Dearest Reader,
How’s January? How’s The After?
Meaning, how’s the space after all the planning and gathering and expectation and celebration and overwhelm and underwhelm and line-up of returns and receipts and intentions and resolutions?
How’s the space after the noise and after the busy?
I ask this as someone who has very consciously stepped out of holiday busyness. Also, social life generally.
Look, until last August, I refused to even live with the person I (re)married. (Though, to be fair, that’s in no small part because of how our first round went down.)
For Christmas, we made calls to family far away. Then we walked, alone but together, along the ocean.
For New Year’s, we huddled in bed reading like any other night. (I’m loving my way through Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: A Mayan Shaman’s Journey to the Heart of the Indigenous Soul, by Martín Prechtel.)
All to say, I haven’t arranged my life to match conventions. I’ve arranged it—in many but not all ways—to provide what I need and what offers some semblance of solace amidst what I mostly experience as madness.
Achieving this took surrender and also decisiveness. Achieving this took finally understanding that I can’t or won’t do things the way others do. That I can’t or won’t make the same choices or uphold the same conventions.
This goes for holidays. This goes for everything.
Know what? You don’t have to either.
That doesn’t mean your path or choices need to look like mine. It does mean your path and choices don’t need to look like anyone’s.
To be clear, I’ve yet to master this. In the area of work, specifically, I’ve yet to transcend the neediness, hyper-vigilance, and imagined urgency of my Inheritance.
Also, that’s okay. The Medicine isn’t about getting it perfect or solving the self. The Medicine isn’t, in other words, more of the same.
The Medicine is a practice and a process. The Medicine is showing up fully.
Not posting or talking about it, but doing and living it. And doing it again. And again. With discipline and devotion. With honest-to-god, this-is-what-fucking-matters presence.
The stakes? All that ever was. All that ever will be.
Mastering the dance of surrender and sovereignty takes time and perhaps lifetimes. It takes fluency in movement and fluency in stillness. It takes learning how to leave and learning how to stay.
When the time to leave has come—when I recognized it as the only hope—I did. I left.
I left small town America and alcohol and cocaine. I left attachment to eating identities and gender identities and sexual identities and political identities. I left relationships and predictable, harmful ways of being in relationship. I left the imagined security of a career well under way with multiple degrees to show for it. I (very recently) left a big-deal job title. I (long ago) left parroted polarities and conventional narratives.
I opted out. Despite all that means in this post-2020 world. Despite all its consequences.
The leaving is important. The leaving of an unhelpful or misaligned thing, place, relationship, pattern, concept, situation, or attachment is one of the most important, most courageous declarations of sovereignty available to us.
In such moments—after we’ve done what we’re willing and able to do from within, to transmute unhelpful to helpful and unskillful to skillful—leaving is…integrity.
And, it comes at a cost.
To resist the pull of the familiar—to get clear and to take a stand for that clarity and for what matters in this immediate body and form. That’s the price.
For getting what we need. For getting what we want.
Not many will pay it. Not many will sacrifice comfort and imagined security and above all collective, often unspoken agreements for liberation.
That’s okay too. Just know, it’s a choice we all have and a choice that defines us. It’s a choice that shapes experience and reverberations long after.
But for those willing to pay the price—for those willing to brave it even once or twice in a lifetime—it’s a glorious, powerful thing. Because this sort of Medicine doesn’t come from staying put or from leaping heedlessly into more of the same.
This sort of Medicine is an act of sovereignty, yes. But also surrender. To something bigger than ourselves. To our grander Inheritance. To really being here. To…life.
It’s hard to segue from there, but I noticed that (based on reads and clicks), you all seemed to love my inaugural link-up last week.
So, I think I’ll do more. The focus of this week’s edition (money, skin, and manifestation mostly) may seem random, but it’s not. Nothing ever is.
In the round-up below: the dysfunction in “doom scrolling” and “hate reading” (along with an alternative); poetry as a template for understanding that both things can be true (most of all, within ourselves); my new favourite guide for getting good with money (while not freaking out about money); a podcast conversation merging money, manifestation, and intuition (a magical blend); pricey but very good skincare (a luxury, yes, but I own fewer than 30 items of clothing and rarely buy more, don’t have kids, don’t drink, haven’t eaten out or gone on vacation in more than three years, etc.). All that plus a few more for paid subscribers, below.