Hello from a rainy Sunday Santa Fe afternoon, y’all. Life has been beyond beyond beyond lately. Are you feeling it too? Are you finding breath? Is your pace shifting with the seasons? Mine has not, and now I’m crashing up against dwindling days with “too much” to do. Slowly slowly, I’m surrendering, or being surrendered. Slowly, I’m finding compassion with myself and this idea of “too much.”
More on that another time. Til then, with great care and gratitude that you are here.
Rachel
Everyone we meet is a constellation, a conglomeration, a thousand different somebodys held within the vessel of a singular body. When we meet someone, we're not just meeting one, we're meeting many. We're meeting mother, uncle, grandmother, 3rd grade teacher, first love, children, boss. We're meeting the people that shaped their day, their week, their years of living – the hostilities and the graces, the bitter tongues and the honey lips. We're meeting their darkest days and their brightest beginnings. We're meeting the worst thing that ever happened to them and every moment of salvation, of rescue, of return from a dozen different brinks. We're meeting their walks with shadow, their journeys through heartbreak, their glimpses of death. We're meeting who they can be, who they must be, who they're permitted to be, who they allow themselves to be, shapeshifting for a thousand different reasons.
When we meet someone, we're meeting thousands of years of history conspiring. Genetic codes transiting through generations of war, famine, captivity, deprivation, abundance, vitality, betrayal, reconciliation. We're meeting a vast past, an ephemeral present, an emergent future.
To me, freedom is the ability to both fully, internally integrate and authentically, outwardly express who we are at the deepest level, in the most expansive way possible, in the generosity of continuous unfolding, of constant becoming, of irrevocable and undeniable belonging. To be.
To be.
Or not to be.
Shakespearean poignancy reverberates the timeless and foundational question entangling humanity.
Will we permit, will we embrace, will we release, will we trust, will we risk being?
On Monday, a new friend asked me who are you? with a smoldering samurai gaze and a generous maternal heart.
I'd never been asked that before. At least not in this way. I've been asked in interviews, on dates, in school. But for the first time I received that question in my self without the need to perform an answer. With the permission in my self for my soul to speak a response.
“So you must question all the truths that you know
All the love and the life that you know and say
Who am I?”
– Nina Simone
On Friday, a new teacher offered: the complete alignment of personality and soul is the great calling of this lifetime. And I add that to honor the ever-metamorphic nature of being and to resist/release the notion that this alignment of personality and soul should reach some finite conclusion, should require some fixed manifestation, is an even deeper calling.
“Identity is sometimes contested, sometimes thrusted onto people and groups, sometimes embraced, sometimes rejected, sometimes reclaimed, sometimes co-opted, always evolving, always changing. If we do not embrace the reality that identity is not fixed, just as rivers and mountains are not fixed, we are in resistance to life itself.”
– john a. powell
I notice the anguish in myself – wanting someone to be/think/feel/act a particular way, needing someone to be different. I question this very human impulse, this universal experience. It as a violation, an act of violence we all have inevitably enacted upon others, we all have undoubtedly experienced by others. This behavior does not feel innate to the eternal soul, the unbounded spirit. It is the trapping of the unhealthy ego, the imbalanced mind. Does it exist only because it has been conditioned for thousands of years? Because we have learned this behavior to adapt and survive control regimes?
Why do we need to learn that we cannot change anyone else? Why is it so hard to recognize that if we want different, we must embody different? Why do we strain to change ourselves as a pathway to shifting the external? Why does it feel so easy to construct carceral demands of others, forgetting so easily what it feels like to be chained?
Each person is a doorway to the infinite, and yet, this paradigm would have us reduce someone narrowly to their persona, their avatar, the metaphorical clothes they wear in this lifetime, their role. We are culturally obsessed. The concept of "celebrity" is an addiction to reduction, to chaining someone to the performance of who they are to the ever-present audience. From Beyoncé to Bezos, this paradigm insists on relentless theatrics instead of eternal embodiment.
If we can release our attachment to over-identifying with personality we make room for the complexity we need for real healing. Beyoncé and Bezos are not actually singular individuals. They are entire energy fields broadcasting to the collective that say "look at this super-concentrated ideation you all believe in, what you live in devotion to, what you glorify, what you believe about yourselves and your experience here on this Earth" – the billionaires, the exceptionalism, the hierarchies. These individuals become so thoroughly dehumanized in this orchestrated, fictionalized, non-sensical reality. But what function does this serve?
I think often Jesus and about the Buddha – also avatars, also non-humanized through centuries of mythic indoctrinations (and I don’t necessarily mean that critically). Jesus was a man who lived for a time and then died. The stories we tell to build empires turn only a strategic selection of humans into gods, instead of amplifying the truth that we are, all of us, both mere mortals and exalted divinity simultaneously.
What is Jeff Bezos asking us to see? The ways we give our power away? Our fear-like worship of the patriarch? Our submission to forces of domination and exploitation that we deem inevitable? Jeff's avatar has become so extreme, so inflamed, so enormous that so many are basically giving our Earth away at this point, resigned, relinquishing even our future possibility.
Avatar can be a blackhole we're fixated upon, intoxicated by, the way our eyes are glued to endless scroll. Until we see the avatar itself and the spell breaks, the grip releases, and we can choose differently.
Is it carceral to commit Bezos to his avatar? Is it freeing to allow him back his humanity? To take him off his pedestal, and see the heartbreaks, the griefs, the ancestral traumas? To say, “perhaps authority isn't appropriate for you anymore, you've lost touch with truth and have become a vehicle for desecration through your persona, it's time to step down now, to come back to the village, to surrender yourself to soul retrieval.”
Are you the avatar or the soul?
Are you both?
Are your avatar and your soul in coherence as you continuously evolve, unfixed and ever-changing?
Who are you?
And how can we hold one another better in this question?
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)– Walt Whitman
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I needed this today!