Heart of The New World

I feel, like so many of us, bone-breaking tired. Lines cracking across my forehead, tired. Slow sighs expelling into guttural groans, tired. Stomp my foot for no particular reason, tired. "I really, really don't know" shaking my head, tired.

Stumbling through this weariness, anger, confusion, and fear, I've been seeing a shadow in my side-eye. To follow this form was, for me, a truth apparent:

Spiritual art is the heart of the new world yet born.

We are creatives that must midwife us into the future's next stage. This means that our loving creation is the response to despairing desperation. Each of us, on this precarious precipice, are reaching toward an inevitable destruction. Spiritual artist-warriors possess the gentle strength to hold along the edge, touch the bright being inside, and enter the hot terror toward home. We made home before, we continue here, and make, make, make all of the way through. Our divine choice: transform, this way or another.

I'm convinced, more than ever, that if transcendent politics were the answer to 20th century moral crisis, the art of justice is our healing for 21st century violence. We need courage, imagination, truth, wisdom, in being, more than ever.

Scarcity & Abundance Scale

Last week a wise friend reminded me that the very definition of our lives is to be in mystery, yet only during certain times are we aware of it.

A blessing coming out of having more flexibility in my life is that I've been given the chance to study the differences among people faced with the utter truth of life's mysteriousness, whether by choice, "accident," or "directioned" stumble. Clearly, my observation is as much of a self-study as anything else.

For reasons beyond me, these times seem harder than most. Almost everyone that I know is dealing with something heavy. I notice that difficulty, challenge, and hardship are collapsing all around us, mostly in the form of grief that hardens over transitional wounds. More tiresome, some of us are holding many tests at the same time, which feels overwhelming at best, and soul-breaking at worst. We rage at divine cruelty, disengage from reality, or find other ways to cope.  

But I'm seeing, time and time again, that those who tend to respond with resiliency maintain equanimity, while those who tend to respond with rigidity simply don't. These patterns are beyond being negative or positive-we can be "positive people" who aren't holding life's challenges healthily or be "negative people" who are entering life's mysteries with tremendous grounded-ness. I think that it's more complex than that.

I'm beginning to observe the stuff that equanimity is made off--the presence to appreciate both of scarcity and abundance in our lives. As we allow ourselves to feel of both sides of the scale, so to speak, the easier it is to accept where we are, and navigate where we're going. We hold what we hold, what we hold, what we hold.

This doesn't mean to me, however, that we have equal amounts of both scarcity and abundance or that we choose to notice the plentiful and ignore the absence. Instead, it means that we recognize that scarcity and abundance scales exist by nature (yin and yang qualities) in which we see less scarcity where there is more abundance, and more scarcity where there is more abundance--as it is. Beyond that though, those who tend toward resilience, because they hold a deep sense of equanimity, are able to see the infinite scales that exist before them--not the few that represent the aspects of our lives on which we choose to focus or over which we obsess. In a sense being more present opens us up to the scales that populate the detailed and miraculous mechanics of our existence.  

I want to be one of those people who tend toward resiliency, so I am choosing to smile at abundance, to nod at scarcity, understand the purpose of both as necessary and complementary elements, and most significantly, visit all of the scales in my life. This way I'm smiling more often (as I see abundance), gain extra clarity (as I see scarcity), lean into impermanence (as I recognize that shapes will readily shift), feel spaciousness (tending to the many scales that exist for me in this dimension and others, and being fully present for each visit).

Please remind me how I'm doing when we speak next!

Jump!

Friends, earlier today I launched my website. It's essentially a freelance website all about me. I didn't expect to feel so exposed when it was live because I've written about extremely vulnerable topics on this blog and elsewhere. It explains the reasons why my subconscious dragged on this project for several weeks. There's the leap, and then, there's the free fall for all to see!

Today, more than ever, I'm grateful that I have a solid meditation practice to ground me--remind me that I am joined to forces which are powerful, hopeful, and purposeful.

