This I Believe, 2020

To The Beloved Artful Conductor of Moments in Whom I Dwell:

You don't have to do anything with this letter. You are living a human life, which is a slow descent into something perfect, and so the descent itself is perfect. Relax into the frantic awareness of imperfection, this frantic awareness is itself of the perfectness! If you're reading this to know what to do next, know that you're already perfectly broken like you always will be. The illusion of brokenness is a function of expectation, which is always changing.

Your attention to this point in your life has been experiencing what I will call samsara, an endless wandering through all of creation, which you call The Valley, the intersectional shoreline of Void (the darkness) and Source (the light). For you, samsara is the unceasing awareness enraptured by unceasing change at the moment where light meets the dark.

You are here, re-reading this letter because you want to find the places along the way through the valley to your healing in preparation for the next breaking. Trust that, as you move, you will ALWAYS pass through a point of balance, and away, and back again. The departure teaches you how to recognize the arrival.

I want you to play and create and hold and be held. I am the sage who reads your journal and listens to your audio memos and sees that all of this life you have is precious and I really truly care about you as you already are, today, in this very minute, as you breathe this next breath. I invite you to breathe deeply, which means, of course, you can refuse the invitation and still be just as whole.

Today you are reading this just to watch yourself move, you are here to do The Work. I know you want to see The Work differently. The nature of the work you are engaged in right now is to see beyond what you are conditioned to believe, for the purpose of being yourself. 

You want to disrupt rhythms and patterns and notice what brings you back into the patterns, so you can choose whether or not to engage in the patterns, so you can choose to leave and choose to stay. Watch yourself move in and out. Just watch. Listen.

This is the garden where your future self sprouts. What are we growing here?

Stories

So I write to you this respite for your attention from a trusted source. You are skeptical if this will make any difference because you have experienced the flatness of Words. Words, as in the things made of letters, are flat on their own. Gongs in the void, but they are painting and directing attention, which paints experience. Experience has dimensionality. Your experience is what has dimension, and the telling (remembering) of your experience is the story. Words are the blankets in which stories are swaddled.

Stories are like clothes. They are not YOU, and you feel very exposed without them. There are times to wear clothes, and times to be naked! Every story is a shirt, a sock, a pant leg, each of them have textures and colors and prints and qualities made up by the stuff of this Earth. These clothes, these stories can be made by you and made by others. Some clothes you inherit. Some clothes you give away. You get to choose how much power to give yourself in choosing your own outfit. Some outfits are a disguise, an expression, a uniform, a poem. Different outfits change how you view yourself and how others see you. How others see you does affect how they treat you, but how they see you is a function of how they see themselves, not a function of what you are wearing. This letter is a garment you are weaving for yourself. You can put it on. You can take it off. 

Awareness

Remember you can choose to stop reading this at any time. Your choice to read this is an active choice, surrounded by motivations and beliefs, your choice to read this is in relationship with your choice of what clothes to wear, what stories to inhabit. You mostly believe your awareness is bigger than any experience you can have. You carry a small doubt about the vastness of your awareness, but you also doubt that doubt. You believe one day you will live in full belief that your awareness is bigger than any experience you can have, and this embodiment of full awareness is what you mean when you use the word freedom.

Freedom, the epiphany that your awareness is bigger than any experience. So long as you believe in an experience bigger than awareness, you are not free, you are in service to fear of this unimaginably enormous experience, which you yourself are imagining. The experience of imagining an experience is itself an experience. The experience of imagining, of visioning, is only a product of your decision to rest your awareness. Your awareness is bigger than the imagined experience. At some point, you forgot you have chosen to agree to pay attention to the imagined experience. You are immersed in the show.

Experiences have a felt sense which lives in your body. Experiences live there as a memory in your body, which words and so also stories can reignite, or "trigger". For instance, you've experienced a queasiness which was in sync with your awareness, you recognized the resonance between the queasiness and your attention, and as your attention shifted, so also did the queasiness. This lesson of watching your awareness and your experience move at the same time was profound for you. What's possible is a dance between your awareness and your experience. Your experience calls for the movement of your awareness, and your awareness can invoke a change in experience.

Marking this experience with sounds, letters, words, stories, naming it, is a method to leave waypoints and monuments as your awareness wanders through the vast stimuli of your whole body and mind. Your memories and your felt experience are both the same, both are experienced in the present moment. Monuments and markers create space for recognition of patterns, which is what changes patterns. I'll say that again, recognition of patterns changes patterns. The awareness is what recognizes patterns.

You are developing a map of the nonphysical stimuli within view and reach of your awareness. You are orienting in a landscape which you believe simply rests on the physical plane while also extending beyond. This letter is a map of this plane, which you also call The Valley.

Belief

You are beginning to pick up the pen which is scribing out this new story, weaving a new garment. You recognize there is a playfulness to this pen, its ink is of the light which is You, which is Your Awareness. You use the word "journey" as a name for this story, which is the felt experience of walking through this valley with a small lantern in your hand, which you call your "present awareness". You are beginning to recognize this lantern is also the tip of a pen. It shows you both what is in this nonphysical place, and also authors your understanding of what the nonphysical place is composed of. 

This journey is a story of awareness of pain, pinpointed in your body from movement of awareness can indicate a boundary, limit, obstacle of another realm. That navigating memories, stories, and beliefs is analogous to walking around a physical place. You sometimes feel like you're swinging your "awareness" limbs into walls that your eyes can't see. You call this place The Valley.

You fear The Valley's vastness in the dark, even though you are so touched by some parts of The Valley your lantern has revealed to you. The Valley's darkness embodies the fear of the unknown, and the unknown is uncontrollable because it is not predictable because it is not known. You believe the valley is real and vast, even though all you can see is what light returns to you from your lantern. You have named the dark night sky above the Valley "The Void", which is beyond even what your awareness will ever encounter, or even imagine.

You believe The Valley is made up of stuff from The Source of All Things, and is only experienced through Awareness. You believe that Source is pure light. You believe that The Valley is where Source meets Void. 

You like to flit between imagining The Valley is always there, and The Valley is only ever what you see. For instance, perhaps the past is real and has happened, and exists behind you as you walk, or perhaps the past does not exist except as a Present experience of memory. Both feel true to you and that tickles you to watch everything change as you adjust the focus of your attention. The experience is kaleidoscopic. 

In addition to the fear of the valley is a belief in another presence which you call by the name of God, YHWH, Love, Christ. You have a wonderfully woven quilt of this presence, and particulars aside, this presence is a guide who knows you and loves you and Calls You Deeper into the Valley. This Presence is the Energy which is the light which is You.

There is a quiet despair felt in your gut, in you throat, behind your throat, and on your head as you are called to step into the dark, when you imagine the valley is already there, and is unknown to you. This feeling softens when you believe you have Space. You have created an experience of Space by allotting yourself time to experience a low sense of consequence, in your bedroom, for instance, reading and writing without any sense of time.

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In crafting Space, you are trying to embody what you call your "most full self", your "authentic self", your "organic self". You believe this self is known and seen by your guide through The Valley. You are listening to this guide in pursuit of what They see in you. By identifying this desire, you are simultaneously separating yourself from this Truth in this moment, which is already you, and also creating a path to walk. You love this path, you are choosing this path every day.

