 2)

I see… Men. (It’s a bit of a revelation actually!)

Enlightened Millionaire.

Knowing, Unknowing, Letting Go.

The one thing that will close all my doors to you right now.

‘I am worth millions’ and other stories of wealth...

I don’t think you actually get it…

Getting intimate with Mr Fin.

Sometimes you’ve got to yell… And a story of worth.

Honest to Wobbliness.

Melted Ice-Cream Soup of the Self.

Radical Gratitude

The Number One Thing I Took Away From Morning Tea With A Multi-Millionaire.

One of the ‘Lucky People’.

9 Years in Numbers

Road trip of a lifetime! (God, I love road trips!)

Keep turning up.

Softly I fear to tread.

Dear small, doubting self…

Space for The Divine.

I have a Death wish.

The space to be seen… Divine redemption.

The God of (Moving) Small Things

Hey You… (In 100 words or less.)

God, I need sex.

Gently does it…

People are so easy to love.

Dancing with Fear (and Death).

Tonight we get to answer ‘Yes’.

Sacred Space.

The Divine Pot of Crazy.

I will not look at you like this anymore.

Intention changes everything…

Naked in my greenhouse.

The 100th Day of Morning.

About.

~~~~~

Day 1: Thursday 19th July 2012

I was having a lovely morning…
Then I found out my dad died.

My dad died this morning. How incredibly strange and bizarre to be writing that.

We weren’t close. Not at all. There wasn’t any animosity between us but there was no semblance of a strong or established relationship either. A one-off meeting when I was 18, and a few random phone calls and birthday cards since, does not a strong relationship make. Still, I’m spun-out. I’m sad that no one let me know what was going on. Not a single one of my dozens of relatives, including two half-sisters, thought to let me know that he was sick… And now he’s dead.

Now, at 26, I’m officially what I’ve been joking about since my mum died 13 years ago – I’m officially an orphan. F*ck. If I continue my parents’ trend of dying young, then I better get my shit happening NOW ‘cause I’m already at middle age! (Not that I intend to die young, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t either.)

A guy I know has a tattoo on his leg that says ‘Remember, you will die one day.’ Nothing reinforces that fact like an actual death right there in your face, rocking your boat like a tsunami appearing from a calm ocean. You will die one day. I will die one day and that will be it. Any inklings in us of reconciliation, of having more loving relationships, of living more fearlessly, they’ll all be useless. Love unexpressed is useless. Passion unexpressed is useless. Desires unexpressed are useless. Adventures not had are useless.

Like I said, I’m feeling rather spun-out right now. Death gives you a powerful dose of perspective. I think of the ridiculous things I’ve been stressing over in the last few weeks as, unbeknownst to me, my dad lay dying. I watch in curious awe, as the things that I had planned to do today, this week, just seem to fall away. I’m just kind of sitting here and contemplating this new development in the play of my life. My friends are sending me messages of love and support, and there is a part of me that looks at them so curiously… These are for me? I am one of those people who other people send condolence messages to? How very strange. How very fascinating.

There is nothing I can do for the dead. There is nothing I can say to my father, Brad. I can only trust that, in his final moments, he was healed of any of his guilt and all of his fear. My grief is not for him; my tears are not for him. I think my tears are for me and the stark finality of this death- of being parent-less.

My heart is shaking in shocked realisation of how much I have been letting fear sway me. How much I have been waiting for this, for that, for everything, before I live bigger, before I love, wildly and crazily. Yes, me. Me who does things. Me who has grand adventures already. I have been letting fear win so often. I have been keeping myself small, holding myself back, doubting myself to the point of inaction. I’ve been worrying about money. I’ve been telling myself I have to do it ‘slowly, slowly’.  I want to vomit up all this fear. I want to smash all these bullshit, needless restrictions and just f*cking play with everything I’ve got. Because one day I will be dead. One day I will be so completely dead. I don’t want to wait until I’m on my deathbed to realise how absolutely irrelevant and completely pointless my fears were.

Dear Brad,

Thank you for your part in creating me. You did good. Thank you for this incredible, intense burst of perspective. I am changed because of it. There is, and will be, more love in me because of it. There is more love in the world because of you. Amen to that sweet soul, you played your part perfectly. There is more love in this world because of you. Truly, there is no greater purpose to this whole adventure.

Divine perspective to you.

Big LOVE,

Gabriella

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~~~~~

Day 2: Friday 20th July 2012

Yes, actually, I DO want to talk about it.