But before meditation I was letting the vulnerability sit in the middle of my stomach like a giant floating lead ball. I watched it as minutes passed, then a couple of hours. I saw two three things. First, that I felt more raw about a website with little curating. Unlike a blog entry it isn't a glimpse into a window of my life--it's who I strive to be and what I do to align to my aspiration. I'm more out there than usual. Second, I have a critical community reflex. I love my political leftist comrades and communities but we oftentimes apply our critical facilities too sharply on one another, so in some ways, I'm waiting for the punches in the name of purity. Third, the website is unwittingly part of my self-love practice, because during my meditation, I had to shower myself with reminders that I'm brilliant, talented, and deserved to shape how I spend my time, and create my livelihood.

The latter was especially a new place to be. Only a few days ago was I able to say that I've left almost organization that I was paid to work for because I had either outgrown my role or I grew too weary trying to move the group toward its professed transformative vision.

I'm tired of doing that, painful, difficult, exhausting work. I'm tired of being told that I need another credential. I'm tired of being "realistic." I'm tired of putting "focus" on only one set of my passions. I'm tired of my energy  and abilities being so under-valued that it's assumed that I'd work for free, especially by entities & people with resources. I'm tired of working under less dedicated & less skilled folks who come from money, who are dudes, or who simply made more conventional choices. Enuf!

Now, I know enough to shape my vision, and I've got community behind me. I bare it out on a website but honestly, I've been walkin' this way for a while.

Reveal

I haven't written a blog entry for three months. Often, this means that there's little revelatory insight about which to connect with others. But my recent absence is because there's almost too much. Nearly everyone close to me has felt, has been swept, or is mercifully directing the immense energetic shift that arrived with Venus in Retrograde. Since, there's been no hiding.

I've moved homes, quit my job, forgave a person, contacted my birth-father, published my first essay, and had a change in my romantic relationship in the last three months of 2013.

Some of these changes were foreseen, others weren't--but they each came fast and furiously, without my oh-so careful consultation. The magical quality of these changes were that they didn't happen to me; rather, like so many people, as I felt the strong planetary pull after at November's end, truths made themselves obnoxiously known. And, when the Universe crashes down on you, and laughs at your astonishment that things changed, I recognized the spiritual test as one not about the Universe's audacity, but as one about making choices or, well, not.

So I decided to leave my job. Then, more truths surfaced, and I made other changes. I stumbled onto yet more truths along the way, and I chose to take every risk--choosing the choice that I would "never" make. I continued to follow and choose following the light on the dark footpath. Soon after, I found the capacity to go beyond making negative choices to making positive ones: if there was ever a time to manifest my intentions, it was now. The intuitive rabbit hole was a miraculous gift wrapped in packaging that shed to quickly that I almost doubted that it was given in the first place.

While giving chase, and at times, being chased, I've asked others: what brings you to center?

What gives you the courage to stay acutely present through unpredictability, to just hold heavy uncertainty for your well-being, security, and future, to become your own lover amidst narcissism and ego-trippin', to return to yourself, and all of that which you bring, after checking out for a few days?

The resounding response was that no one knows. Neither do I. But it's been a beautifully graceless, and supremely humbling journey so far.

My transformation is centered around deepening my self-love. Over the last year I gathered that to genuinely love myself that I must end the sabotage and I must collect my power. If I had offered myself as much care, attention, and gentleness as I'd thought, I wouldn't be so estranged from myself that I couldn't recognize my powerful selves--the possibilities that could, but weren't, the places where I was living through my imagination, the worlds in which I aspired and achieved as easily as I breathed. I wanted to say "yes" to every part of myself that this new path revealed but I was reluctant to unleash this power without the wisdom to harness it. It exists but must be excavated.

On my best days I get much closer. I shovel these parts into the outside world with fervor. To reach these parts, I'm called upon to intensely listen to myself in one ear, and listen to the Universe in the other. Deep listening for me, takes the form of total surrender.

