Garden Of Quirks

The key, I believe, for pulling yourself out of the limbo of not knowing who you are or not embracing who you are, is to love something enough to not care. Sometimes it takes us a long time to find it. There are so many things out there, there’s so much nuance to being human beings, it sometimes takes a really long time to locate it

i ask the Beast to teach me to bear my teeth and sharpen my claws and to me he says ‘your tears have salted my fur for 23 years in them i have found great joy sorrow and strength the very essence of your humanity i will not teach you to be hard  because you are afraid to be soft i will not reduce you to a ravenous wolf when it is the wool of the lamb  that keeps you warm’

Nothing can wear you out like caring about people.

So maybe there’s a war, inside of me and for me, and maybe my heart is the opposite of small. Maybe it’s the opposite of cheap and empty and alone. Maybe it’s sacred and enormous and wild.

me, drinking tea: pls leaf water….sage my body of the demons of my past…steam my colon…let me know peace

Stirring the pot

Most of my life has been spent trying to shrink myself. Trying to become smaller. Quieter. Less sensitive. Less opinionated. Less needy. Less me. Because I didn’t want to be a burden. I didn’t want to be too much or push people away. I wanted people to like me. I wanted to be cared for and valued. I wanted to be wanted. So for years, I sacrificed myself for the sake of making other people happy. And for years, I suffered. But I’m tired of suffering, and I’m done shrinking. It’s not my job to change who I am in order to become someone else’s idea of a worthwhile human being. I am worthwhile. Not because other people think I am, but because I exist, and therefore I matter. My thoughts matter. My feelings matter. My voice matters. And with or without anyone’s permission or approval, I will continue to be who I am and speak my truth. Even if it makes people angry. Even if it makes them uncomfortable. Even if they choose to leave. I refuse to shrink. I choose to take up space. I choose to honour my feelings. I choose to give myself permission to get my needs met. I choose to make self-care a priority. I choose me.

Sit with me and be still. Be as still as you can. Fight the jitters, the thoughts, the jerks. Fight the the flux, the jolts, the itches and aches. And still in your stillness you are torrential, Your body races around earth’s iron nucleus at more than the speed of sound. The ground you stand on and the blue sky above plummets, careens toward our sun, facing a fiery death, saved only by inertia, a stellar waltz at 90,000 feet per second. Faster still, our plasma deity, blazing white, concealing rainbows, forging elements, engendering life, falls toward the darkest of darks, a darkness that eats the darkness, a blackness that sucks us around its invisible teeth 300 times faster than a bullet, itself carving a path through the cosmos at velocities unknowable to us mortals, more than a million miles per hour, speeding, plunging, sinking, circling spinning, spinning, spinning— But still, be still. Close your eyes and look inside, where your cells hurry, busy themselves with life and death, creating and destroying, building and breaking, a microbial universe existing because of you, you existing because of it. Smaller still, particles popping, jiggling, bouncing. Zig-zagging abstractly, attracting, repelling, These tiny wanderers in eternal transit, more atoms in one strand of your hair than humans on earth, all dancing just for you, always on the move, journeying for the journey, your identity emerging from them, you who sits here, still— Be still. Look at me, let the light reflect from your body and embrace the cells in my eyes, send them my way as fast as anything in the universe can travel, and let the information whirl around in my occipital lobe while I revel, let the message engrave itself into my grey matter like lovers engrave their love into the skin of a tree, the photons’ odyssey now forever altered by your presence, interlocked with your existence, You who seems so still, even though you’re not— Be still to see how much you stir.

All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long lists of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.

I love beauty but I find it easier to reject it now because I love other things more than beauty: genius, passion, nature–all of which are often manifested without beauty of form. I love ugliness because it expresses strength.