Lockdown: Day 2

“Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.” ~ Sophocles

… and a father to love.

I am one to see the current state of affairs as a positive and beautiful thing. It has really helped me put things into perspective, which I’ve felt the drive to do since this year began, but my unconscious mind kept distracting me, and that created a lot of unnecessary dissonance.

Now I feel like the universe is forcing me to take a step back and really look at everything, like I talked about doing months ago.

I was always so focused on accomplishing something that I never realized how incredibly selfish that was, and I had long since made an extensive list of excuses why it was justified, which sound beautiful and honorable, but were more likely to make myself feel better for abandoning a perfectly good family to pursue my selfish dreams twenty years ago.

One of my biggest excuses was that I was trying to make the world more of a beautiful place for my kids to live in, but I’m finally beginning to see that I would accomplish more if I invested that energy into teaching these brilliant little humans how to perceive the world beautifully. Not the way I perceive it, mind you, but to look at the sides of everything, underneath and above everything, and learn to perceive things in a way that makes everything beautiful for them.

This may sound like Parenting 101 to most of you, but I never took that class because I didn’t want to do the homework, plus the obvious scheduling conflict with Life 105. It has also become painfully obvious in these times that if there is one thing art, philosophy, and history have taught us, it is that you can’t really change anything but yourself, so what AM I doing?

What difference am I ever going to make if there is nothing new under the sun, and why am I just now figuring that out when I discovered it a decade ago reading Plato? Because I’m an idiot. The only thing more humbling than realizing you’re an idiot, is learning things that are pretty much no-brainers. I've been trying to assemble a puzzle without looking at the pieces I'm holding right there in my hand.

This year I have felt lost and confused, but I am not as lost as I am losing something beautiful that I’ve been looking past, and I need my eyes to refocus on the foreground. I need to stop trying to get people to understand what I'm talking about, and look at my people standing right in front of me. Every day is a beautiful lesson, and if we are doing it right we never stop learning. I don’t imagine I’ll ever abandon my work completely, but I need to take some time to line up who I am with who I want to be.

Our plan with all this crap going on was to get out and hit some trails on a regular basis, excused by “exercise” in the quarantine guidelines, but we quickly realized that a lot of people had that plan, and what was meant to be social distancing looked more like social clustering. I have never been one to buy into the bullshit we’re fed, but the “what if?” is definitely echoing in my head, especially since I’m getting to an age where I’m “at risk” and I’m not exactly the picture of health, but my Amish blood helps a lot.

I do get the flu just about every year, and I’m always the last one to get it, but it only lasts a couple days. So when this does sweep through here, right about when everyone else is in the clear, I’ll be coughing my insides out, and I don’t imagine a couple days of rest will fix that. “What if?” becomes “not fucking worth it” pretty quick. So we’re looking at this as the universe telling us we need to appreciate our own beautiful mountain a little bit more, and hey, don’t visit. I will never live in fear, knowing that everything happens the way it is supposed to happen, and everything happens for a reason, but getting the opportunity to really look at my beautiful little family has left me understanding that I’ve been living in stupid this whole time, and I've never felt further from figuring things out. So if I disappear........... read this again. 

What Do I Do With My Hands?

So I started this wanting to write some rambling post about my complicated relationship with other women and the idea of womanhood itself. I realized immediately after I wrote that piece that what I wanted to talk about was my complicated relationship with and resentment toward my own womanhood, as stepping into those shoes has not been a graceful process for me, but is it for anyone really?

I’ve always gravitated toward more “masculine” characteristics, whatever that actually means. I’ve always been a little bit loud, rough and boyish. Most of my friends growing up were boys, I had three little brothers. I liked to ride bikes, roll around in the dirt and break things. I’ve kept many of those “boyish” qualities coming into adulthood. However, along with those rough-around-the-edges characteristics, I have long felt the haunting weight of the ethereal femininity I secretly desired and idolized, but felt I couldn’t possess. Like somehow being a woman looked great on the rack, but fit a little awkward when I tried it on. If I have to wear anything other than jeans and a t shirt, I’m probably not going. I hate bras and shaving. When my period starts, I implode. I feel debilitated, gross and slightly embarrassed that if I laugh too hard bad things could happen. I’ve never been able to graciously revel in womanhood the way all these women around me do so effortlessly, at least from my perspective.

I felt inherently unattractive and from that developed an automatic gnawing comparison to other women. I’m too loud and profane. People don’t like women that are that way. My hips don’t curve the same, I don’t like dresses, my hair doesn’t fall over my shoulders that way. The list is endless. There came a point when I would cry before I went out to a bar or a party or dinner because I felt that every person looking at me knew how hard I was trying to be (unrealistically) feminine and angelic and they knew I wasn’t good enough. And I knew that too.

