GRIND//GROUND: heavy rock, sweet rage. being with emergence
research + writing as an embodied + emboldening act
This piece of writing grew from some words scribbled onto paper on a friend’s dining room table after reading the introduction to Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliviera. Since then I have been absorbing, chapter by chapter, adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism. Thankful for friends with healthy bookshelves and willingness to lend their book friends to other friends, and this small pot of funding money to indulge the avid book magpie in me.
Themes are emerging. Rocks, rage, the body, the land, the perceived barriers between them and the porous bridges and inseparable nature of it all, the grappling with the existential, the spiritual and the systemic, the surrender to more questions and fewer answers, the reclaiming of delight and pleasure, grief, the opening to more and more connection, the making space for rest, the watching the habitual fearful patterns of thinking, the painful unravelling of oppression, the witnessing of violence, the vast and the minute, the emergent and the tangential.
I endeavour to make a safe home of this body for my own psyche and other beings to rest a while. Writing is a commitment to remembering this fundamental care. It pulls on congealed parts breathing new life, playing with the threads and acts as a way marker on the path.
This writing is an embodied act. These words are penned in a little baby blue (1) notebook as I squat on the grassy farm track near the tunnel of lichen-covered sloe bushes, leaning the paper against my thigh, jacket zipped up against the cold morning winds.
Emerging Essay. May 2024.
With the acceptance of this recent funding, there is an attempt, a rising pressure from my fearful nerve-endings, to “find a way ahead” to “get this shit sorted.” As a divergent-brained human who has found (and still finds) the social, professional, relational, sensory, cultural, and political ‘way of things’ challenging, the inner push of “if only I try harder it will all become clearer, more known, easier, solid” is a persistent belief that is hard to shake.(2)
However, the thing with this divergent mind is that it is constantly curious, constantly seeking a greater understanding of the links and relationships with the human and more than human world. It is always dancing on a moving carpet. The rug is always being pulled.(3) New information becomes available. More novelty is needed to keep the dopamine topped up. And yet I can see more and more that that which seeks to fix, confirm, solidify and know is often rooted in fear and is out of sync with the natural unfolding of unknowns that is this life.
We are all living on a vast, undulating, dipping, ruffled, constantly in flux carpet. We are facing catastrophe upon, within, and around catastrophe, on a local and global level, and there is very little that is firm for us moving forward.
The systems of power and abuse that built this ecologically and culturally devastating moray are crumbling and much is backfiring. Colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy have caused havoc in ways we see clearly and ways we cannot. We are all living with the effects imbued in these terrorising stories etched into our matter and soul. Many bodies a great deal more so than others. The abundantly melanated, the be-wombed, the bodies needing more rest and deemed less able to produce and hold up the financial systems, the strained minds, scratched and raw. It is this I see and know from my own flayed wounds and that which is witnessed beyond the cocooning privilege of my own white skin.
There is no longer wish to expend all of my energy trying to simply steady my own carpet. To give in to the panic that makes it personal.
I am making space for the rage and grief in response to the violence, as I don’t see any other way forward. It has been fourteen years of learning to feel again, all while believing that feeling so much was the whole problem in the first place. Feeling is powerful. Learning to hold and feel the feelings is the utter sweet, challenging, often excruciating gold. (4)
I am challenging the disdainful messages picked up over decades of living in systems that centre the illusion of the possibility of sound and solid systemic ground, (5) while constantly acting to destabilise, and that place individual blame and derision upon those who trip and falter upon the shifting sands.
There is a longing to unleash the joy and pleasure and aliveness that is our birthright. To make space for the whole sweet deal. To sing life back into the bones, in a choir of unleashed voices. To put down the delusion of separation. To see the individualising so coarse and rampant in my mind and our shared experience as wound and not truth.
Connection, interconnection, interdependent ecosystems of human and other than human, sentient beings and seemingly still rock and vast stretches of wind and sand.
I cannot see the whole of it, I am just with an inkling. A feeling in my bones. I know it as I write this summoning spell of connection. A plea-full prayer from the wordless life that pulses in this flesh, seeping black words onto white paper.
No system is big enough or powerful enough to control this.
Let us be together on the dancing rug.
Ways this can look:
- Invite another person to your table. Make them tea. Sit with them. Listen as they speak. Ask them further questions. Listen with your body.
- Reach out for support. Grant another being the gift of being asked for help. Take a walk. Sit at a table. Give the gift of sharing yourself as you are.
