Delayed Reaction Magnificence

As you know, I spent the entirety of the Month of Contentment in a state of wild rage, and this rage was (and remains) extremely justifiable, understandable, necessary, and also I had some feelings about hmmm what is this contentment that past-me seeded with so much love and hopefulness, yet remained so out of grasp…

But then the following month, October, was mysteriously filled to the brim with Contentment!

DELAYED REACTION CONTENTMENT!

Welcoming all the delayed-reaction superpowers

Yes, I love this, let us call on the superpower of delayed-reaction superpowers.

What if it’s all just a slow-release capsule of healing…

May all the beautiful qualities of spirit that live inside of all our past wishes — whether named or unnamed, flow through us now.

Let these words/qualities, enter the bloodstream and the starstream and the life-stream, can we feel them circulating through our bodies and our lives.

And if we can’t feel right now, for our own valid reasons, can we imagine, trust, wonder, allow for the possibility of maybe-this…

What if [better late than never] is actually [oh what beautiful right timing right now]

October was the month of Magificence, and I spent so much of it in an unanticipated state of Contentment.

So perhaps November (the month of Meaning) will be full of unexpected delayed-reaction Magnificence! Yes, may it be so or something even better.

This contentment-state came to pass because, after all these months/years without a home base, I landed in a place!

And ohmygoodness it is an entirely different experience to devote each day to something other than figuring out where I will stay that night or wondering about the next night.

Reasons unknown

Not only did I land on land, this location is extrordinarily beautiful and also I was unable to connect to the world via my phone except in rare moments, and this break from having all that detail about how terrible things are, well, it was healing and useful.

I mean, who can rank the reasons, which contributing factor is most significant, I don’t know.

Somehow, some way, between the breath-taking landscape, the isolation, the quiet, knowing that I don’t need to pack up and leave, the loving dogs that are not mine but come to visit me each morning and nap — contentedly! — on my porch, finally catching up on sleep after seven restless months, I found my way to Contentment.

Or maybe Contentment came to me.

More on delayed + reacting

Guess what, my loves, I made an offer on new retreat space for us, a place where we can rally and gather our powers, a place to retreat into chrysalis and emerge triumphant, and where I can focus on my work of Writing & Righting.

So this is a long-time wish coming true now, and I feel joyful and expansive about this big yes in my life.

But there’s more to this which feels important, and this is the part I want to share with you right now:

When I received word that this is actually happpening, this huge wish coming to fruition, my entire body went weak, and I had to immediately crawl into bed for an emergency nap.

And then I stayed there for over fourteen hours, dozing and dreaming, it felt like the flu but I wasn’t ill, just wiped out. From relief.

Fourteen hours

Sometimes, often, we feel things after they happen.

I think these passing out was my body trying to process the accumulated stresses of four years mostly on the road (almost to the day) and seven months of no home base, everything I wasn’t letting myself fully feel while it was happening.

The intensity of not knowing where I was going to live, and then this news, brought me to this delayed-reaction falling apart. Nothing but good news and all I could do is cry and pass out, and then cry some more.

And this is okay, things land when they land, and also they land because they want to be cleared out, and body-mind recognizes that now it is safe enough to let this happen.

This happens

A wise friend reminded me that migraine headaches can be triggered by relaxation itself. Once the body finally feels safe enough to relax, everything that was being held starts to let go.

The relief of the painful being over makes room to feel the painful feeling that couldn’t be borne in the moment.

Or like this

Yesterday, Emily Nussbaum wrote, on Twitter:

”I suddenly got upset today, out of the blue, about Tree of Life. I don’t know if anyone else is experiencing this daily walling up emotionally against the news, in order to be functional and un-crazy. Maybe that’s the wall he’s actually building.”

Shaking / it off

This makes me think about animals, but also about breath.

Animals often stay calm and still when something scary happens (a predator close by) but when the moment passes, they tremor.

Dogs do this and deer do this, they know how to shake off a scary thing by letting it rumble through their bodies.

We are mammals too, and just like we need roundness and organic shapes and stretching and moving and making sounds under the wild moon, we need to shake and tremble.

Sidebar!

If you are interested in this theme, you might read up on TRE (trauma release exercises), an excellent candidate for a self-fluency technique because it works on the physical and the mental-emotional at the same time, aka multi-directional healing…

But of course People Vary, and there are so many doorways into healing, so as always, the most important thing is know yourself, pay attention, may we meet everything with as much curiosity and love as we can muster.

If this is a clue for you, excellent. If it is not your bus, no worries.

Onward.

So many clues, so much radiance, so much to share about what I learned and noticed in the month of Magnificence.

The radiance sutras

Sanatana: the eternal thrum-hum of universe, we can feel it in breath.

Here is the beautiful reverberating Lorin Roche translation (you can read it here and buy it here)

Close the ears that track the outer world,
Open the ears of the soul.

The song of creation,
Sustaining, enlivening,
is thrumming in your body,
Whispering secrets,
Listen in.

Letting these words echo within me, remembering that contentment, magnificence, all of it, is in there somewhere, inside me, I can return to these places and this knowing with breath, even in (especially in) the scary hard times.

The eternal thrum-hum of universe is in me, circulating through me, hiding in plain sight, there in my breath, each one. Let’s breathe, sweet friends. Let’s breathe attentiveness to the fucking glorious miracle of aliveness, even when things are so hard.

Okay, let’s have another breath for delayed-reaction good!

