by Jewel
to allow me to remain whole
inside
so that I may now
stand above the burial
of my dead ego
oh the sorrow!
how I cry!
before I lose myself
in the sorrow of her cooling outline
I force my head
back to the horizon
to the task at hand
and get about the work
of rewriting
redrafting
rebuilding
no editing
no shame
no apologies
permission granted
as I create myself
with every color
this time
I need not be just one
whole.
human.
afterword
What is in this book took me forty years to learn. My hope is that anyone in need who reads this might be helped by witnessing what I have gone through. Looking back, I can see the lessons that have been critical to my success and resilience, and if they can help you to get where you are going in less time and with less pain than it took me, then this book will have been worth writing.
Hard wood grows slowly. Be thoughtful about the shape you want to grow into, and be mindful that there is no shortcut to strength and character. Have the patience to allow yourself and your goals to develop.
You can’t outrun your pain. You are strong enough to face whatever is in front of you. Medicating your pain will only bring more pain. The only genuine shortcut life offers is facing your feelings. They won’t kill you. Feelings are your soul’s way of communicating. Pain is trying to teach you something, and if you don’t listen now, it will speak louder and louder until it is heard.
Emotional English. What emotional language were you raised with in your home? Volatile? Avoidant? Passive? Abusive? Loving? If there were dynamics you feel did not serve you, identify what new language you wish to speak in the family of your making, with your own husband, wife, child, or friend. Make a plan to learn it that you can execute. Spend time with those whose Emotional English you admire, or talk with a life coach or therapist to help learn to avoid repeating the cycles that have been handed down through generations. It can end and begin with you.
Spend time in silence. Take time to get to know yourself and your genius in stillness. This also lets your soul speak. Its voice is quiet and you must choose to turn an ear to it. Any endeavor in your life, be it creative, business, or personal, will benefit from spending time alone and exploring your own thoughts, ideas, and dreams.
Access your Greater Intelligence. Your mind is a wonderful tool, but it is not all that we are. Get out from under your critical thoughts. Practice meditation or prolonged prayer. Sit in nature or write. Do things that help quiet the circular thoughts of your mind and that allow you to gain the greater understanding and acceptance that is available beyond what your mind offers. This can foster inspiration. A eureka moment. A flash of insight that comes from beyond what your education or experience make you capable of. You are experiencing your whole self when your body has a calm feeling, rather than an anxious energy.
Establish a gratitude practice. Gratitude is incredibly healing because our reality becomes what we perceive. See not just what is going wrong in your life, but actively engage in and acknowledge what is right. Let it wash over your being and fill your heart with the calming peace of gratitude.
Flip the switch and retrain your brain. Identify negative thought patterns and learn to starve them. Don’t indulge in fear, worry, jealousy, anger, resentment, lies, or inferiority. I have found it best to start with just one idea you want to replace at a time. Establish and feed positive thought patterns. Joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth. Create a light switch in your mind. When you have a disruptive or damaging thought, intervene by flipping the switch and replace it with a thought that is in line with your true goals and values. Repeat the thoughts you wish to have often enough until the habit creates its own momentum, forming new neural pathways. With time the habitual effect becomes second nature, and you become a much more positive person who is able to create change in the moment.
Find the antidote. If you are consumed by self-doubting or self-loathing internal voices, ask yourself what the opposite of those thoughts are. If you are afraid you are not capable of something, intervene each time you think that, and replace it with the new thought: I am capable. Do it again and again until you feel your anxiety lessen. With time and practice, the anxiety will subside altogether.
Create a home for happiness. Happiness is not a perpetual state. It has an ebb and flow, but it can be encouraged. Do things that lend themselves to the happiness you desire. Exercise. Eat well. Do something that makes you feel joy, even when you don’t feel like it. Surround yourself with people you admire and who add substance to your life. Soon peace and satisfaction come as your life creates a discipline that is the reward for living thoughtfully.
Practice being present. “Being here now” is the only chance we have to make new choices. Fear-based thoughts cause us to live in a past that we project onto the future, robbing us of being awake in the only moment that exists for us to create change within. Observation causes us to suspend judgment so we can use our senses fully. It forces us to be present. Begin with small steps, like noticing each time your feet hit the ground in the morning. Extend your mindfulness to noticing the feel of each footstep as you walk up a flight of stairs. Watch your hands. They are the servants of your thoughts. Count how many times they greet someone or wave hello.
Being a witness to your behavior is the first step in meaningful change. This allows us to be present without judgment. This is critical because I have learned that when I judge myself harshly, I am not able to see the truth about myself. But when I witness myself with love, without judgment, it allows me to identify patterns that might be less than desirable. We cannot change what we are unwilling to see. If you can witness your behavior, that means you are something other than your behavior. In seeing your behavior, there is hope of change in the future.
