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It’s getting colder now, where I am. This weekend I visited my home town on Dharawal country. I smelled the petrichor of rain hitting dirt, the washed-up seaweed scent caught by the crisp northwesterly. Bana'murrai'yung; “wet becoming cooler” in Wodi Wodi language. The time of year when the quoll searches for his mate and the lilly pillys fall off their trees, deep in the Illawarra Ranges.
The dark and the light are lovers. Hiding and seeking. Chasing and evading. Following. Leading. Dancing.
There’s something about the earth tipping further away from the sun that makes me sluggish and sad. Maybe you too. Being enculturated by my Mediterranean and North African maternal side, my tendency is to curse the coming cold and act as if this is the first time summer’s ever ended.
The last three years have been about dedicating myself to slowing down. And struggling to do so, I’ve told myself I don’t know how to. Is this how it’s supposed to look? To feel? I sit and look out at the ocean, and instead of stillness, I feel the pulse of my blood and the electrical charge of every nerve cell. I lay down and close my eyes, and whole worlds are daydreamed into being. In my quiet moments, I’m not so much noticing feelings, as boiling over with them.
On the first day of spring in 2020, I was told “congratulations, you’re an aspie!” As in, an autistic. I’m still learning what that means—and what it doesn’t mean. Among the latter: that my rest should look like everybody else’s, that stillness and silence have a normal way of being experienced, that I should express this but not that, that anything “should” be any one way at all.
Privileging lived experience over knowledge by consensus is easier said than done when it comes to creative or spiritual practices (as in anything you do regularly and with your whole heart, to quote James Finley). Because “practices” implies rules. Structure. A right way and a wrong way. And granted, there are good reasons for that traditionally, at least where the magical is concerned.
But if we observe heterogeneity, variation, and adaptation as natural laws (something the neurodiversity movement accepts a priori) then we must welcome and internalise into our bodies, minds, and hearts—the fact that the way we are is the way we are. And accepting that is the most (only?) transformative thing you can actually do.
There is a being-with-what-is-ness inherent in this process. A divesting from not only “should”, but “good”. There is a rewilding at the heart of my unmasking. An emerging animal nature, feral and fierce as it is winsome. Hiding and seeking. Dancing and desiring.
Desiring machines
The illusion of good and bad—of separate categories—is the human condition. Duality begets attachment, begets desire. And there’s the rub, we desire. We desire so much that we constantly pit desires against each other as we desire to not desire. This is why humour is so important, spiritually. We have to be able to see our illusions, laugh at them, and learn to relax and enjoy the game. But how do we be with the “now” of desire, of attachment to outcomes? And smiling, be with the very inability to be with it?
In nature there is no need for optimising, no urgency to fix. Survival of the fittest is a gross misconstruction of adjustment and cooperation. There is no wrestling with the angel. No adversary. Only love. A love that stretches so wide and deep it looks like neutrality or chance or void. A force of awareness; a God behind all things. Creating, destroying, concealing, and revealing herself as she dances around, through, and in us—and is named Desire.
We are what Deleuze and Guattari called desiring machines. And unless you aspire to monastic life, desire is something to allow and enjoy, but not overly-identify with. If we can begin to see our angst, our ambitions, our myriad of wanting as symptomatic of all of life/God’s desiring of herself, then concepts like “should” and “supposed to” are more easily dissolved. And those things our ego desires begin to make way for things the aspect of God in us desires. Which is usually just love and connection.
This is how we learn to see dualities like “should” and “good” or “me” and “you” for the fiction they are. This is how we learn to see desire for what it is—the Creator and her image forever reaching toward each other.
What game are we playing with God? The make-believe of separateness. Our human condition is her amusing mirror game. This is the hide and seek of Shiva and Shakti. The dance of dark and light. The play of winter yearning for summer. The hunt of change, courting sameness. The flirtation of the singular with the similar. Desire is the friction of creative force.
Pushing a river of “supposed tos” is not only a waste of your own energy and a creativity-killer, it’s crying over make believe. Acceptance is hard, that’s why it’s so rare and radical. But in practicing it, we begin to notice a widening field of awareness; a mountain top from which we can enjoy the view. Or rather, a cinema in which we can watch the movie and know it’s just a movie. We might still really want the hero to win. We might scream at the scary parts. But we know it’s all a trick of the senses. And that’s how we enjoy it.
So be sad! Curse winter. Be angry. Be as restless and desiring as you want. You are alive to experience. It might not be pleasurable all the time, but it’s happening. So practice being the witness to your desire for something to start happening, or stop happening, and get curious about what kind of wisdom that game might contain.
I try to have zero regrets in life, but if I had to pick one, it would be the times I told myself or someone else that they should change themselves in any way. Even if that way was just a greater level of self-expression. I don’t know what anyone wants or needs. All I know is we all tend to hide and we all want to be sought and seen.
Seen exactly as we are. And (corny but true) it starts with seeing ourselves. In throwing away “supposed tos” and being as fucking cold, sad, angry, annoying, yearning, bored, funny, ugly, sexy, clumsy, tired, or happy as we are.
Because there’s nothing to fear in the dark. The cold will come and go. But when fear and freeze overwhelms you and you find yourself raging against them, desiring the light and the warmth—just know that it desires you too.
Xo Jerico
Tarot card of the week: The Hierophant
The Hierophant is a difficult card for most, what with its central figure resembling a papal-like authority. But think of this figure as simply a meditator, and you’ll crack open a profound archetype—that of a Godly mission; an ideal. This card speaks to your ability to bridge heaven and earth. To strive for connection, meaning, and purpose in your life and world.
This week (with energy building towards a powerful lunar eclipse in Scorpio on May 5) is your chance to initiate yourself on to the path of aligned action. To take what you’ve learned and apply it, in order to realise your ideals to their fullest and in doing so, act as a conduit for a deeper, higher knowledge—used in the spirit of humility and service.
Don’t passively wish for what you want, or merely react to what you don’t. Think and communicate through thoughtful sincerity. Lead by example. Act with the conviction and certainty of a leader; a spiritual torchbearer. Let go of the binary of the mystic versus everyday, material reality. Unify all that you might be tempted to categorise and ignore. Be an active agent of integrity and change in your own life. Don’t sell your own vision short by being submissive or false. Don’t antagonise just to be “right” either. Trust in your ability to show yourself the way to goodness.