McAllistar Counseling

07/31/2025

lol

06/12/2025

02/04/2025

Consequences are related reasonable and respectful.

Avoiding people who don’t honor boundaries is called a natural consequence 😘

05/06/2024

Each come to teach. Get the lesson. Curate the love. Set boundaries when needed. Love and boundaries work together.
If you can love than be respectful

Embracing gratitude for the presence and teachings of family members fosters peace within, dispelling any non-peaceful states.

05/06/2024

Sing, sing loud and long. Open your heart. You exist in this incredible moment. Sing your song

the next time
you refuse to sing
because you’ll never
fill a stadium
or decline the joy of dance
for fear of looking
ridiculous
or you resist risking
the new adventure
because you’re
not entirely ready or
you dim your shine
because you’re not
completely healed and whole

the next time
you hold yourself suspect
because you’re not
entirely qualified

just remember

a bird doesn’t sing
because it’s talented
a bird sings because
it has a song

the moon doesn’t only shine
when it’s whole
it can show up with
a single sliver of itself
and still light an entire
night sky

show up. sing. shine.
the world needs you
as you are.

~ Angi Sullins : www.AngiSullins.com

[Image: Lizzie Riches]

05/06/2024

Grief is a part of love and life and loss and cost of being a sentient being

We have forgotten how to grieve. Our animal kin are constantly teaching us, if we would just pay attention.

"A magnificent killer whale named Tahlequah
gave birth and caught the world’s attention.
Her calf died only thirty minutes after being born, each of those blessed minutes a sacrament to the progeny of love.
But the real reason journalists and photographers and millions of viewers followed this mother’s story, was her willingness to grieve unbidden, to become a thing utterly governed by kinship.
After a year and a half of growing this enormous life inside of her belly, and the immense feat of labor, and a half an hour of looking into one another’s eyes, Tahlequah proceeded to carry her dead baby on the tip of her nose for seventeen days, traveling more than a thousand miles all throughout the Salish Sea.
And some people think that grief is not
inexplicably beautiful. But perhaps it’s because those people (who are us people) no longer see grieving enacted publicly as a plea for sanity, as a way of feeding that which grants us life.
There was no real grieving at my mother’s funeral––
sniffling and shoving tears back up into our eyes, yes, but no keening. No collapsing into the bottomless cavern of one another’s trembling arms, no crying out into the insufferable heat of that late-summer day, and certainly no carrying my mom’s dead body as a holy procession all throughout the places she ever knew and loved.
So I continued to carry her mostly on my own.
I wailed in the privacy of my own home long after the funeral was over, with only the hurting eyes of my husband to behold me––a kind of holding that was never meant to be done alone.
I imagine that if killer whales were not endangered, Tahlequah would have swam those seventeen days with a grand procession of many other glistening, black and white giants all across the ocean.
Or perhaps she swam for one thousand miles
to personify the loneliness of her grief in a world spiraling toward oblivion.
And our savagery for not swimming alongside her; for taking pictures, for watching her exquisite ceremony on our little screens as if it were pure entertainment, as if that couldn’t be any one of us, carrying our dead children out into the dark and emptied streets."

From ‘The Progeny of Love' by April Tierney, Artwork by Lori Christopher 🐋
Story & Image: David Attenborough Fans.

Via Hermanus Whales

02/16/2024

To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.

But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.

~ Heidi Priebe

[Art: Lucy Campbell]

01/01/2024

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I’m not for a moment,
expecting this to occur,
for that is not possible,
a year must be all things.

Happiness must come and go,
like the tides and the winds,
just as sadness,
and all the emotions in between.

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I’m really wishing you,
a baseline of peace,
of gratitude.

Because if you can sit with these things,
for the most part,
happiness will thrive,
when it does arrive,
and sadness will know its place in the mix.

If you can nourish these things,
daily,
you will also grow hope,
for it flourishes in such soil.

And hope is the key,
to this enigmatic state
of ‘happiness’ we seek.

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I’m really wishing you more happy days,
than sad days,
more joy than misery,
more laughter than tears…
and the wisdom to accept,
that they all belong.

Happy new year, my friends.
Happy new year.

~ Donna Ashworth

[Art: Kinuko Y. Craft]