33: re-birthday
come celebrate with (a renewed, renamed) me
Hello beloved readers, community, family,
Happy Lunar New Year and Imbolc blessings. The faint glow of the waxing moon signals a burgeoning spring of fresh starts. Today's post is a revolution for my soul. It took me months to finally put words to this. And as you'll see there is still a story to tell. But this is quite the announcement, so it will take time.
This Substack and I, are co-evolving, co-becoming, and with deepest sincerity this space gives me so much life. That is specifically because you're here, every one of you. So thank you.
Alright, onward...
Today I am 33.
On this day, in this year, February 5, 2022. This eternal and transient now. This geologic, cosmic, ancient, emergent now. Today my heart is intact and undefended and so wide open and beautifully boundaried, after many years of struggle.
In an ideal world, we would gather in communal celebration, yours and mine. A crisp, rushing river with hot springs on its banks offers up warm soaks and cold dips (this is a real place, we'll go there sometime!). A sky full of stars and a crackling fire light up our night. Friends on the strings, and maybe even on the horns, and a few songbirds serve up the tunes. An abundance of food nourishes full bellies. Cozy blankets snuggle up and story shares spin living myths into the night. The more-than-human world conspires, blesses, receives, and gives as companions and co-creators. Sunshine paints the morning in a tangerine glow and bleary-eyed awakenings greet you with hot coffee, warming your hands, stirring you from slumber. Mmm.. can you feel it? I would love to hold that space for and with you, and one day, I do indeed hope to send you that invitation.
Now, with that seed planted, we return to this digital landscape (and maybe the starlight still shines here on our devices built from space dust)...
This post is a marking of the heart in time.
This post is both humble and effulgent (thank you, Abhayraj, for that word).
Humble knowing that I cycle amongst so many, including you reading this right now, who are transforming, disintegrating, and becoming, over and over again. And effulgent knowing that my particular journey has asked of me more than I thought I could bear, left me breathless and begging for mercy, had me asking how it might be possible to endure this much pain, had me questioning all things holy "what else do you want? what more can I give? what else must go?", changed me profoundly, almost unrecognizably.
And here I am, more alive than I ever thought possible, more in love with my life than I thought this heart could bear, wondering of all things holy "could I be in greater reverence?" Flowing, breath-full, and praying in gratitude. What divinity is this? What magic? And also, here I am with a healthy, sobering dose of commitment, awareness, and understanding that this lifetime will continue to initiate me into and through personal and collective responsibilities that rattle my bones and shake me to my core, and it will not be easy nor free from suffering, and I am grateful for that dimensionality, that complexity, and the trust that Creator (the universe, source) has in all of us to break our hearts into greater love.
I write this not from the first exuberant burst of the butterfly from their cocoon (as in thank GOD I never have to do that again), but from somewhere closer to the humorous and surrendered seventh (more like, lol cool, I wonder how many times I'll be doing that). I pray that we re-integrate and re-"normalize" the notion that life is a constant unfolding, an infinite "spiraling into our identity and truth"1, falls and rises and falls and rises. It is the toxic (read: patriarchal, capitalistic, supremacist) world orders that say there is only up, only light, only triumph.
I have felt dangerously, agonizingly isolated through my hard years, despite soulful kinship, moments of ecstatic joy and tender pleasures, and safe, loving, and healing places/spaces/relationships of refuge. And I also know that loneliness is sometimes the truest companion, the greatest ally, as I've written before. But being severed from the village, from the wisdom of our ancestry, from rites of passage, is a tragedy none of us must hold alone, and all of us can repair, remember, rehydrate, reanimate together.
So, today… in reverence for this little one and all her sacred rebel sassy fierceness…
Rebirthing into a new name.
Today is a rebirth of the highest order I've yet encountered. I am meeting you today and every day onward by a new name: Rachel Simon Stark. After many years of initiation, and one particularly immense year of dedicated contemplation about this significant life decision, full of deep conversations and holy communions with all realms and dimensions to bolster this moment with blessings from my beloveds, my chosen name honors this threshold of one life receding and another life opening into bloom. It is in honor of my two matriarchs on two sides of my lineage: Ruth Simon (my dad's mother) and Birdie Stark (my mother's grandmother). I look forward to sharing more with you about this journey and these two treasured women who represent, in many ways, every woman who came before me and fought for her sovereignty.
