you're here to move (With) the Energy

it's all about context / it's all about story

“what if i didn’t attach a story to it?”

i’m a storyteller, so that’s nearly impossible.

in addition to being a storyteller, we humans are meaning-making creatures. art, ritual, story, movement. it’s meaning. it’s collaboration. // i have never been satisfied with, “well, that’s just the way it is.” and statements like, “that anxiety you have? it’s just anxiety. it just is.” my kindergarten teacher told me that when i was 5 or so years old i’d be crying while trying to explain the feelings around why i was crying (in this example, separation from my mom). how should/could i expect myself to be different, now? i’m Inside The Thing and i’m wondering/listening for Why, for better or for worse. // i realize again and again it’s the story we find in that point of listening/searching for meaning that is the actual pivot point.

there’s been a big thread about Energy over these past few years— i just hit the 4 year anniversary of receiving the message from the land where i worked that it was Time To Go. that was a message that i received; but i didn’t listen. and the “collapse of my body and mental state” became the greater story— there’s something wrong with me, i must have a chronic illness or chronic fatigue, this is just another example of me being violently abnormal and not at all like my boss or other co-workers or anyone looking at this from the outside wondering what the fuck was happening / “how i could be doing this”— falling apart Right at the tip-over point into our live season of free public programming, the Grand Return after the 2020 shutdowns.

the shame and bewilderment i felt were nearly obliterating. the grief. i didn’t understand, i didn’t understand, it seemed so sudden. the way it felt like everything i loved and had worked to build for the last 5 years, even through crises and suicidality, was being mercilessly ripped away from me, despite everything/anything i did or tried.

the tipping point came a little over a month after i got that crystal-clear message from the spirits of the parkland, to Leave— after i fought myself to the realization that 2021 would be my last year, and i planned and articulated that i would have a long, slow goodbye, get to wrap things up professionally, choose my successor, exit gracefully— i tried to work the first two events of the season at the end of may, a day apart from each other. the first, i felt so fatigued and ill i couldn’t work it, and even after resting for the rest of the day and the next, i woke up on the morning of the second event feeling the same feverish, ill way— crying on my closed toilet-seat, wracking and wracking my head about why i couldn’t just “pull it out of myself” the way i did so many times before, when i was in crisis and teetering in suicidality, had literally Nothing, and yet found the ways to show up in the intensity and logistical complexity and work my events … through my bitter tears in that squeezepoint the words lilted through my being, and i have returned to them again and again to make sense, make meaning, of what i feel is Really going on— i heard something like, “why do you think we would give you energy to do something we don’t want you to do? we told you, IT IS ENOUGH.”

*

everything is Energy. everything is about Context.

there wasn’t a way for me, at that point— after the first year of the pandemic and now the overculture suddenly hurtling towards Reopening and “normalcy-restoring” vaccines i Knew i couldn’t receive— to read the signals my body and psyche/soul were giving me. the recoiling i felt as we got closer to our programs season beginning. the utter clarity of the IT IS ENOUGH message finally coming through, that i had been Told several years before i would be given, at some point, as a signal to Leave. in my not yielding up the job— surrendering— i brought myself into the place of bodily and emotional and life-framework collapse. and still not reading the energy, the story underneath the story— it became about my continued not-enoughness, un-abled-ness, and abnormality— the stories and laws of the overculture and my pathologization as a mentally ill/unwell/dysfunctional person— instead of the legends of Energy, of the Underground Stream. i was given a message, and i didn’t heed. difficulty comes— not to make you punish yourself. not to make you wrap the cloak of pathology around you. but to Redirect you towards actual Ease and Alignment, in a way that is actually more Natural than Any Of This.

yet we are human. we Hold On. we Cling. we are Fear-full. we layer the stories of our woundings, and our family’s woundings, on top of the stories moving Underneath. we have been hurt and we have been betrayed. why would we believe things we can’t see? forces that seem to have “nothing to do” with what our minds want or are trying to do/build/make, how we are trying so goddamned hard, to Survive? things we have no affirmative context for, in the overculture, our jobs, or our families of origin? why would we yield to a Force seeming to want to destroy or level us, to strip away everything we worked for and that makes us feel familiar/safe?