It is as if you have forgotten who you are, and in forgetting, you have given yourself the gift of the Grand Adventure of finding Yourself again.

(Please know that the most integral part of your wholeness is the felt sense of unfulfilledness. You are beginning to realize the experience of incompleteness is the essence of your wholeness.)

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Mindfulness

Over the last couple of years, you have been entering relationship with the word "mindfulness", which has slowed or expanded your awareness to notice more nuanced Truths of yourself than you were taught to believe by those parents, teachers, neighbors, relatives, and friends who raised you. This mindfulness is like a fulcrum on a lever-arm for conscious, intentional transformation. The act of mindfulness is like listening to a garden asking for what it needs to grow.

One example is how you noticed that you made a decision to broadcast your shallow breaths, this is a translation to those around you (including yourself) that your nervous system has tightened up and is breathing shallow, a heady, reactive, cognitive state. How you interpret these breaths and how others interpret these breaths are always different. Every person uses their language to convey meanings. The words themselves are flat, the experiences and conveyance of meaning are vast and vibrant. The noticing and interpreting of felt experience, whether internal or external, is an act of translation.

Relationship - Language - Translation

You don't know if translating your experience is as important as being with your experience. How do you discern when to translate and when to be with any particular experience? For instance, there are different conversation patterns (look up "High Participatory/ High Considerate" communication styles). Imagine the whole country is talking to each other in different patterns without pausing to calibrate, and instead assumes what is intended by each word. 

You want to move forward with the understanding of differing conversational patterns by following your curiosity in new relationships and playing with your conversational patterns in your own relationships. Differing patterns make differing assumptions for how to translate. How to notice, identify, define, and redefine pace and tone to convey meaning and seek understanding in order to foster trust and presence. In fostering trust and presence, you create space for your most authentic, whole self to be broadcast through your body's words and actions. 

You also learned that when you physically move your body while in conversation, it changes what you have to say. This is important to consider when you feel frazzled or stuck. This goes farther to say if you are on the phone, describing your body language is one way to express wordless shares.

(The word Weird-Normal's relationship to co-regulation, which is balance manifest)

(You've noticed also how environmental elements are reference points for navigating relationship. Clocks are the most constant environmental element, a reference point for relationship. Having a drink, also, for instance, can be a way to set a localized sense of time and pace check from a safe distance.)

You have also come into relationship with the word "container". The container is relational scaffolding with a set of explicit agreements to adjust the pace and tone of a conversation by directing awareness and so also expectations in pursuit of some well-defined intention. 

You "craft" or "set" a container. You can create this by setting intentions, by invoking the names of influential forces of your life, by stating boundaries and limitations for yourself, and open opportunities for consent. It is a way to make space for participants to notice "edges" and "boundaries". You use the word "edges" to identify a discomfort you are willing to experience. Boundaries, however, protect both the discomforts you are NOT willing to feel, and energy you need to protect in order to stay resourced enough to avoid regressing into a state which is more easily triggered. 

You use the word Trigger to talk about the moment of transition from one set of assumptions into another. Different words, sounds, feelings, and ideas "trigger" different states, bushels of assumptions, and lenses of interpretation. You often do not realize you are being triggered in the moment, but you are learning to recognize when you ARE triggered. You'll also use the word "activated" to describe a heightened emotional state. A heightened emotional state makes you prone to quicker assumptions and less conscious reactions. You aspire to be conscious in your decision making. Recognizing your triggers is the way to set boundaries to maintain a state which is open, receptive, and present in relationship.

Relationship and Co-Regulation

You believe that to be in Relationship is to move and be moved. Touch and be touched. Hold and be held. Energetic Balance, (and perhaps energy itself) made manifest. This relationship exists first within you, and then between yourself and others. While your relationship with yourself affects how you interpret all the relationships around you, your external relationships show you parts of yourself in different light than you are capable of seeing on your own. Tending to both internal and external relationships tends to the whole system. You hold Relationship as Most High, it is the most tangible manifestation of Love, which you understand to mean Interconnectedness.

You care what other people think because it is a way for you to regulate your experience, wants, and needs with your environment. It's important for you to shape your environment. You are also a node by which others regulate themselves with their environment, which is why it is important for you to speak your Truth. You are speaking the Truth of your environment for others to hear, as well. There is always some element of the environment that only you can see.

You desire to be in relationship, almost for its own sake. You often forget that every relationship needs to create space for both yourself and the other. You forget that a relationship with yourself is a relationship with multitudes, with many parts, an ego layer cake. This relationship has often been called shamefully "selfish" to focus on. Yet, your relationship with yourself impacts all of your external relationships. 

Intimacy is a word you use to describe a relationship you have with another human which has access to vulnerability through trust or faith. Within the realm of vulnerability, there is access to Truth, which creates tension against Belief, and so Truth begets Change. You believe The Truth is Change, and the Interconnectedness of Change is Love.  

You believe the crafting of space for Truth is wrought with vulnerability and so also discomfort, a nakedness. You believe commitment always includes a conscious acceptance of discomfort, which carries with it a stink, like the taste of morning breath kisses. You believe that intimacy and commitment are interwoven because intimacy has an inherent human "stink" to it, and the commitment is the structure, the decision to remain in connection through the discomfort, the stink. 

Some of the stink is inherent in the commitment to the truth. This discomfort, at a certain magnitude crosses a threshold into a Trigger, an experience of overwhelm which has more to do with the experiencer than the one who trips the triggerwire. It is not the action, but the interpretation of the action which sends signals called reactions. It is only in relational safety that the pace can be adjusted to tend to these reactions. Boundaries are the tools which cultivate Safety which allows the discomfort which begets the Trust.

You recognize patterns within relationship. Your patterns in proximity to another person's patterns make new patterns of the relationship. You cause new patterns and reinforce old patterns in each other. The cultivation of awareness, the crafting of spaciousness and a slower pace is a way to calibrate language and so also redirect and reprogram awareness to cultivate understanding or relational attunement. 

You desire to cultivate a sense of safety within relationship so Truth has room to move, so both of you can experience each other in full Authenticity.

Relationship is what you view as most holy. Relationship with all the parts of yourself, extending to all the interpersonal relationships of your neighbors, the people who you are most immediately affecting and affected by. I do want you to know, every relationship is different. Every. single. one.  

It is easy to forget how different each relationship is because you are constantly using one relationship to understand other relationships by way of stories. Remember these stories are garments. Your relationship experiences you choose to remember are what fill your wardrobe. If stories are outfits, relationships are a ballroom dance.

You want your friendships to have consent baked in both ways the whole time. (How do you let yourself have crushes on your friends without either of you being coerced or have your attention be taken advantage of? What is it to be taken advantage of? There's some element of a lack of consent when one  is being taken advantage of.)

You worry so much about what it's like to fall out of connection with others because you know what it's like to fall out of connection with yourself. You are often out of connection with yourself because you choose to prioritize connection with others. It's hard to let others hold you because you're not letting yourself be held by you.

You want to make more space for coming back to connection with yourself. You want to be with the fear/discomfort of being yourself so you're not afraid of the discomfort of being yourself.

