Posted on by d

On letting go of extraordinary ambition

The feeling of it is indescribable.

In a place like the one where I am now, it’s very easy to get caught up in the dreams of others, tossed into a pot of brilliance as we all are.

I remembered though, recently, that my walk is my own; I don’t have an entire life ahead of me anymore, just half of one, probably. My life already reads as a list of grand adventures and minor accomplishments, and I have little desire to let go of some of the things I had before immersing myself in academia: a garden, a wildness, time to create and enough of an income to provide for my daughter and pay for a pleasurable life lived within our means.

I’d felt isolated, but now I know why. The separation was only painful because I was unwilling to accept the truth: I am different, I am in a different place in my life, I believe that knowledge is power, I’m already good at what I do and being able to study and network with top-notch professionals is an icing on the cake. And I know exactly where the few people I can count on here are. This is literally all that matters right now.

I came here with much more noble ideas. I am finishing my stay with the realization that I am at a zenith. It’s time to reflect.

It’s a story that was told to me many years ago, but I only chose to remember half of it. I would eventually come to this place. I would eventually have things to accept. I would have to come to terms with what I’ve always known: regardless of how loudly I shout, I’m more effective when people don’t know who it is that’s yelling.

I will relax into doing something for sheer joy, with the knowledge that my choice to do so is a radical act in and of itself. It doesn’t require age to earn the privilege of pleasure or creative expression. Anyone who’s been doing the hard work of trying to make the world a better place deserves to settle into the goodness of a present, and we deserve to have the time to create that space if it’s not already there.

I don’t need to be a hero, I just need to live, to show my daughter how it’s done, to make sure she and others have the space they need to be joy.

Posted on by d

These eyes.

A riot of color welcomed me, and a quiet cacophony of hummingbirds and bees, butterflies, other little things come to get drunk on flower sperm and help keep the vibe alive. I was there to see it for her, to relieve some of the pressure of maintaining a garden, of dealing with glaucoma, of not being able to see the finer details anymore. 

She was something of a hedge witch though. She knew where she’d planted things, could still see when the deer had helped themselves to the boneset, knew when it was time to prune so plants had more energy to regenerate. She had me wage war on the anemones, the beautiful white flowers that built networks just under the surface of the soil and spread like a California wildfire. This war, this endless war, had me returning each week to listen to the sounds of the wind in the poplars, to uncover beetle nests with delight, to run to her like a child because I’d found the first monarch caterpillar of the season and it was eating something other than milkweed.

What was this plant, I wondered? She held it close and then far, then sniffed at it, closing the worse of her two eyes in hopes of catching a clearer glimpse.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” 

I was on the clock, so sharing wonder was as far as I could digress. I’d left my phone in the car, the one with the plant ID app. She would have been a bit disgusted, I think, had I consulted it first, a bit angry with everything, the kids these days, kids being relative since there I stood at nearly fifty, wide-eyed with wonder at a caterpillar, holding it out to my 74-year-old friend.

I was still young, to her. Though mine, too, were beginning their decline, I could still be her eyes, so I needed to be good at it. I pinched a sprig and put it between the pages of a book, the book I’m reading, the book I can read. I would look it up later, come up with a way to tell her how I found my way to it. 

She was already losing so much magick, so much magick. I hoped that after I left, she sat and looked at the shapes I’d created as I cleaned up the beds and gave the plants room to breathe. I hoped that she sat there and listened to the music—the wind in the poplars, all the sweet pollinators who’d come to her oasis, the offering her garden gave her in exchange for the love she gave it, for the love that I, through proxy, now continued.

Posted on by d

fire cycle fire

Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Unsplash | sanguine meander

so many thoughts passing through so quickly i’ve forgotten them, having been driven to the present cyclically.

it started with thoughts on how much i enjoy cannabis and a practice often referred to as ‘restorative yoga’ – a deep state deep stretch that realigns my spine in such an organized, methodical way. it’s an ecstatic process of feeling myself from a multitude of perspectives that all boil down to, essentially, three. the mind starts to run and oh yeah, relax your hip and you’ll literally lower down three inches and focus on the breath, bam, you’re back. do that again. but also, feel free to groan because that stretch is so deep it’s like the hand of God digging deep into your glutes and all around your hip sockets…

i mean, for me it is. fuck yeah feel the self-love. can you blame me for loving it this way? feel free to moan. in the end no matter what kind of moan it is, it is the depth of human feeling. i think it all goes to the same place, that deep well of emotion we are, most of us, so capable of. No fantasies of who we are once we’ve all wormholed our way together through a vast array of the dimensions and expressions we are capable of, perhaps even believing at some point that we’ve finally seen it all – and it’s only then that we stop falling, but we also die.

