A good method to writing is to approach it like you are doing it behind your own back, sometimes furtively, like stealing time or hiding from an awful manager. lately it’s been a helpful method for growing up- operating from behind my self. it’s normal if it feels out of body, because healing is fantasy. liberation is imaginary. Regulating is live action role play. self parenting is acting, and we deserve a golden globe.
i grew up around western seekers who practice sadhana, the smell of industrial sandalwood, enmeshment. also around honest ancestral ritual, unfiltered suffering, otherworldly grief and folk method. in the west we call some of that incorrect. i am equally as jaded as i am in praise of the sacred. from spiritual influencers, to distortion by fame, to a culture of bypassing. for better or for worse, i’ve only ever known depth. and i sometimes feel like i’m so motivated to expand- to sink in- that i flirt with the cultish. Are my street smarts atrophied? Am i too inside? am i not inside enough?? How do we consider our relationship to the weirdness of spiritual aesthetics while we are directly participating in it? in spaces of self discovery, we talk a lot about intuition, less about our potentiality to be fooled, about how necessary it can be to feel edges, to learn “the hard way.”
artwork by alicia mersy (btw, click on images and links for more)
It’s flop years (plural) like these when i curse whoever said that we choose to come here. allegedly, the human experience is the only one with such complex suffering and paradox. and our immaterial bodies are intentional in arriving, in this form, to break our hearts open. i’m pretty sure i would choose to be a worm instead, but whatever.
earthworms have five hearts and no ears, they are under ground, their life revolves around acts of service through holding space, poo, and being someone else’s food. how would it feel to be this level of embodied when it comes to our relationship with the earth, the human and the more than human? to gyrate, slick, in a slow grind with the breath of the soil. to be so devotional to growth. how does it feel to remember that we have an ability to “hear” sensorially, to slow down all the way to be meaningfully productive?
roughly 100 times smaller than the earthworm is the Bdelloid rotifera. what does she teach us? she endures, capable of surviving 24,000 years of drought. she lives in waste, evolving over the past ~100 million years not by mating, but through some form of immaculate conception. the bdelloid rotifera procreates by taking another species’ genes from the cess pool that surrounds her. essentially, she reproduces asexually by eating shit and other detritus, creating a “Frankensteinian collage of foreign DNA. Nearly 10 percent of the bdelloid’s genome comes from outside the animal kingdom entirely, with fungi, plants and bacteria all contributing.” (emily singer, from this article) sophie strand teaches me about bdelloid, worshipping her as a new god, an incorrect virgin mary archetype. an invitation to canonise new saints on our own terms. worm god is relatable and orienting when mess feels like home, when in an effort to locate oneself within the hyper sexual, the productive, the heteronormative, the myth of the pure and palatable as desirable or sustainable.
Let us leap from the sinking ship of the singular. Let us join hands and then let our hands melt together, permanently, terrifyingly, fused. Let us honor our wounds as invitations to risky collaborations we might otherwise not attempt. Let us acknowledge that to be correct is to be isolated. To be incorrect is to be relational. Survival is never safe. It is always a breach. A break in the skin. I do not want to heal; I want to survive.
Sophie Strand, from healing: a ghost story
My sleeves are covered in snot and it sparkles under the light like a snail’s trail. I think about the shine in the entropic, rippled elastic waistband of my la senza girl underwear from when i was 7. I think about the small mole on my face that i abused thinking it was a blackhead but is actually a mole. I look this way because I’m building the stamina to shift my weight to fall behind a reaction as opposed to falling into it. I sometimes witness milliseconds that i swore never existed. It feels like the truth when i catch it, and It feels terribly familiar when i don’t. But that’s besides the point, because the reaction will happen again, and eventually, it happens less and/ or it doesn’t feel so important anyway. and it gets really juicy when the practice becomes contagious, when everyone becomes a mirror, when everything becomes god, and that’s called believing in miracles and taking radical self responsibility. it looks like somatic experiential practice and doing the things i want other people to do with me.
Surprise- we still can’t think our way out of this one.
These days i like very garlicky stuff. I like feeling the spine of swiss chard crack in my hands when i massage it into oil, salt and lemon. i like when my mom says “ oh for fuck sakes” in a yugoslav accent. I like being unbothered. I like when my partner does stupid dances to make us laugh. i like prayer. i like learning from my best friends’ sons. i like wintering. I like talking shit about self-help and then seeking those programs, furtively. I like changing my mind. I like moving on.
happy turn of the year, srećan božić, i love you, it is very hard here and ur not alone.