You see boundaries and consent as the CENTER of relationship. Once there's boundaries, there's consent! With that consent, there's so many dance moves you can come up with. Container-building, and so also trust-building are ways to scaffold these types of relationships to be intentional and balanced.

You see language as an access point to co-regulation of the self and the collective. (Or one part of the self with the whole self). Language is the stuff which sets containers, (which makes a container a Story) which is important because you want to know the "house rules" of each relationship. These "house rules" are informed by the greater societal rules of engagement, but each relationship has the sovereign power to adjust these rules. You want to know how to know house rules which, as a rule, go unspoken. How to identify them, adjust them, and give permission for others to identify and adjust. You believe the phrase "Safe Word" operates within the realm of this intention. 

You like to make the right assumption about people, and you like people to make the right assumptions about you. You do not like questions, there is a vulnerability, a squeemishness in expressing your desires, curiosities, or stating your assumptions. You fear being seen just as you desire to be seen.

The discomfort of making the space for the truths to come through. Receiving judgment and poison, there's patterning within you to receive others' experience before or ahead of your own. Understanding their experience first is a way to maintain connection and create a safe space for you to understand yours.

Society, Culture, and the Outward to the Collective

In a collective, you believe a Culture is the amalgamation of all the participants. Each new participant both changes the culture and is changed by the culture.

You believe the name of Society is simply a culture which acts in accordance with its fear of the unknown. Your actual role in the story of society is determined by your willingness and your capacity compared to the willingness and capacity of others. You are less interested in following the rules than you are curious to understand their origin story and that the rules are then expressed in terms of mutual respect, and acknowledgment of the others' complexity.

You believe plastic garbage bags embody the story of "away", which you believe is a part of the myth of separateness. In an interconnected universe, there is no "away". You aspire to choose what you consume based on what you want to create. Simply eating and drinking is an act of creation. You love the idea of spending money at a concert as a way of participating in an energetic co-creation just to find everyone else who wants to see this moment be created on stage and watch together.

You believe that all of these things, and all of these pieces all funnel into your intention and ultimately the co-created world which is Now, that this co-creation of a concert experience happens over and over again in the massive co-creation of "The World". 

Closing

This is what I have to write to you today.

You told me once you want a life where all your sounds, asks, desires, are contributions to the song of your surroundings. To be one in the music of it. Just getting ready for the day makes the music. Doing. Resting. Work to get to know the part of me resistant to you changes for the part of me pushing for change all meeting in my body, the joyful process.

You told me you want to learn to both recognize and cultivate safe paths to change as you identify parts which are dying and ready to change. To recognize and construct safe channels to move energy from the Source within you to the Void around you.

What will happen to your life if you continue to focus on refining your questions? What if your beliefs are made in pursuit of crafting a cathedral of yourself, made up of energy channels, carved by the divine, so you can see how the divine sees you?

Create a beautiful dream. Let it come from you, who are already a gift from God, of the Divine. Already one with the Christ. Give yourself permission to create a beautiful dream to enjoy. It is all there is to do.

Already Good Enough

Dear Beloved, 

What an interesting paradox I find myself in this evening, and how life always seems to be an incredible enigma of beauty. Every morning I wake up and only part of me revels in my own astonishment at how we grow and change together and apart. How each day, minute, moment is its own Last Thing always breaking, breaking, breaking like the sound of a cracked bowl set to the rhythm of a clock, each tick ringing in circles around this thought:

I'm sick of not having the courage to accept that I am already worth loving.

I continue to invite the changing of seasons to astound me and leave me gasping with bewilderment each and every year I miss it. If only I allow myself to take a beat to pause and look at what is here instead of climbing mountains to earn the next peak. I consider my ambition is only trying to get me back to Here and Now. To aspire to Earn This, I must forget it is Already Here. I think about all I cannot see which makes the world whole and the trees stand. The network of roots that intermingle and speak to each other beneath our feet, whether we realize it or not. 

I imagine our roots are intermingling and speaking beneath the floor, too.

Look, there's a small white bowl, painted with lilacs, a pink trim, and gold leaf around the rim, it is all over the pine wood floor in pieces, spread by the force of a fall from a height. For these moments, there are never any pictures. The only thing I'll remember is a feeling, and then I clean up the shards. I feel it in my stomach and the middle of my chest.

Oh, I really thought we would do more, this safe little bowl had such potential. Such a waste.

The bowl is broken, its shards are on the ground. I think about all of my near-misses, missteps, and clumsy elbow shouting regret from my neck leading up to the moment where the bowl is knocked loose from its perch atop the counter. Could I have been more careful, or was this bowl Always Broken? It hurts to consider either my clumsiness or my lack of control, but to me, it is still beautiful. 

In these moments, time no longer seems linear, just different parts of one big pie, that I was still holding the ingredients for, and had already eaten. I wonder if I'd be so happy, so carefree if I was already so melancholy about this relationship or that being over before it had begun. I wonder if I would be so grateful for every little thing that I could find enjoyment and peace in. I wondered while the bowl was on the shelf, what the greatest potential for the bowl would be.

"Just enjoy it"

I feel an ache like a punch in my gut as I begin to understand what this bowl was before it fell, what I failed to see as it was one piece on the table. How I flitted and fretted about the bowl and its placement and all the ways I could fill and empty and wash it. Now I see what it is to just enjoy the bowl being there, only because now it isn't, and I can't. I wasn't sure what that meant until now. 

"Just enjoy it" 

Perhaps if I had accepted that this bowl would break sooner, I could have stopped looking for potential and just seen it for what it was. This final thing spread across the floor reminds me moments are fleeting, and they mean so much to me. 

O the holiness of Last things.

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Counting the inches between all the crushed fragments, I am reminded of the aching hum between dissonant notes or magnets, they know of one another, and they dance around one another in honor of themselves and each other. This is you and I today, I love you and you love me, I know we do, even when it's true that we are not in love. I cannot hear you and you cannot hear me now and I am stomping around in the dark and my child is wildly bashing around, bashful, missing you, but it's not you. 

It's not just you, it never was just you whom I saw or chased or missed.

It's also the me who I get to see when you're around, the me who I put away until I meet the conditions of my society. That I am a young man who ought to have a woman on his arm. The me which is allowed to play in the bowl only when he has earned it. The me who is no longer safe to be here because the bowl is all over the ground. If only I had him, you could come and go as you like and I would be much more centered.

So there you are. I am holding you like water in my hands. I take sips of you as you trickle away. You will be gone and it will rain again. I will hold my hands open, in case you fall from the sky once again.

These shards on the ground show me more about the bowl in its wholeness. I see the water is on the ground and understand that it used to be held so sturdy. It is a gift to know what this bowl held by seeing what it has so absently spilled.

How quickly this lesson and this perspective of the gift leaves me alone with my less reverent edges jutting out and into your tender skin, your wholly unique and entirely real experience.

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I went on a walk with my mom and I asked her what to do, what to learn from this weekend. She said to let the part of me who only emerges in the arms of a lover be dead. 

My lover, my projection, the promise of a partnership by my society, our stories, our poetry. My mom said to let that part of me die, she has already taught me how to lose a part of myself and to have compassion for my grief in losing him. She has asked me to do it again.

Makes me think of the little things to consider how fragile this moment is.

