March 3, 2025

The Last Illusion

Dear Reader,

Love has always been a force that moves faster than I can control, the last illusion. And yet, I don’t find myself wanting to control it. I don’t find myself wishing I could slow it down or make it different. This doesn’t happen every time but when it emerges in this way I notice my speed and I tend to it with great care and reverence. When I fall in true love I don’t just stumble, I plummet headfirst. Sometimes reckless and sometimes urgently. It is this urgency that I will wipe out today. Planning quickly and with great care has a different texture. Taking action when action is called for is not the same as rushing. I could slow down, but the fear of slowing down holds steady with the fear of getting it wrong. 

The other day I noticed a little something I like to call “poll the audience” mode. My mind and heart are comfortable with a situation, but young Cody wants to know what everyone else thinks. Young Cody is afraid that they will get it wrong and everyone will abandon them. To compensate for the flare and the speed I survey the audience and ask way too many people to weigh in. In return I receive opinions, projections, and other people’s fears. The more people I ask the more confused I become and the farther away I get from my own intuition.

Being bipolar I often find that I have to really ground to make sure I know the difference between mania and excitement. This is often revealed to me by reflections from loved ones, tapping into examples from the past and how they looked, and how I trust and relate to a new love. A sign of my distraction is being behind. Behind in school, behind in editing my book, behind in work. This has less to do with new love as a distraction and more to do with a very full social life, something I have been longing for since I moved here three years ago. I let the pendulum swing and as I write to you I am just catching it in the middle, letting it swirl to its stopping point. I am so quick to measure my worth to impossible standards, wishing that I could move as slow as the snail and let the wind catch me and float me away like a snow drift. My speed wavers but my heart does not.

I sit down to the page in my restlessness, wishing I wasn’t in the liminal space of “I am so behind in school and I will never catch up”. I texted my professor yesterday and she gently guided me back to the practice. My only wish is that I had reached out sooner. Sometimes urgent, sometimes too slow. I know it is my great obstacle to let go of trying to figure everything out by myself. I would prefer no help. Especially after years of living alone and unpartnered, I have cultivated an unusual amount of independence that I am now trying to break.

So I sit down to write, and to you dear reader it is always the best opening after a bit of a block. Some days, every thought feels too small, too scattered. Other days, the weight of saying something meaningful is too much. The blinking cursor becomes a mirror of my own uncertainty. What if I pick the wrong words? What if there’s nothing worth saying at all?

Beneath the rushing, the seeking, the self doubt - there is the quiet ache of missing someone. Of new love being many miles away. I also am starting to get to know a version of myself I left behind at some point, that is making its way back. Sparked by two spells and candles lit, I surrender to what we asked for. The absence lingers, it sneaks into the empty spaces, the pauses between my breath. 

I rush toward the mirage of catching up, knowing that it just takes one slow movement at a time. In all this chasing - of productivity, connection, and deep knowing I end up missing something vital - the stillness where god is. The pause where the universe makes itself known, the silence where the answers live. The things I seek will come not from running faster, but from learning how to stay still.

Things of Note :

So much of how I know myself, my pace, and breaking through illusion comes from my journaling practice.

Taking a pen to paper lights something up in my brain and my body, gives me access to the parts of myself otherwise hidden. I journal everyday without fail, sometimes only for a few sentences, sometimes for pages on end.

Journaling is both a contemplative practice and also a place to generate new material for public sharing. It has many forms and functions, none short of magic.

Later this week for paid subscribers I will give some behind the scenes on how I designed my next online class The Tapestry and The Web and look forward to sharing my process.

♢ Registration is open for The Tapestry and The Web : Journaling as a Contemplative Practice March 16, 23, and 30 live on zoom (recorded if you cannot make it live) Scholarships and payment plans available and all details are on the sales page

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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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