Photographs have a way of organizing us into slots of time, space, memory and perhaps temperament. From the age of birth to twelve, I don’t have any pictures of myself. We lost everything in a fire when I was young and everyone just stopped capturing time. There were no pictures. There were no celebrations. I never had a birthday party as a child. There were no formal rites of passage. We didn’t record history.

No one wanted memories.

All the living and visuals of my surroundings are connected to my energy. I play movies in my head; I’ve never owned images of my face frozen in time.

My beautiful sister found some old childhood yearbook photo’s online. We never could afford to purchase the packets. I don’t remember any of these pictures being taken, yet I have wild, vivid recollections of so many experiences never captured on film.

I can travel countless memories by feelings coupled with images of everything around me.

I never see my face.

On a random summer day in 1978, I can recall how Shorty, our local shopkeeper, smelled and how his smile was as wide as he was tall.

I feel my energy as I stand and talk with him.

I look around and see old white metal shelving with black caps on top. A stand of Hostess products are randomly stacked with honey buns, lemon hand pies and Twinkies. I see the layout of the store and the products I delightfully consumed all neatly arranged in aisles. I loved Captain Crunch, pork rinds, Louisiana Hot Sauce and Vienna Sausages circled like fingers in a ring-pull, squatty, little half can.

On this particular day, I can picture myself running through the fields after being in Shorty’s store. Excited, I sprinted through the space between the store and our home with an ice cold soda pop and a box of jaw breakers in hand — the movie continues to play.

I’m flying through time, with patches of red Oklahoma clay dispersed in a field mixed with large areas of Big Bluestem prairie grass. These gigantic feathering stalks tied the earth back in place after the Dust Bowl. To an unknowing eye they were a nuisance, like switch grass, a tilted angle can slice a bare leg wide open. I proudly wear a scar to this day. These indigenous blades brought the land back to life after the Great Depression.

In the words of Rodgers and Hammerstein,

Speeding forward with all the enthusiasm of a free-range country girl, I was completely spared the necessity of arriving anywhere on most days. I didn’t have programs, clubs, lessons or meal times. I was always alone. I was free. I ran wild.

Little did I know, basking with the same abandonment was a gigantic black water moccasin, a sleek glistening cottonmouth coiled in a patch of high noon sun. In a split second, he unfurled his disapproval and lashed out against my lanky-twig-nine-year-old legs. In an instant, this wild, poisonous creature’s mouth flew open, pure white fangs caught my eye. I felt him come at me and just miss. My heart jumped ten feet ahead of my spirited body. I ran faster because it was all part of the natural order of encountering wildlife in rural Oklahoma.

Swearing was not allowed; I was an exceedingly eager and voracious head-swearer. Blatant and very expressive, I love how bad words rolled around in my brain as a simple matter of fact. Life was fascinating and broken, completely made for swearing! I was the sole witness to my blasphemous declarations of truth.

I had been informed that cussing was for sinners. I never had to share these delicious parts of myself. I can feel the force of my thoughts and see experiences and people who stood in the path of my expressive nature. This was all masked by the delicate face of a shy child. I knew it too and took full advantage of my angelic disposition.

I was a very talented sinner.

My mother had us kneel and pray at our bedside when we were little. She would start and I would chime in.

This beloved childhood prayer is a great way to scare the crap out of a child. I was to continue with my silent conversation after the intro from my mother. I would clasp my hands and rattle off a string of swear words to God.

Prayer time was sacrosanct.

I wanted to truly understand the power of God. I tested everything as a child.

I’m certain shit, damn and hell were the only big ones I knew. I repeated them with vigor. Like a chant from a Buddhist monk, it was almost like a soothing bedtime meditation.

The God of this vast Universe has a great sense of humor. There was thunderous laughter from my Lord, and an attagirl approval from above.

I giggled with God.

I understood that God didn’t punish those who earnestly sought truth and understanding. He loved and accepted my odd habits.

Besides, I was three when I started my private engagements with the Lord and 1972 was a dark year in history. There was the Munich Massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by an Arab Gunman at the Summer Olympic games and it was the beginning of the Watergate Scandal. Despite my approach, God let me wake up every morning with my soul intact.

My secrets were scrumptious!

So many great movies I can recall in an instant — so luscious and articulate are my thoughts and random tests for God. And yet, not once in my memories is there a glimpse of my face to match the verboten language trapped cleverly in my head. I know her, this untamed derelict of a child, and up until this week, I couldn’t see a shadow or a vague indication of her face in time.