Crash (tick)

Crack (tock)

Kapow (tick)

We do not fit, we did not change so that we could fit, and so we have called in time and space to hold us at a safe distance. That we may walk and be in the same realm together. I am grateful for this chance to think. (tock)

To be alone without seeking a partner. To accept alonehood and accept Love on their terms as they make their visit, make sure they have the key, and always leave my door unlocked. To accept you are me, and to allow myself to be in the same bliss being alone as with another? Why would I put myself out there if I'm just as well off sitting on my couch? What would move me if not fear?

I do not realize yet that love itself will move me, if only I allow it to.

I get off my couch and seek out togetherness and so enter into relationships overwhelmingly hopeful. I continue to forget that people will always surprise me, that I could never really count on things staying the way they began.

Oh, to earn your love is to give my body's internalized beliefs permission to accept your love! Even in a sea of unconditional love, I need to prove that I've earned my rations. Congratulations! Great work! You have earned my love! 

Then I am met with a tone different than I expected. "Love has always been here, it is already there"

I consider the prodigal son. The one son who was "good" and stayed home and felt like he had earned his father's favor, while his other brother squandered the entire inheritance and came back home covered in mud, only to be received with a party. God's love, agape, unconditional love is unearned. It is the same as

So I abandon myself again and again to work harder to earn more love, and I feel like you must be bothered by my inattentiveness to the vast expansive beauty of Love Abundant. 

"How could you not believe you're already loved? It's so real, it's so expansive."

Like I should have already known about the Abundance of Unconditional Love.

I think of how I am ashamed to be so slow to simply arriving in this Present Moment, so you must be so smug as to have beat me! (I speak now of what I presume your experience to be, how presumptuous!) Smugness I will see through my wobbly, self-imposed shame lens. Shame that I should have finished the race at the same time as you, realized Love was here all along. That what I've been looking for was never gone. What a shame to have looked so hard for my keys which were already in my hand! Shame at making you wait because I hadn't practiced enough to know I'm already enough. Is it True? What is it in me that cinches around the perceived smugness? It is not your smugness, no, you are not being smug. I am Proud.

I invite my Pride to sit at the table, pour some tea.

Pride, my enemy, my soul, my dear darling self who takes offense, why do you take offense here? What are you asking for here? To be heard? To be known? Why are you so insulted by honest care and sincere expression of Another who is already also enough as they are? One who is here to teach you that you are Already Loved, you need not have her or own her in order to prove that to yourself?

"No!" Cries out my Pride, "Love is in limited supply! Love must be hard-fought and earned in the eyes of my peers or my peers who work harder and have made themselves stronger will take the love from me for their own."

I turn back toward myself, I consider a quiet, mute absence of passion. Passion lives in the world of Partnership, this is the way to know I am loved, to show others I am Chosen. I reach and ache to wear my badge which says I have been Chosen, to feel the excitement of romantic Love! To show myself and others that I am Worthy.

I grow reserved in this lonely melancholy alonehood, a bachelor's walk. Already having died lonely. I appreciate all my visitors coming and going, regardless of how much it tears me apart, because even at its worst: Life is a dreadfully beautiful thing.

All of these feelings are valid. Period. 

But, Beloved. 

Am I really not passionate about this relationship with myself, or am I afraid of finally being good enough? Am I truly afraid of being dismissed and disregarded in my seeming complacency of alonehood? And, I think the answer to these inquiries is: yes. And, so what if I don't have a pretty lady with with dozens of adorable dresses and all of the sweetest stories of how we met? So what, if people aren't jealous of me with such a woman on my arm? Why do I need that validation? Why do I feel so bad about having a stereotypical attractive partner? Why does that make me feel so worthless? Why am I allowing people to make me feel bad about my choices and about who I already am? Why do I value the opinions of people who look down on others? Who can say? Only Time.

 

Amazing!

Beloved, I cannot tell you how sick I am of not having the courage to be enough just as I am. I'll put it on my desk so I don't forget. I'll write it down in all my notebooks, and I'll spend my life searching for a way to break away from my fear of living a Whole Life as my Whole Self. 

 

And in some future little infinity, Beloved, I am always figuring it out, crying while I type my grand revelation and my vision blurs.

 

I want to be seen by you, Beloved, as I am. I am enchanted by the belief I am capable of willing myself to be who you are looking for. And the vision of this enchantment fades. I am only Myself, always-and-forever-having-been, Will-Always-Be Enough. And even as you are on your way, you are simply on your way to wherever this Love would have you.

 

I will always, have always, will always be Worthy of being Sought After by Ever-Seeking Love.

And so the moment is gone, and we move on to other things. I feel like it is meaningful, in this moment, to acknowledge that there are so many first and last things that we don't want to notice or document. This intimate moment shows my soft underbelly. My human self and my higher self in one snapshot, in one moment.  

I take out my phone and gaze into the lens somberly, relaxing my face into the shape of my heart to document this changing season of my life.

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I am crying out for you to see me, to see how I love you even as parts of me struggle to accept you, parts of me which make you feel unaccepted. I cry for you to see how I am broken and my edges are sharp and I am changing and growing and cannot change even in my longing to change because I am Already Good Enough, I am Always Changing, I am Change Incarnate. 

I say your name, I hold it behind my eyes, I chant it and invoke all who I was around you, I know I am still here. I know in a timeless way, we lived a full life together and died in each other's arms. I know unconditional love says I am always worthy of love, as are you. Neither of us can betray the Trust of Eternity. Everything cycles back around on that timescale, all has happened, all is known, each heartbreak a mirror of Wild Love, Unconditional.

You're gone like she's gone because in the sense that we are One, neither of you were ever really here, it's just me, it still is Me, and I, You, Us, Them. Unified and split onto all these other living things around me, all of us freely moving and bound together by Love.

You told me I am you are me are we! You call yourself as Them. We talked of God, Spirit, the Divine as a Them and They.

I indulge in you by listening to our songs. I read your letters. I watch our photos snicker. I remember you holding me, tying my shoes, I remember flashes of all we had. These little sparkles push my awareness toward you, my longing to dance and play games again.

Oh, to consider a life without a lover to tie my shoes! To have on my arm at shows! It ought to be a measure of my character to walk outside, court, and sweep an impressive looking woman off her feet! If my arm is empty, surely it is a measure of me, myself, an undeserving lark.

I only try to realize the truth: There is no alone, there is no together, there is only a unified One, perfectly together, perfectly alone, different colors from the same prism of Interconnectedness.

---

--

-

The bowl is broken beyond repair, it is shattered in a way which cannot be fixed, it is hot out of the kiln, it is on our shelf, and it is falling. I think forgetting pain can be just as horrible as remembering it. It feels like betrayal. Time is a strange thing. I believe that there are realities, little infinities. In some way, somewhere, I will always be here, in this moment. This bowl on the floor, bowl in the kiln, bowl full of water, safe in these hands. I don't want to forget about these young lovers. Not ever. 

I want to remember them and sit with them with love and understand for the rest of my days - their first sigh of relief into each others arms in a meadow; a couple angels holding them in their final embrace outside the airport.

I want to sit with you too, Beloved. I want to sip on our tea, and spend a lifetime in this singing bowl, praying on and on, taking it all in. Reveling in the intimate songs and water of us. Feeling our Most Holy Energy pour out of us, harmonize, flow into each other, and then come back into us. 

