en/livening my life
with meaning and other bobs - 🌕 Full Moon
I follow Orlando’s lead, understanding asexuality to be “relating sexually to no one” and a “self-contained sexuality.” - from Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex Obsessed Culture, by Sherronda J. Brown
🕸️ marginalia*
Lately, most days, I experience neutral veering on pleasant feelings or emotions to being alive in my body. It is both a strange and welcomed experience. Once I notice the arrival and enjoyment of pleasant, calm, jubuliance, I contract and I add a layer guilt and mistrust on those pleasant feelings. It is as though I am not allowed to feel contentment simply by being alive. I wonder…what if I chose something different instead of contracting and inviting guilt into my experience?
For the majority of my adult life, I carried the shadows of grief, anxiety, and fear with me. All but three years of my 20s, it felt as though grief was carrying me through. Greif demands a lot of energy from my system. I designed my life with grief and fear at the helm and tried to pretend they were not there. Denial is another exhausting practice. It was all I believed I had a right to practice. And then, I got tired of the heaviness and did A LOT of somethings about it with the support, guidance, love, and benevolence of A LOT, A LOT of someones AND peoples with years of repetition to learn an important thing about myself, I fck with meaning.
I fck with meaning, big time! I am talking about my sense of self, purpose, transcendence, beloved reader—the very story of my inner life. For me, meaning is not the cherry on top. It is a need, the molten magma seeping into the bedrock of my existence! My system craves it before it remembers food and water. I do not believe I am exaggerating here. When I have a clear purpose and orientation with the necessary shape of awareness, I feel sharp, focused, light, and I glow a little. The kind one may not see it with the naked eye; however, one can feel. Think of the song “This Little Light of Mine,” and that is the sort of glowth I am talk about! Meaning has moved me through my childhood, through ridiculous power dynamics with teachers, supervisors, and careers, and moved with me through clinical depression.
Now, I wonder…what if I met the new with something new of my choosing?
Like many of you, my first few sets of meanings were inherited. A conversation here, a few decades of indoctrination there, my family and “home” cultures gifted me set of ideologies and principles to guide me. They were solid and did their job. They kept me alive—job well done, familial and cultural institutions. And then, I got too curious, overly critical, and underwhelmed, bored inside the kind of life my unquestioned inheritance helped me build. I walked right into the ennui of being so ME in the construct of the settler colonial project of the so-called United States of America.
At some point, inside the dread of a heavy and unpleasing life, something dropped, and something clicked…I realized I could gift myself my OWN meaning. I can choose and shape what meaning I give myself and also the how! Yeah, cheat code, you are welcome! And I believe that is the source of my body's neutral to slightly pleasant experience, the gift of self-authorship. It is quite freeing and highly recommended if you feel inclined to a dosage.
As I look back at the last 3-4 years, I left multiple stable positions in cities where I had roots, dreams, and aspirations that would make me legible, digestible, and desirable to the collective imagination. I left every time, looking for freedom and autonomy. Every time, I felt the gaze of capture on me, and I flee to the woods. In my woods, my maroonage practice, I found the space to cultivate the stories of my life, my relationships. My relationship with my creative practices, emotions, thoughts, and the beings that are always near: the trees and plants, the spiders and bees, the wind and soil, the shifting sky and my very fleshy body. Through the devotional tending of those threads, I am finding a kind of freedom that bound with meaning, and it is transcendent.
The different and nuanced forms of meaning being met in my day-to-day life support the neutral and pleasant feelings. Having such deep needs taken seriously is a strange and new feeling, and I can see my habit of contracting when meeting the unknown. Now, I wonder…what if I met the new with something new of my choosing? What if I lingered with the neutral veering on pleasant feelings? What could happen at the meeting place of pleasure? What would happen if I met the feelings of having my needs met with the expansive heart cultivated by tenacity and uncompromising self-regard?
🌾 florilegia - pear fruits
🌱 gratitude & grounding
Where does your light emanate from your being? What does your light need to sing it’s song?
Thank you to the ones who stay shining their light. Thank you to my light!
Shoutout to my new subscribers! Thank you for your ongoing consent for my words to land in your inbox, it lets me know my voice is appreciated and that certainly offers meaning ;)
*the text is, as always, our entanglement