So, my dad died yesterday. There has been a steady, beautiful stream of messages from people near to me, and people I hardly know… Many, many of them have said ‘I’m here if you want to talk…’ And you know what? I do want to talk. I want to talk to every single one of you and I want to listen to every single one of you. I want us to talk about the ‘big’ things. I want us to talk about death. I want us to talk about the fears that we’ve been letting paralyse us. I want us to talk about the sheer, abundant joy we’ve been turning away from out of some incredibly deep, misguided belief that we’re not worthy of the exquisite joy of life.

I want to talk about it because there is nothing else worth talking about. I’m so incredibly bored of talking about the other things; the things that don’t matter. I’ve been talking about them for years and even boring myself, much less the poor suckers who’ve had to listen to me! I’m so incredibly excited about sharing and living the things that do matter. I’m so incredibly committed to sharing and living the things that do matter. Growth, love, joy, surrender, peace, knowing, abundance and freedom- these are some of the things that really matter.

I’ve spent years of my life traversing great deserts of loneliness and mistrust. I’ve deployed my greatest stores of energy and commitment towards the relentless task of ‘defending myself’ and ‘going it alone’. I’ve faced up to my dark nights of the soul. I’ve dived into the depths of my fear of abandonment. This was a fear that once felt so deep and so scary that I was convinced I was incapable of pulling myself out if I went there. I went there anyway. I’ve faced these things. I’ve lived through the deaths of both of my parents and the crumbling of dozens of significant relationships besides. I have faced these things and I will face more. There is more in me that is unhealed. There are seeds of growth that are yet to be sown… And it’s all OK. Everything is OK because I am brilliantly, glowingly ALIVE. Through every season I am purged of more of my fearful delusions. Through every season, my roots push deeper.

If you need an example to follow, then I’m willing to be it. Yes me, in my fallible, stumbling, so often unknowing ways. I’ve been there, and I swear that there is more to life than you’re living. Even in your shades of brilliance, there is more. This is my unshakeable knowing. This is the knowing that I am moving towards living more expansively, more completely, in every breath, in every day.

So come to me if you want to talk. Come to me in whatever ways work for you. Come to me if you’re done with wallowing in the mud-pits of the mundane and the illusions of your cheap drama. I will not always say the ‘right’ things. I will not always tell you what you want to hear. I will not always be able to hear you properly over the noise of my own ego. Some days you may look at me and think ‘Who is this idiot and what does she know?!’… But my intention is steadfast and my knowing growing by the day. I KNOW that here is nothing in you so broken, so hurting, so guilty or so lost that it cannot be healed. I KNOW that there is nothing in you so deep and terrifying that you are destined to drown in it. Nothing. Not a single thing. Let me sit with you, and you with me, through the deluge of snot-soaked tissues and tears, and let us bear witness to the birth of our new selves…

There is so much more love and divine presence in us than this…

These are the kinds of things I want to talk about…

Big Love,

Gabriella.

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~~~~~

Day 3: Saturday 21st July 2012

A daughter reborn.

It’s a weird experience, to find out more about the man who was pivotal to your creation in a public death notice than you ever knew about him in ‘real life’. Very weird.

Thanks to the advances of technology, a simple Google search means I now know, not just when and where my father’s funeral is, but life facts I never knew before… Like how old he was exactly (I was guessing before), his middle names, the names of his siblings, (or even how many there are) and the names of his parents. I didn’t know any of this stuff before and it’s just fricken strange to be finding it out like this.

I read his death notice and there was a part where it said he ‘died peacefully’. I thought to myself ‘‘Peacefully’? They’re not really going to write ‘died traumatically’ now, are they?’ Isn’t all death inherently peaceful? In those moments when there is no ego left, bar those of bystanders, surely there’s no possibility of anything but peace? Ok, I’ll admit it, that’s partly just linguistic semantics on my behalf. The phrase that really struck me was where it read, a little lower… ‘Loving Father of A****, C***** and Gabriella’… I’ve gotta tell ya, it doesn’t get any weirder for me than reading that.

I read my half-sisters’ Facebook walls and I see their public outpouring of grief. I see the years and years of family photos being posted and the deluge of people writing to say things about this man. I find it impossible to reconcile my sisters’ experiences with my own. Utterly impossible. To be honest, a part of me was surprised to read, there in black and white, that to any random member of the reading public, I’m the daughter of a ‘Loving Father’. You mean God? That’s the only vague semblance of a ‘Loving Father’ that I have any real, palpable experience with…

I never knew this man who suddenly becomes my ‘loving father’ in death. I’ve not known these sisters who, in impartial print, I’ve become an equal daughter beside. I don’t feel equal. I feel like my name should be in a different font, a smaller one, with a disclaimer after it that says something along the lines of ‘Biological daughter only.’