 

So rings the bell again, singing its song:

 

"We are all worthy of love before we even accept it ourselves." 

 

Bless this Truth. Bless the treacherous road that continues to walk me home to myself. Bless my grateful heart for each new day's opportunity to love without ceasing, to love without expectation, and to love without regret. Oh may loving with eyes unclouded bring me to my knees, and help me to see love in its purest sense. 

 

I read a Walt Whitman poem which struck a chord and his rebounded through my head every time somebody tells me I have once again loved too hard, too quickly, and too hopefully:

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,

But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

I have never wasted time loving someone, and as I accept that I already love myself, I realize my love never ends.

 

Consciousness. What a gift it all is, and what a heavy burden it can be, all at the same time. I have appreciation for every moment, even the uncountable unsmelled roses which cry out to me to be seen, noticed, listened to. I do believe that some part of me is Always savoring this precious vessel in its transit through samsara.

I have felt such a warmth in my chest and little jolts and sparks all over my limbs. I felt the vitality of human connections radiating all around me like electric currents. What a joy it is to love and be loved by the universe. What a day to be a human being, and to be patient and gentle with one another, creating space for vulnerability.

Always Changing and Already Good Enough,

Riley

 

Investing Stimulus Checks and the Turning of the Times

Today, I am a white man engaging with the thoughts of other white men.  These thoughts are biased and limited, rooted in a privileged perspective. I also validate my own humanity and process in its limitations and desire to grow. I gently acknowledge the inexpressible cost of the stolen land on which I live and work, as well as the advantage afforded to me which has come at the cost of abuse of the disenfranchised. 

I am listening, I am changing, slowly. I am afraid, too. I feel the fear and fragility within my system of beliefs which keep me unmoved. I consider foremost my beliefs about money, connectedness, community, energetic currency. The primal fear of "what will I do if I do not have money or a source of money? What if I cannot pay for healthcare? I will surely suffer and die at the whim of the universe. I must have more, I must earn more, to be more safe."

 Safety at what cost? And am I really more safe? What riches and wealth do I loose by this fear-centered system of beliefs? I am disrupting, dismantling these silent assumptions, I am unpacking my proverbial desk drawers on the floor and re-packing my drawers, holding empty underutilized space empty. This process is slower than I'd like. I wince at the unconscious bias which evades me even within these paragraphs. 

Still I march on, I speak, I listen. 

Change can feel hard like being hit by a car. My mother was diagnosed with cancer in September of 2020, she died in October of 2020. She died an uncomfortable but otherwise privileged death of a white woman with cancer. She is dead in that human way.

And change can be gentle like crossing the street. Yeah, crossing the street can be scary and dangerous, but you look both ways and watch the lights, and you find the right time to cross. I have been making lots of little changes in my priorities after her passing. Death is such an illuminating fact of life.

I am learning I spend a LOT of energy making a strong poker face. Learning songs and dance to divert and redirect potential conflict. People seem to "misread" me because they are reading what I am putting off. I am angry that I am being misread and I am afraid to offer my actual pages to be read. I have been carefully masking and spinning and hiding to feel safe in a world which does not speak my language, a world which I did not yet understand how to articulate my heart. The whole world is a foreign place in the eyes of a child. 

So then I have grown up and I understand the world better, and I understand myself better. Now that I know the words for what I want, now that I understand how to express myself, I learn that I am AFRAID to express myself freely. For good reasons, valid reasons. I am ASHAMED to have expressed myself so carefully before, I now live in an environment which IS safe, and my nervous system, my beliefs, my agreements, press down so hard against my free and sovereign self to stay in line and "behave", "be a team player," and "just get along easy." 

But I want to be seen! I am afraid to be seen.

These tectonic forces are the bedrock of this essay: impatience for my desire to change up against my resistance to change.

---

In shedding beliefs which used to be a source of security and now feel more confining, I have been thinking a lot about money as I pay off my student debt. 

"Every dollar is a vote."

My money reflects my values, my desires, my attention. Earning, saving, spending, investing, donating. What IS money? What does it represent? What am I willing to do to GET it? What am I willing to give it up FOR? 

I have been holding money, particularly the money in my paycheck, foremost as a measure of competency, worthiness, the longer I practice in my profession the more valuable I am. The more money I make, then, the more money I spend to SHOW I'm making more money. But I also need to be careful and spend it right. Opportunity cost eats away at my wealth at every turn. The more money I have, the "smarter" I've invested it or saved it, the more "responsible" of an adult I am.

Yet even with all the fears of the belief system I carry with me about money, I recognize my safety and insatiable desire for status and money and security as an oppressive actor within the world.
Every morning, I have been reading Charles Eisenstein's book Sacred Economics. I have found hopefulness and guidance beyond the realms of the zeitgeist of what money is and how it works.

"As people become aware that merely living in society means contributing to the evils of the world, they often go through a phase of desiring to find a completely isolated and self-sufficient intentional community— but what good does that do, while Rome burns?" (Eisenstein)

Even if I DID create a small system which is self-sufficient and works well, I still have the whole WORLD to contend with! What is money, I ask, again, in the face of its oppressive and patterned beliefs within myself? What is it, in essence? Is money just Energy? Neither created nor destroyed? Certainly, money is created, and so it is not raw energy on its own, but it must carry with it a compelling force just as Belief does. 

What does the energy of Money mean in terms of white supremacy or maleness? With such power, what is the responsibility of my white-bodied, cis-gendered, assigned-male-at-birth privilege? I have been crafting, refining, pondering, and processing these questions and have formed some thoughts which I have not articulated until Eisenstein rings the bell for me:

"Money has facilitated the development of a metahuman organism of seven billion cells, the collective body of the human species. It is like a signaling molecule, coordinating the contributions of individuals and organizations toward purposes that no smaller grouping could ever achieve. All the needs that money has created or transferred from the personal to the standard and generic have been part of this organismic development” (Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, Chapter 5)

Signaling molecule, ahh. But if money is simply an organizing force, why do I feel it is EVIL? Why do I resist and resent billionaires and how can I hold both fear and ideas scarcity within myself while also harboring such self-resentment against these qualities of my belief system?

"The true culprit, the true puppet-master that manipulates our elites from behind the scenes, is the money system itself: a credit-based, interest-driven system that arises from the ancient, rising tide of separation; that generates competition, polarization, and greed; that compels endless exponential growth; and, most importantly, that is coming to an end in our time as the fuel for that growth— social, natural, and spiritual capital— runs out." (Eisenstein)

THIS! "A credit-based, interest-driven system that arises from the ancient, rising tide of separation." This is my enemy. I do not have to be angry or resentful of this system as inherently evil. Money as it stands now, the market forces and so on, have acted as a growth hormone and they have reached the limits of balance. Nature is pushing back just in the gentlest bit, and so the assumptions which this system was originally founded on have changed, so I must attune old beliefs to new truths.

Making change feels heavy, particularly as I engage with my own stubborn subconscious beliefs, nevermind the beliefs of those around me. I am overwhelmed by all there is to do, or anxious to pick the right priorities, or afraid to be too still and judged as complacent or complicit. There are so many good causes to turn my money towards, and yet I still do not trust them. I consider my own self and how unsatisfying it feels to throw $100 at some charity. Where will that money even go? Am I just giving it away to feel less guilt or am I actually contributing toward the solution?

