Anti-aging Campaign

    When I popped straight out the top of the lotus flower of birth, people were already telling me that I seemed older than I was. I receive these impressions habitually from strangers in passing and people who know me well alike. They're often concerned that they've offended me by perceiving me as older. Worried that the vain, youth-hungry image oftentimes attached to how the masses believe women view themselves is going to lead me to believe that I'm earning my wrinkles early. That I am soon to be unmarriable. I am lucky for two reasons: I happen to be excited to wrinkle, and I know this perception comes from the way I carry myself, not my appearance. 

    As far as this has gotten me in life (it has mostly served as an advantage), it has also taxed me in dumb ways. I don't always allow myself the permission of being a twenty-four-year-old girl. Others my age are worried about what Justin Bieber did at Coachella to piss everyone off and I am sitting in deep conviction over the words of Ram Dass, wondering why I had to be born again into the strenuous cycle of birth and death. Believe me, please, I know how this comes off. This sounds like I am perhaps ahead of those my age and painting them to look stupid for caring about pop culture. People my age still care about things that matter. The problem is that what I believe matters looks different sometimes. In many ways I still behave as a bright-eyed twenty-something year old.

   

    The point is that I am more often than not, taking up space as something much older. This is my nature. Something that's been around the sun for a long time. The articulation of my heart is not twenty-four and when I was only a child, that articulation was not a child. Writing this now, I do not know that this is exactly a problem that I have with myself or simply a part of my character that I should feel a healthy indifference for. The voice in my heart speaks, "There is no should and should not" while the body I am in does not get enough sleep and spends too much money on fancy oils and soaps when my health insurance bill is clawing at me. This is okay. I see no benefit in creating stories about this and yet I do. 

    In moments I will feel my age. In others, I will feel the vibration of something ancient that is only watching a version of myself be twenty-four. When I read old pages of my diary and see words of anger long diffused. When I sit in a circle of people I love and think of only the thankfulness of their being alive. When the ocean calls me and I listen. When I can pause inside of a pocket of time by my own intentionality and feel that none of this is random. That is when I feel it does not matter what age I am. It does not matter how separate I feel from others with a disposition such as my own. I lean into the silk curtain of unbridled awareness that knows that I am no age at all, and I have never been. 

At the Bar with my Girlfriends Tonight

It's women in a room and they're laughing. A cosmic seed of absurd joy shared between teeth. Hearts glowing from the center of their bodies. Each of them creating a genesis of a timeline through the moment and yet somehow, they are like every woman who's come before them. 

Tocino y Huevos para Siempre

    Sitting in the back of the bus. It's crowded with smiling, smirking, tired, curious, frowning faces all around. In my earphones I am listening to Tears for Fears and having a moment alone, in company. My morning was a delight. A delight like cutting into a citrus fruit and eyeing the symmetry of the sections. My true love made me breakfast. Pausing every so often to grab my face and say, "I love you so much!!" Imagine if everyone could start their days like this. The world would be so healed underneath its calloused skin. No more wounds just bacon and eggs on the stovetop of forever. I am glad to be healed and awake enough to know that this life I have is unique. My routines feel bright, safe, and akin to answered prayers from a long time ago. Everybody Wants to Rule the World except for me. I want just the minor part that I already have. It's a soothing feeling to not want more. To be satisfied. To get into bed at the end of your day and think 'Mmm that's good. That's enough."

I am not used to this

I know how to love like I know the hands on the edges of my arms. Like I know jam and butter and how much they love each other. I know how to love like I know breathlessness after a deep dive into the ocean. Surfacing through burning salt. Every molecule of water wrapping around me. Cells in love. Atoms enamored. Is science loving?

Do you find that you tend to hold back your love? Or worry that you'll drown someone if you were show it like it really is? Do you have fantasies of being stoic and removed so that people could see you as less tender? Tenderness is both the answer to everything and a navigation toward destruction in false hands. Don't be a false prophet to me. I'm looking for answers here.

The train blares in the distance. I can hear it from my apartment. I'm imagining that it's screaming for me. only me. 

I've been thinking about a lyric,

Do you think that because I sing that I have a light heart? 

I'm loving like this not because it's what I'm used to but because it is what I have always ached for. 

Hungry Hands

  

     I used to reach with hungry hands towards books that promised to point me in the direction of God. Like a woman with no ground to stand on, without feet earthen enough to bear gruff weight, I searched for a literary substance that could teach me to be good. How can I learn to forgive when I am still furious? How can I say only what is true? How can I destroy the illusion of 'other' and 'self'? How can I dissolve this adamant, feminine rage that has nowhere to go? I read and read and reached and reached. I want to be good. I want to be good.                          Be good.

