the patient brutality of time::

on opening to & hurtling through

“Days and more days passed and everything in that danger and the geraniums so scarlet…I quietly put my ear to the ground and heard summer forcing its way in and my heart beneath the earth— “nothing! I said nothing!” —and I felt the patient brutality with which the closed earth was opening inside in birth, and I knew with what weight of sweetness the summer was ripening a hundred thousand oranges and I knew that the oranges were mine. Because that is what I wanted.”

(Clarice Lispector, Água Viva)

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When you have a newborn, time goes by in installments of three hours, and then as things inch forward, in notches of days & nights, and then eventually weeks go by, months at a time, personalities sprout, babes turn to toddlers, seasons fluctuate in and out, round and round, not necessarily in weather-worn ways, but in progressions and regressions; phases and obsessions, things they say in certain ways multiple times everyday and then one day simply never say again.

I have a two year old suddenly. Who says frogbellies instead of strawberries. Who said peace dawg when I dropped him off at daycare yesterday morning, with an errant, toothy grin and a Vulcan salute in place of a peace sign.

And when I look at the faces of new babies now; their tiny inscrutable eyes, their unstable necks, I can neither comprehend being that size nor recall my own child being ever so wildly small. I can neither comprehend nor recall the sensation of aging at all. How is it composed of only a succession of here-and-nows? How is it a portal we all move through, individually & yet synchronistically, at once? How does the evidence show in the creased lines of the faces of my beloveds, in the ways my own body morphs & changes in the mirror, in the tallying of certain numbers on the clocks, on the screens, on the TVs, but otherwise, nowhere, nowhere to be found inside my inner self?

Memory, too, stretches & colludes with my delusion that nothing is moving if my interior stays still. If you told me I was still 28 I would not hesitate to believe you.

I have been thinking about time, yes, always; & specifically the way time is hurtled through us; deepening our solitude, embalming our wounds, threatening our ecstasies. The role time plays in setting cadence to our relationships. The way time invariably, in its every evocation, summons death. How time is hung, some impossible blossom, begging to be opened into:

orange, peeled

pink obliteration

This opening is what I’ve intended to write about but haven’t seemed to be able to. The heat this summer has been irrefutable. Headaches have been staunch and heartaches acute. How have you & yours been, have you felt this too?

The past few months have lowered me into a tender place; a physical and emotional and sometimes philosophical reeling that remembers me to a state I found myself in over a decade ago, when a seemingly superfluous catalyst absolutely shattered me, or, some understanding of me. Some Tower-esque force torched through a vision I’d held for my life, tindering a great internal storm, whose inescapable winds of gutting grief ultimately led me into a cycle of death & rebirthing.

Which is to say; an invaluable becoming.

Recent events¹ have led me down a similar path, though this time I have the wisdom of past storms to fall back on. I have been retracing certain roots to places where deep desires and old wounds are still knotted within me; reassessing particular visions I somewhere acquired, of what a life should look like, sound like, feel like. Confronting the ways in which I am still at war with reality, with my body, with my life as it unfolds in its very particular & unique beauty.

Noticing the ways my resistance to What Is arises; noticing the intricate ways my mind & body work to lunge into the future so as not to be present with What Is right here, right now.

The question I have been tracking is (& it’s probably a pertinent question for most): How am I escaping the here/now? What psychological or spiritual or psychedelic tendencies do I employ to project my Self elsewhere, and what do I name it in justification?

I am hyper aware of the ways my mind dabbles with healing integrating rearranging rewiring rewriting the past. But wow oh wow it turns out my mind is also obsessed with attempting to arrange visualize project daydream into new futures.

And here I was thinking I was simply being ~*spiritual~&~*magical*~ relying on tools like manifestation & trust in some overarching force to continuously catapult my awareness somewhere else: into some desired nextness.²

But I don’t want to live in the constant healings and the nextnesses. I want to be courageous enough to unroll with life as it unfolds in real time. I don’t want to perpetually postpone the fullness that is already so spectacularly here::::: ³

and here

and here

Lately, with great gratitude to Amoda Maa (see footnotes), my practice has simplified to one gesture, one mantra, one action: Open.

When I feel my body holding, my mind clenching around a want, a thought, a need, a should: I notice. I open.

When my instincts tell me to shut down, to cave in, to turn off, to transcend, to run, I am pausing and asking myself, what if instead: I opened?

For so long, when I met with an uncomfortable situation; found myself in a dark and raw place, I would dive in headstrong like let’s move through this gunk, let’s alchemize the shit, let’s get ourselves out of the slog and into the next place o please o please let’s let me be good again.

But what I’m onto now is: sometimes the alchemy must wait. Sometimes the movement won’t be forced, the passage need be unrushed. The way is rather to let my Self experience the moment, the situation, the discomfort, all for what it is. As it is. Refuse to transcend it. Nothing too human or gritty for me to feel. Nothing is below me. So let it through, open wider, loosen grip, unlock doors, fling every aperture agape. Now breathe it in. Are you still alive? Yes, yes.
I am still here. I was made for this storm.⁴

Sending Many End of Summer & New Moon Blessings:::::::

G <3

1. Sorry to be vague here but I actually don’t think this is about what it is about. Meaning, it could be about whatever you are going through too. Meaning, the catalyst is just the catalyst as wise friend doula Jenni Ashby said to me. Meaning, I’m not ready to write about it.

2. I want to be clear that I am neither ragging on nor discouraging the use of these powerful tools: I will certainly continue to use them at times. But Amoda Maa’s incredible book (which I recommend vigorously) enlightened me to the way certain mental tendencies like this are preventing us from being truly open to and present with What Is / already here.

3

“If we look carefully, we will see that trust implies ‘hope in the future.’ In other words, we hope that things will turn out in our favor. We hope that if we have a certain attitude or a certain belief or a certain understanding, we will be taken care of by a higher power. We hope that if we trust in our own positive thoughts, no harm will ever come to us. We hope that if we diligently follow a certain spiritual practice, we will achieve everlasting peace and happiness. We hope that trust will save is from an uncertain world and from a broken heart.
But trust in something is a false safety net. It may satisfy the mind, but it does not satisfy the being—because it is a postponement of the fullness that is already here. Why are you waiting for a better tomorrow? Why are you waiting to find fulfillment when you will have achieved something or acquired something or understood something? What if the future doesn’t unfold the way you hope it will? [...] as long as trust is based on the hope of better future, you are a million miles from the gift of life that’s already here.
Be courageous enough to meet life from the unknown—without a safety net, without hope, without past, without future. Without the hope of salvation—without running away from or running toward anything in your mind—you are forced to fall into the open space of being-ness.”
-Quote (and many sentiments in this newsletter) borrowed from Amoda Maa’s Falling Open In A World Falling Apart

4. Another gem relayed to me via Jenni Ashby, who pulled cards for me from her Gentle Tarot deck. This line is from The Tower card. It’s been circulating through my head and heart since.