DELAYED REACTION CONTENTMENT
DELAYED REACTION MAGNIFICENCE
DELAYED REACTION WISHES
DELAYED REACTION WITCHES (!)
DELAYED REACTION EMBODIMENT

A tiny prayer

We are here /
We were here and have been here all along /
We are remembering our being-here-ness right now

amen

Chiaroscuro

Is this not the most beautiful word?

an effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction on something…

How do I want to see the edges? Where is the contrast? What needs light and what needs obscuring?

The places where Clarity meets Mystery.

Let us dive into depth and definition, illumination, wonder, this is a word for the month of magnificence…

Wild in the wilds

So I just want to be clear that I have fully transitioned into a character in a Barbara Kingsolver novel.

I am an eccentric single woman in her early forties who finds herself living on land in a remote part of southeastern Arizona, inhabiting a tiny 72 square foot camper built by an artist with a past.

The land belongs to a mysterious taciturn older cowboy, I rarely see him but sometimes when I come home, I see that he has built me a firepit or left me a gift, a bowl of salad greens or a bottle of diesel. Ya know. Because I’m in a novel.

“Please no tarantulas today” is my morning prayer as I lift a large rock to empty my pee-jar into the septic.

But really my prayer is my inadvertent gasp of awe each as I open my eyes to a another impossibly gorgeous sunrise unfolding in front of me.

Really my prayer is each intake of breath at the wild SKY OF STARS.

Another Beautiful Day

This is my prayer, my comfort, my mantra, but also my code of resistance.

Arizona is full of border patrol checkpoints, not because of a border, but because the United States is Germany in the thirties.

Each day they stop me and ask “how are you today, ma’am”, and this is not a question I am obligated to answer because it is not about citizenship, but I have learned there are consequences to not answering their questions, or refusing a vehicle search, even though this refusal is, in theory, within my rights.

Engaging with them is an exercise in meeting their catch-22 world with presence, while trying to contain the rage, fury, genetic trauma and general reactiveness that could get me into trouble.

And so I say, “ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY, AM I FREE TO GO?”

Another Beautiful Day = code for “I don’t talk to gestapo, you fuckheads”, it is code that lets me appear to be playing the game so that I can pass this obstacle and do more important work in the world…

But it is also beautiful

The things that are happening in my country (in both of my countries) are awful and not-beautiful.

The desert is beauutiful. Breath is beautiful. Hope. Anything that sparks hope. Anything that reminds me to return to radiance, to the thrum-hum, to gain in powers and steadiness.

The door I didn’t open

For years I dreamed of opening a studio called Wild Honey Concoctions where I could do Interior Design (the actual kind) and Very Interior Design (the kind we do here) and make delicious chocolate confections made with honey.

But I didn’t. And now, in Arizona, I discovered the most perfect chocolate shop that makes chocolates from honey, and they are called Untamed Confections. Their tag line is GET WILD & DELICIOUS.

So it is done, and now I have the superpower of Now I Don’t Have To Do This, because it already exists.

The door I am opening

I am opening a [not-a-school], this needs a metaphor, but a SPACE, a witching center for Agency.

A Secret Agency for Agency?

A place for Clarity & Mystery, Sovereignty & Spells, Writing & Righting, Magiuc & Magnificence, transformative things and gains in powers.

There might also be movement (yoga, dance) but mainly there will be sanatana, listening to the thrum-hum of the universe under the wildest sky of stars, being in reverberation with life, and bringing in our most powerful Incoming Selves to do what needs to be done next, whatever that is.

The name will come

It is more fun than a training center and it is not a camp, but it is a place to be a secret agent, it is a place to take shelter, it is a stronghold.

Chiaroscuro again: shelter and mist are the good and useful kinds of obfuscation, the kinds needed in these difficult times, and agency is about clarity, glowing your light, thoroughly unimpressed by shadow, whether your own or the bleak things out in the world, inspired for action, attuned to the play of light.

We are changing the setting / we are changing our settings

Here’s to the superpower of Change The Setting, and Let The Setting Change You.

Here’s to the superpower of all meanings of setting:

{place}
{jewel}
{how we are set, like a clock or a machine…}

What can we illuminate in the right setting, in this gorgeous play of light, and in the light of our play?

Hineni

Hineni means I AM HERE.

I use it when I want to indicate that I am listening, to wise-me, to my heart, to universe, to the thrum-hum of being.

And sometimes I use it like a collective noun:

A Hineni of Realizations

Hineni rippling through me, I am a body of water, I am a body of breath-flow and magnificence.

Magnificence

These are heartbreaking times and so we recharge on these breaths of Magnificence, making space for the hineni, for the right here right now.

We breathe FIERCE & FEARLESS, we breathe for Another Beautiful Day, we breathe sky and stars and moments, the transcendent ones and the difficult ones.

I am practicing this. I am practicing playful engagement, while also taking my wishes seriously.

I am changing my setting to one of magnificence, and I mean this in all senses of setting. I am resetting myself, attuning myself, to the magnificence within.

The thrum-hum glow-hum of breath in me reverberating with life itself and in recognition of the aliveness all around, and in you. Is that itself not magnificent? I am inclined to think yes. And this yes is also a whispered prayer of the moment.

Pause to seed/breathe/be in companionship

You are invited to join me in seeding wishes, qualities, superpowers, whatever you like in the comments, maybe it will land now as we call it in, or maybe it will be more delayed-reaction good to come, fractal flowers for all of us.

Thank you for being here with me, breathing breaths and qualities and word-spells. Did you notice the exquisite chiaroscuro in the image from the month of Magnificence? Breathtaking.

And a question: if I started a fluent self instagram account with the glorious sunrises here and the questions in my journal, and little snippets of what is in my heart and on my mind as I practice the work-play of self-fluency, is this a thing you would be interested in? Let me know here!

xoxox