this is part of what i feel stronger and stronger i am here to help do. to co-create this “alternate” new-old cultural context of the underground river, the underground stream, the long story, as someone like perdita finn puts it, so beautifully. if we live by the laws of our woundings, trusting a force like “Energy,” or whatever we call it— seems impossible. we have All These Things to point to— and they are Very Real Things. wounds and lacks and hurts and logistics and scarcity and Logic.

i Have to sit here and Say to you— it’s not about gaslighting or denying those things. it’s about opening the aperture and recognizing that they are only One layer. we are, in actuality, in a vastness of Verticality. there are layers of sediment, that go Down. because of my life story— my traumas— my sensitivities— my guiding forces— i am a Listener. i am one who has Had to Listen for what is Under.

and it is this Listening that is Leading me, right now. to do things that make sense for Me. and not need to explain them to the overculture, my family, on and onwards— who are living inside a different context.

*

i think about this time i have spent since leaving socrates sculpture park, my last full-time job, the last time i “made enough money” to “succeed” ie: “live on my own.” the nearly 4 years it has been since moving back into my childhood home (save for the months i wasn’t here, trying to move away or find emotional solace/survive). i think about the context, and the story, i choose to tell about this time.

is it that i am disabled/unabled? is it that my nervous system prevents me from “doing anything” or living my dreams? is it that i am way below poverty line, nearly 40, Failed, adult child, living in their parents’ home? pushed to places of suicidality in the entrapment-feelings— and all of this is apparently My Lot In Life? // or is this Contextual. and have i been here to Reclaim and Re-member these parts of me i left here. to deepen into the intimacy of my storytelling and heart-work. to dethrone the false king. to change and move the energy. to become like the cinderbiter in the Deep Dreaming. to be led to the place wherein Leaving doesn’t feel cataclysmic but a Natural next movement in my somatospiritual/storied research; a movement towards breaking down the overculture’s ideas of “Success” and “Money”— living communally, in ritual, towards old ways, Different ways ..

have things been getting harder and harder and more impossible-seeming because it is *Just Me*— or am i actually not supposed to be doing these things, and yet i am pushing through them and into them anyway, and blaming the bodily and emotional instability on Myself?

what would it mean to radically change Context— so that Energy is the legend we look to and follow— Energy leading us to further and deeper evolutions, uncovered and unforeseen gifts, Joy, liberatory and heart-filling experiences and communities—? what would it mean if we could continue ground-truthing and trusting and developing this reflex to the point that we could so much more readily recognize and tend to ourselves care-fully and communally through the stresses of the redirections and changes (this isn’t about bypassing or pretending this is not excruciating) and cultivate the Equanimity to Let Go, to Surrender, to Yield as the parts of this more receptive, organic, and feminine creative process that have tried to be smashed/erased by the overculture, and buried by our and our family’s woundings—?

*

there is something about being the voice crying out in the wilderness.

i have Always been an optimist. i came to a place wherein i recognized at a young age how “the world” (which i now identify as the overculture) beats that part out of you. the dreamer, the intuitive, the childlike wonder-er. going back again to that punitive lilt from earlier— how would/could you be so fucking stupid and Unrealistic and immature to think that Something Like That— magic, mythic intelligence, the underground river, the benevolent and Grace-full Force— can Exist— in a world like this? why or how would YOU deserve it? with hurt like this? with suffering like this? poverty like this? violence like this? not just in our own families’ histories but all over the world?

this is not about manifesting your dream life. it’s about yielding to Be Dreamed.

i told a dear friend yesterday, the words flying from my mouth before i could stop them— that i’d stake my life on This Being True. how, how, could i adhere to the old laws of the woundings, of the overculture, of the family— when Legend is what kept me alive? when moving in the direction of the Energy has kept me alive— even when i didn’t understand it or it seemed to strip me?

instead of fighting it, i am aiming to Yield. but not alone this time. through friends. and asking for help. and being held. and having sits. and continuing to be frank about what i am going through; recognizing my place At The Edge as its own sacred center.

//

there is something that wants this post to be Up and Out There; though it is written a bit hastily, i’m going to trust and Let It Go.

<3

“it is enough” // april 23, 2021, the shore of socrates sculpture park. <3

thank you for reading.