Dear Kiffie,

As you read this, I am sitting outside in the warm sun in Oregon, having lived a full four decades ahead of you. My heart breaks as I consider your pain and existence today, the pain behind you, the pain ahead. But please know… you have much to give and receive, and you are irreplaceable.

My heart is full and raw and healthy. I know that I am loved and lovable. I have great friends. I am strong and healthy and have a beautiful family and a fully engaging, rewarding career. I have published two books, and will write more. I have known love and grief and heartache, and the love and peace and grace that exceed them all.

I am telling you: you will be okay.

You are hiding. Quiet. Trying not to rock the boat. Disturb the balance. And you do not realize it yet, but you’re buying into a mindset that you do not matter.

This makes sense. You are diminished. Ignored. Overlooked. Because you are quiet, not needy, and do not make demands, you get very little attention. Mom and dad are overwhelmed constantly by their own survival. There is almost no space for you – or nothing but empty space for you. They rarely hold you close, or seek to know you.

But these are their issues, not yours. Their ignorance of you does not prove you worthless. Their neglect of you does not prove you uninteresting. Their beating of you does not prove your guilt. Their manipulation of you does not prove your weakness. Their conflict is not yours. Their constant crisis is their problem – it is part of your journey as a child, but it is not your path through life. Conflict and crisis are part of life. You will have your share, or more. But it does not define you, you do not cause all of it, and you need not be part of it if you do not wish to.

Because you, my friend, are genuinely good. There is nothing wrong with you. You are not broken, and you can never be broken. Hurt, yes. You do wear pain as clothing, wearing it subconsciously as others wear clothes – without constant awareness, your pain is ever present and visible upon noticing. But your pain does not mean you are broken. It means your valid needs are not being met. Others are not caring for you as they should. You have learned early that they cannot or will not meet your needs. There is a lie forming in your heart: that the world is not a safe place. That you must hide. Or pretend. Or stuff your pain. Or deny your truth. Or manipulate or connive to get what you want or need. That you do not matter.

What you will also learn as you near my age is that everything is available to you from the universe – all the love that you need is either within you or available to you for the asking from the One you refer to as Father God.

You see, the universe exists to sustain life. You have fought to survive; now you must love to live. Everything in the world around you is here to help you live, not die. Even the denial you construct, carefully, to avoid self deception, is there to protect you from overwhelming pain and grief. Little by little, you will begin to see a larger perspective – that there is a limit to your parents and their mindfuck. That their path is no longer yours. That you have parted ways for good.

Years will pass. You will become ashamed of your own desires, try to translate or reshape them into more acceptable practices and terms to those whose respect you have chosen to pursue. This is learning. The persistent shame you carry is a long lasting disease, like a stomach flu in your soul that will require decades to ward off. But know that those primal desires – the need to be wanted, cared for, seen, heard, loved, accepted, held, and desired – they are you. They are part of the goodness of the universe itself. They are expressions of your value that seek to be recognized and affirmed. They are questions that exist to lead you to the answers, and both the questions and the answers exist within you. Without them, there would be death, where there should be life. You have much to give and receive, as an organism in the fabric of the world, the ecosystem of energy and mass that is the world through which you pass. Others may contribute. You may ask of them. Enjoy what they add. But you need not sell yourself as a slave to them in exchange for something that already exists abundantly within you.

Your ideas of good and bad, of sin and righteousness, are fucked up. You judge by the wrong criteria – not because you fail to understand the criteria, but because the act and stance of judgment do not belong to you at all. But you will carry this paradigm into your adulthood. It will allow shame to shape you more than love. Thus, when you emerge from this restricted dark tunnel of religious limitations, you will find that love is there, waiting to shape you more to it’s own pleasure. Please do not harden yourself into the shape that shame demands. Keep your heart and mind flexible and open and available to love, so that you will know that you were never meant for the darkness, but for pleasure. That pleasure is the voice of love – and it laughs when you are happy. Happiness will challenge you to open your heart again, and more, to the beautiful full hearted child that relished your father’s embrace and happy spirit. Through the darkness and cold and ice of rejection and neglect you will journey, but happiness will glow inexplicably within you – without justification or proof of its existence – the hope of love to come. Happiness needs no warrant; it is the ultimate bully of generosity from the universe, intruding whenever it likes, wherever it likes. Allow yourself to continue to feel happy, because this is your compass to guide you towards goodness when all around you is storm and bullshit.

You will make mistakes. You will explore, and feel ashamed for exploring, because you are told not to cross boundaries that are arbitrarily set by men who do not deserve your respect or obedience. These bullies are also of the universe, but their message is not obvious: they seek to control you to justify their own judgment, to manipulate you to their cause, to count you among their trophies; your journey will cause you to pass dangerously close to these energy sucking black holes that destroy souls by extracting all the life and light from their existence. But love will save you. Your mistakes will prove to you that grace exists, a love inexplicable and undeserved. Men will set rules before you – steps by which you can reach this grace, but you will always know that you need no staircase, that their formulas are interesting merely for the idea that they believe formulas can be extracted. Meanwhile, your heart will speak truth: you are loved. Period. And thus, the mystery of your value will persist: that you are loved means you are seen and known and there is a promise of meaning to your existence. Yes. There is. It is not yours to find – it is yours to enjoy. And the shame of exploration must become a joyful, playful, shameless exploration. Here… here, my dear boy, you will find the strength of your own heart to be terrifyingly omnipotent and limitless and powerfully good: when you see that all is permissible to you, here for your enjoyment, that the rules of tiny men draw only the first and shallowest distinctions for your discoveries to come. Where they warn darkly: “Here lie dragons!” you will go with a full and open heart, as an ambassador of goodness the likes of which the inhabitants of those lands have never seen. You. The good one. The strong one whose depth of heart cannot ever be fully measured, because the more deeply you love, the more fully grace finds a home.

