Cantering towards an “end”

The last time I sat down to write a blog I meant to publish, was 2022. I remember being in the “basement” of my friend’s apartment (really, just his studio), and wanting my creative career to take off, but so overthinking every part of it.

Today, I’m writing (at 4:03pm) from a park in the Bay Area: surrounded by tiny orange spiders, whose guts I remember splattering as a child by accident when I’d close my massive library books (they were orange, too), and other spiders of all different sizes and shapes: light white, ash grey, black with a bulbous little frond on the back. There might be tiny spiders climbing up my boots — grey wool socks tightly wrapped around my ankles — but for some reason, I don’t mind. I’m writing something, on a solo date, and planning to publish this as soon as the thought train is complete.

If this is for you, then I hope miracles around you today. That your awareness opens up enough to expand beyond the constrictions of your yearning, seeking, troubled mind.

There are words we only use to describe ourselves — I found those today, and more, when I followed The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and decided to reread from the beginning. “Creativity as my blood” is a concept from this book that I’m sitting with right now.

Four years of repressed creativity, chucked deeper and deeper behind thick entombed walls that are the layers of me — my skin — encasing the true creativity of my spirit. My being has had ideas that’ve gathered and layered like potatoes au gratin, a dish I have honestly never had but know well of, or if a more fitting metaphor appeases you — the repulsive nature of a mummification of the living.

My life — devoid of a true spirit — because the spirit has been internally cased, within.

I spent years chasing money — not even realizing it — and am in a space where I’m wondering how I, in my current monogamous partnership, am choosing to examine my own capitalistic views and narratives over my partner’s anti-capitalist beliefs. It’s an unwavering… relationship. There’s so much love that we are glued, but there is also trust, security, hopes and dreams. There is inner work and outer work; there is more fried food than I’ve ever had in my life, including air-fried hash browns from Trader Joe’s that he makes for me (for the first time in my life) and serves to me while I’m playing the Sims. HAHA. What a childhood dream???!

I’m forced to reckon with my childhood in intimate relationship!!!!!! YES ! WE ! ARE!!

I’ve found myself wanting something flashier, something more… elite. But I also for whatever reason, have found the most safety in this relationship than I maybe ever have in the past decade. It’s strange, the comforts that exist for you, when you open yourself to being vulnerable with the right person.

The amount of nights — I feel this post is rambling but hey, it’s a blog, and the year is 2015, right before Obama was elected — [it’s not] — [but hopefully you get the vibe] — [anything goes, and it’s empathizable] — the amount of nights I spent looking toward the stars asking for guidance about my relationship or waking up so tired because my mind couldn’t stop asking questions, not to mention the actual rabbitholes of Google searches I’ve had until 4am… is astonishing.

I want to understand this relationship. I want to not kill myself. (TW: recovered suicidal person).

This person, my lover, lost one of his best friends in college to suicide. This person never even showed signs of struggle: he was actually famous, a musician and singer that was on a nationwide TV show, and an incredibly talented composer, a Philipino-American. I never knew him, but the two shared the same name, and it was one of the earliest stories I heard from my now-partner (whose green-colored shampoo I can smell as I write about him, funny how the claircognisance/sentience works.)

It was at a park that we went on one of our earliest hangouts, walking by a lake that I grew up around, and eventually sitting in the grass together, contemplating how we felt so.. warm and fine with each other. I originally saw him as a friend, as he was in a relationship at the time, and we had just gotten coffee. /A quick glimpse of the current me: I’m wearing a ring, with an infinity, he got me. On my right hand finger./

He told me about his best friend, and I ended up, in my attempt to empathize with him, sharing that I was also just entering a period of suicide recovery and had just sought help for myself earlier that year. I was fresh… like a little strawberry from an enormous field; bruised, sweet to all those except myself. He looked at me with such an intensity that I felt my womb strengthen into comfort from within. I can’t describe it: being with him felt peculiarly bright, warm, and sensitive. He told me with an intensity, a friendly yet bold, encouraging comfort, that he would always want to be there for me if I were going through anything. That people should not have to go through that alone, and even in the short time we knew each other, he wouldn’t be able to imagine a world without me.

I looked at him, and we gazed at each other. Tears welled into my eyes; I remember crying, asking him if I could hug him, and he said yes, and I cried into his shoulder.

The amount of times I’ve cried with him since then has been a bit infinite.

Do you remember when you “fell in love?” Because I honestly, didn’t believe in the idea.

I craved it and sought it, but I didn’t believe in it: it was like a phenomenon that I wanted to find out the truth of. I wanted to see if it was true.

I’ve been in many partnerships (and maybe this is reminding you/me of the “avoidant” love cycles, but I don’t also believe that everything can be explained by attachment theory, or is true). However, there is truth to those cycles. I believe/have seen that in real relationship, there is waking potential to the idea of “polishing the mirror” (Polishing the Mirror, by Ram Dass), wherein partnership or any kind of relationship is simply meeting the divine in another, the concept of the one true soul as shared by The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo, the vision of the gods across all kinds of religions — wherein, some believe that God is in oneself, while others believe God is outside of the self. I believe, to some degree, in both.

I believe in divine intelligence, a manifestation of the universe shaping itself through energy and matter, and I also believe that same energy and consciousness is somehow in our command and at our will, too, within our fingertips. If we are truly so powerful, the evidence of which is manifesting truly anything someone desires if we are able to maintain that energy and unblock ourselves from belief for long enough, then the modern-day caution from schools of spiritual thought and manifestation applies even more: we must always align our thoughts, hopes, and dreams with the highest good.

There are so many things for me to elaborate on: so before I end this taster, as it’s getting a little chilly and windy here, I’m wanting to acknowledge that my belief — which to me is an idea that proves to be true for me currently, yet can change over time with differing evidence, a change in values, or more information— around relationship is most aligned with Ram Dass’s thoughts around relationship. Much like bhakti yoga, I feel the heart-aligned life is the truest one to live. Loving ourselves through another and transcending the physical planes through love are very much real experiences for me (stories to come) — but I have also learned about the human experience and the moral principles that exist in the human plane that I didn’t once pay much attention to, so focused on my own spiritual development (and developing ego) that I forgot you and I are one and the same.

So with that, I hope that this finds you well, and that your forms of yoga and consciousness are NOT forgotten in this rich world of consciousness and energy. Until next time,

Christina