the drip // volume 01
Musings on belief, motivation, and creation
Inspired
in spirals
My eyes close
we’re spinning
and spinning
and spinning
and oh, how we’ve risen
from pools of delicious
enchantment
We couldn’t have planned it
Just breathe
and be here now
You don’t have to know how
You don’t have to know anything
Experience that which is
written inside you
Mind you,
the journey is yours to expand upon
if you choose to persist in your creation myth
You creatrix witch
You goddess nymph
You humble warrior
You’re held
Glorious
A lover, magician, a king and a queen
A fool’s undertaking
A world woven through your fingertips
The connection you’re missing?
It’s always been you
Now let us rip through the seams of illusion
and sink into the majesty of Being
On motivation and maintaining momentum through the sometimes volatile process of creation:
Once the magic of the discovery has worn off, practice. Keep practicing. Let yourself move through the boredom. Arrive at an impetus for change. Stagnation tends to be a good indicator of the need for movement. Rearrangement. New ways of perceiving.
Listen. Be open to the emergence of something different; maybe the beat of your own drum is what’s changing, and your mind is resisting where your body is going.
Remember to play. It’s of utmost importance to the discovery of your well-being. And the maintenance! Recess is part of the curriculum I teach for everyone.
Remember it’s not that serious, even when it seems like everything is riding on this one moment and you Just. Can’t. Mess. Up. Or else EVERYTHING will come crashing down…
Let it. Let yourself fall. It’s the only way to know you can pick yourself back up (and if you reflect a bit, you may notice you’ve done this, over and over again, without acknowledgment). Failing and falling and rebuilding is the way to build trust in your process of becoming. It’s an opportunity to pause, in the rubble of your existence, and notice: do I want this? Is this nourishing?
What can you recognize when you stop the constant rush toward… more of something.
What is it you need?
Maybe it’s less.
Pause for more than one breath.
Pause for longer than you’re used to.
Pause with no input.
Let your space be silent.
Notice what you notice:
What are the thoughts that torture you, and are they true?
Must you entertain these unwelcome guests?
What do you believe?
Question that.
Breathe and drop back in to your body.
STAY with your breath.
Let your entire awareness cover the way your inhale slithers through and fills every crevice.
Notice the anticipation of every atom. Notice the excitement of minimal stimulation.
Notice, perhaps, that your experience of sensation filling your body is much more interesting, and, indeed, much more USEFUL, than instagram manipulating your awareness into the high speed mental plane for hours on end.
Drop it down. Drop it in. Notice the difference in your awareness.
Groundedness happens when awareness is rooted in the truth of your experience. Not the state of constant intake we’re used to as a society. Not in the flood of information you do not have the time or space to integrate. Information is useless if it is just floating in your head, swirling you in circles, perpetually asking you to figure out what’s “correct.”
Correct only exists in context. Right and wrong are subjective. This is not to say we should all be selfish heathens hurting each other to satisfy our egos’ interests, but that pain is different for every person. What rubs up against someone’s wound might be wrong for them, and right for you. It might be right for them, too, on a different timeline, with a different perspective. You see… I know you do.
Know your purpose, know your values, know your reasons for doing what you do. Know what you are supporting. Know why you show up to living. Knowing WHY makes the difference. Why is the medium between ego and spirit. Why is the way to steer the conversation back toward the greater purpose of your Being. The besieged and victimized (or inflated, superhero status) ego is selfish, fragile, afraid, abusive, avoidant because it believes it must get things RIGHT. While the superego can trick you into believing you must bend your will to fit into some sort of “good girl” (or perfect man… or what the fuck ever it says to make you feel “holier than thou,” or at least holy enough, to not be called out) expression of your humanity.
Your spirit does not have to rely on belief. It KNOWS. Your spirit wants to be expressed authentically, lovingly, without unnecessary editing. Without diluting the message. Without removing the NUANCE that is so crucial to understanding. You don’t have to hide in love and light when the darkness want to come through. AND, you don’t have to overstay the dark’s welcome. Life is a series of crests and troughs. To let yourself experience them IS the journey, IS the learning. Contrast is what teaches us everything. The difference between difficult and easy. Meeting the challenge - arriving at the threshold of deepening your capacity - and taking the leap. That is when the net appears. Not while you’re frozen, thinking about it. Not in your head. Out there, in the world before you, organizing to support the dreams you share.