Is my paycheck coming from the profit made from CAUSING all these world problems? What is it to take $100 out of my paycheck to offer penance and pity to those who I will never meet? To those who suffer outside my earshot?

I turn my curiosity to emotional sources of energy: gratitude and grief.  

In the death of my mother I have felt the impressive emotional force of grief within my system. It completely disrupts my relationship with the world around me, just as growing older has (27 is certainly not the same as 37, but it is also NOT 17). New limits and capcaities come with it new expectations, which of course rewire my values and priorities. Both grief's interruptive force, as well as its generative and love-centered inspiration. To make space for grief in a society which views the unpredictability of grief as a nuisance to the rhythm of the schedule. 

"Stuff it down! Compose yourself, you are a professional!"

These are the words of the feelings within me. No, I will make space for my grief as I imagine I would for a child. I honor it, as it is tied inseparably from mother-love, a powerful force all its own. I turn next to gratitude

"Gratitude is the knowledge of having received and the desire to give in turn." (Eisenstein)

This one strikes me true. I understand the worth of gratitude within myself. I recognize the energetics of a DESIRE to give and the selfish pleasure which arises from offering what I do not need for myself. This tension within a system of both needing to have and needing to be rid of forms the rhythm and frequency on which community is built.

"The community of the future will arise from the needs that money inherently cannot meet." (Eisenstein)"

"Community is woven from gifts." (Eisenstein)

"To be in community is to be in personal, interdependent relationship, and it comes with a price: our illusion of independence, our freedom from obligation. You can’t have it both ways. If you want community, you must be willing to be obligated, dependent, tied, attached. You will give and receive gifts that you cannot just buy somewhere. You will not be able to easily find another source. You need each other." (Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, Chapter 22)

Now instead of considering how to SPEND my money "responsibly" (either to make more money or increase my pleasure or standard of living), I consider my NETWORK, my capital C, Community. 

I consider my wealth, my energy, my legacy in these terms:

• My attention (my time, my schedule)
• My liquid assets (the balance on my bank account, my investments, my debts)

Expanding my "wealth" to be UNDERNEATH the term of my Gifts, I ask myself what to do. What do I do now that I have identified this value of community, who do I turn to? How do I recognize the kind of community I desire to create while I also hold within me such fear of the intimacy of the kind of community I desire to be a part of? What do I do so the energy I release falls down in the shape of the values of my heart?

Enter the term "Sacred Investing". 

"[Investing] means to clothe, as in to take naked money and put it into new vestments, something material, something real in the physical or social realm. Money is naked human potential — creative energy that has not yet been “clothed” with material or social constructions." (Eisenstein, Sacred Economics)

So now I consider all I have to give. My gifts: my money, my attention, my privilege, my schedule, my connections, my reputation. I hold, in particular, my unclothed money at the forefront of this purpose-seeking question: 

"If you are an investor, it is time to shift your focus entirely to the creation of connections, the generation of gratitude, and the reclamation and protection of the commonwealth.” (Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, Chapter 20).

A new intention, a new mission statement to start considering in all my vast considerations of shifting my belief systems toward community connection and interconnectedness, interdependency, all of course at the pace which suits me, the heir to the privilege of white men.  

Now that I know better, how do I shepherd my gifts (my time, my energy, my unclothed money, my attention) towards "connections, generation of gratitude, and reclamation and protection of the commonwealth" when I look into my pocketbook and schedule for answers. I am noticing this new language in my pockets to guide my thoughts and crafting of new intentions for my life formed in the wake of my mother's death.

So I look both ways as I cross the street. My change from primarily holding and spending money to positive-interest accumulation toward facilitating the construction of social giving structures which operate in terms of the protected Commonwealth. 

Where can I expand the protections? Where can I shepherd dollar-currency into the ineffable qualities and wealth of The Commons?

Today I do not have answers, but a new hefty set of questions which feel proportional to what I have to offer and where my growth edge is. I offer you my questions and process earnestly for those who are looking for a new story of the world. And with that, I take my leave this evening, and wish you well as we turn towards spring of 2021.

In Truth,

Riley

 

For those who are searching, I offer this list of my most recent inspirations and channels I've been tuned into in this growth:

---

THERE IS ANOTHER WAY OF RELATING TO THE EARTH AND EACHOTHER THROUGH ECONOMY WITHOUT VIOLENTLY TOPPLING OUR CURRENT SYSTEM.

"Sacred Economics" by Charles Eisenstein

https://sacred-economics.com/

 

THERE IS A GROUP OF PEOPLE LOOKING FOR NEW WAYS TO THINK ABOUT ONLINE SPACES.

"New-Public" by Civic Signals

https://newpublic.org/

 

THERE IS A PATHWAY FOR COMMUNICATION IN TENSELY POLARIZED SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS.

"Non-Violent Communication" Marshall Rosenburg, PhD

https://www.nonviolentcommunication.com/product/nonviolent-communication-a-language-of-life-3rd-edition/

 

A FRAMEWORK FOR REVEALING UNACKNOWLEDGED RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ELEMENTS OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS

"Systemic Constellations" Collective Transitions

https://www.collectivetransitions.com/what-is-ct

 

GRIEF AS A CENTRAL FORCE FOR REBALANCE

"Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution" Peter Kalmus

 

THERE'S OTHER SYSTEMS OF VOTING BEING RESEARCHED AND PRACTICED IN THE US.

STAR Voting

https://www.starvoting.us/

 

MotherGrief Part 2: The Mess

Dear Beloved:

 

There is a metaphorical mess in my metaphorical room and all I can think about is "I don't know where to metaphorically start," so I don't start. I sit in the mess and I am metaphorically ashamed of the mess, and all I can think about is how I don't know where to start and I am so so metaphorically ashamed.  

 

Here is my mess:

Round and round and round my body contemplates its own inevitable demise as it struggles and resists to rationalize or understand the demise of others.

My mother is dead. While I dream of her spirit, my mother will be dead in the human and social sense for the rest of my life. Grief blooms from the soil of her Goneness. The flower of grief is the truth of my mother's Everywhereness. The stem is anchored in the silent soil of the smoke from blowing a candle out.

 

Grief has been a colorful experience. It has been an experience of inkstains all over all of my other experiences.  As if one of the pens in my brain snapped open and poured all over my ideas and instruments and pages in my brain. The part of me which solves problems says maybe I could paint all the ink stains with white-out, wouldn't I be better off then?

 

-

My mother was diagnosed with cancer in September of 2020. 

We both celebrated our birthdays then. She got me a garden rain gauge. I didn't get her anything. Driving up for quality time over coffee felt like gift enough. 

She underwent a 2nd round of Chemo in late October of 2020. I drove back up early to surprise her, and she was surprised! I was there talking to her during her entire chemotherapy infusion. I took the day off work. I stayed for a week at my parents house after, working remotely and helping out around the house and drinking coffee with my mom every morning for an hour before I went back to work.