My old name, my birth name, remains a sacred part of me (and for now continues to be my legal name) as it surrenders into the background, while this new name steps in to the light. I have learned at this point how to ask for what feels good. So, a few ways you could help me honor this include:
changing my name in your contacts (if that applies to you)
if this doesn't feel too awkward, I invite you to say my name out loud at some point today as an affirmation and a ripple outward
and of course, call me by my new name - that is, if ya ever need to holler with my full name which will be rare I know
anything else that sparks you! I'm open and curious to hear and receive.
As this transformation settles into form, I also want to share with you all that lineage healing and reconnection has become one of the foundational components of my work in the world. I taught a course last year, and am teaching an evolved version of it late summer/early fall 2022 on ancestral repair and reclamation to find greater resolution of the past and reinvigoration as future ancestors (biological and/or otherwise). I'll look forward to sharing more as it approaches, but please feel free to let me know if you're particularly interested in learning more.
And finally, I wrote a list of 33 learnings, cultivated medicines, ideas I'm sitting with I'd love to share with you to swirl into our collective sourcepool of wisdom:
Creation is fueled by magic, and we are magical beings of creation.
For a long time, the gap between 'who I am' and 'what I do' felt like a massive chasm. As I become more coherent internally, more deprogrammed from conditioning, and more attuned with my highest self, this gap is closing. In the space where 'I am' meets 'I do', this is my art. This is my love made manifest. This is my service to the world, unbounded and unconstrained, aligned with the same source energy that births all creation.
One of the great offerings of incarnation is for each of us to find this place in ourselves where 'I am' and 'I do' converge and bloom. From here, we bloom our soul's gifts, our unique creative expressions. This is the birthright of all beings.
The more grounded and generous our presence is with ourselves, the more we can welcome that in others.
Divine and aligned timing is when it's a full body yes. "If it's not a 'fuck yes', it's a no."2
Indecisiveness means the decision simply hasn't arrived to me yet. Indecisiveness doesn't mean I don't know, it means I need to wait. "I'll know when I know" never fails.
When I wish to be somewhere else, when I strive to be "out ahead" of where I am now, I am not present for the information that's waiting to meet me. The obvious next step will emerge when I drop into connection with self, when I am here and available to receive.
Let things reveal themselves.
The mundane, the ordinary, is our portal to magic. Profound presence with life as it is happening all around us, with the divine orchestrations that enable existence, inspires radical amazement3.
There is a difference between being vulnerable and being exposed. Our world today is saturated with exposure. Exposure carries a charge that catalyzes a cascade of constant triggering: undigested, raw, sensitizing material. Exposure does not demand responsibility nor accountability. Exposure can be reckless and uninitiated. Vulnerability is mature. Vulnerability allows us to be permeable, to be reachable, to be seen and understood, to build connection and community, but within the safety of consent (most of all, our own) and clear boundaries. It is our sacred discernment that determines whether our story, our experience is vulnerable or exposed.
We meet at the surfaces of our lives. We can't expect others to have any insight into our interiority -- this requires that we bring what we want seen and known up to our edges where we meet another. It requires that we feel safe enough to do so, to truly be seen and known. Safety is co-created.
Love is intimacy with our vulnerabilities.
Emotions are energy. Energy evolves or dissolves, digests or dissipates, fuels or disperses. Energy always moves. The shift from one emotion to another happens fluidly.
All emotions are valid and deserve space to be heard, seen, felt, understood, learned from, and then released4 and we alone are ultimately responsible for our own emotional experience. We can co-regulate, we can process, we can find support, but co-dependency compromises the autonomy of others and undermines our own evolution (though shout out to that survival pattern, we know you're just trying to help!). Part of creating a care economy is expanding our personal and collective capacity to be with our own emotional energy.
Emotional maturity is interdependence.
Healing is nonlinear. Healing is surrender. Healing is personal and collective, internal and relational.