In this practice, I have no option but to completely trust myself. Or when I've felt too small, I've entered the warm embrace of the Universe. When I return to center, I can hoard all of the tangible and intangible twists and turns because they are unmatched against my infinite resources. I have every ability and influence that I need or could hope for. I feel the continuity of lifetimes of wisdom, and that of the world, to actively shape my reality in the present moment. These are very good days. I have them sometimes :) for which I am very grateful.

Love as a practice of faith is a strong force.

Weathered Home

Last fall, a person that I love joined me in a writing project with the theme: short poems inspired by lines of the same. This means that one of us wrote a poem, and the other wrote another poem borrowing a line from the previous poem. It recently re-appeared into my life, so I took it as a sign to share. Thanks for reading. 

Weathered soles hold up our
Weathered souls
Wandering steps
Self-possessed
Wondering, whether
This heel marks home for
Weathered souls upon these
Weathered soles

Yet, as leaves turn, weather learns,
Toward which way, or as some say,
An uncertain, whethered way,
For with each foot-fall weary,
Wake pieces of Earth, into
A trail of ancestral secrets
Waxed upon land, many years old,
Wherein healing magic lives,
From weathered souls, standing upon
Weathered soles.

This place, we call home.

Peeling The Onion

I sat down for lunch with a dear friend of mine a couple of weeks ago. We hadn't seen each other for some time, so we were eager to summarily divulge everything about our lives in the span of forty minutes. We each shared our successes and struggles in the same easy tone. "Oh, I changed jobs." "It was the first time that I saw my family in years."

As we traded updates, as children trade their most treasured toys, I confessed a question that was sitting with me over the last several months: if you know what will make you happy, what prevents you pursuing it?

I have been exploring my subconscious about this question for most of the year. My intention was to strive for a greater sense of freedom--releasing myself from my perpetual caregiver role, surrendering any self-definitions or identities in which I casted myself, shedding a structured schedule to follow the way of my own presence. All of this effort is toward loosening the suffocating grip of responsibility, my own "light shadow" which distances me from myself.

Yet, I disclosed to my friend sitting across the small metal table, I wouldn't always let myself get there. What stopped me from embracing what was good for me, what was satisfying, what was fulfilling? Why would we--and I--negotiate with self-sabotage?

She nodded in agreement, and simply replied, "It's like peeling an onion, Baby."

Since that lunch I've peeked at, picked at, and begun peeling layers of habit, comfort, expectation, uncertainty, anger, and pain. For me, the onion analogy is a description of a deeply-inward process of refining my fundamental self; a piece-meal transformation through exuberant trial-and-error. This unglamorous but necessary road has characterized 2013, which I can hardly believe is nearing an end.

Many of these layers are messily mundane. For example, earlier this year, shortly after celebrating twenty-eight years of life, I discovered that through my long-time stomach sickness that I developed a bad gluten-allergy. One which made me disoriented for hours with too much exposure. It took me almost six months to take it seriously! Now, I have a mostly gluten-free, vegan diet, but it took many congested days, yeast reactions, and nights out-of-commission to arrive here.

And some of these layers are leading me to unconventional choices. I'm slowly entering a community of people who have chosen to carefully shape their livelihoods. We aren't climbing mobility ladders, we aren't part of a single "profession," we call upon our ingenuity, creativity, and available resources to get by. We question and challenge the norms around work, what it means to us (and doesn't define us) and creating lifestyles to happily survive. I've long-talked about holding similar values, but only last month realized that while I like organizing and law, I love writing and healing. So, as a former paid organizer and current lawyer, why has it taken so long to make writing and healing work my priorities? I laugh out loud when I think about it--how obvious but not obvious it is.

I still don't have full insight about the hidden parts of myself or relationship to the Universe that immobilize me. After all, the layering of our own self-imposed limitations, and that of our environments, is a thick, useless moldy sheet, which some of us constantly try to pull away.

Admitting my self-sabotage struggle isn't an exercise of self-flagellation. I actually think it's one of the kindest self-inquiries that I have held for years. It's a challenge to do more toward my Purpose. And if anything has come of it, I've become better friends with myself by saying "yes" more often to that which serves me instead of making excuses to ignore parts of myself.  

