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For the next three weeks I’ll be talking about research, retreating, and recording our work for private and public use.
In Getting to Center I map out the process of getting back to myself following a series of acts of self-abandonment. I share this process in book form because I have found that in the last decade of sharing my way back, a lot of other people are approaching the path I am on. I read books by people already on the next path I am going towards.
The farther I get away from myself the more I grasp to others for a sense of safety and control. With this comes the crash from destiny, where the only reason I got so far away in the first place was because I started to reach outside of myself somewhere along the way. I started to look outside of myself for myself. Looking outside of myself for love, connection, support, cheering on, is an integral part of the process. But when I am looking outside of myself for the very essence of who I am - my desirability, worth, lovability, source, bond with spirit - I will never find it and I am left emptier than when I began my endless search.
Here is the absolutely unhinged plot twist. I write a weekly newsletter, have written multiple books, hosted radio shows, advice columns, online courses - all about how to come back to yourself over and over again. The pact I made with god must have been that in order for me to stay gainfully employed, I too would have to keep forgetting. Or else I would have nothing to write about.
It is this frustration with the self, this agony over “I wrote an entire fucking book about earning secure attachment, carving out alone time, and spaciousness as the answer to grasping, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING to me again?”
The excavation of the WHY has been bringing me into a loop so fast and so far into the ground that I feel like my brain is moving 100 miles a minute and I am frozen and cannot make a next move. At the end of the day I know why, and I’ve known why for a long time, and knowing the same why from a new person or a new self help book doesn’t bring me any closer to myself.
Research, retreat, reporting. This is what brings me back. Every time. Because this is what being in my life looks like.
Research keeps me in the noticing, keeps me in awe, keeps me in delight, keeps me in remembering
Retreating keeps me with myself, keeps me in my practice, keeps the processing only between me and the work, keeps me coming back to center
Reporting keeps me with the people, keeps me in service, keeps me in wholeness, keeps me coming back to the cycle
citizen research as a tool for tending to attachment styles
Healing an anxious attachment style is more painful than anything I’ve ever experienced. More than quitting drinking, more than quitting cigarettes, more than getting divorced, more than the grief of someone dying.
In over a decade of sobriety I have never come as close to the edge of pain, as close the the feeling of : a drink would stop this from hurting. And I while I speak so effortlessly about the miracle of sobriety and the gift of time unearned, the thing that stays true about alcohol is it does stop pain. Because it stops everything. It stops joy, it stops enchantment, it stops noticing, it stops research retreat and recording. It stops breathing, it stops heartbeats, it stops love.
When I come this close to attempting to pull out the weeds at the roots, there is nothing left to do but plant more flowers and make garden bigger. To put on the sun hat of creation and bow down to the soil and put something new in it and watch it get grow wilder. To focus on pulling every weed around it keeps me in the desire to leave. Leave myself behind. The obsession of thinking I cannot plant a new seed if all of these weeds are still here.
To drink is to enact the greatest motion of leaving myself behind. And I don’t know if I could get back to myself and that’s why I don’t pick up, even when I want to.
When something stops working it is the biggest blessing
There is the in between time when something stops working and the new pathway hasn’t been illuminated. I’m raw out in the world again because my current drug ~ the illusion of control ~ no longer protects me and numbs me from pain, it creates the despair loop itself, and the only way to get free is complete surrender. Acceptance of the discomfort so great it feels like it could be the one that really takes me out.
When I get to the level of pain that feels unsolvable is when I look so far past my own tools to fix it that it begins to feel unfixable. The thing about fixing is it never works. When I want to fix it’s time to be alone, time to retreat, time to go on field trips alone, map out the process, and record it.
I can say with absolute certainty that one night alone with a personal dominos pizza in bed, surrounded my my pens and quilts and journals and one hundred post it notes on the wall, I am always back quicker than I thought I would be. RETREATING TO ACCESS THE RESEARCH, RETREATING TO RECORD.
May the research of anything outside of yourself bring you back to yourself. The fastest way to thinking about yourself less is to focus on the history of the place, the history of your work, the beginning of the work. May the research bring you to organizing your practice in ways you simply cannot access from others.
Next week I’ll share about my most recent solo retreat, how to organize your own, how to become a citizen researcher, organize the research, and record it to put into your work and creative practice for public and private use. Also attribution to Cindy Pincus for teaching me about tending to making the garden bigger instead of pulling out the weeds.
An Ace of Pentacles kind of love in partnership. Remembering the day-to-day as its own form of sparkling intimacy. The way her teeth don’t touch kind of glimmer, the way her ankles click when she dances, the way she carefully puts her bike away in the shed or spreads her earth balance on her bagel. Handing her a macaroon after a hard day, the glance that says I’d like to kill you now but I still choose you with very little effort. The way her hands still feel like gold on my achy shoulder. - “The magic will often remain hidden from us because we see its products as so ordinary.” Rachel Pollock
How a small Alabama community stitched itself into the history of American art. “The women of Gee’s Bend transformed a practice born out of necessity into an expression of political defiance and then an art form celebrated the world over. Here, we speak to one of the community’s contemporary torch-bearers and learn about its remarkable history.”
Rashaan Alexis Meneses Confronts a Season of Pandemic and Fire
Latimer School exhibit at Nevada Museum of Art (Later the Nevada Art Gallery) Bylaws state : The annual meeting of the members and directors shall be held at seven o clock pm on the First Monday in February of each year
Luv me Luv me - Shaggy feat Janet Jackson
October 24 in Incline Village, NV : BEE INCLINED QUILT GUILD EXPO AND SALE 1-4pm at the Chateau
“Soft and cuddly, hug me up like a quilt” - Boombastic by Shaggy (I am in a really important Shaggy phase
Newest Uppercase Magazine is all about quilts
When you resist me, hun, I cease to exist
Because I only like the way I look, when I look into your eyes
And when you come back
You command me like the penetration of the sun
Into the deep dark sky - Fiona Apple, Cosmonauts
Many Blessings
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