All of It

beauty. beasts. thorns. ego, soul, animal body. eros. rubble. ashes. roses.

beauty is human. so is suffering. listening is an act of love. love is golden. truth is a gift. presence is powerful. these bodies contain infinite possibilities as well as multitudes of broken stories.

the new age movement might convince you to eradicate 'everything negative'. smudge it. cut the cords. release it. burn it.

there is also medicine in remembering: within every human being is a story of isolation. a story of deep sadness. a story of something once whole, now broken.

within every human is a story of failure, a story of forgetting. a story of sleep.

when we accept the story of our wholeness, we give a gift to our brothers and sisters, even our strangers and enemies.

we don't offer 1-800 numbers. we offer our ears. our hearts.

the caverns of our acceptance. we don't deny the problems of others. because we are part of that problem. we are part of the part of humanity that is broken. remembering itself whole. by the nature of its own acceptance.

This Morning, the author Sharon Blackie shared a substack by another writer, Josie George. It’s called All In. I highly recommend it. Because there is so much exquisite truth in it. Because there is a lot of pain. There are a lot of thorns and weeds. There is a lot of suffering. There is a lot of all of it. And perhaps it is a time to go ALL IN. I was inspired by Josie George’s words. The writing above is a memory poem which popped up on this day. But which is related. I highly recommend reading Josie’s words here: All IN

I’ve been pondering the thorns since diving more deeply into the Fairytale of Sleeping Beauty. I’ve been pondering the tangles and the hedges, the pinpricks and the pain. The thirteenth fairy and her curse (perhaps it is the greatest blessing). It’s a curse when we forget to invite suffering and pain to the party. Who wants to celebrate those things? But what if, the suffering, the pain, the acceptance of these things is really the exquisite eros of experiencing ALLness. Not shutting off one part.

It’s a complicated dance. Inside the webs of stories, there are a lot of sticky uncomfortable threads. Sometimes we need to tightrope walk carefully around the sticky stories, because once caught, we can dangle in them like a dangling participle, caught in old patterns of thinking.

Stories aren’t just what we think about them. Sometimes we need to walk the path of Beauty for miles and focus on bare feet, soil, soul, breath, body.

Sometimes we need to tenderly walk over to the sticky thread, and carefully listen to it, but not get caught in the lies that it might spin. Sometimes we need to be mindful of the burden, the beast, and the beauty, all sitting together round the council fire in the center of the room.

Were you made for ALL OF IT? Were you made by ALL OF IT? How do you feel, think, see, breathe, experience the all of it.

To me, the all of it is EROS, which is also beauty. Which is also energy. Which is attraction. But which is also experience. Which is also belly to the ground listening through the umbilicus. Which is also touching the core of sensation. Which is less mind, less thought. More sensing, more animal body. But animal human body. We are humans, not animals. We really are. We have this thing called EGO which is also a burden or a blessing, a beast or a beauty. Ego separates us from the animal body that we are. Without it we would be a lot of soul, a lot of animal body. If the world was run by animal body we wouldn’t have Sistine Chapels. Intentional Communities. Great Pyramids. Standing Stones. Architectural wonders. Master paintings. Brilliant ideas born from imaginings. Born from the ashes of Rubble. We need Ego as much as we need Animal Body as much as we need Soul. We need the complex mish mash marriage of the All of it to be full in our humanity. We can’t just take apart the soul and separate it from the self, or take the ego and separate it from the soul. It’s marriage time. Integration time. Eros Alchemy All of IT time.

Which is why Fairytales give me such great wonder, such immense inspiration about what is possible when I embrace all the parts, all the stories, all the pieces, all the characters within.