a summer of stillness.
expansive in a different way than imagined — a stillness that brings growth : a study of quieter joy than my usual fast pace or loud volume ~

growth is a fascinating concept — oceanic for me

it comes in chaotic waves of disaster and deepening —

gentle tides and shifts

sudden storms

unexpected bursts of winds and pivots

or, like recently, island spaces of intense focus and isolation between large volumes, short interval bouts of connection

(( attention is the beginning of devotion — Mary Oliver ))

i’ve been sitting with the japanese concept of ma (間) —
the meaningful interval.

not emptiness, but the charged space, the pause, the timing between things
that gives form, rhythm, clarity, and depth to whatever surrounds it.
without it, everything collapses into noise.

interesting observation:

there’s something unsettling about the calm and safe pocket I have found myself in

to be honest, I think… the regulation is a bit disregulating

the healthy responses and people I am surrounded by stay close

the unhealthy and lower frequencies fall away

the stillness around gives breath.

I can go inwards, asking:

what is presence what is important?

in seeking ripples of peace —

peace does not have to always be waves of chaos but a steady sea

been turning to nature and observing
how spirit translates to matter,
how art shapes patterns,
how we make things harder than necessary,
how life simply gives everything if we notice,
how even air plants have roots

it’s been earthy.

for whirring minds,

artistic souls

and big spilling hearts,

external rhythm is crucial — especially between the big intervals

so the complex inner worlds and ether creativity have room to breathe.

my new home is almost set
and the grounding is so regulating it almost weirds me out.
paradoxically, my mindset has evolved too.

who and what we surround ourselves with,
the standards we create and emanate,
is key to the doors we open.

key takeaways from this timelapse staycation:
• slow down ~ zoom in ~ breathe out
• pattern recognition and play matter
• not just the grandiose, but the step-by-step
• dance with or without music
• the in-between is everything

even the pause (ma) is growth.

-

In yogic and tantric traditions, prana — the vital life-force carried on the breath — and kundalini, the coiled creative-sexual energy at the base of the spine, are classical concepts found in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

CREATIVITY BREATHES

CONSCIOUS BREATH OPENS THE CHANNELS

We perceive more. We express more.

Pranayama works with this energy through four stages:

1. Puraka — the full inhalation that draws in prana.

2. Antara Kumbhaka — the retention after inhaling.

3. Rechaka — the full exhalation that releases tension and stagnation.

4. Bahya Kumbhaka — the retention after exhaling, creating a quiet pause.

When blocked by fear or unconscious tension, the body and imagination contract. When it flows freely, raw intelligence becomes tangible form. I fuse traditional frameworks to describe what I call pranic erotica — my own term for the hybrid of pranic life-force and Eros: the erotic, creative intelligence that pulses.

These practices, developed over centuries in Hatha and Raja Yoga lineages, teach us to notice the holding, soften the grip, and allow our deepest yearnings to rise and take form instead of remaining trapped by shame or cultural conditioning. Wilhelm Reich, the radical psychoanalyst who explored the link between sexual vitality and human freedom, described a parallel universal life-energy — which he called: orgone — the pulsing force behind both orgasmic aliveness and creative power. When this energy is blocked by fear, guilt, or unconscious tension, the body and imagination contract.

When it flows freely, raw creative intelligence becomes tangible form..

To creatively breathe is to stop holding ourselves, our thoughts, and our desires, and to let pranic eros move through us freely. The same pulse that fills my lungs draws me outward — away from the center and toward the edge where everything raw is waiting.

Yet every time I return from that edge, I’m struck by how rare it still is for people to stand there unashamed. What feels natural to me is often seen as dangerous or indulgent by a world addicted to contraction. So I keep finding myself having to explain should never have needed explaining: that our sensuality is a birthright, a sacred pillar of our humanity. I keep having to defend these uninhibited ways of feeling, creating, and connecting — the thoughts, expressions, and ways of being that feel like home to me — are sometimes met with awe and delight, and other times with shock or shame.

Isn’t it obvious? When the guilt arrives and your body tightens, when your breath shallows because your mind has shut down — doesn’t it become glaringly apparent?

To deny our Eros is to harm ourselves psychologically. It drains our joy, our capacity to dream, to expand, to feel truly alive. As Audre Lorde wrote, Eros is “a source of power and information,” a wellspring of creative energy that fuels everything we do.

