There are only fragments
“There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.” ― James Salter, Light Years
Sophisticated and effective defense mechanisms
Some defense mechanisms are good tools for life. They help to transmute conflicts into something positive. Below is a chart of common defense mechanisms organized by their level of sophistication and effectiveness. Aim for Sublimation.
From Beyond the Narrow Life: A Guide for Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration:
The absence of defense is, in general, closer to psychosis than enlightenment. The ego is largely our friend. It’s doing its best with what it has. Expanding self-awareness isn’t about taking a sledgehammer to all our defenses. Some strategies, however, are more effective than others.
The Inner Why Technique
How to do it:
When you notice a sudden change in your emotional state (e.g., you start becoming anxious, sad, frustrated, or angry), immediately give yourself the best quick explanation you can for WHY you think that change in your emotions just occurred. The sooner you can do it after the emotional change, the better. — Spencer Greenberg
Note: This post is an excerpt from my weekly mind dump newsletter, sent out each Friday.
The Legacy House
n. a property that has maintained its historical and/or cultural significance over multiple generations.
My “legacy house” was run-down and boarded up. I walked a long way in the dream realm just to stand guard in front of the house and protect it.
Squatters had broken in and ruined all the plumbing and stolen all the copper. Nothing worked inside and it was unlivable. But still, I stood guard.
I knew my family had forgotten this house. They no longer stopped by for their shifts.
I wanted to gut the place, pay for someone to come and haul all the trash away. But then I was told, “It’s not your responsibility to clean up your family’s mess. They can help too.”
This was never just my house. It has gone to shit, but I am not responsible for protecting or preserving it.
Then I woke up.
Sailing stones
We were two stones sleeping in the desert,
when I woke up you were miles away,
I asked you why you left,
you said a strong wind had stolen you,
I asked if you still loved me,
you said yes and no,
I wanted to throw myself at you,
you said you and the wind were in love,
I asked what that felt like,
you said like sailing.
Updated: Nature Timespiral
This depiction of all time and all life since the Big Bang is the Universe’s subconscious manifested. I have been using it as a visual meditation. I close my eyes. I breathe in deeply. I breathe out a timespiral of my own life on Earth. I populate the spiral with everything I have created in the past 37 years. The energies I have manifested with my words and my actions and my emotions. I ask myself what is missing — what still needs to be expressed. I want to live my life with as much creative force as the Universe.
The history of nature from the Big Bang to the present day represented in a spiral with notable events annotated. Each billion years (Ga) is represented by 90 degrees of rotation of the spiral. The last 500 million years are represented in a 90-degree stretch for more detail on our recent history. Some of the events depicted are the emergence of cosmic structures (stars, galaxies, planets, clusters, and other structures), the emergence of the solar system, the Earth and the Moon, important geological events (gases in the atmosphere, great orogenies, glacial periods, etc.), emergence and evolution of living beings (first microbes, plants, animals, fungi), the evolution of hominid species and important events in human evolution.
How to challenge your fear
“You must challenge fear and ask it what it means to say. As you go into the fear with eyes open, heart open and courage flowing freely, you will see that fear is only an empty room. Fear is only as strong as your avoidance of it. The greater your reluctance to see the fear, to accept it and embrace it, the more power you allow it.”
— Emmanuel's Book: A Manual for Living Comfortably in the Cosmos
Think Radially
Think Radially is the phrase I use to help me bypass my analytical mind. It works because it is impossible to think radially, so instead I visualize my existence spiraling out of a nautilus shell.
Think Radially acts as a taproot into my expanded consciousness and it permeates all possibilities.
To Think Radially is to transcend time. I give myself equal footing in all possibilities that exist. Everything is within my grasp — even the paths I did not choose.
The life that you fear will never be lived continues to unfold. You can sense it in the spaces between your breath and in the silence between your sentences. Events exist in all realms: mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, ethereal. Your cells are communicating and aging, while your emotions are maturing and your thoughts are evolving. When I say Think Radially that is my attempt to grasp what is happening behind the veil.
Your ancestors are You.
You begin to know your parents and lovers and friends more intimately, because you see their missing spaces. The space between their possibilities. You see their journey — the direction in which they’ve always been reaching. You see their sacred imagery. All along it’s been staring you in the face. This supernatural reality.
You knew from the beginning how everything would end: that relationship, the career, a move. You know this in the same way a compass needle ticks toward its magnetic north — pulling you toward what you’re most attracted to. Try to sense the direction in which your compass is pointing and then sense all the other directions you not will be walking toward. This is Thinking Radially — a doorway for connecting to your intuition.
When you find yourself flooded with Egypt
When you find yourself flooded with Egypt / the gold in your bones begins to sing / close your eyes / we made portals for this / let your blood dissolve / become stars in someone else's galaxy / in death we inherit wings / in life only your heart can fly
Flooded with Egypt created by AI Art Machine
This poem was inspired by a passage in Antero Alli’s book Angel Tech:
To the Western world of the latter 20th century, Egypt circa 3,000 B.C.E. is a most exotic, magical kingdom of great knowledge and power. A remarkable surge of human identification with this era has unleashed torrents of psionic information from the Akashic Archives.