Brilliant resilience. Identify the natural gifts or beliefs that served you as a child but that may now be creating limits to experiencing intimacy and joy. Does the loyalty that once served you now keep you beholden to others? Does the competitive spirit that helped you rise to great heights now keep you from connecting? Has the natural independence that once helped you to leave a bad situation now caused a stumbling block when it comes to true intimacy and trusting someone to help you? Look for areas you feel blocked and meditate on them. Ask yourself whether they started out as instincts that worked for your well-being or survival but now may feel stiff and hold you back. Learn to let them go.
Believe in the law of enough. Don’t accept the fear that that scarcity exists in any corner of your life. There is enough love, enough time, enough healing to go around. Give what you wish to receive.
Let go of what does not serve you. Make a commitment to choose happiness over anger, love over pain. Let go of hurt and resentment. Let go of what weighs you down and keeps you from ascending to the height you choose. The cup is half full and half empty simultaneously. Your reality will be defined by which you choose.
A soul cannot be broken. It is not a teacup. If you have suffered abuse of any kind, know that perfection exists untarnished within you. You need not fix yourself so much as exhume it. Engage in a loving archaeological dig back to yourself. Let all that is not yours within you fall away until only your real nature remains. You are trusting. You are loving. You are worthy. Your innocence is not lost when you are hurt, but converted into wisdom.
Be an Every Day Angel. Nothing saves us from our own misery like community service or helping a friend. Be less self-centered by thinking. Give to charity, donate time, learn about how other people live. Your self-esteem will be g
enuinely bolstered as you give to others, and it will also help bring gratitude to your heart, as it will inevitably remind you of how much you have to be grateful for.
Embrace imperfection. Life is a journey and there is no destination. There is nothing static to life. Employing rigid standards inhibits growth and makes you unhappy. Remove the armor that weighs you down and cuts you off from your joy. Instead, learn where safety exists for you, in the process of accepting yourself and others as they are right now. Be brave—be more open, more yielding, more transparent.
Give internal permission. To be the kind of person you want to be and live the kind of life you want, the only person you need permission from is you. No one is standing in your way but you. Give yourself permission to be as radical as you need to live the life you want. Be bold in all the parts of your being. Be as silly, serious, seductive, or spiritual as you want in any given moment—or all at once! Invite your whole self to the table. The hurt child, the brave, the shy. Don’t let shame, fear, or doubt cause you to self-edit in an effort to find approval in any other person. When you give yourself permission to be the sum of all your parts, you will be amazed to find that others do as well. You don’t need anyone’s permission to be exactly who you want to be.
Stay sensitive. By numbing pain you also numb your ability to experience joy. If someone or something has hurt you, don’t be hurt twice by choosing to limit your ability to ever experience trust or joy again. Being vulnerable in the world may cause you to feel pain, but you are strong and can let it pass. It will not defeat you. Let your emotions do what they are best at: communicating how safe, happy, and fulfilled you are in your life. If you cut yourself off from your feelings, your soul has no feedback system, and you will be deprived of that deeper sense of satisfaction and purpose every day.
Let go of shame. Shame does nothing but drown us in that which we wish to be free from. Communication is the antithesis of shame. Give your worst fears a voice—speak out loud your deepest, most shameful thoughts. None of us have a secret shame that others don’t share in the world. Find out that you are deserving of love despite your flaws. Find a notebook or a loving friend to be truly seen by. We cannot change what we are unwilling to bring into the light of day.
What’s simple is true. We are so busy looking for and working toward the things that will make us happy that we blow right by our actual happiness, thinking surely it must be more complicated. But often the things that make us truly happy are much simpler: sitting quietly under a tree. Being present with your child while you read a book to them. Living in a smaller home, perhaps, so you can work less and have more quality time with your family. Doing fewer “enrichment” activities so that you and your children can experience the joy of play. Peace and patience are learned by practicing.
Choose love. You can boil down all interactions to two categories: ones that grow love and ones that diminish it. Choose love. Do not choose how to behave based on who is in front of you. Choose because it is a value you hold in high esteem and because it is how you want to experience your own life. Choose love.
If you want to be a warrior for change and mindfulness, visit my website, Jeweljk.com, where I break down each of my guiding principles into simple challenges you can apply to your own life. We are never broken. Join the community.