I didn’t run home and tell anyone about my encounter in Eden. I tucked the black viper in my memory as a prophecy — a vision of my legs traveling through time and carrying me forward to an adventurous future.

I saw every experience as a way of eventually delivering me to some unique arrival. I was a thought-obsessed, sun-kissed, blonde daydreamer who travelled without a concise plan or map. I was a collector of experiences and a living witness to my life. I recorded my feelings and the visions around me. I can replay them in an instant.

Had the experience of running home from the store been captured on film, I think it would have become one of those near death encounters with Beelzebub.

Southern Baptist had a way of reshaping the biblical force of nature and expanding exhaustively from there.

I would have been an innocent child with a soda pop, nearly struck down in a field by the will of Satan himself.

One of my favorite scriptures.

I always thought it meant I was a magnificent, mystical creature summoned to be here — alive and fully expressive because my creator made me who I am. I am here as a reminder; we are each a singular unique soul not meant to be like another.

My creator went out of his way to make me…doesn’t he know the exact number of hairs on my head? Nobody has my thumb print or the same DNA. My eyes are completely unique.

It’s a fact. I was made to be different.

Grace is a sweet deliverance. I was a gesture from God honoring my purpose. Why was religion trying to make me follow rules and be like everyone else? If God wanted me to be a homogeneous soul, he would have seen to it.

In Oklahoma, a Southern Baptist viewed grace with a dark approach.

Religion was loaded with shame and foreboding. Somebody was always trying to ‘get you,’ and end any good fortune that may have crossed your path…this fearful approach was somehow attached to grace.

I was no fatality. I remained a mighty force.

I lived my entire childhood slipping in and out of adventures and creating my own reality. I believed in myself. I always felt carried by the wind and transported through space with the smells of nature seducing me while my essence was recorded rather than my face.

My spirit was a cherished time capsule. The power of grace and nature, in the here and now, has always been the long hand of God guiding me on this oh-so-strange and delightful journey.

To this day, I still feel my hair blowing back away from my face. I can smell sweet delicate honeysuckle in the air. I know exactly how the willow trees draped and flowed in the wind around Old Mr. Dabney’s pond.

The wide leafed grapevine by our little quonset hut home is still yielding fruit. I can see the dense, knotted vine entwined around the edge of trees and bramble in our front yard. Pricker bushes with cockleburs were guardians.

As if it were an hour ago, I can pluck a green sour morsel so completely tart and almost unbearable and toss it into my mouth. Ripe was boring; I had no patience. The pucker was the wow, like a dare you were willing to embrace for the thrill.

I feel all of me and yet I can’t see any part of who I was back then. In my memory, I’m fully there. I own my freedom, my lightness of being, my desire to soar and the power of my purpose in that exact moment while living the experience in my mind. The sun and the worth of my existence is bright and radiant despite the many shadows.

The shade cast during my childhood created more depth than I can explore in this one-little-zap-of-time on earth. There was always so much to figure out.

I didn’t come from a doting and involved family. We were a shattered mosaic of odd cast members; each person was part of an improvisational troupe of spirits without clearly defined social etiquette or set traditions.

As my brother Timmy states, “we were the poorest kids in the county.” We knew how to make do and make things up.

My best friend once told me,

I didn’t. We couldn’t afford accessories.

There was no acting out our roles from a script. We didn’t live a life anyone would have measured as a success. Unlike most of upper and middle class America, we couldn’t pretend away financial or emotional lack. There was no place to hide.

I was dirty, on welfare, unbathed at times and smelling musty like the wood stove that heated our home. Eddie Lingford refused to stand near me during line-up time for lunch. I think his motley crew might have landed the second poorest family in the county. Surely, I smelled better than he exclaimed.

Flawed, broken and fully alive, everyday was unknown and new. I was messy and sprinting from the day I was born. I was part of a journey that didn’t have instructions. Looking back at the complete dysfunction of our parents, I was gifted with their unavailability.

I grew up unsupervised.

The world was mine to explore and I made up the rules as I went along. It turns out you can completely reimagine any life you long for. I did.

I once took a desert tour in Sedona, Arizona. The guide was pointing out various plants. He announced the most amazing thing I ever heard.

Not counting everyone from the church, who tried to save my soul while using their God to shame me, I never had anyone telling me I couldn’t do something. I was dauntless.

Fearlessness is the antidote to a broken childhood. Brave from birth, I always had the guts to attempt anything.

