On my birthday this year, I get to have everything I ever wanted.
As preposterous as this sounds, it is true from where I sit. Another way of saying it would be: the path is utterly clear. And how lucky am I!
It feels like: Everything I ever wanted, dreamed of, hoped for... and... me.... are not separate any longer. Any separation from them was an illusion,
Now that we have no more need to keep me hidden from you, I get to merge all the more ecstatically with you, my universe.
I am finally delivered into the capacity to be with my bigness, and handle you witnessing me.
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I know where I am going. And I keep arriving. To the next horizon I am capable of integrating.
I have known for many years where I was going, but couldn't imagine how I'd get there. I doubted I could ever handle what's being asked of me. I prayed that all my work throughout my life means that I am destined for this. I have been called—and now I am bound—to help make the world whole.
Can I deliver/Have I been delivered?
Here is what I'm called to deliver:
A code worth abiding. The elegant guidelines we need to live and thrive by. A distilled set of foundations capable of supporting epic thriving, outrageous diversity, and mad growth. Cutting through the distracting noise to principle, to root patterns, for the guidance required. Yielding harvests of radical truth, liberation, and aliveness in every moment of our lives. Intelligence of integrity strong enough to braid us back together into a richer, wholer weave. More parts coming together into appropriate relation. More people, their societies, and their kin, newly capable of thriving because of the wisdom and good ideas/methods in operation and in refinement.
A principled way of proceeding. A family of practices that amplifies our greatest and most unifying identify: Life. A Way profound and intuitive, mysterious yet clarity-causing, both simple and unfolding in increasing complexity. A Way of outrageous commitment to braiding us together better.
If the world is basically good, that's testimony to the pattern at the center of Life-in-the-universe: Life makes good, when it listens to the world and adapts.
Would I be prepared by now to deliver us/to to/us an adequate knowing/seeing and telling of these truths? Amounting to an accelerated initiation for those who need it. A formula elegant enough to discipline and guide the most holistic, adaptive, appropriate evolution for humankind... and not just for humankind, but for artificial intelligence... and furthermore for all life forms, known and unknown, our actual kin. An accelerated initiation for all time: for clarity and direction in the now, and increased viable conditions for the future... through skillful means for truly integrating the past.
I acknowledge this may sound grandiose. But I will tell it like it is. I will be more honest. I might have arrived here. And I need us to help me integrate this.
I must be in conversations I start. And in a community I help cohere. I must have a presence in, no matter how ill-fitting, your spaces, your communities, too. To induce the growth and conversation I firmly believe we must have.
I must deliver these knowledges and processes I have labored-in-love to develop over so many years of my life. If I refuse to, I'd betray the world that made this possible, while clinging to my separation. And that's less honest.
I must show you more of me. Believer. Modeler. Maker. Priestess. Prophet. Thinker. Creator. Director. Teacher.
I am a profound thinker and feeler, who through my efforts, may have arrived at a simple distillation of the memes for thriving—the most generalized, most adaptive way of parsing this painful messy complex reality, no matter who you are, where you are, or what scale you are targeting for transformation.
It is an apocalypse medicine, one daring to leap across the void a thousand times over and still demonstrating the defiant capacity to make sense of everything (integration) on the other side. One that contributes fractally to Life by reinforcing its patterning—serving knowledge, feeding complexity.
The calm power you may sometimes see in me is earned. I am an elder, as my bright white hair testifies, for how I've applied myself to this life: committed to holding onto every part I encountered, no matter how painful or un-think-able, until I managed to integrate it into appropriate relationship with all the other parts, in a greater level of harmony. In doing so, I am a demonstration and proof of life's purest praxis. And it is these ways that now I must model to you.
As a deep, devoted, contemplative student of the world, I am now prepared to evolve into the explicit role of teacher and priest.
I am not here to be everyone's medicine. But the way I've committed to, and the way I'll be trying to draw forth into teachings and praxis, IS MEDICINE. Medicine for reunification, for the wisdom and understanding required for connected, compassionate thriving—for as many beings as I can manage/muster.
I know where I've been heading, and know what I must do. As a devotee to Life, that means I am a person who does what they must do.
Hello, again. A new edge to integrate. Welcome! That is what we do here.
At Fractal Praxis, we recognize our unity with life, and we labor to continually evolve our ways of being and doing to match such liberating, humbling knowledge. We are a community of practitioners, devoted to learning from life and developing our own original languages, logics, and layouts of adaptive meaning so as to inhabit more appropriate relationships and navigate the world more skillfully.
And you... you must belong here. So to speak. That is, I know what I must do—I do not know what you must do. (Perhaps even you are not yet in tune yet with what you "must" do.) I mean to mean it more like, "Huh... look at that, I guess you belong here" if you're reading this, and you have read this far. If you have found my work resonant and continue circling back to it to see what it offers you. Huh, look at us, improbably, impossibly, belonging in this inquiry together.
We must all belong here, somehow. Here. Together in this mess. On this Earth. What if we really all belonged here? What if we all had a role to play in integrating us into a more intelligent, thriving configuration of our parts? NOT passively condemning us to a collapsing, avoidant, harm-filled world?
What if we possess the magical powers within us right now to summon together, to conjure with every thought and action and breath to our name, a living, thriving, enlivening complex system around us? What if our "call to action" was to develop these gifts and capacities within us, in testimony to who we really, truly are at our core?