Healing unlocks trapped energy. Once that energy is released and reinvigorated, post-traumatic growth thrives into abundance.
Seeds of trauma propagate from one generation to the next if they are transmitted, not transmuted. This is how hurt becomes so diffuse it becomes a cultural characteristic and pain becomes so vast that it becomes an entire politic. Healing is one of the most sacred acts of love.
Acknowledging responsibility does not mean you have to take something personally.
Respect does not means you have to agree.
Doubt/mistrust/chronic uncertainty can evolve into intelligent skepticism. Instant gratification into the principle of immediacy and radical presence. Hyper- individualism into healthy individuation, which allows for belonging through diversity and individuality not assimilation nor conformity. Self-righteousness/entitlement can heal into sovereignty and self-understanding without proselytizing, projecting, demanding, nor expecting everyone to be/think/feel the same.
The Earth is a mirror, not a metaphor. One example: does restoring biodiversity mean embracing diversity and celebrating the multitudes in and around us? As within so without.
The most beautiful parts of life come from the unknown, the dark, the wait-and-see, the trust, the faith. Darkness clarifies desire. Constraint amplifies commitment.
Find those who support you in the not-knowing (as opposed to the always-fixing/solving). It is a deep relief to simply hold the unknowns together.
Right relationship as a design feature. Repairing harm as a design feature. No-one-way as a design feature.
Conflict is sacred and expected in relationships. Mismanaged conflict leads to violence and harm. Well-managed conflict builds connection and brings us closer. Tension and friction are essential to transformation and expansion.
Soft power is a beautiful thing to harness.
I don't have to be legible, digestible, resolvable, package-able, sellable, easy, simple. I can be messy, complicated, difficult, imperfect, illegible, uncategorizable...
Listen more, listen deeper, there can always be more listening.
We are starved of rituals and ceremonies, intentionality and groundedness. We are hungry for healthy, not perverse, incentives to mobilize and support us in nourishing thriving presentfutures. We are in a drought of literature, art, music, creation that seeds healthy possibilities (plenty of disaster dystopia to go around). Every gesture we make toward building altars, making ceremony, hydrating lifeways of mutuality fills the well our ancestors left for us many generations ago. It yearns for all of us to pour in, so we can source from a deeper, fuller well too.
Relating to the world, time, creation as spiralic, queer, expansive, fractal, nonlinear, nonbinary, prismatic: these are the life-giving ways of being.
Sometimes magic just needs us to open the door. Sometimes joy just needs us to take a deep breath. Sometimes ease just needs us to go lay down. Sometimes our inner children need to play in the dirt. Healing, processing, adapting, living, surviving on Earth right now is asking so much of us. Let us not downplay the immense labor involved in being incarnated into this time that looks much different than any prior moment in history. Rest and physical connection through our bodies, with Earth bodies, is only going to become more important.
Practice holding more lightly, gripping more gently. What would it be like, instead, to hold oneself, to be held by the love all around us always, and to imagine what it would be like to hold even deeper?
(And one more to grow on: always, always, always be humbled by god-level questions.)
Alright y'all. I tried to make this a short post today!! But turns out 33(34!) is a lot of things. I guess I feel very 33 now after writing all that. Thank you, thank you for your generous availability to this, and more importantly, thank you for your enduring hearts and your love.
As I venture around the sun again, I bow in deep reverence to all of you that have held up a mirror for my highest evolution, who have taught my heart how to hold even deeper. This human experience is an initiation of the greatest magnitude, and there is nothing to do but lie beneath the mountain of geologic time, to bask in the ancienteternal, to commune with the ways and the beings much vaster than us and remember we are held in the cosmic family of creation.
You mean the world to me,
Rachel (Simon Stark!)
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Zuni elder Jim Enote, spoken in Emergence Magazine's Radical Renewal Leadership Program last fall
My mom has been saying this a lot lately, sourced from a million elsewheres ;)
“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you?" - Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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Celebrating you today, Rachel Simon Stark--in ever-joyous witnessing of you and your healing and your sharing and your wholeness and your becoming. Love you, dear sister!