My grandfather Yule, photographed by my grandmother Ruth. (Courtesy Kilcher Family Trust)
My grandmother Ruth and Yule. I look a lot like her. (Courtesy Kilcher Family Trust)
Ruth, holding Sunrise, and Yule with (left to right) Fay; my dad, Atz; Wurtilla; and Mairiis (who we call Mossy). (Courtesy Kilcher Family Trust)
Ruth and Yule, the poet and the philosopher, both cut from the same pioneering fabric. (© William Wakeland, Courtesy Kilcher Family Trust)
My dad, Atz, and his sister Fay. (Courtesy Kilcher Family Trust)
My mother, Nedra, at about age seventeen.
My dad’s portrait from the army, age twenty.
Me, at the piano early. I didn’t get the hang of playing instruments until much later, but it didn’t keep me from trying.
My parents.
Top to bottom:
Atz Lee,
Shane,
Dad,
and me.
Shane, Dad, Atz Lee, and me. Yule is standing in the doorway, playing a homestead flute, which he made from various materials.
Shane, me, and Atz Lee.
One of my early performances in my Swiss yodeling outfit with Dad.
Rehearsing, with Dad at my right, at a friend’s house in Anchorage.
At about age twelve I loved to escape by myself and ride in solitude, here with my aunt Mossy’s horse named Enchantress and her foal, Souldance. (© Mairiis Kilcher)
With Dad, playing the cafeteria at University of Anchorage when he was a student there.
Even after I got my driver’s license, my horse Clearwater was my trusty form of transportation. (© Mairiis Kilcher)
Performing at the Inner Change in 1993, where I was discovered and, more important, where I found the love and support of fans who are with me to this day.
Steve Poltz and I were inadvertently part of a drug bust in Mexico, in 1993. We’d made the trip to do some songwriting, crashed in an abandoned house overnight, and tagged along with some federales to go whale watching on their skiff. We found drug smugglers instead—after a high-speed chase on the Bahia de Gonzaga, they led us to their enormous stash of marijuana, which we hauled back to the camp and loaded in a government vehicle, pictured behind us.
Performing at the Inner Change after I was signed, July 1994.
Making my first album at Neil Young’s ranch in Northern California.
In Neil’s studio with bass player Tim Drummond.
Drummer Kenny Buttrey, Steve Poltz, and me in Neil’s studio.
Making the video for “Who Will Save Your Soul.” Director Geoff Moore is behind me as we shoot in the women’s bathroom at City Hall in Los Angeles, March 1995.
With Sean Penn in Venice for the festival premiere of The Crossing Guard, 1995.
With Jack Nicholson at the Venice Film Festival.
Me, in costume as Dorothy. I was the one relative unknown in an all-star performance of The Wizard of Oz at Lincoln Center, November 1995. (© Photofest, Inc.)
I opened for Johnny and June Carter Cash at The Royal Albert Hall in London, in April 1997. Backstage, with the legend himself. Little did I know I’d get to play June in a movie about her life years later. (© West Kennerly)
With my friend Lee Greene, who I met when I was fifteen and who is still my dearest friend today, on the set of Ride with the Devil, 1999.
Going back to Interlochen to perform, 2002. The power went out, so I just sat and talked to the crowd. (© West Kennerly)
Performing at the Coors Theater in San Diego, for a much bigger crowd . . . (© West Kennerly)
Performing with my dad in Alaska in 2008. (© Joe Hardwick)
Showing off my roping skills during a cattle branding in Texas.
Visiting the homestead in 2008. I’m standing on the hill where as a child I would sit beneath the Pegas Tree to daydream. (© Joe Hardwick)
With Ty. (© Joe Hardwick)
My dad and me. (© Joe Hardwick)
A Kilcher family reunion, including a few Murrays, 2008. (© Joe Hardwick)
My beautiful son, Kase. (© West Kennerly)
Performing at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 2013. (© Chris Owyoung)
I tell my son, Kase, that my first job is to be his mom, and my second job is to be a singer. (© Chris Owyoung)
My first job is my favorite.
Recording a song that I wrote called “My Father’s Daughter” with Dolly Parton in Nashville. Kase was impressed. (© Philip Macias)
Lee and Kase making a new friend, on the ranch in Texas.<
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With Kase and my old friend Lee, who has become part of our family.
acknowledgments
I’d like to thank my editor, Sarah Hochman, for her patience and unflagging help while I learned the ropes of long-form writing. Thank you to Virginia Davis, Lee Greene, Alan Bershaw, West Kennerly, and Eric Greenspan for your support over the years. Thank you to everyone at Blue Rider Press and Penguin Random House who had a hand in publishing this book. I thank all those who have helped me on my path, and also those who stood in my way. I know my strength and worth through you all. I thank my son for inspiring me to be the kind of woman I want him to know.
credits
Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint the following material: