What do I remember?

That our lives move as spirals. That the spirit is a wild, winding thing. The body asks for a different temper. A kind of restraint is needed to keep the whole system humming.

The hum of a vital body, an alive and awake spirit that feeds and is fed, is rich enough to sustain in even the harshest winter. You can look to the old ways, the old words and the first cosmologies to see echoes of the infinite knowing: what is inside of you is a gift.

It can take lifetimes of patience and exact timing for the conditions to be right. For your spirit to ripen. It is not guaranteed that you will hear it now. But one day you will be able to hear the sound of who you have always been in the water. For you to remember what it is that you know.

Remembrance is not an act. It is not something you get to through your own brute force. Especially not when that force comes from the mind. Remembrance is a holy start. The heart a holy signal. What it desires and what it loves must be answered in the living.

When it is your time, when you have become wild, you will know. You will hear the call to prayer coming from inside. Without knowing how you will be living in the after. In the resonance of your own knowing. It is an alchemical process you cannot rush. Ask the rocks how they have moved. Let your rock body open, in the course of lifetimes.

Join me this fall for a three-part virtual writing workshop and collective ritual:

Write Through

I have had a dream for a long time. A dream that I have kept at the edges of my consciousness. I dream of a life where I speak in technicolour. Where my words are portals. Where I decide and a world appears. My emerald heart at the very centre.

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Grief reaches backwards and I am in the undoing part.

The knowing echoes through my bones — your past self isn’t coming to save you.

I am trying to savour the fruits of August but my mind is living in October. How will I make money? Where will I go? The flight isn’t booked yet but I hover over the checkout buttons.

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Everyone I know feels stretched in two right now. I have been communing with past and future.

July threw all of my fears in my face. Childhood dynamics playing out directly in my adult life, with my adult family. Sitting with the grief of experiencing my limits to help, the pain to the heart of knowing it beats alone. The small death of knowing, as Ram Dass said, we must allow others to suffer in the ways that they choose.

How do I explain to you, that in the midst of so much pain, my heart is more at home in my chest than ever before? That I feel more alive in my bones? That I open my eyes each morning, and that it’s like seeing for the first time?

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Grief is a spiral and I have been spinning. It’s August now and she’s taken me under.

The medicine is bitter.

Can you look at all of your fears in the face?

My teeth hurt and I want to spit it out.

I am done playing mind games with myself.

The life I seek is the same life that I crave.

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I am 32 and I am spending the summer living in my parent’s house. I have lived a life of untapped and scattered potential. When I was nineteen, I went to study yoga at a place that turned out to be a tantric cult. A few years later I spent months living at a Buddhist centre, cleaning the garden and painting the walls and cooking in exchange for next to no rent. A few years after that, I lived and worked in a butterfly garden in Costa Rica in exchange for a bed in a treehouse and two meals a day that was really one big meal because all we ever got was eggs, coffee, rice and salad. I have degrees in philosophy, psychology and creative writing. I am a certified holistic nutritionist and 2x certified yoga instructor. I was mentored in somatics before somatics was a cultural thing. I’ve worked as a coach, a personal assistant, a copywriter, a human design reader. I’ve published a book of poetry. For the last two years I’ve managed a small restaurant in the city I was born in. I almost married a rockstar and my longest relationship was also my first queer one. I’ve lived in England, Scotland, Portugal, Ontario, British Columbia and California. My body has had a way of telling me when it’s time to move on my whole life, and my mind has interrupted or rushed the process more times than I can count. I have spent my adult life circling around the question of my dreams, watching them change shape faster than I can keep track of, looking forwards and backwards asking if this is what makes up a life well lived.

The internal shift that has occurred in my life in the past year has been seismic. It has been nothing short of psychedelic to watch my entire perception change, no plant medicine required. Like a flower waiting for its moment, something inside of me opened to the present and to my own internal resource system in a way I have been waiting for forever. The life well lived has become more of a practice of noticing my current state, and working with that above and beyond anything external.

And now, of course, I am on the precipice of massive external change.

Moving countries, again.

Leaving a job, again.

So I am sitting with the questions of what will make my dream life. Not the life I have been sold, or a beautiful life I see on the internet. What makes up a dream life for me.

I recognized recently that my resistance to achieving a dream life goes hand in hand with the feeling that there will never be anything to strive for after. That the line between genuine seeking and becoming identified with the search is thin. That I am addicted to the crash of giving in to what holds me back. That the wounds I spiral around are the very things I must welcome into my centre.

The questions of how I will survive, how I will make money, what I am here to offer swirl violently in my mind when I get too far away from my self – that is, my inner state of being and feeling solid in my body and mind.

To be alive and to love it fully is to be with all parts of ourselves. The shadows must come into the light. Not to make them any less dark, but to welcome them into the totality of who we are. And only by being with this totality can we experience true vitality.

And vitality is the dream that I seek.

To be so alive, embodied, on purpose. To feel erotically alive. To be healthy and whole. To expand my capacity for grief, for pain, for suffering. To be able to hold the totality. To live as closely as I can to my truth.

There is no declaration, only a gentle holding of this time. A reverence for what wants to come out of me here, in the midst of so much change. A body asking for more stillness and quiet. I am finding myself again in breathing deeper, more often. In daily exercise that keeps my lymphatic system moving. In food that feels like light (because plants literally are that). In drinking more herbs. With every choice: does it increase, or decrease my sense of vitality? It’s shocking how simple everything becomes with this orientation. Allowing the simplicity is the second part.

I am living in the second part, the work in progress, knowing so much will change and knowing I will still be who I am. Tending to that part. The one that is here, and here, and here again.

You can keep pretending that more answers out there will help you. You can study more, collect more knowledge, accumulate even more information. You can follow teachers, guides, mystics. You can talk to friends, to a tree, to your ancestors, to God. But there comes a time when you have to leave it all behind. There comes a time when the only way out is through your own heart.

I have been thinking about why we stay stuck, why we live on the precipice of transformation. Why so many stay stuck in the loops of their karma, waiting at the very door of their dharma.

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I post via notes on the ideas and processes I am currently examining as an excerpt and preview of longer posts. In an effort to support my creative practice, all posts are paywalled.

I really, really love being alive.

I did not come to this conclusion lightly. Something of a dark cloud hovered over me for most of my adolescence and early adulthood. I developed passion early, I became a seeker of truth at nineteen. But I never fit into any of the world’s boxes laid out before me. It started with my exit from the other world and my entrance into this one.

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I post via notes as an excerpt and preview of longer posts. In an effort to support my creative practice, all posts are paywalled.

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