Hello fellow earthlings:
It’s been a little over a month but feels like a lifetime. I’ve entered and am emerging from yet another unexpected life portal—shedding off the excess goo from an incubation learning period that has me feeling tender and uncertain, but also focused and clear.
The world has in many ways been absolutely atrocious—still. I continue to seek a balance between engaging and preserving my mental health so that I can move forward on my path and not be overcome by existential dread. I am thinking deeply about what it means to be *in* society without feeling completely overwhelmed by everything that’s going on.
I am trying on some new shapes that I haven’t tried before. I am practicing healthier forms of connection. I am practicing boundaries in all aspects of my life. I am slowing down. I am seeking harmony.
The slowing down one is particularly new. I have a tendency to throw myself into my passions with everything I have, and often prematurely. I have had this fear around the precarity of life, but I am learning that I have the time. As dire as the circumstances might seem at the moment, time is relative, and as I lean into faith somehow time expands.
Papa Saturn is teaching me the difficult lesson of slow building. I am learning the difference between stagnance and stillness. Stillness gives me space for clarity… to understand what really matters to me in my life and get clear on my vision and desires *before* moving forward. Stagnancy is the paralysis that comes when I’m afraid to lose time and want to keep moving forward but don’t have the clarity to do so.
In nature, periods of movement necessitate periods of stillness and vice versa. In a capitalist society, movement is meant to be constant. So we continue to churn and churn and churn without having any clarity on what things are meant to be or on what we are even creating/sustaining. The constant churning motion keeps us numb and disconnected.
Slowing down into stillness is nauseating at first (naturally)—it’s uncomfortable and dizzying and so uncommon to my system. After some time though, the nausea fades, and I begin to hear the birds again. I begin to feel the wind on my skin, the earth beneath my feet… I am reminded that there is this secret hidden truth to life called listening.
Going dark, pausing to understand cycles and notice patterns, are all things that life has challenged me to learn over the past few years. Any structure built prematurely and without plan, skill, or intention will surely crumble.
Recently while in Rio some incredible musician friends of mine talked about the liberation that comes from practice. The untrained ear might think that jazz, particularly freeform jazz, is just throwing random elements into the air and leaving it up to chaos. Musicians know that the level of freedom that comes with music is only made possible by daily commitments—by hours upon hours of practice and devotion to craft. So what if we treated our relationships like this too? What if we treated our hopes for the earth and for healing in the same way?
Might we find liberation through devotion, and by leaning into the temporary discomfort of consistency and ritual?
My perhaps unpopular opinion is that most people in my generation are *deeply* afraid of commitment. I think we’re so aware of the ways that society has us in a chokehold that we want to exist like freeform jazz notes without paying reverence to the form itself and what it requires.
I am learning that just like jazz, true freedom requires devotion. So what are the things that feel worthy of devotion? And if we were able to shed our shackled devotion to the hamster wheel of capitalism, what other kinds of devotion would begin to feel more natural—more worthwhile?
I’m leaning into a new aspect of myself and committing to the things that I really want to see flourish in my life. I am learning to enjoy the small daily actions knowing that they are growing and evolving me into the human I have always dreamt of being. And that means that I’m learning to enjoy the process, and coming to understand the sweetness of being exactly where I am at (including the mess whew).
The world is usually scary as hell. There is so much that we have to confront and change in our ways if we want to create space for more life to exist. It can feel daunting and paralyzing, but the microscopic actions have felt helpful. I am searching for harmony between action and stillness, between structure and fluidity, between commitment and detachment. I feel that if we can learn to embody these practices in our own lives and daily actions, we will naturally start to shift the larger more daunting narratives too.
Today as I was sitting by the ocean the wind blew some notes into my ear and I scribbled them down—
Questions to ask for deeper engagement with life:
What is the source of this?
What is the afterlife of this?
What are all of the textures of this present moment?
What does my body have to say about this?
What can I let go of?
What can I commit to more deeply?
I like that these questions are broad enough to apply to any situation. For example, what is the source of this can be as much an internal inquiry to stop emotional reactivity, as it can be a question about the ethics of a t-shirt company’s garment practices. It can also be a way of paying respect to the source of a thought or idea. For example: this whole language around source was initially sparked in me by my dear friend Brontë Velez in our Higher Ground podcast interview. Finding the source allows us to remember that we are all always interconnected.
I’ll be playing with these notes and am curious to see how they land for you.
In any case, as I crawl out of this Scorpio eclipse season and into the coziness of Taurus, I’m holding the lessons of their polar relationship. Scorpio teaches the importance of facing the depths that we are afraid to uncover. Taurus teaches us to build slowly and with intention. Holding these practices together feels like a sure way to create nourishing soil from which to grow life. Too much time in the underworld can be depressing, and too much time in the luxuriating can become hedonistic. The two polarities exist in a sacred relationship for a reason—to teach us that balance is essential, and to offer a star map to get there.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading—more notes soon <3
Love,
Reva