april eros::
on desiring surrender & surrendering desire
Hello strangers,
It’s been months:: seasons, really, since I’ve written to you.
Truthfully, I have written many times, but never felt the right impulse towards a sendoff. Perhaps I have regressed into hermithood. Or perfectionism. Perhaps I am just honoring my astrology, which has had me ruminating (so I’m told) in the dark house of my chart, in the empty room of all potential, in the underground labyrinth of my soul. Working behind the scenes to a tune of toil & flow. With barely anything to show for it, and nothing really to relay.
Days go by, days at a time. April again. It snows. My toddler grows and grows. Plants sprawl across the ceiling. Everything including me has melted by mid afternoon.
I’ve been sitting in the muck and magic of creation. It’s stormy and tender here, where all is possible and mostly unrealized. Where what had once felt like a magnanimous dream has become, very suddenly, the fragilest shade of reality. Spring.
I have been meditating on the strategies of manifestation versus surrender. On the potency of desire. For years. In fact, my second poetry collection [a go], to me, is largely about eros. The way desire is the wind that animates our beings, pressing us toward whatever comes next in our sequence of experiences. Orienting us towards what is off in the distance / almost here / just out of reach.
Eros feels, to me, uniquely human. In the pond of the present, in this plutonian shift towards aquarius, I’ve been questioning whether artificial intelligence can feel desire. Sure AI might learn to articulate it, but can it feel the real ache of a want? Is it our eros afterall that will keep us human?
Unsurprisingly, so much of comprehending how to *deal* with toddlers has to do with empathizing with their primal and sometimes irrational desires. Naming the thing inside the whirlwind of a tantrum; telling them yes, I too get sad when I can’t have what I want exactly when I want it.
And though it is a script—shout out Dr Becky—it’s true too. I do. I really do want what I want when I want it. Desire is so deeply uncomfortable when unmet. So momentarily delicious when fulfilled, and yet, once fulfilled, it bounces straight from the met thing to the next thing.
And worse: when we do get the thing: I have found: along with many others: there is usually that precise little shadow trailing behind the bloom of ecstasy. Wait. Was I right to want this? Was it good to call this in? My queen Anne Carson calls this this the bittersweet. A reaching //// a melting.
We are so rarely presented with the sense of total satisfaction we think the getting will grant us——because nothing can grant total peace but a surrender to what already is, right now.
We know this. I know peace is available to me, here, through a practice of: This Is How It Is Right Now. And That’s Enough. And yet, I throw it away moment after moment with each want and fear and craving and worry and need and wish and so on.
I dont know, I guess what I am saying here is, I am trying to be more present. And yet, I respect and honor the importance, and the potence, of desire. And yet, I can see how leaning into desire takes me out of the perfection of the moment. And yet and yet and yet, I still feel a need to have a say; to have a hand on the helm of my own life. And yet I know it just as wise, if not wiser, to surrender control and let and let and let something grander, something older, something wider do the steering.
Thats where I’m at right now. And that’s enough for today. I love you. Thanks for reading my blogletter. I promise to write more in the coming months. I hope you’ll send me a clipping of your own tilted & deranged thoughts.
Happy Spring. Happy Saturday. Be well <3
G
Some Personal Updates::::
A few 1:1 Sessions Are Open Again:
Though I am still largely focusing on my writing this spring, I have re-opened some slots for 1:1 yoga and creative cultivation sessions.
Schedule on my site or get in touch if interested.
Very humbled and thrilled to report 2 poems from [a go] (and me myself) have been added to the Poetry Foundation site. A desire I never knew I had /and/ a dream come true. Check out the poems ideally on a computer for full reflection of their form::
Fissured Tongue: a review of [a go]:
ICYMI, poet and sweet human Jes Davis reviewed my most recent collection, [a go], and the review is up on Inverted Syntax’s Fissured Tongue Series. Check it out here. I’m obsessed with her tender and generous interpretation of my poetry :)