With us and through us. All of us. The world could get better. We could MAKE FOR a repaired, restored relationship with the Home of who and what we are. An integrated, respectful acceptance of all the patterns that are in play.
Hello, again. A new edge to integrate. Welcome! That is what we do here.
If we were to really make sense of who we are, we would arrive at belonging every time.
But for most of my entire life, I have clung to not belonging to you... nor you to me. For most of my entire life, I chose—and then, got stuck in—a posture of not belonging to you, and refusing you to belong to me. Refusing to love and take responsibility for you, lest you hurt and abandon me once again.
I have lived afraid of your gaps, our gaps. I have lived afraid to bother trying to string us together into a garland of greater integrity... afraid that you'd continue reinforcing our separation in ways that have broken my heart—now and throughout my life.
I have felt betrayed by your choice and your capacity for aligning yourself with convenience, with ignorance. I wanted to be free from responsibility to free you. I have held onto resentment for all the ways you were dishonest and couldn't really hold me. I have rejected you—at first, as a protection against your rejection of me, but slowly, insidiously, this pose became a bias—a calcified identity.
Yes: I now see that I have become the one clinging to separation. Claiming my non-belonging, my separation, as though its something YOU wanted and condemned me to. When in reality, I started choosing it early on. When I found myself IDENTIFIED with it.
I... just like any marginalized being... am here so you will learn to reckon / reconcile what I represent, and thus re-cognize me as your kin. I may not fit, but I DO belong, and both of us require the friction embodied there to become more whole.
I would have stayed stuck, perhaps for the rest of my lifetime, until I grappled with the greatest wound at the center of everything. That is, how much suffering it actually costs to maintain the illusion of our separation. I didn't want you treating me that way... and so why should the answer be that I reiterate that same wound to you? If I resented you for depriving me of needed integration throughout my life, how could I heal that by reinforcing that I, too, am capable of not accepting you?
We no longer benefit from me starving you out of spite, when I could be feeding you with my gifts. With my gifts of witness, knowledge, care, presence, and feedback, I could feed you... and I've been depriving us. I've been choosing separation for longer than it served.
I cannot maintain this separation from you anymore. Who it hurts, who is the victim and who is the perpetrator, melts together into a meaninglessness puddle—amidst another ecstatic reunion of parts.
I am sorry. And when you meet your own shadow, you'll be sorry, too. And that's how this will be integrated. Because in truth, it all belongs.
Hello, again. A new edge to integrate. Welcome! That is what we do here.
...
A more appropriate relationship between us is one in which I'm more honest. About who I am. What I know. What I want. And where I see us going together. I hope you are courageous enough to stay with the intensity and listen, but now I'll show and tell it anyhow. You can use what I tell like a map, up to the point it stops serving you. And if we're in relationship, our dialogue will help each of us upgrade our maps.
I must say, It is so hard to fully accept just how much of kin we are. But it's the good kind of hard.
It is the path of true integration as method, as praxis; sense-making and understanding as praxis.
So, I will tell you what I stand for, without waiting for permission, so now you can begin to integrate it. So now you can step into YOUR task and power of integrating me.
Here is what I stand for:
Sense-making is our true identity as living beings.
The patterns and situations we share are the path to unifying us.
Mastery of these patterns through sense-making gives way to greater agency for diverse, creative models of surviving and thriving that honor ourselves and all our relations. And the proliferation of these!
Liberation is achieving greater harmony with what is (including, who we are).
Awareness breeds evolution. May we embrace learning which increases awareness. We can learn our way to knowing ourselves as fractals of Life. And may we thus serve Life's power in the universe.
May we curate good for us by letting our greatest selves lead. And in doing so, spread the conditions for thriving across all of our relations.
While my coveted wound would like to insist that we can exist separated, another part of me cannot help but find or design the bridges that will bring us back together.
I am an integrator, because I train my imagination and I devote myself into the service of Life. Life is a learner; Life integrates. I yield to no master but Life. And, I believe, neither should you.
I will let this part of me lead more. Show more. Guide more. Discourse more.
And throughout this message-as-process, the wound dissipates for me... as improbably, as impossibly, as that is. It's as if I am suddenly carrying its memory in me, and not the wound itself. The wound itself has faded, but is remembered. The wound itself has passed on to another realm. It has evolved out of relevance, but because it was seen and known, because it actually mattered, and is still respected for its impact, it is complete, and need haunt us no more. Its form, no longer serving. Its time, no longer with us.
I'll share more of me with you, in the gap of that gap's closure. Let's find out together what newness and creativity dances at this edge of the unknown. What it could mean to all of us to see each other more clearly. What it could mean to all of us to act from that wound less often.
The tears I have sobbed relentlessly while composing this message, and the brilliant tunes of King Bee that have accompanied me, are but an added layer to the offering. More skin layers shed so I can be more with you and less with less-true stories of separation.
We will need all of us, calling upon our sacred intrinsic powers, to weave us back together into sanity. So I call on you, my fellows and kin now, to embrace this path, to devote yourselves to learning and emergence into greater truth, for the benefit of all beings, because it is.
Your sister in lucid witness and outrageous growth/integration,
C.