I now find myself in this strange land, homeless and yet never more fully comfortable with my existence. You and I have walked together through a lot of shit, my friend. We have fought together, back to back, side by side, sometimes barely surviving through abuse and neglect, shame and guilt, grief and love. The half assed manipulative gaslighting narcissistic love that fucks with your logic and value and causes you to question your own right to suck air – this we have seen and felt fully and then rejected with the blind rage of our divine right to exist in the universe, having no real reason or explanation for our combative destruction of the cage in which we were jailed except that it was a cage and we were not free and have no right to be kept in a jail. This we have done. And life has changed. This fight has cost us dearly – our home, our traditions, our original vision of goodness, the respect and understanding of our community… but the cost of remaining caged unjustly in a jail of persistent insanity is self-destruction – and your most fundamental mandate from the universe is to continue to exist and grow in health. This jail formed by the lack of another’s self love is not for you. You have no obligation. Serving time there redeems no good, pays no debt, frees no other soul – you simply served as an ornament, a sacrifice on the altar of an irrational idol. Your decision to crawl down off that altar before her knife found your heart is the bravest step you have taken in life – defying her economy of values that demands you suffer so that she can be well, or that one or the other of you must suffer at all, is a declaration of your own personal value, an acknowledgement of your worthiness, a claim on your soul as territory that should be owned by nobody but yourself. This lesson comes late for you. Others have learned it earlier. And as you explore the lands of happiness outside the dotted lines of false prophets from your childhood, you will be challenged to distinguish your soul and love and goodness and rights as separate from those around you. Must an explorer become a citizen of each land he transits? Be a good guest – the ambassador of love and health that the universe has predestined for you. Plot your own path. Make your own way. Others may or may not. It is not abandonment for you to seek freedom and refuse oppression – you do not become the perpetrator to your own darkness when you choose to refuse the darkness of another.

You can sense a strong presence with you constantly right now. You will refer to this for years as Father God. There is a never leave or forsake you quality to this presence, and that is entirely true. I would like you to know, now, that it does not matter how you envision this presence. It is a mystery to our human consciousness. Others have other names. Your names will change over time, but the depth and stability and safety and love and goodness and care and understanding of this presence will never ever change for you. It is, my dear boy, you, yourself. For you are deep. You are stable. You are safe. You are loving. You are good. You are caring. You are understanding. You are all of these to yourself and to others. This makes you an eternally indestructible and powerful force in the universe and it constitutes both your right and your mandate to exist and breathe and connect with others in the world as fully as you wish. These are limitlessly available to you. This presence is not a separate being from yourself, it is a space within you that is you – like a constantly flowing fountain beautiful in its own existence. Do not think of this as a means to serve others – that is disrespectful. It simply exists as good of its own satisfaction. Others may see it and enjoy it and benefit from it, but by doing so it is not diminished in any way. It cannot be drawn down. Your understanding of it may be limited, but that is merely because the light of your consciousness is limited and cannot perceive the vastness of your own powerful spirit that shapes your soul and expresses itself through your purest voice – a voice so unique there is nothing else like it in the universe. This is the entourage you carry with you everywhere you go – as you explore formerly forbidden lands, defying taboos of the now foreign country in which you were raised, which now seems strange and backwards and awkward and painfully narrow and myopic. This presence is god in you. God in you. Father God. Father Christopher. Christopher. Kiffie. Boy. Man. God. Limitless. Powerful. Infinitely, immeasurably good. Satisfied with its own value and at rest in its mere existence as a force to be reckoned with. Unchallenged by shame or fear or doubt or guilt, you stand apart from all others, offering goodness and safety and love and grace with defiant generosity that renders obsolete all the written laws of small and insecure men and women who seek to control themselves through others.

This realization is your final lesson in life. Your universal master’s thesis in loving existence. When you gasp your last breath, may that moment stand as the final transition from your human state to the infinite as you give birth to a more fluid and unlimited expression of who you are in the universe: spirit good omnipotent love. Until then, I now give you and receive from you the highest ordination: man god. Accepted, endowed, this oath to walk each day a free sovereign, pledging allegiance to love and defying any other self appointed master’s assertion to limit, oppress, define, or detain your life.

Bow the knee to none, Christopher. You exist to breathe. You breathe to exist. You love to free. You free to love. Make that which would oppress you a slave to your journey, explore those areas they define as prohibited, and conquer the darkness there by simply walking in and breathing and existing as the god that you are: good. Ultimate good. Selfish selfless good. Benefactor of all that is good. Observer of injustice, conquering lies with good. Lover of all that is good. Capturer of goodness. Lover of joy, singer of happiness, benefactor of peace, patron of liberty. You. Christopher. Kiffie. God. Father. Father God. Man. Man god. Purposed by the living universe to live in the universe as good, bringing good, residing in good, existing as good, revealing good, promoting good, enjoying good.

Autonomous.

Connected.

Free.

Strong.

Seen.

Loved.

Known.

Good.

Kiffie, I love you. I always have and I always will. You are infinitely powerful. The pain of your limitations and dependence will soon be removed. Do not resist it, allow it. Your love must be freed. It is what the universe has given you to grow in the garden of your soul. So, allow it to grow. Promote its growth. Enjoy its growth. Walk in that garden every day, morning, and evening. Do not be afraid of your own power. Your own omnipotence. Relish it. Explore it. Enjoy it. Allow it. Do not hide or restrict it. Stop apologizing for it or trying to control it.

Walk your father’s path… and then journey beyond it into lands he never knew existed.

You are free now.

Be free.

I love you,

Christopher