Dear friends,
I am relearning how to be Mammal.
I am learning what it feels like to reach out for the soft body of another -whose warm blood runs the same way as my own - rather than retreat to the cold hollows of my own protective cave.
This means moving away from that split-eyed, forked tongue reptilian in me who, in fear, escapes and calls it a personality trait.
Anxiety makes me feel like one of those creatures who lurk beneath the carpet of our oceanic basement. Those fellow mortals with downturned lips, narrow eyes, and translucent scales; who lost their pigmentation in a war with the dark.
But I know what I am. And I know you do too. I know you feel the call to lean into what you have been pushing away for so long. And it feels like the ultimate battle. It feels like warfare between Mammal and Reptile. Between Present and Past. Between Heart and Head.
We also know now, that nothing in life is definitive. Nothing is black and white. Writing yourself into a new life chapter is not as simple as burning the old book and buying a new one.
We still have to learn a new language, a new way of telling our story before we can begin to narrate our renewal. This space of liminality is fundamentally what it is; messy and disorientating and overlapping in foreign tongues…
until what was once new
and frightening
becomes the deeply
nourishing way
that we live.
I know you are in a period of overlap right now. And however uncomfortable it feels - whatever that amalgamation of tail/feather/spine/blood/scale/fur looks on you right now - keep leaning more towards the Mammal that you are.
I acknowledge that many of us do not feel like we have other soft-bodied creatures to find comfort in, to curl ourselves against, who have the capacity to hold the whole of us. But let that not be a validation - let that be an invitation to reach out, even more, to dig in, even deeper - and to recognize the many souls right here, reading this with you, who share that insatiable longing for connection.
I’ll leave you with a poem that I wrote about being shaken from one way of being to another, and how the fall and the growth are one of the same.
Much Love,
Sez
To be shook from the tree. To be dislodged and loosened from yourself. And to descend to the ground, every moment of free fall; a place without roots, a place of in-betweens, a place where your heart levitates between joy and ache. The very act of being shaken can fill you with fury and despair and you may ask why, why did I had to be taken? Why now, why here, why in this way - and what will happen to me? I hope you know, dear friend, that the hand that shakes you, that breaks and plucks you, is the same and plants and nourishes and grows you. No fruit has ever been sweeter in its refusal to let go. No soil ever richer in its rejection of what’s fallen. To be shook, therefore, is to be touched by a greater Love that quivers and quakes and awakens within you. And how you fall… how you either, curse the sky or honor the ground - is the little but mighty power you have.
CATCH UP
I wrote a poem recently called The Cave, which you might like (for paid subscribers), and recorded an edited version of it for Insight Timer (which is free and should be up tomorrow). There’s also a new meditation up for you - The Soul’s Cycle. Listen to it now on Insight Timer or Spotify ♥
