Jan. 3, 2022, 5:28 p.m.
How to get out of your worst nightmare
Letting love in instead of blocking it's arrival
Monday Monday
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The arrival of love is offered to me everyday, and everyday I have two choices.
To let love in and trust it just for this day, letting it wash over me in the gratitude that I get to feel it even for an hour
Spend all hours of the day obsessing over if I can trust the love being offered, take out my detective notebook and look for all the holes in the story or where what is being promised didn’t line up with what happened before, and block the love. Because if you block the love when the love goes away you don’t have far to fall
When I choose option one I have a life beyond my wildest dreams. I have relationships with my work, my body, my mind, my partner, my friends, and the few very special people who make up my inner circle that provide me with safety, hope, faith, and communication that is steady and reliable.
Option two is an effort (a strenuous effort) to block my Worst Nightmares from happening. The thing about having “worst nightmares” is they usually happen, especially if you spend most of your time thinking they will. They can happen when you expect them to or when you least expect them to. They can happen under your nose or behind your back. And they happen the most when we look for them in every corner. You can’t prepare for them like you think you can, which is both frustrating and an invitation towards complete surrender. Powerlessness as relief.
I am currently in a “worst nightmare” situation. Where I wanted to try something and had one worst nightmare. If ______ happens then it will all be too much for me and I will not be able to continue on. It’s hard to say how much of this I called in on my own, how much is co-created with other humans, or how much is just a phase of my own disconnection to myself that ripples out to others.
Now that I am inside the vortex of Worst Nightmare I am again met with two options:
Make everything I do hot and sexy and cool and fun and live my own life one day at a time and trust that intimacy, joy, and trust is what follows that. Putting service and esteemable acts at the forefront of my life
Succumb to worst nightmare and let is consume my every waking thought and how to get out of it and obsess over how to fix it and keep the focus on how if other people changed their behavior I would feel safe (this option is as consuming as a full time job except you do not get paid, have no benefits, and no vacation days)
Photo by Chloe Sells
Worst nightmares for me are situations that manifest and result in my self esteem completely plummeting. I feel mortified, small, useless, and like I am the least desirable or efficient person on the planet. I feel embarrassed, don't want to be seen, and have all of the evidence to show that everyone else is better than me.
The pain of Worst Nightmare is always worse than whatever Worst Nightmare actually is. Worst Nightmare does not invite : nuance, zooming out, one day at a time, faith, trust, or letting love in. Worst Nightmare is the self fulfilling prophecy that you thought would happen and there is no fixing it. Because it already came true.
Which is why we must use option one to exit worst nightmare. You reach Worst Nightmare alone because you aren’t actually powerful enough to bring anyone else down there with you (especially if you choose to love people with impeccable boundaries) So the only way out is up, alone, through, around the corner, over the tiny mountain of discomfort, through the valley of uncertainty, and out the other side.
Worst Nightmare is almost always about what other people think of me, and most importantly - what I think something else means ABOUT me. These nightmares are about the stories I make up to prove my unlovability. Like I said - if I am unloveable it is much easier to be disappointed or abandoned because HELL I figured that would happen anyways!
The only way out of Worst Nightmare is to fully let love in. To let it arrive completely. From other people, from my higher power, from myself, from my partner, from my metamours, from my dog, from my friends, from my fellows. I can either fight it and dig myself down deeper, believing the stories I make up, or choose to listen to that love. To let it wash over me. To trust it. Endlessly. Unconditionally. Without question. Questioning the love I receive only leads me to despair, unproductive reassurance seeking, and vast loneliness.
The scariest thing I have ever done is love someone fully. And never once in my life have I regretted it. The only thing I have regretted is pushing them away in an effort to protect myself from pain. Over and over again that is the surest formula for disconnection, abandonment, and burning love into the ground.
The miracle of uncertainty is it actually invites us to do less, to know less, and to rest more. Nothing can prevent worst nightmares, all the illusions of structures of safety can’t stop the wildfire of life from raging through. It is my hope and intention to move out of worst nightmares with fun, play, and pleasure. Taking everything so fucking seriously is a fast way to a nightmare. Holding the tapestry of life with a loose grip provides so much more opportunity for delight and surprise.
May we burn the meadow before the fire comes, so that the trees and their roots stand sturdy. So that we may stand in certainty that even if we do burn down we will grow back.
KMRD My favorite radio station on planet earth is raising money for their new Radio Station! Click here to contribute
Black Feast presents : Notes on Tenderness January 7 5-8pm in Berkeley, CA - A special event celebrating Annika Hansteen-Izora’s latest book, “Tenderness: An Honoring of My Black Queer Joy and Rage."
Non-Black folks : Black Feast is accepting donations to help support this project. Venmo @blackfeast and Cashapp $blackfeast.
Ellen Rutt’s show Both/And at Louis Buhl & Co. comes to an end this week - you can inquire about available artworks here - Seen and unseen messages, themes of pleasure, coming out, and newness - Ellen took her shape making practice to a whole new level integrating the written word : destroying and beginning again and again. Run don’t walk to have your own painting hanging on the wall.
This Lucille Clifton poem
“The fan is adjusted to the proportions and dimensions of my body ... head and shoulders are the centre, the axel of the circular movements ... one half of the fan rotates in front of my body, the other behind my body. My body becomes the fixed axel of the rotational movements. Through the slow rotation of the two fan halves, parts of my body become visible, others become hidden. In the constantly changing angle of the circle the two fan halves spin faster, closing to form a transparent circle.” – Rebecca Horn explains Mechanical Body Fan series
The Marshall Fire was the most devastating wildfire in Colorado’s history. Check out this quilt raffle that includes links to go-fund me’s and here is the post for the raffle if you’d like to share
I am thinking a lot about remembering to keep bags in my car for groceries. I am thinking a lot about the little things that don’t feel like they make a difference but vibrationally they do, even if one more paper bag won’t sink the world. The Earth feels a lot better when I just remember to put my damn Baggus in the console
Made a New Moon in Capricorn essence last night with light of lantern, watch your step, tumbling snow ball, cardinals, and more - my favorite part of essence making is that you can make an essence out of anything. Like the time me and Sara Strickler made PURPOSE - an essence with water we had at a Justin Bieber concert. ANYTHING PEOPLE. ANYTHING.
My 2022 mood board :
found this on the 69herbs instagram account If you have covid I love you
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