Action begets response from the universe. Not mere contemplation of the options. You must choose to embrace your direction (or the world will tell you who to be and where to go… and I don’t think you want that. But then, maybe you do. What do I know?)
Well, I know this: Action is what lets the wheels experience the friction necessary to gain momentum on the road ahead. Otherwise you’re revving the engine of your, perhaps sexy, but fundamentally useless vehicle, in a muddy ditch without 4-wheel drive.
John Mayer’s song “Belief” illustrates this beautifully. Here are the lyrics I’d like to emphasize, though I hope you listen to all of them:
Oh, everyone believes
In how they think it ought to be
Oh, everyone believes
And they're not going easily
Belief is a beautiful armor
But makes for the heaviest sword
Like punching underwater
You never can hit who you're trying for
Some need the exhibition
And some have to know they tried
It's the chemical weapon
For the war that's raging on inside
Oh everyone believes
From emptiness to everything
Oh everyone believes
And no one's going quietly
We're never gonna win the world
We're never gonna stop the war
We're never gonna beat this
If belief is what we're fighting for
Certainly worth your contemplation, in my opinion.
What I’m taking in
One of my favorite explorations in this video: learning to appreciate and enjoy the entire movement JOURNEY - not just the feeling you get at the end. I mean really… extrapolate that to your life. Food. Work. Sex. Art. Friendships. The romantic. Relationships as a whole.
The relationship you have with your body is your most intimate, and the MODEL you create for your relationships with e v e r y t h i n g in your life.
I’m not exaggerating.
But don’t take it from me.
Experiment for yourself.
Notice all the places you’re subtly waiting for the reward at the end at the expense of the beauty that is happening along the whole way.
Notice, too, the places you jump straight to instant gratification instead of the challenge you want to meet, actually.
John Mayer's Love Letter to D'Angelo
Click through to read the rest if you’re interested in the authentic expression of appreciation for someone’s art.
And listen, get used to John making appearances here because I anticipate them being… quite frequent. He (and his, I’ll argue, often overlooked brilliance for capturing nuance and offering DEPTH simply and unassumingly) is my first, most pure, and innocent love… full of everything from the sweet open ears of my 9 years old self, to the lust of raging teenage hormones, and the tenderness of a Woman who’s fallen in love and found solace within the sweet soothing tones of every single album he’s written.
John, if you ever read this, I’m pretty sure you’re the only man I’d ever have babies with. I mean, I’m almost positive other sorts of creative children - albums, books, watches, a clothing line - might emerge more willingly. But maybe my body would be willing to go through the labor of childbirth if it were with someone as loving as you
That was the first love letter of many. I can feel them flooding my system already. Oh dear, get ready ya’ll.
A bit of wisdom from Alan Watts
“This wave phenomenon is happening on ever so many scales—the fast wave of light, the slower waves of sound—and there are all sorts of other wave processes, such as the beat of the heart; the rhythm of breath, waking, sleeping; the movement of human life from birth to maturity to death. And the slower the wave goes, the more difficult it is to see that the crest and trough are inseparable, and this is how we become persuaded in the game of hide-and-seek. So we see the trough go down, down, down and think it keeps going forever—that it will never rise back up again into a crest. We forget that trough implies crest, and crest implies trough. There is no such thing as pure sound—sound is sound/silence. Light is light/darkness. Light is pulsation—between every light pulse there is the dark pulse.”
I’ve been studying Alan Watts’ work for years and this is the essential thing he’s helped me remember: everything is an implication of everything else. Right implies wrong. Black implies white. Good implies bad. Me implies You… and so on.
I’ll leave you with that for the moment.
If you have any thoughts or questions to share, please leave them in the comments, and let me know you’re enjoying this by clicking one of those buttons intended for that very purpose. It appears to be in the shape of a <3.