Hello from a rain-soaked morning scented with blooming jasmine and singing with bird call, rehydrating so many thirsty bodies here in northern California including my own. I don’t have a recording today, just words. I send them as love letter, as always.
I’m thinking a lot about this place. How it lights up my life to write to y’all here. Thank you for that gift. This is sanctuary. It is healing. It is deep breath. I take no moment here for granted. I yearn to make this more of a community, and lots of ideas are incubating right now I’m excited to share when ready.
With love,
Rachel
P.S. I’d love your help widening this circle, if you feel moved to share this with a loved one.
I trust you because you build altars and sew seeds and listen to flowers.
I trust you because the little ones around you bring their fears to you, and you are a refuge, holding space for their dignity. You see yourself in them, and you go home and cry, and you feel less alone in your own fears.
I trust you because you are devoted to the sentience in all things, seen and unseen.
I trust you because you're willing to be unpopular to be liberated.
I trust you because you're a dreamer.
I trust you because you’re learning to not abandon me.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon The Moon is Behind Us, a gorgeous, spontaneous co-creative exchange of images and words between photographer Fazal Sheikh and writer Terry Tempest Williams over the summer of 2020. These were not love letters to one another, they were love letters with each other, alchemizing two beings into one vessel, a manifestation of love itself which is always the co-creation of a third space. I'm enamored by this concept: co-writing love letters is a beautiful kind of magic.
This week, I felt the spark to evolve this concept in my own heart. I put pen to page on a co-blooming love letter, too. Today's opening is not a note I wrote to anyone else, it's a few lines of a letter I wrote with myself. It is tender to share it, and that's exactly why I am.
Lately, I've been feeling extremely sensitive to affection starvation – a kind of emotional/spiritual/psychic malnutrition that takes shape in the body and spirit just the same: fatigue, despondence, depression, hopelessness, helplessness. Love-deprivation and care-depletion has taken a toll in these pandemic times, war times, late stage capitalism times, rampant antisocial times, climate crisis times... A brutal world can make us brittle. A fend-for-yourself culture can make us callous.
There are so many moments I wish I could drop the heavy burdens I hold and fall back into the arms of love, sigh into the embrace of deep care, settle into safe places beyond the pain. It's not a plea for rescue, it's a yearning for what being in a body calls for most: connection, comfort, care.
I am devoted to making sanctuary in my self. I am exploring how to withdraw my resources from quicksand masquerading as lushness. I am learning how to reanimate unhurried attention to live with more permission. I am fleeing from the gaze of industry.
In a conversation with beloved author and elder Stephen Buhner recently, he described our social media habituation/intoxication as "intimacy avoidance". Ahhh.. the way my heart shook with the witnessing of those words. Yes. Though, as easy as it would be to say "yep, there's intimacy avoidance over there!" I know I'm triggered because I witness myself in this, too. The world we build is a reflection of ourselves. As the world of our making becomes increasingly disassociated, detached, disembodied, distanced, I shudder with the reckoning I am called to within my own heart for engaging in the same behavior inside my self.
I think a lot these days about the ways self-loathing has taken root. Self-loathing is not something we talk about much. It holds immense stigma in a world organized around carefully curated, idealized personas and commodified “self care” - superficial sustenance that satisfies briefly, then slides off without sinking in. Self-loathing runs deep. In our culture, it remains shameful to admit to the silent war raging internally, the invisibilized, inescapable battles we’re fighting on the frontlines of our own hearts and minds, the hostile inner landscape that makes it unsafe to be inside our own being. We are quick to pathologize and medicate, instead of to understand and liberate.
Earlier this week, a little girl at the farm confessed to me that her parent would yell at her if she shared any of her snacks at lunchtime. Her childhood innocence still learning how to navigate: “do I withhold my generous heart? do I lie to my parent? do I risk punishment either way?” I think of how these small moments build and build into a collapsing of self-trust, a spin cycle of self-blame within senseless authoritarianism, even in one’s own household. I think of surviving a punitive society. When powerless to change vast systems and structures, whether our family’s or our society’s, we learn to digest it, to squeeze it inside us, and wage that endless self-despising war within as some attempt to manage the unmanageable.
I think humanity at large is in the midst of a self-loathing crisis. It's almost controversial to look upon humanity with grace and reverence as our species confronts our own suicide. As bombs explode, as billionaire boys crush life with their greed, as dinosaurs continue to be dredged from their tombs (surely against their own will) to ensure the next mass-extinction event, humanity has built a harsh home here through hate.
I want to lift self-loathing into the field of awareness with compassion, and recognize it as a maladaptive, yet effective, survival response. Nothing exists unless it has value. Why would we develop this capacity toward such violent internal complexes? What function does it serve? I constellate that with the way modernity has demanded countless maladaptive, yet effective, survival responses to get us "there" faster. Self-loathing is an internalized punisher to ensure we keep going, doing, performing, earning, achieving. Self-loathing keeps us on track. Self-loathing is a demonstration of the will to live by any means necessary. We are trying to survive this place hate has built. But if we want to thrive in a world built on love, we need new inner technologies to inspire the innovation of outer ones.
There is a lot of hurt on this Earth. Generations of hurt rippling through. My ancestors are so close in, looking for their liberation through me, I sometimes feel like I'm in group therapy with them in my sessions. They crowd around as my therapist guides me through the process of making myself sanctuary, they listen close, they take notes, they sip the nectar and apply the balms to their own wounds from across the veil. We heal together.
What I know about healing is that it is not enough to remove toxicity. It is equally vital to fill in the void of whatever that toxic substance was serving with a vitalizing, affirming alternative. As I watch my own self-loathing patterns unravel themselves, I harness the immense energy that was locked up into the constant churning of the survival mode machine. I am simultaneously giving myself what I didn't receive in my childhood, and creating a thing of beauty with my adulthood. The nourished inner child and the resourced adult collaborate to pour into the communal wellspring and feed a generously re-generative source of exquisite, enduring love that reaches toward the world we seek. Instead of starving myself to fuel internal and external colonization, I starve oppression and feed my soul and then community soul and then Earth soul, in widening circles.
My therapist helped me realize this week that this is a lifelong devotion. The inner child and the adult need a constant stream of affection, tenderness, care, and love. It is humbling to me to realize how non-intuitive this remains, as though I only need so much care now because of how much trauma took residence in me for so long, but when I heal I’ll need less. No, my therapist reminds me. I'll always need generous affection, and I'll always deserve it. I know this from the life around me: there are thousands of bees, hundreds of hummingbirds, a million hours of sunlight, hundreds of thousands of deaths that compost into nourishing soils, hundreds of millions of years of Earth in co-creation with the single lemon tree in my yard. That much love multiplies across every living being. I am one of them. That love is exponential. To be inter-dependent forever, even when our breath leaves our bodies, is so beautiful I could cry.
This week has met me with so many of you who are investing and affirming and trusting in the same way. My beloved friend Cara said she's dedicated to making her mind the safest place for herself possible. On a Zoom chat, my friend K gestured off screen to his altar where a photo of his kid self was placed, holding vigil for his inner child. So many more stories of tenderness flood in, making sanctuary, building temples within.
As an invitation, I wonder if you’re moved to co-create your own letter. What are the ways your inner child finds trust in you? Could you pause now and write down one thing you've done to tend to your precious young self? If you struggle with this, like I do, it could be: "I trust you because you got off your phone when you needed a break. I trust you because you noticed the sun on your skin today. I trust you because you’re pausing right now to consider this prompt."
From my inner child to yours, I love you.
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This resonated with me so much it’s hard to put into words. Thank you ❤️