Your ethical responsibility is to return and help your bodies become more intelligent. Teach them as if they were your children, as they are, and express the denser sides of yourselves. Have patience with their anxiety and ignorance, for without each other—they will grow lonely and you, dear lost souls—will not grow at all—visit their little minds in dreamtime and show them who you are. If they are flooded with Egypt, appear as KA—the bird-human symbol for the soul from Egyptian mythology—but appear!
A definition of time and space:
Space is what you desire and Time is all the ways you move toward that desire.
The Catfish Museum and All Points of Possibility
Catfish: Points of Possibilities created by AI Art Machine
I am given a tour of an underground water museum. The tour guide takes me to the catfish exhibit. I see a catfish swimming toward me and I see it’s skeleton and how it forms and grows.
I can see sound waves and the potential of energy before it is “activated” in the water. The potentials appear as dots or points. I see the catfish navigate all the possibilities at once.
A propeller appears in the exhibit and it is churning my subconscious, like the deep waters.
At the end of the tour the guide gives me a jack-in-box toy made out of paper, but instead of a jester it is a catfish that pops out. I ask a lot of questions and the guide pawns me off to the exhibit programmer who is disinterested in telling me more. He mumbles something and turns his back toward his computer.
I take my folder of informational pamphlets and my paper catfish-in-the-box and I say I am ready to leave. This dream is an invitation to see the potentials of my life and desires.
There were poems inside this
Old hand-bound journals I made using repurposed fabric, found paper and ribbon.
Oh my darling demons!
Oh, my darling demons
I love you
I love you for all the drinks
and the flings
and the hearts you break —
including my own
But mostly, I love you
for the words you write
words wearing masks
and carrying machetes
and these words
are always so charming
even when they undress
to show the ugliest bodies
On sacred loneliness
This is not a how-to. There are no steps for shifting loneliness into solitude. Loneliness is an intrusion that makes my bones cold. Loneliness feels like a void and Solitude is a sanctuary. Some days I just feel separate from the universe.
I think of the Rupi Kaur quote “Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself,” but what I am missing is not myself, but my connection with the Divine. And Yes, I know the Divine is also me, but knowing this doesn’t make the loneliness go away.
The gaping hole in my heart grows wider and I ache for a sign, or a signal of love, or for someone to seek me out. When I was in my twenties this is when I would go out to bars, get drunk, sleep around — anything to escape myself. What I do now is different.
I seek out nothing. I acknowledge that I am in pain and I sit with it. I imagine other humans feeling this same profound sadness with no source point and I breathe into that feeling. This is how I create an equilibrium. I remind myself this is a condition of being human. I find connection in the separateness and that is what brings me comfort.
This mystifying grief called loneliness belongs to you and it belongs to me and everyone else, and that is what makes it sacred.
All roads lead back to yourself
In dreaming life I pulled a tarot card. I saw myself in a sacred circle surrounded by other versions of myself pointing what felt like staves/wands/arrows. At first I felt cornered — was this something to ward off?
No, my subconscious interpreter said.
This card means that you are never worried about a missed chance. These are all versions of you existing after each road taken. Opportunity after opportunity will continue to arise. All roads lead back to yourself. You are never lost.
10 of Arrows
All roads lead back to yourself
The Labyrinth Theory
What I love about walking labyrinths is that the closer you get to the center the farther you are in distance. Life has often felt that way too.
A brief summary of the past 37 years: I am born to two teenage immigrants who speak no English. As they grow, I grow too. Their mistakes are my mistakes. I am uprooted and left behind. In my earliest memories, I am always alone. I write love letters to God and search for portals in trees. I will be the new girl in school 15 times. Being called “weird” or “poor” will never faze me. By age 10, I am irrevocably damaged and weighed down with worry. Poetry saves me. I write it all down — the dark parts and the dreams. I never stop searching for meaning. At age 17, I move across the country to survive on my own. Besides books and my own intuition — and the occasional Divine interference — there is no guidance. A decade is spent destroying when all I want is to create. After one near-death experience and three suicide attempts — at age 30 — I decide to get off Zoloft and heal through nature and talk therapy. I give up poetry for a brief time. I ground myself in the Earth. I meet my husband — my anchor. I grow beautiful friendships. I find my center. It feels a lot like the wonder and magic of my short childhood. All those years spent in the outer circles, I never knew how close I was to myself.
As human as possible
I scatter your moons like dice on a table. Pick one. You expel spirit animals from your body. The tiger that claws your heart out. The whale who always digs up your dreams. And that damn peacock you refuse to accept is you. We’re not here to be animals, I say. We’re here to be as human as possible. Find out what that means to you.
What happens to hearts while dreaming:
He said he would call me later that night while we were both sleeping, because in dreams our hearts disrobe themselves of muscles and tissues and details of life and they become entangled in light. Light, he said, that twists and forms shadows of every thing, and the shadows of things are not really things, but fragments of things that care for nothing but love.