*idk if i even need to say this, but i write these daily and sometimes post versions of them on here. This one is from last week.
I got up really early today and drove over to San Jose. I had the intuitive sense that listening to David Whyte’s conversation with Krista Tippett might be valuable. It was wild to revisit that conversation again after everything has settled down around a season of life that was super wild for me. There was just so much pain for so long. It felt like it would never end. I remember listening to that in the middle of 2020 and trying to make sense of everything and get in touch with my own vulnerability and the awareness around “alertness being the hidden discipline of familiarity.” It was a traumatized period of time personally and universally and I don’t think I could even hear a lot of the conversation over the noise of my own panic and pain.
I got destroyed in that process. I literally almost died after and I am finally healing in a real way. I think writing about it all has helped a lot. I think that I’m learning how to be more myself in the world. It’s beautiful to be alive and breathing in this air. I think a lot of what David said this time around made a lot of sense because of my lived experience. Because I’m learning how to live more in my body and more on the frontier of what I want and what the world wants from me and the process of learning how to concede and take opportunities and walk the path of life with grace and truth.
I was reading the beginning of the gospel of John this morning after I woke up. I just keep jumping in to specifically the words of Christ, but John felt right this time. Even if it’s for a moment, it’s good for me to have these words echoing across my internal landscape and informing in a quiet, gentle way how I engage with the storied ways that I am formed in this world. I don’t know what will come after, but I do know that I am learning how to be myself more fully than I ever have been. It’s an allowance of the process of myself being realized and forgotten. It’s a washing of my soul by hands that are so gentle and lovely.
It is letting the violence be washed away and the integrity be restored. The trust in the healing hands of my God as they embrace and wash me. To eat his body and drink his blood. It sounds so strange and yet cosmically it makes perfect sense. To commune with this reality, now, today, and to be drawn deeper into that sense of beauty. It is a conversation with all things. Everything is waiting for me to come home to myself in this body and be here today in love with the one who spoke love and I was thought of and became tissue, bone, and whatever comprises the human soul and spirit. To commune with the deep wisdom and humility of God. It’s more than I can fathom.
I will not break faith with my awakened heart. I think when I step back and breathe and incarnate and allow myself to stop and think I become aware of the ways that illusion seeks to grasp and control me. It’s this thing of like seeing how grasping for the moment in an objectifying way is actually keeping me from living in the moment. This fear of death that drives folks to be so miserable and do really harmful things to themselves, others and the earth. To let go and become something else. To bring that despair close and listen to the beating heart of a child who does not understand what is happening. Life isn’t fair. It is so painful. It will end.
I think the most profound shift in my orientation to my life is when I realized that I was growing into my life like something that grows more rich and complex and refreshing and true with age, instead of sliding into a pit kicking and screaming. Understanding that how I engage with my life today is going to directly impact how I am tomorrow and ten years from now. This realization is something I can think about, but until I allow that generosity to wash me and that kindness to grant me solace, I will continue to grasp and strive and thrash about in my own life. Sabbath rest was made for humans, not the other way around.
structures of home 