I can’t speak for the dead, and there are too many things I don’t know… Maybe, in his experience, I was a fully-fledged daughter. Maybe he carried a sweet love and thought of me in all his days… But my experience has been one of having no father at all. My experience has been one of being told stories by my mother of a man who wouldn’t even completely accept that I was his. The most poignant story I have of my father is from my mum. It tells of us driving away when I was a babe, and him offering us no form of support whatsoever. None of the stories in me are stories of how much my father loved me. There are no stories in me of any love between my parents at all. The harsh breakdown of the stories of my mother is that there were abortions before me and at least one after. In my late childhood, in my precocious reasonings and analysings, I considered myself ‘lucky’ to have survived at all.

With my mother having been dead 13 years already, I can’t go back and clarify. I can’t turn to a mother who clearly, obviously did love me, and ask her better questions. I can’t relearn the stories of my conception and of my father from her, healed by the balm of time and more gracious awareness. When I plunge deep into the childhood well of stories of ‘my father’, there is scarce little there… And even less still that speaks of anything but hurt and guilt, confusion and abandonment.

My story of my father is a big expanse of nothing until I was tracked down by my paternal grandmother when I was 18. Then it continued to be epic expanses of nothing with occasional, confusing, inconsistent moments of contact. These left me perched in an even weirder place than I’d been before. To not have a father is one thing, but to have a ‘not father’ become some kind of sporadic entity in your life is another. On my 21st birthday, he sent me $1000 in cash in a birthday card via unregistered post… But he hadn’t wished me ‘Merry Christmas’ or spoken to me at all the year before.  For two years in a row, I psyched myself up and made myself ring him on Father’s Day. We had random chats… But I never said ‘Happy Father’s Day’. The words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’, they stick in my mouth… There is something so intensely foreign about them. They feel a part of my intellectual vocabulary only; they’re not words my heart has ever used in love before.I write all this and I know they’re just stories. I know that. I’m not writing them to cast any of us the abused or the abuser. There is not a thing I would change about my past. On the contrary, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But these are the stories that present themselves… These are the dirty sheets that are scrawled with blood and words of hurt and laments of unlove. Here they are, presenting themselves to be washed. To be wrung out and made clean again. To become a clean slate on which new and exquisitely beautiful stories of love and trust and gracious forgiveness can be written and flown free in the wind. Declared to the whole world.

I am willing to re-write my story with the belief that my father loved me in the best way he knew how. I am willing to see that the absence of a practical, physical, ‘loving’ relationship when I was a child had so little to do with me. Our lack of a close relationship had nothing to do with me being unworthy of being loved and so, so much to do with his own lack of love for himself. I believe that my father’s absence was about his guilt and his fear of not being forgiven and thus irrevocably failing as a father. I’m only just now in a place where I’m willing to consider this a possibility. I’m only just now willing and able to rewrite this story. Only just now. Literally. Now.  To be achingly honest, I’d grown comfortable with the mantle of ‘abandoned, fatherless daughter’. That story I knew. This new story, this story of ‘being a daughter whose father loved her’ is so unknown, it’s kind of bewildering in its newness. I don’t know what it means to be this new thing…

But here it is, the seeds of a new story. ‘I am a daughter who actually had the very thing I secretly longed for and envied in the world around me- two loving parents. I am someone who is, and always has been, loved and cherished and wanted beyond measure.’ It blows my mind to be writing that. It changes everything to be writing that. To be consciously, literally, re-writing my deepest stories changes everything. If I can re-write this, I can re-write anything and everything. If I can coax my heart into thawing the barriers it has held strong for my entire living memory and even before that… If I can move this way even when it seems externally ‘one step forward and two steps back’… If I can know, as Rumi said so well, that my task is …not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within myself that I have built against it. If I can know and live all of these things then everything changes…

… I am so willing and ready for everything to change.

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~~~~~

Day 4: Sunday 22nd July 2012

100 Days of Morning…

There is this sacred space when I wake… This empty moment of pregnant potential before my story rolls in… Before my memory reboots and I remember my stories from the day before… Before I reload my stories from the lifetime already past…

