Letting Go of Structure to Find Life
🌕 Full Moon with thyme
🕸️ marginalia
I have spent several weeks developing maps and a calendar for this newsletter. I thought it was necessary to write and share evocative topics and soul-deep explanations of my processes. Since the last new moon, every time I came to the page to write based on my map, I experienced my chest tightening, the words were near yet refused to reveal themselves, and eventually, I forgot what made me open the document. I felt lost, and the motivation to write seemed to disappear. What is wrong with me? I asked in frustration. I planned more, read more about how to build a routine and make this newsletter publication successful, created beautiful templates, and stayed further away from the pages.
What is going on with me? I ask with curiosity.
Here is what my mind offered me: I am working from my trained ecologist perspective. Those methodologies are not places to feed creative work. My maps, goals, and timelines are tools. I need to write from the heart. The work in my plans is safe, known, and risk-free. That is out of alignment with blackness. One cannot observe the black. One experiences the blackness; perhaps it experiences you. In the experience of blackness, the relating to the blackness, the becoming unfurls, emerges. This is where I can dance with my thriving.
In the experience of blackness, the relating to blackness, the becoming unfurls, emerges. This is where I can dance with my thriving.
What a lesson to be reminded of again! And again? This work might be on Substack, but it cannot be of Substack. As my life’s work can be in the realm of Ecology or Environmental Science, it can never be it. The moment I start to source my inspiration and align my motivation from those constructs and structures, I am out of alignment with my inspiration, with the source of my life, Blackness. Fortunately for me, my body came into this world with a design element, a gift, to remind me of a way to return again, again. The chaos of sensations in my body, unfocus in thought floating through, and an unpleased heart…impacting my relationship with colors!
🌾 florilegia - (thyme)
This wonderful plant has been in my life for as long as I can remember. She is a staple in my family’s sòs and bouyon. She is sweet, aromatic, and lingers in the back of the nose in that perfect way. I’ve watched her being added to my mother’s and aunty’s throw-in right before the pots, often wrapped with a pyè epis more time than I can innumerate.
An encounter I’ve had with thyme: adding her to an infusion with sage and orange after being visited by COVID-19, and my whole body felt confused and disoriented. I added the infusion to my bath! After the bath, I danced. I danced until I sweat! I did not notice my body stopped producing sweets after my fever fell. It was sweet and relieving, as though I had a good cry. And then I screamed and cried my way into insight and clarity.
Garden thyme, aka Thymus vulgaris, loves full sun and needs it to thrive, just like the melanin in my skin and my favorite food, fruits. Here is more information about thyme and how she likes to be tended.
🌱 gratitude & grounding
I offer gratitude to our hearts; who knows who we are when our intellects and thoughts are trained to believe something else! May you find a moment to connect to that sweet drummer.
Sweet reader, I wonder, what truth is your heart whispering to you about who you are and what you need? And are you listening?
