This year, I vow to become more seen and as a result, more loved.
🕯️I will remove my light from under the bushel.🕯️ I will shine it out, and let it attract and dispel whomever it shall. I will let myself be received as a medicine woman, as a priestess, my primary craft being ideas, language, words, and song. I will let myself be rejected, and filtered out, by whoever is not ready to integrate me.
Well-made words, sound ideas, benefit life by helping the world make more sense, to be more clearly seen. To be more clearly seeing/seen is the fractal aim ahead of me this year.
My endowment from my ancestors is these gifts: words, performance, music, and a great grand mind. If I produce beauty, you have a right to enjoy it.
If I offer you medicine, you have a right to decide what dose you take of it.
If I have a body, I have a right to decide how much I give with it.
(Y)Our mantra for 2023: Don't sleep on who I really am, self. Don't sleep on who I really am.
Ainslie. One of my only consolations in your loss is knowing you lived your life to the fullest. You did not hide yourself. You gave yourself as a gift to this world. In honoring you, I will take your example, dear friend.
See me, know me, love me, find me unobscured.
🔥Let it be lit.🔥
For New Year's Eve, I performed this channeled poem at Shared Ground to an open mic audience of ~20 people.
This is an ode to Shared Ground, and to Ainslie, and to this moment, and to everything we are all doing here.
It is unpolished and scarcely edited, flowing out of me like a raw gemstones wrenched from the earth. It is and was meant to be medicine for the moment. I hope this enlivens you.
New Year's Eve Incantation
Shared Ground!
Hot night.
Cool sounds.
Late hours.
Heavy hearts.
Life is exhausting.
Life is necessary.
Life is exalted.
Coordinating
Self-organism-making.
Thinning struggles like some bushy branches in our garden
Thick treats our rewards, our thorny fruits.
We are gleaners.
Making gold out of this society’s mass wastage.
We are meaners.
We live like everything we encounter is for our meaning to be made.
How couldn’t we
gather together
when it’s all dissolving around us
and in us?
How wouldn’t we
find ourselves
talking out solutions
walking procession in sacred circles
fostering sacred new notions in the process
calling in the knowledge of wild wisdom beyond us
til the daylight comes
til the endless work is done
til the fire once more contained, burns,
and til the peace returns.
it is meant to be that we make meaning
until at least we are free, or at least we are freeing.
Cooperative congregation: May it be
An ecstatic come-and-get-it conflagration
Come be, beloved, become, beloved, come be
A selective fringe, eking out an existence embracing the edges,
this symbiotic cluster expected to withstand the agitation
of an unbound society, unraveling in full display
roiling and toiling just like the boiling oceans and flame-raining skies of the apocalypse
whooo—fully in its grips
a queer happy mutation over here, a pluralist fringe remains
quietly buzzing, seemingly latent
taking up space in old ill-fitting buildings
conjuring weirdness, cultivating strange breeds of resilience,
and sending cuttings home with all its attending ascendants
we draw your curiosity like a beacon
we are an ambiguous hub pulsing energy, like it radiates life itself
and takes firm forms only as it must, mysterious…
a collective cauldron for calling into being…
perceived surely as something other than sane or sensible,
not abiding the games encoded as normal
so much for solutions, the nihilistic world balks
so much for magic, the scientific world scoffs
at the gall to believe in
joy amidst destruction
revelation amidst disruption
rapture, yes even amidst rupture
repair and care amidst despair
inspiration underlying revolution
togetherness as the remedy
defying enculturated separation
how daring.
Build back beneficent
Greatness makes us as we make it
constraints ain’t no thing, it’s the game
creation
creativity, vitality, exuberance mentality
to revive conviviality is to reclaim wisdom of our ancestors
we meet face to face so as to witness the unveiling
ourselves in high resolution
ourselves becoming more whole
with the feedback of life encompassing us, we make our way to more whole!
spiritual paths and living systems share a common agenda:
to get more whole.