The power to overcome starts with a daydream. I was very very good at dreaming.

Here I am in 1st, 2nd, 4th, 6th and 7th grade. I’ve never been able to add the visual of me to the character in all of my adventures until this week. I know her very well and now I see what she looked like.

The older I got the more I was informed of the tragedy of my childhood. Knowing adults told me how broken our little family was and how disappointing and unfortunate my father’s drinking and my mother’s medical conditions were. Well meaning and true, it was delivered in a rational-linear-downtrodden-you’ll-never-become-anyone kind of way.

The truth is, the girl pictured above, had access to portals beyond time and space. That swearing little hellion had plans.

Being left alone to my adventures turned out to be my saving grace. All my solo treks down dirt roads, climbing Oklahoma Southern Red Oaks and fishing on isolated ponds without the watchful eye of a graceful guardian built a stronger and more resilient kind of species. I trusted my spirit.

It’s a gift to be wildly driven and befriended by nature. Unfettered by properness and expectation, I became an explorer who dwelled in the land of possibility.

There was definitely shame and disappointment but there was always the me I remembered…defiant, unruly, determined and running free in a field. Without any photos, I had captured the true essence of my higher self. It’s odd to have her staring back at me now.

I enjoy how each of us is on a unique journey. It’s a true superpower to capture the raving, exotic, expressive spirit of your childhood self.

For a scrap of time, I made so many big plans for my adult persona. I knew that someday I would live on my own, travel the world and have an apartment in a far away city. I’d shop in little boutiques and thrift stores, and sit on a river somewhere eating fancy sandwiches. I’d hang out in coffee shops, read amazing books and be somebody of my own making. I’d get a degree, have a career and start a family.

I did it all.

It’s so bizarre and wonderful to try to understand and make peace with memory, loss, grief, joy, courage and persistence as we make our way.

It’s a genuine honor to travel back to the soul that guided you forward, to the see the face that built your dreams and gave you purpose.

Seeing little Kim, she’s no stranger, but picturing her face attached to all my movies is a revelation.

I clearly looked in the mirror as a child…the vision looking back at me was a portal. She was a starburst to a far away land of bewilderment and awe. She wanted to take me there someday. We were a team. I simply got slightly side-tracked along the way. There she is, Kim Kyle, my navigational beacon.

My whole life I have loved the feeling of being a vessel-of-experience rather than any kind of documented and proclaimed success. Nonetheless, I had tracked down and mastered the prescribed indicators of overcoming my broken childhood. I had proven the naysayers wrong.

In some ways, I paid the price for all my eagerness to overcome.

In the worst of circumstances, I was on a voyage to a greater reckoning, one that made sense of the chaos I swam in and oddly enjoyed as a child. Now, I have a visual of this young girl, her voice is more clear than ever. She stares back at me lovingly. I find her to be beautiful and hopeful, which was exactly how she made me feel flying through Oklahoma prairie grass.

My younger self had so many reason to be broken and not believe in life.

She is one of the most hopeful brave soul I have ever known. She is the best part of who I am. Her voice now coupled with mine is as clear as it was on that summer day in 1978. She’s confident as she commands me forward…

I’ve realized I needed more of her and less of the expectations of what it meant to be successful.

Our trials create a sacred space, a capsule to teach us about yearning. If you don’t have a mentor, you become your own, a guide — Polaris in the night sky.

My educated self, pulled-up by my own self-determination, found me longing for the freedom and the spirited adventures of my childhood. More than anything, I have always longed for truth. You can overcome and become anyone with the right mind set, the catch is, you must be yourself. You can’t ever become someone you are not.

Understandably, I ended up in a world where nobody really knew me. There are no support systems in the land of line-walkers yearning for perfection. Everyone is too busy acting out their roles. I couldn’t walk a line if you put me in a brace and pulled me forward. And God knows I suck when you assign me a role—like the little pious girl who clutched her hands and prayed.

I tried for a very long time to fit in. It brought me grief.

Over the past several years I’ve been making my way home, and with perfect timing, my sister sends me the long lost image of soulful little Kim Kyle!

Look at her face. She is swearing to God. Like George Carlin on a rant, I like her a lot! I’m so inspired by her mischievous eyes—mostly because I see what’s going on behind them. I live for her strength and fearlessness. I honor our reunion.

Free, magnificent and mystical, she is the definition of grace. It turns out, the devil wears socks, while God is a snake coiled in the sun.