Hello y’all,
How are you feeling? How is your breath today? How’s your back and belly and heart? Mine are really aching so I’m just checking in. I’m sending love to those tender places in you and to my own.
After a week of Piscean intensity, I feel grateful to find my face pressed into warm sand. My body is waterlogged and weary, but I am relieved for this refuge. Motionless except the rhythmic expansion and contraction of my ribs pressed heavy on the Earth, radiance reels me in to the shoreline and it feels hard to get up.
Next week (hopefully) I have a more hefty essay coming your way that I’ve been rumbling with for months. Today, I have an announcement, some sharing in a more unfiltered fashion, and one of my favorite poems – a tribute to the astros that accompany us through these heart-thrashing/breaking/expanding times.
With big love,
Rachel
COLLABORATIVE
The "Collaborative" aspect of this ecosystem is hungry for some attention. There are countless seeds I hold around this vision, waiting to sink them into fertile soil. Some will sprout into saplings that will deepen and stretch and reach into ancient oaks some day . Some will offer one belly-nourishing harvest and then return to the ethers. I'm excited for the gardens and forests currently existing in pure, unmanifested potentiality, awaiting the opportunity to crack open into the lifeforce they contain. That said, I have one seed in hand I am ready to plant today, and that is an invitation to you and a deep bow to your brilliance.
This place yearns to be in much more prolific co-creation. This place yearns to be a platform for a chorus of voices. I'm grateful to have invited my dear friend Makshya here and want more of this.
Is there something you want to share? Is there an offering you'd like to put forward? Is there a wisdom or an insight in your heart you want to express? An excerpt from a book? A poem? A thought? A meditation? A voice note? It could be something you're already sharing elsewhere, it could be anonymous -- just to crack into the space of sharing yourself either for the first time or again or in a different way.
The field is ready for you. Reply back to this email, leave a comment, or contact me directly at rachelsimonstark@gmail.com. Let's widen the circle together.
A LIFE WELL LIVED
Somehow I stumbled onto the writings of Hanif Kureishi here. I remain unfamiliar with his work (plays, books, etc), but his posts are one of the most consistent dispatches I have committed to in a long while. He suffered a horrific accident about 6 weeks ago and finds himself trapped in his own newly disabled body, in a hospital from which he can’t escape, in a foreign country.
His writings are a gut-punch and an aching gasp and a humorous rant all at once, and they are entirely addicting to me. In part, in my own small way, I know this place. To read him writing from the depth of this tragedy, from the dark trenches of uncertainty, from the grueling battle between despair and awe, hopelessness and faith… it tethers me to my own experience in a shared, shattered place of suffering 14 years ago, after my traumatic brain injury. I have been sitting with my story, transmuting it into various expressions here and there, glimpses of it. But I’ve never told it in full, in a way that contextualizes it within the complexity of my life’s unfolding to that point and since. It is supremely moving to read the real-time revelations of this and remember what it was like for me back then, day by day, despite the differences between our experiences. And it is also immeasurably valuable to remember our stories never grow old, never age out of relevance, they matter always, and sharing them from years of distance has its own medicine. Here is a fragment of an essay I’ve been writing since 2020, with a yearning to surface something alive for me today…
~~
It was late November, 2009. A nurse hovered beside me, rushed and breathless. A fleeting moment when I was awake demanded every second of her attention to evaluate my cognition.
"Charlie went to the market. He bought a carrot and an apple. What did Charlie buy at the market?" she asked.
The test was futile. At that point, words were scattered rain drops falling across a vast desert. It was unimaginable that one drop miles from another would have anything to say to each other, or even last long enough to be detected. When a drop fell it was slurped immediately into parched earth - not even a damp trace to remember its presence. Was I supposed to know anything but rain? That it happened and then vanished? Were they seeking a weather report? They waited.
I was hovering at the edge of life – whether that meant actual death or the death of a life free from an unforeseeable scale of interventions needed to fill all the indeterminable gaps that could or would remain if I didn’t fully recover. I was just out of grasp, unable to express myself, unable to understand what was happening to me, trapped between words, between worlds - everything evaporating before it could reach me. All I felt was fear.
