March 31, 2025

Divine Emergency!

Dear Reader,

There is so much happening within me. I want to collect all of you and sit you down in a big amphitheater in the woods and tell you so I can see your faces light up. I sometimes wish I could be next to you while you read this newsletter. To see your excitement, your disapproval, your delight, your confusion. I imagine you with your hot drink and being a little beam of light in your inbox. I feel grateful you let me in, thank you.

I have fallen, been swept up, completely and totally in love. Up until three years ago I had never gone more than a few months without being caught in love’s current. Venus in Gemini, plunging into love is an art form and one I do with little effort. The last three years in the rural north proved otherwise and without love I have been. A divine emergency!

And yet, I am always surrounded by love. And in its own way, this new love has always been with me. The love of my family and friends is always beside me. The love for myself has grown exponentially in this time without a partner.

Something new is within me, but it is also something so ancient, something I have always been looking for. New love will do that, shine itself so bright that it feels like the first time all over again. But then there is the grounded part of knowing that something is different. Falling in love at thirty six after traumatic heart break holds different limits and different expectations of love. My priorities are clear, my needs are sharp, and my patience is strong.

No longer willing to lose myself in love’s tide I find myself both enthralled and autonomous. This love, like all love before it, is teaching me something new about devotion and care. How to hold myself while I hold another, a sweet in between.

Love has a way of sharpening my focus and I have noticed since ending my spending ban and beginning a new relationship that my spending habits have ramped up a bit. While I aim to find a middle ground rather than a pendulum swing I have decided to do another spending ban for the month of April, which starts tomorrow. I’d love to invite you to do it with me which requires no action other than creating your own list or spreadsheet and then sticking to it and coming along with me for the journey while I report back each Monday.

My categories are :
- Allowed
- Not Allowed : These are a little stricter than last time. I am going to do no eating out or coffee shops and see what happens :)
- To be traded / bartered
- Broken/Replaced
- Questions / curiosities

I have one larger purchase I will allow myself to pick out this month (speakers for my record player) and otherwise no books, clothes, objects, plants, records, or anything you might put in the physical want category.

This was such an amazing experiment last year and opened up so much for me, I look forward to doing it again for the month of April. I want to challenge myself to save and find pleasure in the action of letting the savings account grow.

I find that love and spending can really spin me in the dopamine loop, my ability to focus on tedious tasks or reading falling by the wayside. I trust that there are seasons for research and seasons for deepening skills and seasons for holding love with a steady hand. I am desiring more rigor. March was a month of much travel and I look forward to rooting down at home and tending to the yard and the plants and the meadow.

I trust each thread to hold, letting only what I cannot carry on my own unravel.

Things of note :

• What a gift to be trans! What a gift to experience trans love! A gift and a risk to be visible! Consider this Trans Day of Visibility giving to an organization that supports the magical trans people you love. Here is where I will be redistributing to today <3

• I remembered Sheer Mag exists and I am so happy

  https://open.spotify.com/track/3yIjzNJqVDMOytl0vM1tTX?si=e567f3e490d94421

• I had a chance to visit Secret Room Press in Portland and it was so inspiring :)

• This Saturday in Landscapes there is going to be an amazing workshop with Alex Dobrenko about building a knowledge library using Sublime

CLASSIFIEDS : 

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Thank you for reading another installment of Monday Monday by Cody Cook-Parrott. If you loved this newsletter feel free to share an excerpt on social media, forward it to a friend, or link it in your own newsletter.

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