What is alive?
A fire in my belly -- is this the daemon Peter Limburg speaks of with such certainty? The truth. Damn I'm so jealous of his journal entries -- he's so prolific. I envy the ease with which he seems to create and flow in his aliveness and invite us to witness it. There must be a part of me that think's I'm unworthy of accessing such daemonic aliveness, as I keep an arms length from him. His journals are the writing I enjoy reading the most right now, yet I don't attend his Collective Journaling sessions and my attendance at Stoa events has been pretty sparse over the past ~5 months. I think I'm afraid of getting too close and discovering how unspecial I really am -- how many burgeoning daemons there really are our there. Or maybe I'm afraid of getting too close to him & his inner crew and getting too triggered by their masculine energy. The speed and certainty with which they produce and ship. My feminine energy is still very shy and often dependent on perfect external conditions in order for me to feel grounded it in: the right time in my cycle, the right amount of sunlight, the right relationship with my collaborators. I guess I'm afraid of getting too close to Peter and his crew and realizing I still have so much healing & growing to do before I can play at their level. And when I enter relationship with someone a few steps ahead of me I get COMPETITIVE. My well trained masculine gets LIT UP and I want to WIN. And then my connection to my somatic and energetic experience gets cut off and I freeze... And then I crash and burn and collapse into darkness. Maybe what I'm really afraid of is the darkness.
Now what's alive?
This journaling is a practice of staying present in my aliveness. Being with her. I am listening to my current song obsession, I Know A Place by MUNA in my left air-pod -- my right pod is in Sam's ear. We are on the Amtrak headed to Sacramento, CA. We touched down here 2 hours ago from NYC and I immediately felt a sense of flowy fiery daemonic energy. It's hard to keep writing because what I really want to do right now is DANCE up and down the aisles of this two-decker train and not give a FUCK about what people think.
Alright so now what's alive?
So I want to tell you about this goal I have with my writing & work. I'm ready to come out. I'm ready for you to see me. Goals are a new thing for me, so this a big deal. I don't fall under the category of what Peter describe's as "spiritual something or others not believing in goals" but my behavior might look the same. Historically, goals have been coupled with my masculine energy that ran me into the ground when I was 18. I found (didn't necessarily set) lots goals as a teenager and I achieved them with lots of effort & force. My tactic was: just push through and love is on the other side. So I've spent much of the past decade of my life in a state of rest and grieving, with glimpses of divine peace and epic aliveness. Where I'm stuck is in harnessing this aliveness into a coherent "project". A project that is a platform for the the depths of love and leadership I have to give. And I'd rather do "nothing" (rest) than revert to my "toxic masculine" strategy of goal achievement. In fact my body won't let me -- just a few minutes or days, weeks of activating such energy and I grow weary and near burn out.
Checking back in: What's alive?
Oh yeah so this divine goal. I'm going to experiment with calling it a divine goal to distinguish it for now from my previous relationship to goals. It's connected to a project called Emergent Me that I've been developing over the course of the past 1 to 3 to 28 years depending on how you look at it. Now I feel overwhelmed because I feel there is a backlog of things I want to tell you about that lead up to this divine goal -- GAH! This is why I've put off writing about Emergent Me because it feels so BIG. It encompasses all of me in my being, becoming and belonging -- or that is the mission that my co-creator and I are committed to. More later on how hard it has been for a project to do this. Perhaps that's for another post.
What's alive now?
It helps to keep asking this question because I feel my attention and energy waning. I wonder what Peter does about this. Peter, do you re-read your journals when you lose steam to witness yourself and reignite your daemon? I feel a prohibitive energy coming up for me around that because I worry I'll get into editor mode and get preoccupied with shaping a good narrative and flow. But perhaps it's good to check in on the larger arc -- I certainly feel as though I'm losing it here.
My divine goal is to journal out loud AT LEAST once per week for the next 2 months. I have NO idea if I will be successful at aligning with this divine goal. My commitment is simple: to invite you into the aliveness of becoming in that moment of that day. I imagine as I do this I will begin to bring you into more awareness of my transcontextual being. You will bear witness to my often painful relational with my daemonic fire belly energy. The risks of setting this goal out loud? That I will not meet it, and feel ashamed, or you'll think I'm lame or delusional or something. Parts of me definitely still care what you think of me. I also worry I will share things that I might regret -- that setting myself on fire in public feeling that sounds both enlivening and not so fun. Something I imagine that will come up a lot here is my relationship to my menstrual cycle. My cycle has always been quite painful so I've always been very "aware" of it, but not in a loving way. I would try to hack the pain away with some combo of heat, Advil, CBD and sound baths. The past 10 months of so I've been focused on shifting my relationship with my womb and seeing it as my greater inner teacher. I am learning to love the epicenter of my divine feminine power. I track my mood and energetic quality on a lunar calendar as I menstruate on the full moon so it's a great map for me. I quickly learned how my energy and mood states aligned with the seasons. So if I am able to meet this divine goal, you will witness my aliveness throughout all of my seasons, even in the dead of winter (the few days leading up to blood & blood time) when I am deeply suffering in my aliveness and would usually rather be dead. I'm learning to let go of the aliveness love the death and quiet. The complete surrender to the pain and the release.
What's alive now?
We just arrived in Sacramento. I'm going to hit publish before I reread and regret this. Love you all.