Recently, I've also come to terms that I'm  most motivated when my lens of the world is reduced to the naked existential reality that our human experience is finite. In the past it was an occasional panic that would befall me every few years, when I would enter a state of hyper-reality for a minute, aware of the preciousness of every millisecond. The fear of not being here was paralyzing yet revelatory.

These days I try to induce the same without the panic everyday: What would it be like, Richael, to feel heart-opening splendor? What would it be like to possess a passionate urgency for the moment in front of me? Peeling this layer, and another layer.

Glow

Around this time, for the past two years, I've experienced trauma. August and September, in many ways, have become months when the worst unexpected came true, bearing open my most vulnerable parts, and demanding courage and resilience that I didn't think was within me.

Trauma, like all things-that-happen, occur some Place--a physical location attached to the feelings.

I was very conscience of this Place, where last year's event happened. Often times, when I'm near this Place, I held my breath while I passed. Other times, I avoided it altogether. No matter what I choose, I am aware of this Place, reminded by the anxiety swimming in my stomach. I remember.

Tonight, as I sometimes do, I decided to pass this Place on my way home. I felt my feet slow from a city gait, to a southern slug, and then, they stopped. I stood in the exact spot that it all happened. Before, I didn't recognize the particular house it was near, or the split in the pavement--I just felt where it was in my heart, as if it was tied to an anchor and suddenly dropped into the center of the earth. I understood that it was here, where I was changed.

I stayed for a moment. I let the tidal wave of feelings wash over me: betrayal, anger, disbelief. The feelings was so palpable that I could taste them, and yet, the experience wasn't overwhelming. A breeze brushed my face. And almost as suddenly as I relived last year, I felt myself in the present. I smiled and I was OK.

While I still held feelings from before,  they were vague shadows of what they once were. I recognized that I had survived it. I thought, "could I be sure that this was the same place?" However, what I was really asking was "whether I was the same person who stood here before?"

And I am. I gave myself permission to recede into my surroundings, and reflect on exactly what allowed me to arrive at this moment feeling so strong. I understood that it was the tremendous quality of love in my life that beat back the haze of deep hurt from the past. Love saved me.

Love allowed me to ask and receive support from close friends for which I never believed brave enough to ask, or even rightfully deserved. Friends who generously offer their cars so that I can visit my parents; friends who run a distance races with me to support my personal goals, and then hike with me to re-visit my sacred, self-retreat spot; friends who apologize for being distant upon realizing that their resentful reaction to your happiness is wrong, and that it was on them to make amends.

Love allowed my family to show up during my hardest moments in surprising and unselfish ways; family who listened to private things of the kind I have never shared or believed that I didn't have the capacity to feel; family members who challenged their own confidence of their abilities to hold more and be more responsible for themselves, in light of witnessing my complete depletion. Family who reminds me that they love me everyday, and always have.

Love that returned me to the queer politics of love. A belief that inspiration and imagination are the only tools in our war arsenal; people who celebrate struggle, honor ancestors, and realize that lost campaigns can't take away laughter; communities who value the Beloved, practice integrity, and reject fear as reflex in which to live.

The promise of Love that inspired me to build the most loving romantic relationship that I've ever had with a partner who genuinely accepts all parts of me; a partner who asks to create trust with me everyday; a partner who possesses the kindest heart, held together by gentle bones, and holds me as carefully; a partner who is committed to transformation, dedicated to learning whether unconditional love exists and what it means, and who treasures working toward the hard parts of love, as much as the easy parts, because the reward of each other is so valuable.

The memory of Love let me surrender to the Ultimate Love. A deep, inevitable Love that gave me insight when I could barely open my eyes; trust when I didn't believe; and instill hope when I was drowning in my own morass. I followed goodness when doing so felt almost foolish.

A year later, there's no doubt that I've arrived and stayed in that Place because of Love. Thank you to all who made that Place more like any other, and a Place of my own power.