A week later, I left to return to my life, I remember we said goodbye one more time. I remember we looked right into each other's eyes. I remember the quickness and the wideness of her eyes. I remember the flicker of that moment so brightly passing by. I am glad to have witnessed the flickering of her eye and her soft anxious expression of love in her words. I am sad I watched the moment slip through my fingers as carelessly as it did. I am sad I did not savor the moment how I could have. I am sad I wanted to pray with her in that moment and I did not. I am sad I left her without feeling entirely complete in my heart's expression. I know I am forgiven and I am okay and I am sad my fear of talking about death stopped me from talking to her about death.

She had one bad night's sleep vomiting, went into urgent care, was sent to emergency surgery, and then she died on October 26, 2020. I drove up to be with her in her final hours.

I am grateful I was with her as long as I was. I am grateful I talked to her as much as I did, as honestly as I could muster, even when I felt inelegant.

I am sad I did not go to see her sooner, that I did not push harder for her life. I am sad I spent so much time working and didn't spend more time talking with her about mortality.

I am sad she died so suddenly.

I am so thankful she died so quickly.

Her departure was so quick. Her transition swift.

Her suffering did not go very far beyond typical cancer suffering.

I can imagine her last day was full of incredible pain.

And then the still sound of a closed book.

Just quiet.

-

-

-

The tragedy of my mother's death is in the loss of potential, the death of possibilities which I felt entitled to. The possibility of her one day meeting her grandchildren, the possibility of her helping me find a house (she so loved to shop for houses). The possibility of watching her graduate into a season of reflective wisdom and presence and peacefulness. The possibility of talking with her about my life today and tomorrow and the next day over two warm mugs of black coffee over the phone or early in the morning of a quiet day.

It's important to know the last time my mother cried in front of me, she was grieving her the end of her teaching career as she knew it. She'd been diagnosed with cancer the September when school started back up again in the throes of coronavirus. She'd started developing a YouTube curriculum for art programming as a substitute teacher, but she feared that while she handled chemotherapy trips, others were learning how to run a Zoom classroom in a way she never could. 

She sent me an email right before her cancer diagnosis that told me that while she knew teaching had afforded her wonderful gifts, and part of her career choice had been fear-based. She was paying attention to where her feelings were coming from and asking each of them whether they were coming from a place of fear or love. 

Her last week she kept bringing up the words "blame and responsibility". Her contemplative life during that last week was spent at least partly working with how to move her life from blame (which today I interpret to mean "focusing on what I can't change") into responsibility (which, today, I interpret to mean "focusing on what I can change"). I consider the blame and responsibility I carry with me today. Blaming my difficult feelings on her sudden death, taking responsibility for allowing those difficult feelings to move through me. Allowing those feelings to be seen. 

-

Grief is a colorful experience. Sharp. Vibrant. I love to share the gifts of grief. Even the sadness which is cleanly sad. I am loathe to share some of the muddier colors, the feelings which are True and very difficult to express. Feelings which cannot be written because they cannot be understood until they are felt. Feelings which I don't want you to feel, but I want you to understand. The feelings which cannot be affixed to a rational agenda or process. The feelings of sadness that everything very good goes away, and that the departure is what makes them very good. How can I share what you cannot understand? Maybe I'm asking for space to do some external or verbal processing.

There's something about me that wants some kind of guarantee of safety or external sense of invitation in order to give myself permission to express some of what I call "my deeper thoughts". I feel the urge to say that desire for a safety guarantee is not  a unique desire, still, it's REAL for me. Something about spaciousness or rhythm in a conversation. Something about the pace of it tells me whether it's okay to offer up an "unpasteurized" share.

 

Such a delicate place that is to feel safe enough to bring my process into relationship. I understand I am the only one having this very specific experience of grief. I am the only one who knew my mother the way I knew her, and everyone else knew her uniquely as well. We all lost the part of ourselves which would come out when she shone her light. It is very uniquely my calling to walk this lonely path of missing my mother for the rest of my life. To consider the eternal nature of her goneness is to consider the eternal nature of the universes's HEREness. A divine calling, to be sure. But is it divine to you if you cannot see what I see?

So I hide the "sloppy messy grief" and feel the "sloppy messy lonely grief". 

 

I tell people about the bright colors of grief. 

 

Part of me continues to shout "You don't get it! You don't understand! You all around me going about your day can't see the permanence of her goneness!"   The messy feelings dwell in me and ask again and again to be shared. So I try sometimes. I write things like this article. In quicker social interactions, I say things like:

 

"I'm in a fog?"

"I'm letting myself be not okay."

"I've been in a funk"

"The grief-dam is cracked and the repressed stuff is going to flood."

"I've entered another level of grief."

 

The responses I get when I try to express all of this into a few words:

"I'm sorry you had a drag of a weekend"

"That's good it was sunny out at least"

"I'm sorry you're going through this"

"There are no words"

 

The words themselves do not always comfort. I look instead for indicators of presence. A willingness to be messy with me, rather than helping me clean up. Grief is colorful, and it is not clean. And in order to understand some of the more delicate gifts of grief, I must listen carefully to, and so make time and space for the mess as well.

So Yes, thank you, at least I have grown I understand the poignancy, the wonderful lessons and affirmations which arise in the face of considering how delicate and uncertain life is, and how close death is each day. Still, I really would actually enjoy having another cup of coffee and a chat with my mom today.  

 

I feel like the contents of this post are a bunch of things that have been stuck for me these past weeks. I'm pausing here to notice what about them has been stuck and what about our connection here as blogger and reader gives them space. 

 

Some space for uncertain, unpronounced, unclear, fuzzy-wuzzy wisps and waves of emotive experience being a living human bearing witness to the eternal void of bodydeath of Other, and bodydeath of Self. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

at the foot of this small altar of time we have built together, I invite offerings of reflections and resonance and response. I leave my own offering, a poem my mother's eldest sister wrote, modified for my own expression, as I bid you a good night:

Yes:
I lost my mother;
not playing peek-a-boo,
not a game of hide-and-seek,
not just out-of-sight –
not around a corner,
not like
coin,
keys,
phone,
wallet,
glasses,
or any timespacestuffnonono

No:
I lost her to the ether,
to the air,
to the space between the unknowable moment of be-ing
between me and you;
She is close as thought,
Brush of wings and light.
She is lost.
She is gone.
She is everywhere,
And everywhere's been here
all along.

--

MotherGrief Part 1

Hold me, for I am in grief.

Today I have a very deep delicate awe that I don't know how to express. I feel unsafe being held or being seen and my heart is a wildfire, my lungs are full of the ash of what was.

Today I am in grief.

I am pickled in a Deep delicate awe with a film of fearing being misunderstood on top, Making my experience difficult to see into from the outside. It's difficult to be with and so it's hard to share because I imagine it will be difficult for you to be with it, too (perhaps I am wrong)

But I'm not sure if it's okay for me to share. There is some primal "I have to be so careful" urge surrounding this precious weighty grief-awe. If I do share, it must be received in a certain way so that I may be seen in and allowed to have my experience. I value this grief experience like a lantern on a dark path.

I have a very specific desire and I don't know how to be or with who in order to fulfil that desire. My "shoulds" come up. I tell myself I really should reach out to this friend or go over here and have a walk or look at these flowers or write about my mother's life or go back to work or don't go back to work and take more time and don't rush but also the wheels do keep turning. All of that for some very specific and hard-to-nail-down desire.