Lama Rod Owens speaks in his work about the unmatabolised grief that sits at the root of all great violence that is being enacted in our minds, bodies and the wider world. Our own pains and personal violence act in rebellion in our lives, and on a collective stage we see this as war and slaughter and faceless systems protected by laws and bureaucracy carrying out untold damages to land and flesh.
As I pass my 40th birthday I am reflecting on personal life things. Moving over this threshold was held in sweet loving community with close friends, and I have been asking myself what I am committed to moving forward. To date, I have been in rampant rebellion against aspects of my own experience. Less and less so as Buddhist and creative practices, psychotherapy and quality friendships have marinaded life, but there is always so much more. Ageing brings with it more questions and fears, as well as the inner call to not hold back so much. It’s a lifetime’s practice, and I don’t think it ever will get “there”, wherever the “there” is that we are being so perniciously fed again and again by ad campaigns and political strategy. In recent years the blame and pain in my experience have been focused more outwardly against the systems of oppression that I see have contributed to the suffering experienced in this body and across our communities and world.
I am curious about that which allows for connection and the enhancement of life in the intimate and collective experience. I am curious about moving into the ever-unfolding unknown with more ease. To not resist the wholeness of this experience. Not to take a spiritually bypassing approach, not to deny hurt and harm, but to unclench these shoulders and loosen the jaw and take residence in this body. To be bold enough to be part of communities and connect with other humans, while also taking care of the parts of me that scrunch and sieze up in response to the confusing unknowns of other humans.
To truly believe that we are not separate from each other and from the other than human world. Not to just intellectually comprehend this, but to make my skin porous to the winds, with soles flat to the earth. To live, work, speak and act from this place, with the graceful knowing that high ideals can also welcome sweet human fallibility. That this body’s flesh will always need a nest in the moss to regroup. That the cycles of outward and inward still apply. That perfection is an idea. That writing, that making space for that which teems and longs to be lived and expressed through this body, is a process, a practice, a sense-making act to be trusted.
What would it be to welcome wholeness?
What would it be to welcome imperfection?
What would it be to stand for all of life by daring to listen to the life right here?
What would it be like to be open to sweetness and good feeling?
This last question is a pointed challenge to myself, and to anyone else who needs it. As someone who is most comfortable in the edgy, the grief and the pain, the opening to the possibility that this does not have to be all of it, is crunchy and challenging AF. There can be sweetness in the revolution, in fact, it is essential. (6)
There is so much sweetness here accompanying the raw heart and heat of painful rage. This last full moon was a flower moon, on the day of my 40th birthday last Thursday. I took myself out for a walk between food shared with loved ones. Flowers were my focus for noticing; deep pinks of Red Valerian, the emerging Elderflower scent activated by the warmth of the sun, choruses of Pink Campions and the statuesque flutes of Foxgloves.
I do not find a natural inclination towards sweetness and peace in this mind. A natural inkling is towards problem-solving, seeking and working out what needs fixing. A result of brain chemistry and lived experience.
Sweetness-seeking needs to be an intentional practice.
Ongoing.
Whole.
Everything is here.
Sweetness and blood. Grief and love. Rock and stream.
Ongoing.
Whole.
Everything is here.
(1) This makes me remember again, and again, the babies in Rafah. In Gaza. Those surviving and those not. Harsh, true words of their horrors catch in my typing fingers. I wish for them the softness of this blue, this baby blue.
(2) I have stated this before here, and I wonder how this might resonate with you in some way.
(3) This analogy I came across recently, I forget where. An analogy of how neurodivergence pulls the rug constantly from under your feet so you had better learn to dance on the moving rug. Or something like this. It may have even been an analogy for something else that I am now equating to this.
(4) I am ever grateful for the privilege of access to quality therapeutic practice. For the ability to make this financial commitment, and to Akhila for navigating this path with me for over a decade.
(5) Favouring the rational, the clean, the unfeeling, the civilised, the organised. Read, the inhuman, the unnatural, the sanitised, the purified.
(6) With deep appreciation to adrienne maree brown and her Pleasure Activism work.
Valley Rock. Grief//Safety. Y Stiwdio May 2024
So much richness here, opening into the unknown with rage and grace. Good reading / research pile too
"As a divergent-brained human who has found (and still finds) the social, professional, relational, sensory, cultural, and political ‘way of things’ challenging, the inner push of “if only I try harder it will all become clearer, more known, easier, solid” is a persistent belief that is hard to shake.(2)"
= try harder, do better, be more... that STRIVING impulse is something I totally resonate with. Go faster - THROW yourself at it.
But... Rest. Create space. Think clearly... this is the counter move, the non-default move.