write like a m*f*r
I wish I had something grandiose to say to you.
I wish I was beginning this new newsletter with something so profound your jaw would drop, a lightening bolt of passion would strike through you, and you would tell all your friends and they’d tell theirs, and this newsletter would become a new kind of gospel overnight. But life don’t often be like that. Even the bible took centuries to write. Even the existence of everything took unending millennia to be where it is now.
What I mean to say is, things take time and that most of our significant changes happen gradually, incrementally — barely over the course of minutes, days, weeks, years. Profundity doesn’t happen in an instant, it just appears that way because that’s how it occurs to us - in a sudden glimmer of insight; when in fact, it took centuries of human development, layer upon layer of thought like a kind of existential wedding cake, for each understanding of what is to be realized. And there is always much more to realize than there is realized. I must humbly admit I know less than there is to know.
But here is what do I know (for now):
✨ Reality = Potential, and to deny this is to deny reality altogether. It’s easy to be cynical and to find hope repulsive because it requires a lot less creativity to look at the world as it is and think, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck. It’s much easier to think of this place as a sick and sad happening when there is so much sickness and sadness. But to think this way and only this way is a very small way of thinking (when you think about it), and yet I must admit I have a tendency towards this way of thinking, disturbing as it is for me to wander through my days with a cloud of doom hanging heavy upon me.
✨The world is always ending, and this won’t stop me from having the time of my life. The doom storyline is singular in a sea of many. There are many more stories of love and joy and success (success isn’t synonymous w/ money and fame) . There are stories of survival and beauty, and happiness with challenge versus happiness being the opposite of challenge. The story I’m choosing for now is that I see possibility everywhere. This doesn’t equate to solid and sure solutions. This doesn’t mean perfection. This doesn’t mean without error. It just means possibility. It means life is always looking for a way to live, despite its fate. It means as a mere mortal I do not know the broader mystery of why this is or even how or even when (of course other than NOW). It means there is a process to everything and I am learning to trust it even though I do not know exactly where it is leading me. We the humans are semi-magic in that we can create and choose to engage with all kinds of story lines; accept them or deny them. Helpless as I pretend to be, I have agency. I only must learn to use it, and understand it exists more as a muscle that must be exercised and less as a heart that beats on its own.
✨ I must write. And I must invite activities into my life that keep me writing and inspire me to write and hold me to account, for the thing I love most is not always the thing that comes easiest. This newsletter is a process, just as I am a process, just as you are a process. The humble slice of life pie that is Cheryl Strayed once wrote: Write like a mother fucker. Which when I first read those words as a young woman who was drunk all of the time and deeply hurting, I thought, how cheesy. But now I see it for what it is — a glaring invitation: Let what is within me spill out so it may become apart of the cosmos! Call it god, call it fate, call it a burning desire, call it a habit I’m trying to form. It is what it is, a truth in me that must be expressed, one that I can no longer dim - for it will destroy me. I hope the truths within me invite the truths within you to mother fuck their way into the cosmos, and vice versa. Thanks for coming with me into the heart of the process. 💕