I define myself as a ‘night owl’. During the night, I’m deliciously, abundantly full to bursting with ideas and words and experiences. But in the mornings, in the mornings there is this space in me. There is power in this space me thinks. There is infinite, divine creation in the emptiness, in the space before my story. I’m playing with this. I’m experimenting with this… Leaving space…

Today, when my story rolled in, there it was again ‘My dad died the other day’ and the lightning-fast response ‘What of it?’ What of it, indeed? A friend said to me on Friday, ‘Does it kind of feel like this could really mean very little in your life?’ I knew what he meant. My external world hasn’t been rocked in the slightest; there’s no practical hole in my life where a father once stood. I’d thought about that, and I thought about it again last night, intensely. I get to choose with this death, I get to choose. I get to choose whether it becomes a major catalyst for change or stays a relatively minor blimp. In the witching hours of the last 2 nights, amidst strange swings of exhaustion and elation, I have chosen. I have decided to let this be a catalyst that changes everything.

Four short months ago, (again in the witching hours) I had the most serious of discussions with myself. I decided that this is it. I decided that I’m committing to this. I’m committing to my own deep, powerful growth and the fruition of my deepest desires. Never before had I committed with such clarity as I did on that day. In the days that followed, I bound myself with my own conviction, a hundred times a day if I had to. (And many times I had to!) Things changed; things moved with a speed and a rampant, abundant growth I’d never before seen in my life! In less than 12 weeks, I created the strong beginnings of a new business (The Passion Tree), completed my first full set of inspiration cards, (Big LOVE Bytes) and drew AMAZING people into my life. The calibre and excitement of the people around me, and being drawn to me, validated the shift in me as being like no other before it.

I live by the belief that ‘My internal creates my external’. In the past four months, it’s been made irrefutably clear that this is my truth, and that things have actually shifted and changed in me. The rapid changes in my external world have mirrored my internal changes with alacrity! But behold, Life was only just getting started! Three days ago, when I found out my father had died, I was presented with a choice. Life posed a question, ‘Are you ready for your life to really change now?’ I sat with that question in my unexpected exhaustion of the first night. The next night I answered ‘Yes’, and the next night I answered ‘Yes’ again. My answers of ‘Yes’ seemed to burst and stream out of me in a renewed flood of commitment. Tonight, for the third time, I say ‘Yes’. I say ‘Yes’ to monumental change. I say ‘Yes’ to the possibility of letting go of everything I thought I knew. I say ‘Yes’ to the reality that all of my relationships will change. I say ‘Yes’, knowing that I will have to dig deep. I say ‘Yes’, knowing that this is the path less travelled, less understood and often shied away from. I ready myself for my ego’s thousand deaths. I am so unknowing, I am so fallible and still, I say ‘Yes’.

In my mind’s eye, my future self looks back and recounts ‘2012 was the year when everything changed.’ The prophecy of the year isn’t lost on me. It seems that the Mayans were right; this is the year when one version of my world ended and a new one began. I know I’m not the only one. There are cries of ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ all around me. Whispered in agony, shouted in ecstasy ‘Yes. Yes. YES!! I am ready for my life to really change now. I am unknowing but, God help me, I am committed. Yes.’

The title of today’s piece, ‘100 Days of Morning’, is the title of the book I’m writing, the book you’re already reading… Prompted by the death of my father and this new ‘Yes’ seared into the heart of me, I will be writing, every day, for 100 days. There will be miraculous change. I don’t know what it will look like but I know it will come to pass. It’s confronting to commit to that, here in public, in black and white. Hold me accountable will you? Hold me gently though please; it won’t all be pretty or even agreeable. It will however, be as real and as truthful as I have power in me to express. What will change in these 100 days? Everything.

Big LOVE to you, let the adventures begin... again and again and again!

X

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~~~~~

Day 5: Monday 23rd July 2012

She who has faith the size of a mustard seed…

I had a vision of myself tonight, as I sat there sweating in hot yoga class. I had a vision of myself as I breathed into my body’s literal, physical pain and oscillated erratically between the urge to bawl my eyes out, give-up and curl into a ball, or grit my teeth and push myself some more...

The vision was of me undoing myself at the seams… Of cutting the stitches of a garment sewn so tightly and so close to my skin that it seemed almost as if I was about to cut myself away… Except it wasn’t myself that I was cutting away. It was an undoing, a revealing of a self that hasn’t seen the light of day in a long, long time. Like somehow my nimble, childhood fingers sewed me into this garment and, over the years, I gradually forgot that I was