Oh, hey guys. Didn't see you there.
Nah, just kidding.
It’s been a red hot moment since I’ve engaged here, or anywhere internet-based, really. In past times if I had taken to writing on Substack on a regular basis I would have run a high risk of using it as a sort of purging grounds for my inner neuroses and anxieties about the world at large, and the seemingly impossible task of reckoning with Quite Literally Everything, from within a body that had quite simply Had Enough Of It All.
I also think I just didn’t really want to write on Substack, or on anywhere, and I struggled to accept that reality because I am quite strongly attached to the idea that I am a writer and that I like to write things. Paradoxically, accepting that I didn’t want to do it has allowed me to freely return to a space in which I do actually want to do it. Albeit tentatively, and with great care.
This has been true for more than just writing - I’ve had to learn to relinquish control over so many parts of my identity, so many ‘interests’ and ‘hobbies’ and ‘passions’ and ‘things I think I’m supposed to be doing’ - the latter probably being the most important piece here.
Most people currently subscribed to my Substack know me personally to some degree (and to those who don’t, fabulous! You have my greetings. How on earth did you find me?).
You may know me from my tumultuous days of raging or cynical or despairing Facebook rants (wow, that was an age ago) or my slightly more reflective albeit chaotic sound bytes of the Instagram sphere. Neither of which space I occupy now, and I am eternally thankful for it in this increasingly uncertain world.
Whatever the case, you’ll also probably be familiar with the fact that I have chronic illness and that I am not at all shy in talking about it. You may not know that this illness is intergenerational, my nieces being the third known generation to inherit and express it in their growing bodies (and the fourth known matrilineal generation to be on the receiving end of heavy medical gaslighting). Without getting too deep about it right now, I need to make the statement that I have felt adversely affected by the relentless demands of this mysterious genetic expression for the majority of the years that I have been on this planet.
But perhaps more importantly, for all the relentless demands that this illness has made of me, for all it feels it has stripped from me, it has taken me an astoundingly long time to heed its demands and to honour the truth of my physical existence - not to push against it, not to try to match the capacities of my more abled peers. Maybe if I had learned to listen earlier, I might not have lost so much. Where the lesson goes unlearned, it will only demand more.
I have done significant damage to myself in trying to pressure cook my way out of my own suffering - whether that suffering be physical, mental, spiritual, environmental or communal. If I do more, if I say more, if I force more, if I self-discipline more, if I martyr more, sacrifice more, bleed more… oh, and social media post more… maybe then, it will be OK. Maybe then, I’ll stop hurting. Maybe then, my existence will be justified.
Maybe then, maybe after all of that, maybe, just maybe, I can finally rest. Really, really rest. Because the world will be OK and we would have ‘solved’ the intense intergenerational, cross-cultural, environmentally bound, historical and future collective wounding and we can all go home and have a nice fuckn’ cup of ethically-upstanding decolonised tea and knit some socks and tell stories and sing songs by the fire until we lull ourselves into a deep, dreamless slumber while a free and just world revolves us eternally around our life giving sun.
Hey so everyone, I just want to give you a spoiler alert here: It doesn’t work. Internalizing neoliberal capitalist attitudes to fight your way into a sense of wellbeing and belonging and safety is a fast track to self-destruction. Too many fall in the struggle.
Yeah, you heard it here first. OK you’ve probably heard this many times in many forms from many people but on a scale from 0 to ‘it doesn’t matter, metrics are overrated anyway’ how do you rate my fresh iteration on the topic?
Silly Ruby jokes aside, what I’m wanting to bring this piece of writing around to is something of a reflection on where I’m at now, and why, and where to from here, and also, how are you all? Sorry if you are one of the people who have sat in a mental list of folks I’ve been meaning to touch base with, and haven’t, because of *reasons* (those inexplicable, indefinable things).
Here’s where I am at.
It has taken me a lot of deep work to get here, a lot of letting go and grieving and reconciling and licking my wounds, but here is where I am at.
In between coaxing myself to go easy on eating geopolitics for breakfast and dining on the latest local NZ political fuckery for dessert (things are weird, right?), I've been continuing to deepen my relationship to all things that are good and life giving and sacred in this world. Evading the eternal mystical call of meaningless distraction is not yet an art that I have fully mastered, but I'm working on it earnestly with varying degrees of success and/or failure.
I can say that I am better able to perceive and interweave and communicate with Te Ao Mārama, the great space of lightness, than I have ever before - in living memory at least. This topic perhaps deserves its own post or even a series of posts in order to fully explore what I’m putting down here. If you’re interested in that, please let me know, I’d rather be writing things that people actually want to be reading than whatever flimsy whims might strike me at any given moment. In the coming months, I hope to explore these threads — through story, reflection, art and hopefully, through real dialogue with you.
In some ways I feel like I’m standing on the threshold of something great. Not the sort of greatness that is celebrated through external measures of success, accolades, titles, societal standing or even external recognition of any sort. It is much quieter, infinitely more subtle and simultaneously more personally powerful. It is also deeply grounded, rooted in mythos and ancient forces. Whatever it is, I have not yet harnessed it - as I said, I am on the threshold.
It’s more like a whisper growing in persistence, summoning me to life, summoning me to my senses, summoning me to presence. I’ll try not to rise to the summons kicking and screaming. I don’t think that’s how it works, anyway. I only really hear it when I cut the noise. Presence is not something you fight or force your way into.
Among the tools I have used along the way has been the repetition of my most sacred, powerful mantra to date - “shut the fuck up”. Yes, I do use this quite literally. I find it very effective as a neurolinguistic programming tool in calming the incessantly unhelpful and draining loop patterns running between my mind and different parts of my body.
Shut the fuck up.
