Vulnerably Good
It's vulnerable to say how good life is right now.
I'm in the gluttony of Receiving, the utter humiliation of getting everything I have ever wanted, in ways nothing like I ever imagined.
Yes, life is unimaginably good. Indescribably good. I've fallen silent about it in lieu of attempting to put any of it into words, to conjure your imagination of it.
It's itching at me. Sharing through writing with people who care for me, people I care for, people who enjoy hearing what's happening in my world and my heart has become a practice of connection for me through these years. Connection to you, yes, and connection to me. Sharing my process and my way of life is a way I hold myself accountable—I require me to be what I say I am.
I say what I am as a commitment which produces refinement of my behavior, what I show up for, and how I show up.
Sharing has been important, yet now I find myself sharing in person more and online less. I'm constantly surrounded by my close community. Moments alone are precious and scarce, and I sit to type and don't know what to reference to tell the internet how my life is.
It comes to me as I write this; it's most like a sitcom, unrealistically close and deep friendships between people spending unrealistic amounts of time together, unrealistically unchallenged by life. Our greatest luxuries are time and proximity, and these are also the engines of our creation. The themes of this sitcom are truth, humor, love, intimacy, collaboration.
We are all living in right relationship to reality, to emotions, to responsibility, to creation, to the unfolding, to the emergence, to abundance. We share our resources without tracking them. We operate as a close family. We are sovereign in our sexual relationships, and our culture observes loving relationships as ASSETS and never as threats. We spend hours in nature every day. We serve brilliant clients impeccable reflection, recognition, narrative, and embodiment.
I get asked ALL the time if I go to burning man.
No. I live my whole life like it's a festival. And I sleep in a dust-free bed in a climate controlled house.
I walk 2-6 miles a day. I dip in a majestic river. I have hours of sunshine, hours of nourishing touch each day, delicious sex multiple times per week. Money flows in and out and barely ever feels like business of mine. The bills are on autopay, as is the income, all the resources seem to flow without real handling—groceries, trash, cleaning, cooking, humans to do the latest project. My relationship with systems and bureaucracies of every kind is at an all time high of peace and allowing, of divestment from manufactured and abstracted pressures and emergencies.
I got a CSA box subscription and I'm delighting in creating with it, in the way produce shows up for me to make something out of. My roommate has put in a garden, bit by bit, and in a couple months we will have more veggies than we know what to do with. But then, I am thrilled to reach into my recent ancestry to find I DO know what to do with it—to cook for five or twenty, to pickle and preserve, to sneak zucchini on the unwitting, just like Grandma used to do.
So our family hums along, choice by choice, moment by moment, day by day—the ease and joy of doing life together is the momentum rendering motivation unnecessary. The Way we walk replaces the need for a vision, a map, a destination. We make outrageous jokes about what the future might hold, and those jokes get more serious as time goes on.
Goals are superfluous because they cannot lead anywhere but HERE. There is nothing more valuable than what we have HERE NOW, and so there is nothing to chase.
All that achievement really promises—happiness, harmony, peace, joy, meaning, purpose, the experience of wealth, abundance, prosperity, safety—it is all here now. Here now is the only place any experience can be, and the ability to be here now is the only access point to any experience other than striving.
We aren't striving, and life doesn't require striving. Living, living on, nourishing myself, it's a command for life to continue delivering experience to me. It's a commitment to show up for this now moment offered by life.
I am not seeking novelty, though I know novelty is sure to find me. I am not trying to grow, though I'm always growing. I am not building relationships, but they're creating, deepening, broadening all the time. I am not doing a business, I am allowing a calling to move me.
I walk the Way of Devotion through Love's Forest. I'm securely detached, existentially empowered, emotionally masterful, armed with tools of love and entropy. I have a compass heading, not a destination. I have the skill to navigate these seas. The wayfaring IS the way and the destination. The only arrival is death.
No, there are no words that suffice to convey the peace and prosperity of this life. The way that I still have every emotion, but I have no emergencies or urgencies. That I still feel brimful of craving and desire, but have no seeking or striving. That I am always adjusting and harmonizing, but never in conflict or problem solving.
I am scared to say I Have it, spooked to call this a stable iteration, what a full life for me might look like, what it is to have life be just big enough to busy my brilliance without losing the closeness.
But I want you to know, to remind me, and I want you to know so that you know you might have it, too.