So after all this turmoil feeling I couldn’t fill the shoes of womanhood with all the beauty and grace it deserves, here I am posing naked in Joshua Tree with Maya and NevaehLleh. Absolutely terrifying. They are undoubtedly beautiful and have an exponentially greater knowledge of modeling than I do.

I assume immediately this is going to go so poorly. I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m small, I’m awkward, clearly not graceful. These women are the epitome of the celestial goddess, molding their curves effortlessly into this beautiful landscape. And here I am fumbling my naked body up and down rocks reminding everyone frequently that I’m terrified of heights, I don’t know what to do with my hands and my knee is, in fact, fine after I sliced it open on a boulder and bled everywhere. I’m thinking these women eat rose petals for breakfast and leave fairy dust everywhere they go, I mean come on are they even human? What am I doing here?

And I was so wrong. We talked about geocaching and hiking and coming home from shoots bruised, cut open, sore, cactus needles in feet, splinters in hips and thighs. These women are fucking fearless and loud and opinionated. They doubt themselves just as much as the next person and have the strength to do this anyway. They’re awkward and goofy just like me. They’re real.

And they’re beautiful. Which just might mean I’m beautiful too. Woman isn’t a list of strictly beautiful and feminine things. Woman doesn’t have to be soft, smell like strawberries and not have body hair. This shoot was woman in dirt and sweat and unshaven legs and a lot of cuts and bruises by the end of the day. Woman is strong and fearless and whatever she feels like being one day to the next and your ability to flow between the blurred lines of masculine and feminine doesn’t make you any less so.

I guess what I’m trying to say is thank you to Maya and NevaehLleh for reminding me that my roughness is beautiful. That I can be soft and ethereal (don’t forget to point your toes), but that’s not what makes me pretty. Thank you for allowing me to feel out where I fit in and providing a space in which I can exist safely and just be. There’s a duality to women I didn’t quite understand up until this shoot and I’m finding every day that I am exactly as I’m supposed to be.

The Best Possible Versions of Ourselves

 

If change were easy, everyone would simply do it. It is the exact opposite. It is ugly and messy, like a Joshua Tree bathroom in July; it hurts, deeper than you ever thought possible; it tears at your brain, pulls you down into darkness, and gives you all the easy options for old behavior, like that familiar face on the corner offering you one last hit. The reality of change is terrifying and painful. Quite possibly one of the most difficult things anyone would ever have to do, the most difficult aspect of which is wanting to do it… because this is easy… this is comfortable. This is what I’ve been doing my whole life.

If you can get to the point where you can let go of ego and recognize that you’ve been doing it wrong this whole time, then you can start peeling back the painfully rotted layers of the monsters some of us become. If you are truly open and receptive to it, the universe gives you plenty of help, but not like a passive sign to the right path; it’s usually a horrifically twisted reality that punches you in the face like a freight train. It gets easier with every punch in the face, though. You learn to smile through it. Then you learn to laugh at it and say, “ok, I get it. Thank you.”

Then a kind of excitement builds; a wonder and curiosity of the beautiful world that exists on the other side, after you pull all the broken and jagged puzzle pieces out of the old picture, toss them into oblivion, and wait patiently for the new pieces to fall into place, with bandaged and bloody fingers. Everything happens for a reason, but most can’t see past what they think are rewards or punishments.

An open and receptive mind welcomes all of it, especially the negative, because those are the things which teach us the most, and when you can learn to be grateful for the negatives, you can finally see the positive in them, then everything gradually becomes positive; baby steps become giant leaps as our strength builds.

At the end of this steep and exhausting trail, after all the slides and falls, cuts and bruises, after thinking we’ll never catch our breath again, we will find the best possible version of ourselves, and we all deserve that. Some of us are even lucky enough to have strong and powerful souls around to help us up when we fall flat on our face, and to call us on our bullshit when we want to stay down and give up.

Single Point; Stopping Point

The beauty and the pain of it all; the beauty of the pain, and the pain in the beauty. When all the complexities of life swirl into a single point, there is a strange kind of contentment; comfort. With mind cracked completely open, the senses are free to process all that life has to offer; no good or bad, but simply thus.

The sustaining importance of self love can only be found in letting go of self, absolutely, and existing within all the vibrations and frequencies that make up all the things that we choose to define and place delusional importance on, for the self that we place mentioned importance on is nothing more than frequency and vibration, and the contentment of true happiness can only be found in surrendering ego and becoming what we actually are: swirling atoms in this energy field. We have the choice to resonate with this flow of energy, or bring it to a dissonant standstill. Our choice is translated by perception; our single point.

