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“Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.” - Rumi
Walking in the woods, Jade by my side, June up ahead, I exclaim : I should be walking more. Jade replies “We walked a few days ago and you said “I should walk more.” Then we walked again the next day. And now we are walking today. It looks like you are … walking more”
If I walked 100 miles in a day I would still arrive home thinking, I should have walked 101 miles. It will only be enough if I go the extra mile.
I just want to be the best walker. I want to be better than I was the day before. A friend once said to me - I want to be the most perfect anti-perfectionist. Acceptance of this default, this mechanism for survival, just a stone’s throw away.
This week I have felt a desire to write, but haven’t written
This week I felt the desire to cook, and I cooked
The last few days I have only listened to the album Dedicated by Carly Rae Jepsen. It has made me feel hot, move past the desire for intimacy with unavailable people, and generally feel happier.
This week I called Jeff from ATT and he fixed the internet after 2.5 months of it going out at least once an hour. As Jeff installed the new line I told him about how in the middle of Game Four of the NBA Finals I would curl up in a corner of my room where I have service on my phone to access Hulu Live, just to see Jordan Poole make another splash.
This week I feel the portal opening post surgery and pulled the Queen of Pentacles :
We act as though announcing what matters to us is the same thing as living as if it were so. I think we should normalize thinking about values as something that is both ideological and behavioral , as requiring both imagination and will. - Jessica Dore, Tarot for Change
I find that my hyper focus on the extra mile, on making my god so big that I lose track of time, my wishes and my wants and my curiosities of what is precious, it has all stayed in my mind the past few months. In the mutable nature of my being I float all the way above myself and face inaction. This sometimes happen during a time of crisis or healing or just needing to tend elsewhere, but as each wound on my body closes I find myself actually born again in my desire for writing, service, and attention.
It is why I come back to devotion before I can recenter into discipline. Something happens to me right before I tune back in though, I know because this is consistent. My inconsistency in my discipline is to be expected, this is an outcome I can rely on. What is written out as unreliability is in fact consistency of the self.
As my next book continues to rise to the surface, quickly quickly, I must say - yes I wrote today. If one sentence was what I wrote, I am an author. I let the wildflowers of words come through the cracks. I am the ground that I walk on. I did not walk the extra mile, as an act of discipline for the page.
As a Manifestor (Human Design) I try to remember that I spend so much time gathering. Experiences, information, books, podcasts, ideas, color schemes. It is slow and steady. And then when it’s time to create and output it happens rapidly. What feels stagnant is hibernation. What feels stagnant is integration. What feels stagnant is micro movements.
The measuring is hardly towards others. I measure myself to my last book, my last newsletter, my last text, my last book, my last relationship, my last anything, my last everything.
When I first got sober people would say - if all you did today was not drink it was a success. Eleven years in I’d like to extend that same good will to myself. If all I did today was not drink, if all I did was not walk the extra mile, if all I did was manage to eat a meal and drink even one glass of water - that will do. Let me be crumbled.
May we measure nothing
May we measure nothing
May we measure nothing
I paid attention to the way the light hits the spider web outside my window while my pink socks hang on the line
I paid attention to the way Jade’s feet cross June’s paws when they nap on the couch
I paid attention to which friends reached out and how cared for I am
I paid attention to how my clothes are all over the floor
I paid attention to my motives
I paid attention to my open wounds and how to stop the bleeding
I paid attention to my tarot cards
I paid attention to oat milk lattes
I paid attention to the Annual Dog Parade
I paid attention to how hard I cried when Marissa Cooper dies
I paid attention to the sensation of not being able to swim
I paid attention to the over stimulation of social media
I paid attention to the swelling
I paid attention to how different I look in my clothes
I paid attention to feelings fading
I paid attention when I heard someone said I was hot
I paid attention to feeling confident
I paid attention
I paid very close attention
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