Anaïs Nin understood this in her bones. She wrote her way through desire, contradiction, and the luminous dark of the psyche without apology. In her famous letter to the Collector who wanted “sex without poetry,” she pushed back with fire:

“Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone… You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.”

For Nin, eroticism was never separate from creativity. It was creativity — the same life current. She chased the edge on the page and in the bedroom, turning her diaries into a lifelong act of sensual self-knowing. She showed us that to live erotically is to stay porous: to let experience move through you, to taste life twice (once in the moment, once in the writing), we must refuse the neat, sanitized, societally imposed versions of womanhood or artistry forced upon us.

True freedom asks that we accept ourselves as flawed and deeply self-aware. This is where expansion lives — where agony and ecstasy diverge.

As Brené Brown reminds us, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”

And yet, even as we choose to step forward, the pull to retreat remains. There is a constant oscillation — a deep desire to be seen and known, right alongside an equally strong instinct to protect what’s tender and hide. That tension doesn’t go away. It simply becomes part of the practice.

D.W. Winnicott captured this push-pull perfectly: “Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”

The water was still that afternoon, until my fingers broke the surface.

I crouched there on the warm stone edge, linen slipping off one shoulder, sun licking the tattoos that map my skin like old scriptures rewritten in flesh. I forget I have tattoos until someone asks me about them. Then I remember the spells encrypted in their ink and the experiences embedded into my body as deeply as the shapes they take.

Below me, a glass pane hovered just beneath the ripples. And on it, in golden script that caught the light like a secret finally spoken:

Eternal seconds.

Not minutes. Not hours. Seconds. Those fleeting, trembling things we usually let slip through our hands like water. But here they were—held, suspended, made visible. A window into time itself.

I stared at my reflection fractured across the pool’s moving skin and felt something unnameable stir. In that moment, I didn’t recognize myself — this woman gazing back at me felt both intimately familiar and strangely foreign, her face and presence reshaped by the carbon monoxide poisoning and concussion that fractured my memory and rewired how I perceive the very thing we were conceptualizing in the shoot.

Time.

I teared a little but the photographer didn’t see. My surface composition did not match my internal landscape. The feelings were wetter than the water. The same flood that arrives when I’m deep in ritual, or when a poem strikes its way through my throat at 3am, or when a circle of women storm into the raw throb of what it means to be unapologetically full-spectrum in these wild times. Those feelings.

Time is a window.

It used to feel like a prison. Or a straight line marching me towards unimaginative decay. But I have learned that time, as a metric, can be a support rather than a handicap. An enhancer of whatever we choose to exist. A window. Something we can lean through. Something we can open.

I’ve spent years unlearning the rigid clocks and musts of the old stories and the old world—the constructs and schedules that once dictated my body, my creativity, my worth. That path collapsed beautifully, messily, under the weight of its own control. What emerged was this: a life lived in eternal seconds. Moments so full they stretch into forever.

Before the accident, I had quietly asked the Universe to help me step into my full evolved self — the version of me stripped of performance, egoic masks, and everything that no longer belonged. I didn’t know the prayer to know myself would be answered through forgetting. The carbon monoxide poisoning was an unspecified initiation. It stripped away what I was attached to: old identities, linear stories, the illusion of a continuous “me” built on accumulated memories.

Memory loss is sacred, ruthless work — it peeled back the layers I clung to; narratives I mistook as a sense of self. It has left me so raw in essence I ache. From someone who has moved through the repercussions of this, a complete identity shift into who I truly am—without the avatars or egoic drive—is not only likely, it was —and is — inevitable.

Scientifically as well as philosophically: CO poisoning starves the brain of oxygen, particularly damaging the hippocampus—the very region responsible for forming new memories and binding our sense of time and self. What was lost were not just fragments of the past, but the smooth machinery of linear recall. In its place came gaps, fog, and a strange liberation. Art became my bridge across these fractured landscapes—a way of sharing the ineffable, not because I couldn’t speak it, but because the old pathways of memory had dissolved. I needed an anchor. A kite. A way to fly while feeling grounded again. Art has been that for me.

Art has reminded me that life is not passive retrieval but active creation. The brain’s neuroplasticity, its miraculous ability to forge new neural pathways, became my ally through art. What science calls synaptic rewiring, I experienced as the soul’s refusal to be bound by broken clocks. Time, once a rigid metric, revealed itself as fluid, malleable, and deeply relational—something we don’t just move through, but something we can reshape from within.

