The year of everything

There are those years where eternity is crammed into just 365 days.

Life on fast forward. One giant event after another. A year where you land in a completely different space than when you started...figuratively and literally.

With a shiny new decade about to begin...

(the energy is palpable, isn't it? It's electric. It's sparking. I can see it, thundering behind a wooden door that can barely contain it. The brightness seeping out the cracks at the bottom, and all around. It's about to burst!)

...I am reflecting on how completely my end and beginning of 2019 were. Everything I learned can be summed up in three words:

I AM CAPABLE.

This spring, and just a few posts back, I published one titled burn. Where I talked about precipice, and how I had only felt on the verge like that just one other time. When suddenly I knew my life was about to take a redirect, and change, entire. I was right once again. A couple months later my dream day job came knocking, and the opportunity presented itself to become a homeowner for the first time. Needles to say, both transformed the current state of my world.

I get to enter this new decade with so much new:

As a working mom
As a mom with a preschooler
Without friendships I didn't expect
With friendships I didn't expect
In a brand new living space that feels like heaven
As a homeowner
Without the same car
Without my old furniture
Without fighting legally for my son
Without anxiety and PTSD...or at least with hardly any left...
With true in-my-bones and in-my-soul contentment
With a changed body, one that no longer experiences the beauty of breastfeeding, but now belongs to me, altered just for me
As an associate artist with one of my favorite theatre companies
Side passion projections about to be announced, and come to fruition
With giant dreams
With a limitless sky
With new optimism
Strengthened by knowledge
Senses buzzing once more

I have so much god damn gratitude. I couldn't wrap my head around what that meant for so long. Trauma left me longing for just the bare minimum. If I learned to want just the bare minimum, wasn't that...sad? Devastating? Didn't that shrink me, my dreams, all I once hoped for and strived towards?

No. It simply means appreciating the little moments along the way up, through the journey of my rising. The small parts build the foundation. Tiny miracles are always around, in the form of coincidence, of chance encounters, of omens. Looking back, even through the destruction there was beauty.

Only I steer this ship. I am finding I have loved every part of my life that led me here, and I will continue to. Was it always there? Whispering to me all along? The undercurrent of energy saying this was all meant to be...unfolding exactly as it should...?

I've never related more to the tale of The Phoenix as I have this year. This was the year I earned my wings. I proudly stepped into the ancestral line of warrior women that have paved the way before me, and will come after me. Confidently, and unapologetically.

This was my time to become...and I finally became.

For over two years, my senses dulled. I could only see black. Now, I'm rushing toward the light, for I've finally broken...into blossom...


"Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom."

A Blessing by James Wright 


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A new introduction.

Welcome! 

My name is Deena Marie Manzanares. Because I think it's far more interesting to know who people are, rather than what they do, let's start there. I am a highly sensitive person who often felt my heart was made of glass, my nervous system the outside, not meant for a world so harsh. Over the years, I learned to harness life's alchemy to redirect my perceived weakness into my superpower. I am the softest warrior you'll ever meet. 

I am a single mother to my son. I saw him in a vision years before he was even a possibility. Birth was the moment of my life. Housing the bones and soul of another is completely life-altering, and put all my priorities in just the right places. He is the greatest love I've ever known. 

I'm an actor, model, and tv host. Theatre, and storytelling are sacred to me. As an actor and as an audience member, I am able to dissipate into the whole. Relating to story reminds us we are not alone. 

I am a member of Actors Equity Association, and represented by Talent Management group. I am Brand Ambassador for local business Got Beauty. I am associate artist with the Sting and Honey theatre company. I am a tv host for ABC4. 

Over the years I created a large social media following after an extremely popular YouTube channel(s). 

I am a shapeshifting poet. My heart comes in many forms. My words, my poetry, my art, my exchanges with you. 

I'm in progress. I am a giant heartbeat. I am learning. I am sharing it with you here...

He's three.

Lumbering down a never-ending hallway in a body I no longer recognized, I desperately sought relief. Leaning against the wall each time a contraction hit, I could do nothing but ride the wave of the worst physical pain I'd experienced in my life so far. It would end as if it had never happened. Then repeat.

It wasn't until I was finally admitted and we could call my parents that I let myself cry. It was real.

This was it. The day when all of the things I'd been the most scared of in the world, would happen. In one day. Less than.

It's blurry. Feverish. Dreamlike. The sound of the monitors. A heart. An ocean. Over, and over.