    Now I toil with books such as these. I wonder if it is similar to cheating in having the answers spread out for me, written by those who only gained their knowing through sacred experience. A life spent locked away in a blank, solitary room, having only books to read can teach a person many things. But a life where you feel hurt, where you watch love take hold of you as if you have no choice over the progression of what is next, a life where you see the ocean, taste the salt, see how it burns you after too much time spent interlaced with it...never to read a page. Which life has learned more?

    These days I have an appetite for books that tell real stories. Books of pain, of pleasure. Books that renounce both. Maybe what most appeals to me is to be shown the answers through a very thin veil. The secrets never fully divulged to me so that I may have a part in it. I don't know that a guidebook on shattering ego will be successful for me in a way that reading the story of a woman deep in her own truth, completely intimate with the aliveness of her own life can show me how possible this is. My taste waxes and wanes. Preferences shift when we expand. The hardest part to learn, I find, is to listen. 

Greener Grass

    The world seems to be engulfed in flames. Plainly and in a metaphorical sense: on fire. Driving down the gloom-riddled streets of home, I wondered where all the good news went. When I learn of a beautiful occurrence, when someone falls in love, a bone heals, why do I find myself with the sense of shock? The two constants of good and bad are but illusions when you hear it from the Buddha and all the others who finally yanked free from their own maya but if all of that is true then why is the Earth ON FIRE?

    I'm not burning up but I can unmistakably feel heat rising all around. People yelling when they could be kissing. That sort of thing. Politics. Politics. Politics. Politics and horror. Will we ever surrender to the wind? Another illusion yet is that I was born in the wrong age. I've always said I would've done better holding a candle in the hallway to get a drink of water from the kitchen. Technology both frightens and delights me. Another sentiment today was one of mourning as I stood frozen in place at my work and realized how much smarter I would be if I never had a phone. Were we actually connected before all of this? We were still killing each other over oil but maybe we looked into each other's eyes more. Maybe some of this was slower. Gentler. 

    The happiest place I can be (subject to change because I haven't been to India yet) is alone in my house. Every light turned off, skin scrubbed clean, wrapped tightly in a loving fabric, with my journal in front of me. Whenever the world is too much and the good news seems to have gotten lost en route, I close my eyes and ask to be shown where the love is. This has become a common visualization practice for me to gain a broader sense of life... because it is still terribly beautiful no matter how atrocious. With eyes closed and my head in the ceiling I saw:

Shiva dancing with one thousand arms, unicorns drinking sugar from a waterfall, towers of rock in Joshua Tree on a wide open plain, the quiet of outer space, my body as complete, a lotus flower opening, a jar of peanut butter, aging and dying. 

    I, a twenty-four year old woman, can not heal the world today. I can not heal the world and it hurts my feelings. What I can always do is understand why density exists. It is something I always seem to write about but only because this is a constant reckoning for me. I find it very confronting no matter how often I look it in the face and say, "I understand". I'm lucky enough to experience it and still believe in greener grass. I will let the density eat me alive but I will never be jaded. I meet lovely people with hope in their eyes everyday. We look to each other and a cord of communion grows. We're all suffering in some way but as my old friend would say, "Goddamn it, the sun's gonna shine. If you can't find yours, you can borrow some of mine."

Tidepool

    My eyebrows are back and the world is different now. I've never been so homesick in my entire life. I missed my blue, shaggy carpet. The feeling of hugging Savannah. Fogging up every window in my house while making hot stew. I make stew like it's the last one I'll ever get to make. The other night I sat at my alter and mediated for a long time. God met me somewhere in the middle and laughed at me, lovingly.

     "Long vacation?"

"I'm sorry it's been so long. I get distracted towards the end of the year. You're still very real to me."

I apologized. It's never been my intention to only commune with God when I am tired and desperate. I want to reach out and touch God at the height of my joy, not when I'm anxious on a plane.

    I am in love and it feels sustainable this time. Like it isn't going anywhere when I turn my back to go write something down. No, it is not some antsy child in constant need of entertainment. It's more like a tidepool. Something with it's own community. With waves of grand elation flooding everything on occasion but mostly with an ecosystem in utter support and serenity. I am no longer struggling to keep dying things breathing. This thing has lungs. 

    Starting this year I find myself broke and yet so spiritually wealthy. I've been wondering if anyone can really reach nirvana on their own accord. The moments in my life where wisdom has punched me in my face have usually been from a friend's mouth unto my ears. I need people to show me God everyday through their laughter and confusion. Through surrender and generosity. 

    Over the holiday I mediated in a moment of shakiness and asked God to show me where the love is. This can be a cruel, shallow place. One where people idealize killing, hurting, breaking what stands in tact. I asked to show me how abundant and glorious my life is outside of this frustrating moment, outside of the noise of desperation. I saw my love and I saying beautiful words to each other, dolphins playing, a secluded cabin in the forest with moss engulfing the roof and front steps. I saw my future bookshelf. The espresso machine at my work. My cat laying in a patch of sun. There is one word for this year and that is: enjoy. There is so much to beam. Let's know what we have.