Dear reader, dear friend.
I have SO much to write about here and am brimming with things to share: my art residency experience, how it felt to spend time alone for days and days on end, the sea, the roses, the moon, what I made and how I made it (I took so many photos), what I discovered, what questions I still have, what is incomplete, and (also!) a big natural dye party I held when I got home that makes me want to teach even more living color workshops. But I’m going to take it slow, bit by bit, because I haven’t even begun to digest, and I don’t yet know what to share and what to keep inside.
Something I might do is make zines from some of these expressions and instructions I want to share, because a newsletter sometimes just doesn’t fully do it. I really like to make things that can be held.
Today I mostly want to say hello again, because I miss writing and I enjoy sharing. Since I’m still churning with the recent past, right now I’m writing exactly what I’m thinking about most in this present moment, to break the seal.
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Important Report:
Recently at sea level, ocean water powerfully and repetitively rushed over and drained away from psychedelicolor sparkling boulders, with seaweed swaying and barnacles holding on for dear dearness. Each crashing gush of sun-meshed saltwater felt like the fluids in my very own body were being replaced with pure, fresh, new water, as I sat alone for a long while there at the threshold with my attention on it, and each time it all receded, I felt as though water was emptying out of me too. There was nothing else but this rhythm, and immersion into it. I felt it fully, over and over, this intense nourishment. Almost unbearable at times. I am very grateful I stayed awhile.
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Earlier that week, I sat with my residency host for a flower essence consultation and told her that I don’t think I came here to seek direction. Rather, I want to be comfortable with the reality of not fully being able to predict what the direction is. I think it might be ok right now to keep discovering it in real time, and do what I can with what surrounds me in each step.
I, as barnacle, am holding on steady to anything I do know to feel true, and at the same time accepting the pushes and the pulls and how many things I don’t know. While trusting I am supported.
Meanwhile, in the background of my summer glee over color, rocks, sea, friends, beings, love, growth, inquiry into the nuanced questions of power and divine webs of relationship, and also just simple delight, the world at large is being incinerated by greed and delusion. Does the water crashing into the precious meeting place of worlds know this? Do velvety candy magenta petals falling from roses in the rain know this?
Life has the capacity to be this complex.
The other day on my birthday, I decided everything was perfect for a moment or forever, after discovering a MASSIVE sized mysterious (to me) bronze beetle on a grape leaf, only to further discover the beetle isn’t mysterious at all, because according to the internet it’s called a grape vine beetle, and a grape vine is EXACTLY where a grape vine beetle belongs.
Who am I to label anything a mystery?
Maybe things are where they belong.
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I decided that what I need this trip around the sun is more contentment. HOW HILARIOUS IS THAT!!! To have a need for non-neediness. This need feels a bit like a backwards scenic wrong turn to something that should just be easy. So I pause to wonder: is everything, secretly, already content, underneath it all?
Of course it is. I believe there is a well of contentment in us all, in every moment. Maybe we can’t always access it, the scenic overlook for the right view, but it’s always there.
Here is something significant about contentment:
In other words, according to trusted wisdom literature, contentment is said to be a promising key to a supreme form of happiness. That sounds easier said than done, doesn’t it? But there is good news. I’ve been told that contentment is not a result of practice; it’s a practice in itself. Yes, you can “do” contentment. Let’s not wait around for it.
I’ll try my best! You too?
Thanks for reading. I hope your summer is giving you space and ease.
♡