At some point I stopped listening to people when they told me who I needed to be and how to become that somebody better. It wasn’t really a gradual thing but it certainly began to creep across into areas of life beyond the direct stories I was being told about me.
As it started to affect my studies, my career and my friendships there was something else going on I knew I needed to be paying attention to in a different way than I had ever done before.
I don’t know what was more upsetting — becoming intolerant of other people’s ideas or knowing I needed their help as I became less and less capable of looking after my own needs — but I can tell you that the culmination of those two forces, the unstoppable and the immoveable, was a crisis point for me. Or at least it would have been if I was looking for a way out.
Allowing Is As Allowing Does.
It sounds poncy, superior, pretentious; I know. It sounds like that to me too and I’m the one saying it, but the truth is that I allow what-is to happen and nothing has ever changed that. Not being “sick”. Not being poor. Not being sad.
Some of us can focus. We can pick a goal and work toward it or choose an outcome and make it happen. While some of us cannot.
Those of us who do not choose but let the universe choose for us, those who do not have goals but allow what-is to transpire, are leaves in the breeze.
— Melanie Kim Brockwell
Allowing is not what it seems to be but then nothing ever is really.
I am a starlight elemental. I don’t know what that means exactly. I know that the tarot was part of what led me to it. I know that it’s true b/c of the way I feel when I say the words, when I feel the sensations of being spoken, and what happens when I ask if it’s true. And yet, I know I don’t believe in truths, or knowing, or belief for that matter.
So how can all of these things coexist?
More than one being.
I’m thinking now of Fred Moten’s ‘Consent Not To Be A Single Being,’ and of the non-zero-sum reality available to those of us who can fathom it.
I’m also thinking of digestion and production, especially of the egg and sperm variety, and I’m wondering how it’s not obvious to everyone that we’re surrounded by living examples of it, of being more than… until I am reminded by that wise and ever-present silent voice that it’s not obvious to everyone b/c it’s not, and that is enough.
Allowing makes that possible. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Perhaps it’s my way of being that makes allowing possible. I could not say.
The idea of back and forth or give and take, like that of causation and origination, has never really made any sense to me. It seems far more plausible that there’s some alchemy at work, that there is a simultaneous back and forth within a closed free-form system perpetually reconfiguring itself. A bit like confetti forever in motion, never truly settling into one form.
Although it works as a metaphor (or is that an analogy, I get them confused at times) the idea of traipsing around with a fixed sense of what-is, even a free-forming one, feels like a lot of hard work. With so much going on in this ongoing conversation called life, I’m wondering if it’s not more to the point to just be here now and figure out what to do with that. It so often feels as if there’s barely any time left to do anything else anyway!
Where do people get the energy and space and inclination to go into all those be-causes and what-fors, I wonder. I have a hard time streaming consciousness all day long. It’s exhausting and overwhelming and wholly un-realistic, for me, to keep to a daily schedule of that plus anything else. And every time I try something new, like experimenting with being a person of the world who cares about creating balance and growth, I get so overwhelmed my nervous system starts to shut down.
Shutting Down.
When my nervous system begins to fail, falter, spit and splutter, screw up its face and grind loudly across the floor so as to wake the neighbours three towns over, I start to pay attention as if it were a thing in and of itself. For a while. Not log, though.
Soon enough, I’m back at the wheel of a rudderless ship waving the ocean by. Juttered by rips and roiled by storms passing. That’s the way of it. Really. That’s what’s real to me. The everyday stuff of living life as an ongoing conversation where there’s nothing to hold onto or grip or flail about. There’s just this.
Paying attention to my nervous system soon becomes paying attention to the next minutiae of being here now. It means what it means when it means it. It appears as it does when it does for no other reason than it is.
Signs and Symbols.
Of course, I look for signs that I’m paying attention. Signs for what I’m paying attention to and signs for how I might be attentive. But it’s all the same thing, really. One does not lead to the other. There’s no meta-data or overarching theme to pull it all together. It just is. That’s as far as the story goes and as much explanation as I’m ever going to get.
I do like Jungian explorations of the alchemical imagination, applications of the tarot to Kabbalistic sphere- and pathworking, and the whole Madam Blavatsky cum Aleister Crowley crew-type symbol-rich readings of the world. I have come to them through many doors at various points in my life and found them to be enriching, altogether.
I have found my own wisdom/s reflected in Osho and Crowley and witchery and magic (those places that feel dark and unwelcoming to some) and have never been afraid of ghosts or violence or abandonment in favour of being alone. But these are not patterns of learned behaviour. Nor are they rebellions against social mores. When I find my/self in these places, in affinity with these substances, they are like water bubbling through rocky fingers towards a latent spring. Nothing could be clearer.
That’s how I read the signs — through metaphor and visionary allocations of wisdom. Through pictures.
Think of it less as confirmation (or what’s good or righteous or of the highest vibration) and more in terms of what is most important right now. That’s how the images work. They filter through to the loudest point and make it relevant to me.
How does that look on a resume?
It looks pretty shit, conventionally. Except, these days, one can canoodle the information to look any way one likes. So it depends on how I decide to manipulate the data.
- The gaps in employment become something of a private skill-building cum self-examination aspect of professional development or research and development for some larger project.
- The ending of employment can be explained as outgrowing one’s role rather than feeling so crushed by the mundane that there was nowhere left to turn but away from all that held one underwater.
- Leaving a degree or two or more isn’t about failure or a lack of stick-to-it-iveness but instead proof of versatility and buoyancy and a willingness to be part of our mobile have-nots’ workforce.
In the unconventional sense, my resume looks ultra different.
My journey
Let the stories unfold and unleash yourself.
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