8/30 in the face of fuck

I’m v into flash at night in the garden right now. I’d like to invite everyone out in the garden to see- that’s part of my nature. I like to hold microphones up to the thrills and pains in life.

I am so lucky! I know and meet the most interesting people, I feel loved by them, I feel safe to share.

What a thing to feel!

What fortune!

In these most recent years I’ve become a kind of a devotee to “how it feels”, more than “how it looks” or “what I should do”. When I engage should and look, I find it useful to notice which aspects of me are in the drivers seat and where it takes me.

Some of my experience in this process has been unorthodox and strange and I’ve been very worried at times I would hurt people by not being what I thought I was, or what I wanted you to think I was. It’s embarrassing to be a person! So cringy to change! Heavy is the head that crowns itself in hyper-vigilance.

When I look through a technical (stay safe) or pathological (you’re not good enough, yet) lens I am not aware of this other “feel” thing. Feel is a different vibe, so now I am practicing feeling, which is goodhard.

A few weeks ago I was processing a core memory of being hit as a child and you know what I remember most? I most remember feeling in absolute awe that after the first punch you don’t feel it anymore.

What skill!

What a perfect mechanism!

And I was right. On one side of the coin our nervous system does something protective and evolved, but this dissociative state of not-feeling as a way of life got real deep on lack and deep on numb as it worked its programming for the last 40 years.

Learning to paint has taught me that I’ve done technique (stay safe) long enough to be burned out so now I am raising the energy of expression (I am safe, I feel safe). Sometimes “feel” is good looking and smooth but often it ain’t. But then again what the fuck is “good”?

The things about us, the ways we are and were brave in what @lidiamiles calls, “the face of fuck” may be called wounds, but wounds can also be voids, voids can be filled with whatever we put there to be amplified and materialized as our lens and life.

gifts of cringe

I spent 38+ years performing and playing out hierarchical roles. I created them inside myself and outside myself.

I internalized capitalism and binary thinking so deeply that when I saw it, it knocked me into the ashes. For many moons the idea of being perceived, sharing, reaching out to people, making photos, being part of anything, having friends, replying to texts, looking people in the eye or being looked at brought me physical and psychological pain.

I learned fast that I had to take my time eating the ashes. When I forced it I got physically sick and it took days to recover. So I called myself an introvert. I was embarrassed to be alive, to be flawed or to be anything at all. I yearned for death. I forced 1500 of my followers to unfollow me, I left groups, I buried a business.

I ate the ash, went to the river, to the kitchen, to books and bonfires and to the study of my own dreams. I made a private college of me, of what felt renewing where I studied and continue to entertain only what I feel “is” and can not be earned or easily subdivided into isms.

This unlearn-learning has been embarrassing and hardperfect. I am more genuine to myself in it, more made of magic and contradiction, a crone’s mess, a loss of gains, a non dualistic undulation. I’m not arrived at something I just am.

This so-called shadow work isn’t over either! It fucking happens when it does and like my period each month I’m like, “LOOK AT ALL THIS BLOOD! I FORGOT THIS HAPPENS!”

Like the season cycle itself, the expansive experience has a quality of feeling singular, no matter how acquainted I am with it it feels like the first time. It sheds and illuminates and brings me deeper to me, and to what’s on the other side of these embarrassing, miraculous gifts of cringe.

Hallelujah! 🌻