"Rachel, do you remember what Charlie bought at the market?" the nurse asked again.
It had been quiet for too long. I remember squeezing out the words "I can't.” My throat burned with the agony of desperation. I knew this was a life or death question, and I was veering too close to the latter.
I heard the nurse say "we'll try again later." I don't remember much after that. My world was only pain. Shockwaves of blinding ache pounded against my skull and radiated down my spine. I lived in an inescapable cycle. I woke up long enough to press the button on the pump in my right hand and shook with pain as I awaited the relief a dose Dilaudid would deliver into my bloodstream. Then I writhed in agony until sleep came to save me. Then another spike of pain or a nurse flashing my pupils would wake me again. I needed more sleep, more drugs, more time. I remember the rain storms: the doctors and nurses rushed in, poured out, then left. All I had was sand.
The essay goes on for about 11 pages (so far), most of it I’m not ready to share publicly (i.e. there is a difference between being vulnerable and being exposed). And yet it feels good to crack it open a bit today and reflect from a vantage point of nearly 3 years of slow, steady work.
To encounter disability in oneself is to realize that incarnating is an experience of temporary ability, of fluctuating ability, of nonlinear ability, and yet this world is built to propel the lie of permanent perfection and progress.
To encounter disability is also to feel into a certain pressure of living that becomes acutely palpable in the wake of tragedy, but hovers close constantly in life regardless of your capacity. I remember one terror amidst an ocean of trauma was the loss of all of my future potential to accomplish, to achieve, to be someone, to do something that mattered. In another Substack I read this week, the author spoke of launching something new, motivated by the idea that “one day you won't be able to.”
I am wondering about this propulsion/compulsion in the belly of this pressure to maximize the ability to “do” while we still “can”. What of the preciousness of life simply in the living of it? What about walking lightly on this earth, leaving as little trace but having as sacred of an impact as a single honey bee or a single whale - integral and inseparable from individuality, community, and ecology simultaneously?
I am feeling through the suffering that is fueled by the energy of desperation and the liberation that is amplified by the force of inspiration. Constraint and scarcity tend to feed the ego, trust and generosity nourish the spirit. Becoming less identified as one and more integrated as one of a whole.
"We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related."
—Henry Miller, Sexus
I’m wondering about the ability to do less as an individual and more as a collaboration and how that both softens and strengthens the idea of impact and influence.
Perhaps this is a call to soften into the simplicity of life, to release this idea that we have to be anything more than common, mundane, and ordinary to consider this life a miracle…
What do you think?
~~
The most appropriate conclusion to today’s piece revisited me this week, sparked by the beautiful dance (and kiss!) between Jupiter and Venus that romanced us from the heavens. I’ll leave you with Rebecca Elson, poet and professional astronomer who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma at 29.
Antidotes to Fear of Death
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for cultivating collaboration. Please do share your offerings here if you feel so moved!
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There is so much about this post that I just love.
1. I sat in shock, for a moment, that it started with an invitation. Me, an offering, here? Both a sock of being invited along to share, but also the shock of the shock. Why was I shocked? Have I been coming along as a consumer? Was that my expectation of this space? Ooph, I need to sit with that. But also, what gift do I bring that contributes to this space.
2. We are all temporarily abled. (Thank you for the glimpse, I'm ready for more when you are ready to share). We come into this world not able at all(oh, how I forget!), and even if we are blessed or lucky or destined to live long...eventually...that will fade.
I was challenged with a question about embodiment this week from my yoga instructor. I recently came to yoga, and have literally, embodied. I've connected with my body in ways I can't ever remember having done before. The challenging question came up around embodiment and personal responsibility. This adds a whole layer to the conversation. That the way I connect to my body is also ever changing. It's never constant, even if I develop good practices along the way.
3. That poem. A friend shared that exact poem as well with me this week. I suppose I'll need to sit with it a little longer.
As always, thanks for this space. I love it here.