PS C:\> tar -xf I_Gave_Up_MP4_v1.zip
Application_Install.exe
A while back I deleted a song from every playlist I owned because it reminded me too much of something I lost. That is what I thought deleting was, a mercy, a way to stop the reminder before it could hurt me again. This week I danced to that same song for the first time since. The Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation carry a teaching called Mitakuye Oyasin, all my relations, the understanding that nothing in the universe exists in isolation, that everything is connected including the parts of us we would rather not look at. I had been treating my grief like a file I could permanently delete. Turns out grief does not work like software. It does not go away because you removed it from the folder, it just waits somewhere without a name. Carl Jung would say I had been managing my shadow instead of integrating it. Alan Watts would say I was white-knuckling a wheel that was never mine to steer. My last name, Helianthus, means Sunflower. I chose this because the sunflower always faces the sun. This week I stopped managing and started dancing, and giving that song back its place in my life felt less like reopening a wound and more like finally letting it speak.
That is the application. The rest is the source code.
Source_Code.txt
The open-source code below is free, for you to analyze, modify, and build your own application with.
> deleting was never the same as healing: rm_dash_rf_grief.sh
I deleted that song off every playlist I had. Not skipped it, not buried it three folders deep, deleted it completely, the way you delete something you never want to accidentally run into again. I told myself I was protecting my peace. What I was actually doing was building a very elaborate detour around a piece of my own life, one avoided place and one avoided song at a time, and calling the detour healing.
Mitakuye Oyasin, all my relations, is the Lakota understanding that everything is connected, not just people to people but people to memory, to grief, to the songs that carry both. Nothing exists off in its own isolated folder. You cannot actually delete a relation, you can only refuse to acknowledge it, and refusing to acknowledge something is not the same as it being gone. It just moves underground and waits.
> the current was always going to win: surrender_protocol.sh
I had been holding a current back with my bare hands, and a current does not care how strong your grip is. It does not negotiate. It does not wait for you to be ready. It just keeps moving, and eventually you either move with it or you exhaust yourself trying to stop it. Traditional Lakota grief practice does not ask people to hide their sorrow, it makes room for crying it, singing it, wailing it out loud in front of the people who love you. Grief was never meant to be a private deletion. It was meant to be witnessed.
This week I let go of some of that grip on purpose. I decided to face the sun. I went back to a song I had erased and a feeling I had been avoiding, and instead of drowning I fell into it, and falling turned into flying almost immediately, the way it does when you stop bracing for impact and let the fall become the flight. I did not plan for it to feel that easy. I expected a fight. I got a current that had been waiting for me the whole time, patient the way relations are patient.
> i let the song choreograph me instead: no_plan_required.mp4
Somewhere in the middle of dancing to a song I had spent months refusing to hear, I noticed I had stopped counting steps. I stopped thinking about what came next. My body just responded, honestly, which is a strange thing to feel in public and an even stranger thing to feel good about. Jung would call this the shadow finally getting a hearing instead of a lock and key. The parts of myself I kept managing and hiding were never actually gone, they were just waiting for me to stop performing long enough to integrate them.
There is something almost funny about how much energy it takes to avoid a feeling compared to how little it takes to just feel it. I spent months managing my distance from one song, building an entire architecture of avoidance around four minutes of music. One dance undid most of that. Not because the grief left, but because I stopped treating it like an intruder and gave it back its seat at the table, the way you would welcome a relation home instead of turning them away at the door.
> the bISON taught me before i knew its name: horns_forward.sh
Before any of this, I learned that the bison does not run from a storm. It turns and charges straight into it, head down, horns forward, because moving through is faster than trying to outrun something that covers the whole sky anyway. I had been living that principle for years before I ever knew its name, charging into the hard conversations, the hard rooms, the hard truths about myself, because the alternative was staying lost in the storm longer than I had to.
When I found out that principle had a name in Lakota, Tatanka, I did not just start using the word. I wrote to a woman named Bunny Sings Wolf Engberg, an Ambassador of the Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation, and I asked her plainly whether I had any right to carry it. I did not want my reverence for a teaching to stand in for permission to use it. She wrote back with more grace than I had any reason to expect, and told me the teaching walked toward you, that I had not taken it, it had found me because I was already living it and giving it away freely to people who needed it. She reminded me that bridge-builders are exactly what this world needs, and asked only that I always tell people where the wisdom comes from. So I am telling you now. This teaching is Lakota. It is sacred. It was given to me, not claimed by me, and I carry it with her name attached to it out of respect, not decoration.
> what i am building now walks beside people, not ahead of them: peer_protocol_v2.cfg
I have spent years doing peer support the way I know how, freely, quietly, sitting next to people in their storms instead of pretending I have a map through them. Lately that has started turning into something more intentional, a way of formally carrying the spirit of Tatanka into the rooms and communities I already belong to, veterans, people in recovery, people relearning how to trust their own bodies after addiction or trauma has taught them not to. I am not ready to put a full name on it yet, but I can tell you the shape of it. It will not ask anyone to run from their storm. It will teach them to turn and walk into it, the way the bison does, the way I have been doing since long before I had a word for it.
More on that is coming. For now I just wanted you to know it exists, and that when it arrives, it will carry the name of the people who taught it to me honestly, out loud, every time.
> falling and flying were never two different things: same_motion.exe
Alan Watts called it the backwards law, the harder you grab for security the faster it slips through your hands. I used to think losing control would feel like failure. Turns out it feels like relief, once you stop calling it losing. The fall and the flight are the same motion, they always were, the only thing that changes is whether you are fighting gravity or trusting it. I was fighting it for a long time, one deleted song and one avoided place at a time. I am done fighting it now.
So here is the headline you did not see coming when you clicked on this post. I gave up. I gave up the grip, the deletion, the detours, the performance of having it all figured out. I gave grief its voice back instead of its exit file. That is the whole announcement, and Mitakuye Oyasin, it turns out that giving up was never really losing anything, it was just finally letting all my relations back in.