The Expectations we put on others…
starts with ourselves?
a step away from the light, in Sarah’s living room. October 2021
I feel like writing for a bit on here… When did feel right, and what does feel right?
There are the textures of sensual wool and soft, looped blanket fabric, warm from the wash and sprinkled with the deeply softened scent of soap & fabric softener from the laundry;
Of the creamy microfoam bubbles atop “the Hill” of cappuccino coffee, the well of extracted espresso from a steaming bowl of handmade, speckled and fired clay. Of the textured ridges of the mug, gripped and cupped cooly in my hands and palms, warming my fingers to their extremities.
Music has been carrying me through some pretty wild storms lately — storms within relationship, within my heart, within external conflict, within realizing where I went wrong within all of them. Perhaps I think too much — but, even this belief I’m dismantling. An air sign to my body, I’ve been accepting who I am, and the fractals of my brain, those trains, their cavernous expanses and dissolutions into the ether. And, I have been grounding: yearning to live life completely through my body.
For a while, I’ve been terrified of change. An unstable childhood developed this… fear, within me, that grew into my layers like the rings of a redwood. Fast forward to years later, and technology has created the breeding ground, I mean, platforms, for new age spirituality, and these spaces, I’ve witnessed, come entirely from the ascension process.. and I’ve resisted heavily coming onto any kind of platform for my writing for those reasons.
“Gotta clean my act up
I don't wanna act up
So I gotta find my groove,”
lyrics from Guru by Coast Modern | 2017
Things are constantly dying.
and the conversations I have been having, are around lifeeee.
What does it mean to be alive, to feel alive,
How does it feel to nurture the conversations inside of, through, and within your own body? To hold a mirror, container, and safe space to your inner world, and ask or invite it to reflect?
You tap into a wisdom, a sensuality, a resilience, that is deeper than the spine that contains it; an energy of ancient times… ancient connection! How it feels to feel alive.
Within death, and with death on standby, what feels right in the moment is honoring it all at the balance at the heart’s center, the midpoint of the entire body… To honor and balance life and death, newness, closure, ritual, ceremony, and dance; bringing oneself to nature, to running for a wild mile in the cold wind spontaneously, while remaining in the heart center, remembering the unspeakable traumas happening on this earth current. That we consume in remarkable amounts each day, like shrapnel to the ever-expanding and unfolding heart: alchemize into a fire that burns through statements and resistances based on dark matter, pulled out of structure and into the heart of the fumes.
I had to allow myself to grow through all of that, and it was a scary path to choose. For a long time, I’ve found myself choosing the distractions; the more challenging routes, the harder roads with much more chaos; the sensual sweet roads seemed too full of nectar to be true, but if only I slowed down…
I can realize that death and life are present in each moment.
All I am being asked of, while basking in the honor of both, trying to forget that either way exists,
is to listen, to soothe, and to choose.
The expectations we put on others, starts with ourselves.
Am I putting too high of expectations… on myself? It’s 10:32 and I feel fucking cranked out lol I wanted to sleep much earlier, but here we are. We came so far tonight!!! I’m so pumped I had snacks, and enough money to fill up my entire tank of gas today, and I edited a bunch of photos (nearly 20, more than 10) for myself to post on the website. I felt like doing the blog, I stepped out of my body for a moment and looked at the art itself. From the beginning of editing, I felt like I was going to another place, somewhere else.
I’m eating popcorn, and it’s the nostalgia for me of all of those late nights staying up on college — which for me were pretty far and few, until senior year, when I somehow wrote my entire semester final paper for my English class within two nights, and it to this day is one of the best papers I have ever written in my life, a rhetorical critique essay. I didn’t have many genuine people who I could open up to in my life in those last three years of college, and I remember my dreams were still the same, my days spent fully worshipping the sun, my brain, my body, and my goals.
And the other half of me is split, in this present moment full of bodily connection, the autistic brain that Sarah embodies, my own consent papers within that are forming hahaha and always interview me to see how I am actually feeling about what I am experiencing; memories of running in the woods and mountains today and the exhilaration of the wind in my face and hair, my knees, the pounding of blood through my body; did I really just park my car on the side of the road, flowing after my Maps app lost signal, and have my ENTIRE life on my back? I brought out my yoga mat, water, homemade banana bread & some fresh cut fruits and veggies; my journal, iPad to draw in, and was wearing zero underwear, and my favorite grey sweats and fitted grey-lavender long sleeve. There wasn’t any service, so my speaker wasn’t working, because my phone wasn’t, but somehow, a Maggie Rogers reclamation song was pre-loaded up in my Spotify cue on my iPad (service less), so I whisper-played that in the woods, after connecting with so much of the wildlife there, and eventually caught my heart and mind in a wintery break, reflecting on gratitude for my friends. in my black Under Armor backpack,
