A Call to Magick: Become Pregnant and Roaring with Longing
Sunday Honey — If I do not long for all of me, there is no crueler punishment.
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A break from your “regularly scheduled programming.” Alchemical process. Step by step. Breath, dance, and sex. Eros everywhere. Undeniable. Life bursts open, becoming what IT is. Transforming earth’s raw material into honest gestures of power. Expanding organisms.
Poppy leaves bursting through warm spring soil. Fuzzy waves meandering toward heaven. A new bud risen from an open stem’s hungry mouth. My mouth watering. What is this flower penetrating space?
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“An organism is a differentiated system, but it has no parts. That is to say the heart is not a part of the body in the sense that a distributor is part of an automobile engine. Because although surgeons are trying to treat the body as a machine with replaceable parts, the difficulty is, there are not parts in the sense that they are screwed in.
When the fetus arises in the womb, there are not a lot of mechanics in there who are lugging in hearts and stomachs and things and fitting them together and screwing them to each other.
An organism develops like a crystal in solution. Or a photographic plate in chemicals. It develops all over at once. And there isn’t a boss in it. Because all of them act together in a strange way. It’s a kind of orderly anarchy.
This is the Chinese view of the world fundamentally. This principle or organic growth they call tao, usually translated “the course of nature” or, “the way.” “The process of things.”
— Alan Watts
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To be the whole ocean. What a thing. You can’t water yourself down, not really.
But what you can do? What’s worse? You can disintegrate your magic. The simple, striking salt of it. Your flavor. Your complexity. Your eros drip.
You can spill yourself in so many places and in so many ways that the depth of you is next to nothing. Not enough to soak in. Barely enough to stick a toe in.
Or, you can pour yourself into one little glass and reserve the rest, tell yourself, “That’ll do. Just a taste. That’ll quench.”
But you know, you’re only fooling yourself.
What you need is riverbanks. What you want is to concentrate. To focus. To magnify your brilliance. To feel yourself, a current rippling. What you yearn for, really, beneath all the fear, doubt, judgement, self-criticism, is to be wholly yourself in a world of people who are everything but themselves.
“Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself…
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
— E.E. Cummings
For a moment, set aside fear and hear this:
You are here to carve your way through mountains. You are here to move, change, become something other than a stagnant pond. Listen. Do you want something different?
Your body is the container that always fits. Learn how to shapeshift. Feel the tension. Find your edges. Slowlean into them and watch yourself expand. Trust the fire built by friction. Breathe, greedily. Become pregnant with longing. Fill yourself with oxygen. Ignite your burning. Yearn for IT.
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Nothing is weaker than water,
But when it attacks something hard
Or resistant, then nothing withstands it,
And nothing will alter its way.— Lao Tzu
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Water does not resist. It is soft and it is fierce and it is ever-changing.
If the obstacle is the way, why are we afraid of our power to move it? To channel this power entails nothing but embracing harsh edges with the flow of our bodyconsciousness; softening them with our willingness to become one with longing’s sweet ache. This is non-resistance.
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Fear is a funny thing, lurking in the shadows of imagined futures and long-gone histories. We avoid it. We are beholden to it.
This fear we speak of, wordless sensations, are real to the body, yet Here, in the present moment, not a whisper of danger. A closing of the heart, a tightening in the gut, breath constricted in response to a thought. Vapor. A world occurring to a mind preoccupied with maintaining the homeostasis of a horror story.
How do we leave this lurid dream loop?
We practice.
Opening our bodies. Feeling what is. Breathing. Being Here, with all of it. Noticing. Moving. Taking shape. Becoming impeccable, exquisite, so bright you can hardly stand it. But you do. You stand for it, because you are IT.
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“Recognizing the influence of my subconscious mind over my power of will, I shall take care to submit to it a clear and definite picture of my CLEAR PURPOSE in life and all minor purposes leading to my major purpose, and I shall keep this picture CONSTANTLY BEFORE my subconscious mind by REPEATING IT DAILY.”
— Bruce Lee
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The obstacle to your becoming is embedded in your bodymind, debris coagulating; a habitual tornado of thought and response without pause to assess the matter at hand.
Without recognition, a body becomes heavy with matter. A body aches.
The matter is the obstacle, and the obstacle is not a problem to be rejected, rather, an invitation. An initiation into the next shape of you.
Choose to walk through.
Here is the truth: it is a distorted mind that makes the new shape of you some body you mustn’t embrace, some door you mustn’t enter.
Once you clear the doorway, you must proceed to the liminal space, ripe with bliss and possibility.
Otherwise? Debris collects again. The message replays itself in a quest for your attention.
Stop pushing away your pain.
Feel it, and realize beyond it is a world you’ve never lived in.
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“Recognize and use the spiritual power of the infinite. The intangible represents the real power of the universe. It is the seed of the tangible. It is living void because all forms come out of it, and whosoever realizes the void is filled with life and power and the love of all beings.”
— Bruce Lee
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If I do not long for all of me, there is no crueler punishment.
x Faye
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I enjoy the extreme polarity you often have going on.
"If I do not long for all of me, there is no crueler punishment."
It's the soul of a poet that legitimately feels these extremes.
Wow, Faye. This whole thing is beautiful. We live in a world of pretend edges and boundaries, of expectations that we fit into made-up norms that so many have become completely hypnotized by.
You and your writing defy this in the most marvelous ways. I'm gonna have a tough time figuring out which part to highlight and restack, but the payoff is worth the seeming impossibility of the task.
And I'm struck by the eerie synchronicity of things. How is it that you and I both posted pieces referencing Watts (though mine is implicit), referencing the deep dark void of reality and how it becomes impregnated, thus giving birth to the mind-bending, overflowing spill of spectra both visible and beyond? How is it that you pull the exact same e.e. cummings quote as another post I just read by another friend and fellow writer (https://thecosmicgumballmachine.substack.com/p/gumball-37-apples-and-oranges)?