Not unkindly. Not judgmentally. Just, you know… a gentle, meditative reminder to shut the fuck up never really goes astray when a large swathe of ones own thought patterns are behaving like a poorly trained and uncared for pack of dogs, ravenous for scraps of attention. Shut the fuck up, you dogs. I see you. I hear you. I feel you. But for the love of all good things, can you just shut the fuck up for a sweet silent blissful minute.
This is why I can’t be on social media. By design, it exacerbates everything against which I am working just to stay present here. In Te Ao Mārama. I have been fighting to be here for so long, and I don’t have it in me to keep fighting. Can’t I just exist, for a while, and for that to be enough?
So anyway. I want to communicate about everything ever in the whole wide world but there is such an incredible backlog of unrealized thought threads to be woven into tapestries of words and visual media, with more logged almost every single day, that I have tended to exist, at many junctures in my life, in an almost perpetual state of non-doing.
Which is not as zen as I wish it were.
We can call it the freeze response, because I think that hints more strongly at the undertow or root of my disharmonious relationship with action/inaction.
Chronic state of cognitive and physical fatigue aside, I’m working to course correct, gently unfreezing hidden corners of my being and offering the warm light of remembrance into my Forgotten Spaces - in part via the ‘shut the fuck up method’ (I should Trademark that shit), and in no small way through a concentrated and meaningful effort to reembody mythos, storytelling and dream weaving into my creative projects and further afield.
This is a work in progress, and I recognise that it may not be immediately clear what exactly I am talking about. That’s OK. I have a lot to share, and I can only hope there will be others to share with. I would prefer the unfolding of meaning to be a conversation rather than me just running my mouth off about things, assuming that it will land with other humans. I don’t want it to be consumed by the void into which we all seem to be screaming as the foul winds of societal and environmental collapse howl around us.
Echo, echo, echo. Swallow.
I speak of quietude, of lightness, of deep connection. If I could speak more it would be in the theme of running my hands over dew beaded lichen in a dense old growth forest, or of watching gulls gliding unseen currents above tumultuous waves, and of the specific colour of light that reflects on the water at my local beach, or inspecting pieces of wood washed up by the river and dreaming of the instruments, the taonga pūoro, that I might shape from them.
You would think, for anyone who has known me long enough, that I would be speaking of more urgent things. Darker things. Scarier things. Matters of grave injustice and imbalance. Because these are things I have always spoken of. That is the world that I have always inhabited. For as long as I can remember. And, truth be told, that is the world that I still inhabit, because who among us can truly turn away from the sufferings of the world without turning away from a part of ourselves?
Traditionally speaking, I am a muck dweller. A voicer of ugly realities.
But, dear one, haven’t you heard spoken the feats of the bard Fergus Fionnbheal in the great battle of Ventry, as brave warriors fought long and hard to protect the sovereign lands of old Ireland from those who sought to control the world? Did you not hear of how he came down onto the beach, in the midst of battle when hope was fading amongst his brothers, his kin, and played and sung courage into the hearts of the defenders that they may rise once again with renewed vigor?
If all we do is fight, or dwell in the sheer hopelessness of it all, in the hyper-normalisation of disconnect, who will sing the songs of rejuvenation, the songs of courage, the songs of hope?
Who will sing the songs of the immense loss that we all feel, that we cannot otherwise touch if not for the artful story or song? Who will facilitate the collective grief to move through our bodies and to be released into the sky that we may feel a little lighter, that we may feel the power and potency of transformation? If we all die fighting, or sinking, with no rest or respite or moments to return to the healing waters, the puna, to tend our wounds, to dream of clear skies and waters running freely, who will remain to tend the sacred flame of life?
Who?
I believe that to contend and reckon with the state of our world as it is, its many injustices and its many perils and the destructive, violent, rotten core of the extractive machinery of dominant society, we Must. Touch. Dew. Beaded. Lichen.
And before we have stopped all the wars and ecocide and genocide and extraction and colonisation and collapse, we must learn to rest. Really, really rest. Not because the world will be OK when we do. And not because we have solved the intense intergenerational, cross-cultural, environmentally bound, historical and future collective wounding. Intergenerational wounds will take an intergenerational approach to healing.
I’m telling you that we must all return home and have a nice fuckn’ cup of ethically-upstanding decolonised tea or even just standard Earl Grey which is what I’m drinking now (I never claimed to be perfect), and knit some socks and tell stories and sing songs by the fire until we lull ourselves into a deep, dreamless slumber, while a world riddled with injustice and suffering revolves us eternally around our life giving sun. Even if just for a restful moment.
Not a single ancestral line of yours, or of mine, ceased to sing in the midst of chaos and upheaval. No sensible tradition would ever ask of you to shut your heart down to the wonders of the world and to the love of your kin just because it feels like the earth is shaking beneath your feet. If anything, there is no better time to sing and to dance and to rest and to cry and to mourn and to feel and to break bread and to speak poetry than in end times. How else will we remember what it is that we are fighting for?
Defy numbness. Defy the call to occupy only the warrior spirit, and not to occupy beauty. Defy the capitalist machinery. Defy hopelessness. Defy defeatedness. Defy hypernormalisation of a sick society. Defy tame. Because end times are not end times at all. They are merely the closing and opening and turning of cycles. And if we cannot sing our stories during these times, if we cannot keep our spirits alive and tended to, if we cannot be simply present and observant and wild then we risk gifting future generations nothing but an amnesiac misery and a cold, dead planet.
And that is not a world I wish to leave behind when my time comes.
The future is not a cold, dead place. Nor my heart.
I hope you’re all well out there. What’s been on your mind, friend?
❤️🙏❤️ yaaaay shes back in the game ! X
<3