In these deep centrally connective spaces on my body i hold these visions, some of which are true and some of which need a little more space before they can be released, so they can be let out completely, leaving not even a hair behind. gone. full mobility has returned along with ecstatic release.

i spray the room with magic to clear all that has been let go, to bless and send it further on its journey. may it glide its way out the window and fall to the ground. may its decomposition fertilize soil and create space for new growth, new experiences and new ideas.

clearly, i will also bleed soon. i will feed this land.

 

 

 

Posted on by d

that one and this

i felt in her a kindred spirit, one who needed both a buffer from the world and space to observe it.

what kind of love was this, however, in which trust allowed for full creative expression? it was not what i felt i had. it would be the death of us, i was sure, the day i truly came alive again.

some things are worth the suffering. i needed to return to the world and expand again in it. both of us were innocents. we had empty toolboxes.

it’s okay. there is loss there, but loss is okay. there are gifts in it and i welcome gifts. for weeks though, i questioned what kind of person i might be: i was feeling expansive and social and willing to let my guard down and have energetic exchanges. i wanted to know where my grief was. I know better now, though, that really, it depends on the archetype. There are four of these who accompany me on my moon cycle, and I embody one at a time.

Fun stuff, being a woman. We are shapeshifters.

This is an interesting exercise, of once again dedicating focus on my cycle this way while I simultaneously experience deep loss and major transformation, both of which I  welcome as co-pilots on this new journey. Take me where I need to go but if I may be so bold, let’s all put effort into a gentle landing. This is the inward time, where I harvest, and likely my grief is here, waiting for me to take her in and acknowledge her presence. I still do not know but I don’t judge myself for it anymore either, and I no longer worry. We will see each other when we do.

 

 

 

Posted on by d

where the roots of it lie

i decided to mess with her head this afternoon. i’m not a violent person, she was telling me, but someone had made her very angry. blew the top right off of her.

but i didn’t punch her, she said. i could have, but i didn’t. i’m not a violent person.

we were sitting by the river and i was high and so was she, and she’s savant-smart so i went for it to see if we might be able to talk philosophy and so i said yeah, there are people i have wanted to punch too but i didn’t do it, but i still thought about it. so what is it that makes a person truly nonviolent? is it when you simply don’t think of punching someone anymore when they drive you to rage, or is it the choice you make not to act on impulse or to indulge that rage? the latter would suggest that violence and rage are innate, instinctual things that had a point when our amygdala served more of an upfront purpose.

If the latter is the case, then more than likely some of this fear is imprinted in our genetic expressions, our limbic systems, and originating from a scarcity fear that turned us from peaceful garden dwellers in fig leaves to the warring, post-Saharasian tribes that may have given us our first real, violent inclinations. it’s one theory, anyway.

i liken this particular question to that of freedom versus determinism. i find great comfort in determinism, of course. it gives me purpose and meaning to look for and stay focused on. i am here with a purpose and that purpose is… bam. done, kinda. i will just go and do that.

freedom seems terrifying in comparison, like the difference of being in a lush and comforting forest versus facing a great wide open plain. it is easy to see which i prefer – the forest is as a womb to me. the field has nothing to hold up the sky and is too full of too much possibility. and again, i’m likely operating from my amygdala. i’ve done a lot of work the past several years on rewiring some things around that, but at one point in our evolution, we shifted to bipedalism so we could see over the grass and better keep ourselves fed and out of danger, so… it’s in there, that fear of the hunted, and it’s more about collective species damage than individual trauma (add that to our united misfortune, though, and that person suffers even more than most. they are always watched). It might do me some good to channel the raptor, to fly over the plains searching for prey, but i am not really interested in hunting anything, and I do not want to kill.

what i want is trust, strength and indulgence and a consciousness that has a very sharp eye. i ask myself what it is that i want from other people. the next step is to cultivate those things in myself.

when i remember to do this, i’m forced to be honest about what it really is that i want from others and what is mine to fill. what comes next then, are those joys that can only be shared through conscious communication with others, endeavored and indulged in with a much higher level of clarity, sincerity, and courage. and maybe some dirty words (actually yeah, definitely some of those. i’m a fan of spoken word).

oh, courage. one sometimes needs so much of it to be vulnerable. shame is maybe the biggest curse to befall us; it cuts us off from joy and catharsis and the sloppy wet sounds of life. we lose out on the answers to questions we don’t ask.