so that’s why we get up and do the work
that’s why we get down and work it out
let loosening
break bread-ening
let blossoming
let brilliancing
let composting
yes to get on this tip, you gotta let shed the better part of your skin
let it return to compost again
egos don’t have much traction in this action
thin skin lets much get in the way of connection
we are here to see each other as best we can
to deemphasize if not deflate your self-authored sense of separation
self-organizing needs a self for you, but the code breaks if there’s self-centering
deemphasize the story that you are other than your reception
you are empty, you make waves in
the infinite spaces left for you to measure your weight in
hold space as though you too are infinite, and you exceed any edges
brave the edges you imagine contain you, and you expand indefinitely
like a leaf drifting on the air and song emitting from a throat you are
a chord, a chorus, and a spectacle
a force, a forest, electrical
catalyze change in us by presencing,
remembering
what parts of us we think we may have lost for all time
but find again, by seeing reflected in you
Connecting our fragmented parts
Love is the glue
making us whole only because we have been broken
like gold gleaming from cracks, like a handcrafted put-back-togetherness, like wabi-sabi.
To grieve is to repair.
To grieve is to repair.
Before we make great new worlds we must grieve the ones we failed to make
The wrongs we failed to right.
The lives we failed to nurture.
The truths we failed to integrate.
To grieve is to repair
The only way to grow back as nature meant for us
surviving through trials and getting bent toward the light
the only way to grow back as nature intended
we as tendrils extending
life’s praxis that is way in the world
through the world
we recognize it. we make sense of it.
We try.
Ainslie, you were the greatest model and mirror
of a life lived to its fullest
You deserve to adventure endlessly on these tides of time
and now, free form, you will,
sacred being
you are so much more than an afterword
your life was so full, it burst out of its shell
may a thousand words of praise follow you on your journey now, like a rose petal train
you were a hundred novels written with lucid details leaping off the page
you were a million dawns breaking over the roof of a frigid mountain yurt
you were a trillion stars aching for the rebirth of just one of you
you were an epic movement firing through the universe like a comet,
encapsulated in a body all too briefly
our time with you was not endless, but our love of you is
our joy of you was cut short like a song, but, we will sing you on.
thy genius was unbidden
thy strength was unwitting
thy beauty, undisputed
thy kindness be unmatched
and we will try, and we will try
for we so loved you that we seek to spread your soul to far and wide
spread word and deed of the wonders we came to know through you
in actions stitched into a single quilt
we invoke your name as we repair
the fabric of nature and people,
of people to each other,
of spirit to body,
for you always consistently modeled this to us,
you always reminded us of this potential
and now, all we have left of you is the reminder.
so we will remember.
remember our way to reconnection with you.
Love is the glue
that reconnects our fragmented parts
So we can become whole in the way that only something broken can be.
This is why
connection is universal liberation
a rhythmic community gets sophisticated
sycophants, get syncopated!
glorious ones, get glorificated!
apprentice kids, get inculcated!
frayed frequencies, get modulated!
if it all sounds like too much intensity
notice this:
the intensity is. it is everywhere and inescapable.
yet here is where, and here is how
the harsh and noisy
get woven into symphony.
would you rather the capacity for symphony
than the brute power to withstand stress?
here is where the feisty yeast and brackish water
get braided into edible bread from stinking batter
!!
Get fed.
Countercultural confetti, count on us to bring the all the sauce and the revolution spaghetti and do the dishes afterwards… after and before the revolution, and during…
our revolution is no more radical
than the revolving of the earth around the sun
for all this millenia
wisdom of ages accumulated, etched into the path of space-time
like a record groove or songlines
we sing and dance these tunes and make new trills and forays of them
even when the record skips, or because of it.
or our hearts stop
or our lungs choke on air that should be there but isn’t,
on something too much, Â or too big,
like we could never even dream of integrating it.
Praise the veil pulling back
Power placed in every moment
Creation unfolding is wisdom unfurling
A destructive culture propagates death
A regenerative culture propagates life and the means to living
We enculturate so as to choose, to select for,
what conditions our descendents will live within
And not one drop of this falls short of sacred work
There is nothing this is less than
Perhaps it will all add up to something more
than all our imaginations combined.
Together we will find out
Together we will weather the storm
Together we will build the shelter
Together we will invent better systems
Together we will compose the future
Together we will compost the past
Together we will understand this moment
Together we will unearth right principles
Together we will re-earth this world
Together we will rise, or not at all
Together we will be alive and thriving
As soon as we remember
It is now or it is never
It is now and it is forever.
***
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Love,
C.