Suddenly, you were on your way. Four days late, and now ready to make your entrance, you did things on your own time, and in your own way from the start. The doctor, "should I run?" As the nurses said you were coming, now. I couldn't feel you, but I asked for a mirror, and I got to watch your entrance. It was by far the moment of my life. Words fail. A record 1 minute 36 second birth. Four simple pushes, I was laying back, and you were in the air...descending onto my chest.

You seemed huge, your hair was black, and neither of those things were what I'd envisioned. As you laid on me for the first time, I wondered who in the world this was that had just come earth-side.

Hours went by and I had no clue. It's all so hazy. You were so beautiful. Your dimples the fist big surprise.

When you came home after that first week in the hospital, I remember waking up each morning with butterflies in my stomach. Actual butterflies. Even though I'd seen you all through the night, there was something magic about starting a new day with you in it.

Every single thing about you, and my motherhood experience every day since, has been nothing like I thought, or ever could have seen coming.

I have fought for you, and alongside you, every step from the minute you arrived. One day I hope to rest.

At three, you have talents, and a vocabulary far beyond your years. You have brought things with you that only could have been accumulated from having been here many lifetimes, and you are ancient in your newness.

You have remained foreign to me, yet you're inexplicably mine. We are bound together, meant to be, and I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it.

Blonde, light, pure, sparkling, life-force, who's bones and soul I housed. You taught me that death and birth are two halves of the same whole, and of the devastating permanence to each.

I died the day you came to me, and I will never be the same. I was reborn, a giant heartbeat. Inside out, as if my nervous system now on the outside. I am stronger, and more fragile, and exhausted, yet more energetic, and full of opposites that all exist in me at the same time.

You sifted my priorities, entire. I could almost see them shuffle, and settle into the right spots, like sand. You gave me clarity, new vision, changed time, and taught me a deep appreciation for my body.

You recently asked me where we are before we are born. I replied, "the stars, the clouds." This week we talked about when you were in my tummy. You asked, "were you in the clouds with me? Or were you waiting for me?" Tears filled my eyes, as they do at this moment. "Both. Of this, I am certain, my love."

Happy Birthday to my Charlie, love of my whole life.

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Burn

The other night I dreamt my childhood home burned to the ground. I stood on top of the rubble, with other members of my family. I looked to each of them for a place to live, to be taken in. There was no one for me to stay with. Although in reality this home was sold shortly after I'd moved to New York, in my dream all of my belongings had still been in the house, and now they were gone. Everything I'd owned had burned, but I wasn't phased. In fact, I felt a relief. I could start fresh. I needed, and was attached to, nothing. Yet there was a realization of how special the walls of that home had been. What they had held was scared, and now it was gone...as if it had never stood there in the first place.

I've often documented my dreams, and the visions that have come to me in the in-between here. Some I understand the meaning of right away, and seem almost more real than reality.

This one makes sense. I've been in a state of emotional purging recently. A lot of gunk has built up inside me over the last few years. Trapped in me, I've been living with the sickness of it. PTSD, and anxiety. Physical manifestations that breathe down my neck daily, and dull my sparkle. Only recently has it started to pour out, mostly in the form of tears. This is unusual for me, to have bouts of crying. Sometimes full-on sobs. I have been in fight-or-flight for so long. I've had to hold off on letting it out due to the battles I've had to fight, raising my son, and simply not having the time. But lately it's leaking out, ready or not.

This isn't a bad thing. The webs are untangling inside from around my brain, and heart. The water from my tears is cleansing. "Make space. Clear the way." It whispers..

I have had a sense that a new page is just about to turn. The next chapter is so close. New players will enter, a new stage is set, and life begins, anew. I see white light where I once saw no color at all. I feel warmth right around the corner, coming to me from the opposite direction.

I have only felt on the verge like this one other time. I searched through my old posts until I found it, and wouldn't you know it, the date was February 2013 (here). Exactly one month before absolutely everything about my life changed in a million ways I never could have seen coming.

Is there a shedding of the skin every six or so years? I laugh to myself, remembering that every seven or so we literally become new people, as every cell in our body replaces itself with a new one.

Of course. 

I hope I'm right about this precipice. I have no reason to doubt. Everything I once had burned to the ground. I need nothing other than walls to house a sacred space, where that ends up is TBD.

But I stand calmly on the rubble.
A clean slate.
I don't feel loss.
I am not empty.
There is a hint of spring in the breeze.

I wait...

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