Whatever happens or doesn’t happen is only defined by our single point, which is a negative fight, or a positive flow of Love. Take the self out of self love, and what do you get? Be the Love that you want to feel, and the Universe will respond accordingly.

As much as we have accomplished this year alone, I am overwhelmed with the feeling that I need to step back and look at all of it, as my inbox gets ironically flooded with emails from models. I want to work with everybody. I want to capture every emotion. I want to feel all that energy, having spent my life locked up in my room crippled by it. I need to absorb all the emotions, to fuel my energy and become the best possible version of myself.

More than anything right now, I just want to smile, and breathe, and Love; those things I’ve been preaching for years but couldn’t truly grasp until I embodied and pushed past all the suffering that I have been drowning in for decades. I feel like the tension that has been building in said time has finally smashed me, and I love it.

This place, and my work, need a serious overhaul, with the divine help of this goddess that I am somehow lucky enough to be spending a life with. As I am learning to readjust, there will be more guest writing, so keep an eye out.

This post is obviously relative to my own personal journey, thus not something I should be sharing with the world, but I will always stand by the fact that there are some souls out there who appreciate personal journeys, and need to hear that others are feeling all the things, too, especially when they’re beautiful. You are all welcome to join us. You are all invited to breathe

and smile

and Love.

2020; Arête (ἀρετή); Shams Tabrizi

I certainly went into 2019 like a lion, in an attempt to make the most of another year, but the Universe had another path for me; a much more painful and rewarding path, but I will obviously shy away from getting too personal, as this is no longer a platform for that.

I will say that between my creative work dropping off over the summer, leaving me feeling like I was accomplishing nothing at the best time in our weather to do so, and my own personal journey, by Autumn the lion was a shivering lamb, and by Winter was a caterpillar incased in its chrysalis, wondering what the fuck was going on and having little hope. I realize I severely mixed up the metaphors there. Deal with it.

There were obviously some beautiful moments in there, and I am eternally grateful for the individuals I met from around the world, and the stories that I was given to finally expand my website and vision, but I focused a little too much on the empty moments in between. I needed to let go of that madness; and I needed to do it the hard way: suffering every little pain and wallowing in it a little; alottle.

This year we celebrated Yule, which was much welcomed. The last day of Yule is New Year's Eve, so we planned a little escape out to our spot in JT to burn some hinderances, set intentions, and bury something very significant that we've been holding on to for five years. We maliciously didn't plan anything creative to focus more on us just connecting with this beautiful family we've been given. That night we headed out to our spot to burn hinderances, only to find the road closed, likely due to damage from the recent storm.

Luckily, my tiny car easily fit around the blockade, and we did a passive little version of trespassing (the road wasn't that bad). Sorry, Joshua Tree. We honestly feel a little entitled to our secret little spot. On the first we did the same thing, heading around hoards of tourists, to bury (respectfully) our something significant, and set intentions. We were grateful that the road was closed, because we had our spot to ourselves, and were able to do what we needed to do without interruption. Now I have this strange joy; a freedom; like I am finally emerging from the cocoon, and everything is beautiful again... and I have wings... and I need to fucking fly. I already have a significant model booked for next weekend, and I am anxious and excited. I genuinely feel like my life is finally starting, but I also appreciate that most people feel like this at this time of year, so I am also incredibly grounded and just flowing with life. I'm not going to say this is the year, like everyone else, but I have been looking forward to 2020 for a while. It is leap year, so my birthday is on the new moon first day of summer, and I'm a cancer instead of a gemini. Things already feel so much different, and then Rumi gave me something this morning...

Love comes with a knife, not some shy question, and not with fears for its reputation! I say

these things disinterestedly. Accept them in kind. Love is a madman, working his wild schemes,

Tearing off his clothes, running through the mountains, drinking poison, and now quietly

choosing annihilation. A tiny spider tries to wrap an enormous wasp. Think of the spiderweb

woven across the cave where Muhammad slept! There are love stories, and there is obliteration

into love. You've been walking the ocean's edge, holding up your robes to keep them dry. You

must dive naked under and deeper under, a thousand times deeper! Love flows down. The ground

submits to the sky and suffers what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse for giving in like that?

Don't put blankets over the drum! Open completely. Let your spirit ear listen to the green dome's

passionate murmur. Let the cords of your robe be untied. Shiver in this new love beyond all

above and below. The sun rises, but which way does night go? I have no more words. Let the

Soul speak with the silent articulation of a face.