Recent expressions of gratitude and effluvient love for the universe. In the spirit of giving thanks and thanks giving, y’all.
Here are some curated-but-not-cured, raw-as-activated-almonds kind of thoughts, collected from my notebooks.
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My tears are my prayers. Happy or sad, they cleanse me. The elements as they exist in the body. The earth cries too.
Have you seen a stalactite before? A single tear drip. My heart beats fondly, happily, steadily. Subtly in vibration with the universe, in, and out, and of me.
The stars? They are my incantation, my rhythm, my breath. This is my life, moving forward, every step. Swinging from darkness into light. Finding there is no end but there is hope.
How to mark how far I’ve come, when the hardest was to see exactly so?
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and in the moment your consciousness
is a dragon line energy slurping
and in the moment like
a velvet night sky
bursting
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This need for quietude – this poetic love for the word ‘quietude’, and ‘mesmeric’, and more – capitulating, catapulting on my tongue.
How to use my favorite words for a sunset? Those few brief seconds of technicolored twilight; three strangers in silent contemplation; another stopping to stare in awe of the sky.
In the moment, the hours feel so long. Every second is a gift to see and meet. This is the power of feeling love in yourself, you see it reflected in every tree.
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If we pay close enough attention, we can feel the drag of the tides, the axis of the moon, the migration of the butterflies.
We can remember what it is to feel. And learn once more to lose it –
only to find again,
- a rose bud, a sunset, a smile tucked under someone else’s tongue
where all colors come from,
- a stillness inside, a radiance around objects, a salt of the soul.
We can output happiness instead of grief, and let the past live in the past.
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My friend Firas, seated on a couch in a post-dinner discursive daze, made the point that hope is extracted from pain. My mind sees deep wells of oil in the desert.
Iridescent surface shimmering over opaque and dark –
and out comes hope.
Hope is, and always has been, the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.
My dreamworld has been excavating the dustiest cupboards for me, the place under the stairs my conscious mind does not go.
I wake up in fear. Startled in sheets, nervous system humming. I realize it’s a dream. I see what the dream is processing. Then I am free to return to the clarity of present day.
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I have been falling back to my self.
Really, it’s something we have been doing all along – but for the first time I am falling with an awareness. I can spot when I am drifting now. It feels like a satisfying crack of the bones – a subtle foundational settle – a physical ‘drop’ down into the heart.
And it has been happening more and more all the time.
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Some days, my heart cries out like a young child weeping. I must stop to ask why it’s sad. The events of the day? Walking home? Not finding the love you wished?
Well, that’s what happens when you hope too hard. The heart like an old dog sleeping. Fluorescent porch gives over to gravity.
Some days, I have the feeling of flying downhill. All effort removed.
Like shaking dead blossoms off my skin. The soul emerging from despair, whispering in wonder, so this is sweetness, so this is light. To love at all is euphoria: this is what makes it worth to live and sad to die.
Still sometimes, on this earth, I can do nothing but drop down in dappled leaves and cry.
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I see a common silvery thread of hope, gratitude, and dreaming in my recent scribbles. That’s sweet.
More musings / what’s been on my mind / friends, if you have compelling thoughts on these topics, please share them with me:
- What does it mean to live without base fear? What we will write/make art about when we no longer want/have to re-hash lived experience and traumas? Or do we continue going deeper into the darkness, expunge further into the light? The halcyon future is preceding.
- Korean skincare, Sodium Laureth Sulfate, and capitalism.
- Also, tiny airplane seats.
- The massive rise in astrology’s popularity.
- Magnesium, and our overall lack of it – our clenched muscles (and assholes) reflecting the state of our lives.
- Tongue scraping, oil pulling, toxins – the connection between a strive for purity and trauma.
- Rupaul’s Drag Race vs. my personal feelings of femininity.
- How Australians vs. Germans dance and what it says about their cultures. Structure, community, personal space.
- Also, what our toilets say about us. German toilets.
- And, as always: why white people can’t dance: they’re traumatized.
- Peak capitalism. Now? My Instagram feed is like a tiny television tuned to the shopping channel, but personalized.
- The different manifestations of the void (in and out of the mind).
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Let’s keep practicing active appreciation and self care – I recommend topical application of magnesium oil as one way to unclench. Self care and contentment are radical acts of embodiment – and forms of resistance, too.
Lastly, a poem to share:
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
~ image : untitled (1961) by cy twombly ~
jasmine hanley 