All of that for the very simple desire to be with my mom.

At this moment, my nervous system is driving hard through rationalization and explanation to avoid the very hard truth that she's not here in the same way she was anymore so I can find other ways to nourish the parts of me that she would nourish.

Still,

The feeling is that I'm

Crying out for mom and there's no mom

crying out

crying out

crying out

"But Riley, there's love!"

How do I tell you I know this and still am in grief at the same time?

I sometimes share my heart and am told:

"At least at least at least"---NO

This is Hard

"Oh, it is hard? Welcome to the Club. The Life is Hard Club where you join when you run out of baby fat and all that is left is the truth that was there all along, which is that Life is Hard."

But please do not tell me it is Hard, either, do not welcome me to any kind of club, do not amass me to being a statistic, this is Real.

And yes, there is Love.

There is a very primal dance teacher in me

and learning this part of the dance of my life is difficult

It brings up things I've been avoiding and now I have to face all at once

Like do I turn the volume up a little louder and dance a little harder?

"No, turn it down, only the fools leave the volume knob turned up"

And I don't know how to express the ways I would hide, hide, hold, hide, swallow, hold, bury, away, away, away, I'm fine, fine, fine, it's okay.

And since I don't know how to express it, I hold it because it's easier to hold than to express wrongly and get the wrong thing back.

That's nasty to show my precious grief and be told "at least".

And there's so much of it

"At least at least at least"

There's so much "Doesn't-Quite-Understand-Ness". It's one thing to not understand and to offer that discomfort honestly, there's just all the Stuff that comes up for somebody who doesn't understand and wants to but doesn't know how but thinks they should so they just pretend. And I don't have the capacity to take care of that

And so I hold,

I hold

And what I have to offer is just an invitation to the very difficult dance within the self, to whoever hears my grief song, I'll turn my volume up, and that's good. Sometimes you and I will hear the same melody or beat and we will do two different dance moves but they will be in rhythm and that's Good.

Like in a "Makes it all worthwhile" kind of Good.

My shoulds come back up and I set them down and turn back to the grief.

I don't know, death itself isn't the thing. The death itself isn't that big of a deal, we all knew she was going to die. Maybe it goes without saying, but it's the little things surrounding the death, like the timing and the duration and the chores that she doesn't do anymore and the conversations she used to prompt that she doesn't prompt anymore and now there's this unprompted emotional burp within me that she used to know how to work out of my system but now it's stuck and I have to be fussy and learn what aches are really just burps. Stuff like that.

The death itself is just the contrasting color so that I can see the Thing Which Is a Big Deal.

And that Thing is

Lovely and is

everythingforeverywhere

And I'm in awe of that because I can see everythingforeverwhere lit up all so nicely by the bonfire of her death.

Today I have a very deep delicate awe that I don't know how to express.

And I feel the despair of a careful urgency pressed up against not knowing how to express or to whom or when,

And I see the Energy which is my beginning and my ending,

And I see all my little plans, efficiencies, stories, supposings, interpretations,

These stories are the quilt blanket of me,

They are insufficient and they are flimsy cotton fabric held against the vast expansive Void,

But they keep me warm tonight and are made of the place where I am

And in that place,

I am Held.

We ran out of paint while painting the ceiling so my mother did this texture herself. I realize now with her love of art, this is a vast mural which can only be seen when the viewer pauses to look up. She has a hidden beauty.

An Essay on Fallen Trunks

Dear Beloved,

 A tree lives in an ecological dance of energy.  As it lives, the tree breathes in and breathes out its life. It moves the energy available and sought-after and dispels the energy spent. Perhaps in its life it found sunlight above and shaded out other trees below. For me, I feel indifferent to describe this, I can imagine no nefarious plot of one tree over another. Certainly it is true, one tree's flourishing life is another tree's crippling shade.

When this large tree dies, when it falls over, all the sun it gathered to move and reassemble the forms around it, the empty trunk is a cathedral of nourishment and shelter for those scavengers who might take up home here. The dance goes on beyond the tree's most immediate consequences of being. The dance is what brought the tree into being, and what brings it out! The joke is the energy from the sun is spent so haphazardly into the cosmos, and that energy is most certainly the hub, the most physical bass drum hum of the song of our planet.

I consider the way energy moves around me, how do I know what energy is available? Where do I store it, how do I know what to store? When do I know to spend it? Where is it spent? Sleep, rest, food, hunger, thirst, fullness, quenchedness, these are all words describing energy and structures which energy moves through. I consider these systems and consider the words economy, subsistence, capitalism, socialism, these systems of trade, philosophies and agreements for common ways and means of moving energy, holding energy, releasing energy.

Across the news here in Portland has been the resounding gong of calling Wildfires a consequence of Western Colonialism. Be it through land management and controlled burns, or climate change as a whole:

• https://www.opb.org/news/article/northwest-plants-animals-wildfire-help/ 
• https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-california-looks-to-what-tribes-have-known-all-along
  
• https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54278988?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/ce2gz9mdde3t/wildfires&link_location=live-reporting-story
  

The wake of death in conquering of the native people lead to the halting of the ceremonial fires which were set by this land's original inhabitants for generations. These ceremonial fires now being looked to by the Western Authorities as legitimate and necessary when massive wildfires grind the industrial machine to a halt. Grounding helicopters, challenging power grids, invading the comfort of even the most climate-controlled, season-resistant homes. 

I thought to myself in my two weeks that perhaps what we call a tragedy, some more ancient cultures called the season. When night meant a darkness which would halt work. When winter came halting chills, without insulation and coal to burn. When summer brought blistering heat that dulled the mind to an idle trot. 

Perhaps climate change could be a reintroduction of

"...I believe that as inheritors of Western civilization, we must humble ourselves enough to return to these atrocities in search of some piece of humanity that was lost there. For without this missing piece, we will not survive.

"In effect, that search itself must be what we do for a living - that search for a lost chord that imparts meaning to those of us who can no longer find ourselves in this strictly mechanical economics of things. And while it is true that many of us may very well merge with our machines to eat coal, others of us will not do this, and at whatever moment we jump ship we'll have to extract our identity from the story of the capitalist machine and find a refuge in these other stories of the soil, of falling leaves, rotting wood, of blood, bone and bacteria; these stories that we've lost and found so many times."

-From "Eternal Return" by Paul Feather, as featured in the Dark Mountain periodical, Issue 17

I consider the capitalist machine from an ecological standpoint: Perhaps how when the wolf dies, the deer consume the mountain. Perhaps capitalism or consumerism is an overpopulation of something much more serene and pure, like the innocence of a doe. Perhaps to hate the consumerism and desire for comfort is not so effective as it is to recognize the role of the wolf in the whole story.

I wonder about capitalism's wolf. Perhaps it is the idea of the wilderness itself, preservation of the unpredictable. Perhaps our wolf is the experience of the big bad seasons. Perhaps this Great Smoke and these Great Terrible storms are guardians of the planet, in effect, though they are unbiased consequences of a system finding new balance.

Perhaps this climate change is making space for us, rather than destroying us. Perhaps it is clearing out a space for us to sit as our fragile human selves, humus, oh to be humble in these times.

So I look for the fallen trunks. 

 

 

For those who are intrigued by this work:

https://dark-mountain.net/