We are told time is running out.

But we don’t ask where the voice is coming from or how it reached our ear.

Yes, the world is burning — but so is our spirit.

The clock is ticking on everything from our bodies to the planet.

And yes—there is urgency. But urgency without presence becomes violence. The real revolution isn’t in speeding up. It’s in slowing down enough to actually feel what’s moving through us. To let the seconds become eternal by giving them our full, dripping attention.

In my Substack, in the circles, in the ceremonies —I keep returning to this: how do we live inside the eternal second while still answering the call of these times?

We do it by making art that remembers.
By touching skin like it’s scripture.
By laughing so hard the ancestors lean in closer.
By planting a garden and calling it prayer.
By choosing pleasure as purpose.
By claiming joy as rebellion.

Where are your eternal seconds?

In the way your child looks at you when they think you’re not watching?
In the first sip of tea made with the reverence of plants you grew yourself?
In the song that makes you dance alone in your kitchen at midnight?
In the brave, trembling yes you whisper to your own desire?

Find them and free them.

CREATIVITY IS SPIRITUAL ELECTRICITY

It is how the body remembers what the mind has been taught to forget.

Slightly disheveled, flushed, unfinished — sometimes that’s exactly how it should be.

The flow can arrive gentle and lush, like a milky, herb-soaked bath that comforts and nourishes my entire being. Other times it seizes me in an almost unbearable ecstatic sweetness — a formless chrysalis of divine communion.

Honey strands of concepts pour from my zygeist, dripping, sticking, coating me completely.

The zygeist is my private name for the living, electric undercurrent — a personal, pulsing spirit-source where raw life-force bursts from imagination. Not quite the collective zeitgeist of an era, but its intimate, alchemical twin: an inner daemon that ferments experience into image, sensation into symbol, ache into art.

It is the place where body and mystery conspire. The more I say yes to being its satellite, the more I input epiphanies. It tangles in my hair and pulls it, coats my fingers and puts them in my mouth, refuses to be wiped off until I am tuned in and turned on. The zygeist doesn’t deliver polished ideas — it delivers feeling that demands form. To open into it is to risk being remade mid-creation: sticky, startled, gloriously incomplete.

Sometimes it shocks me. It electrifies and expedites the currents inside.

Sometimes it floods without warning and I gasp for air.

Gasping, for a source of oxygen I can’t seem to find till I lick and let loose.

LICK AND BREATHE.

Breath is a declaration of hope.

I N H A L E

ART IS THE E X H A L E

It pours when I stop holding (back).

Breath is the original creative act. Long before the first word, the first brushstroke, or the first note, there was the inhale — the body drawing life in — and the exhale — the body offering something back into the world.

More than a bodily function, breath is a principle: a way of being that invites us to stay open and intimately connected with life. It teaches us how to receive fully, release honestly, and allow desire and imagination to flow without censorship.

In eroticism and creativity alike, this principle becomes our orientation — softening the hold, expanding capacity, and letting aliveness move through us unimpeded.

CREATIVITY BREATHES

The space between the notes. The emptiness we dig in order to fill. The contraction and expansion of vitality is how we breathe creativity into form.

Eros is our natural state. As children we know it instinctively, yet most of us are programmed to repress our expressions. Violated by the constrictions of society, we unknowingly become violators of our own life-force.

We hold our breath in fear or shame.

We hold our thoughts when they feel too wild, too sensual, too much.

We tighten the belly, clench the jaw, shallow the chest, and swallow the words and moans that want to emerge — until our vitality grows dry, dim, and anxious.

Somatic holding blocks entry. Conscious breath, movement, and softening — through pranayama or somatic experiencing — open the gates. Here the creative trance arrives: the body remembers, Eros circulates freely, and creation becomes communion — sometimes soft and steady, sometimes a godsmack.

The artist’s body becomes an instrument, lungs and diaphragm acting as bellows for the fire that Esther Perel calls Eros: the creative force of desire, agency, and passionate engagement with life.

CONSCIOUS BREATH OPENS THE CHANNELS

We perceive more. We express more.

More soon.

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Xx Adeléyde

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Wet and floating like a cloud, vapor dreams inside my mouth, when we kissed. A million futures to bring into form. But first, we shape together, our bodies, then our fates. It’s how you know.

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