Collecting Shards #2: The Map of Love — bell hooks, The Boy, Anne Lamott, Frida Kahlo, and More.

Hi beautiful people,

So...I got a little carried away with this instalment. Such is the case when we're navigating the weighty topic that is Love. Strap in for what more or less turned into a whole chapter for my book!

I booked in for a kinesiology appointment the other day for the first time since early covid. Honestly, after the Great Life Re-levelling that has taken place over the past few years (which for me, weirdly enough, didn’t kick off with the onset of the pandemic like it did for many others trapped in deep isolation; but, like Death in Final Destination — like Death in general — it finally caught me and I went down for a long while: a story of burnout and forced re-purposing I talk about more in my opening book chapters).

Prologue Pt. I

The first of three(!) parts. Keep enthusiasm, patience, and trust close to your heart as you read.

Synaesthete MediaLauren Crabbe

I felt like I needed it. While I’m generally fairly dense when it comes to responding to alternative therapies (seven planets in Capricorn: I need hard evidence), I’ve found kinesiology and acupuncture in particular to provide my most surprisingly tangible results when the need for a body/mind/spirit tune-up becomes painfully real and obvious; and I’ve staggered through most of my days since the end of 2022 feeling like, to quote Diane from Bojack Horseman, “burning garbage.”

So there I was, face-up on a massage table with my forearm propped upwards, wondering what would come through and hoping to Gaia I might get some answers from my body that my mind — my ferocious intellect, my rigid “rationality” and its firm grip on right or wrong — has been shouting over the top of for years, to little avail.

And, as is often the case with applying gentle pressure to my subconscious via my muscles, certain responses rose to the surface I absolutely wasn’t expecting. The key one being the "concept" of Love:

What the heck is Love, what is my relationship to it…and why does my physiology apparently detect it as a threat?

Truly, a twisted form of a question I’ve already been thinking through for a long time (doing what I usually do: reading a bunch, listening to experts, gathering data, presenting the case to my inner judge who calls the shots — presently writing a whole fvcking book in part to find satisfactory answers as to Love’s importance; why it’s worth the pain).

My confusion manifested physically: when asked to give Love a name, my troll brain immediately threw up something ridiculous — Winifred, a name I would never give anything (no offence, any Winifreds reading); and when asked to visualise Love, I could only concoct something vague in my left periphery, dancing just out of sight…eventually I couldn’t imagine anything at all. I went totally blank and felt increasingly stupid for not being able to define or consciously feel into something so fundamental to our human experience.

As my kinesiologist said, no data is still data, and insisted that even in its perceived absence, Love is still trying to teach me something — has always been teaching me. Seemingly, trying to teach everyone; I received a conveniently timed email from The Marginalian this morning as I was drafting this up, featuring author bell hooks and her long-time confusion surrounding this very topic:

“Had I been given a clear definition of love earlier in my life it would not have taken me so long to become a more loving person. Had I shared with others a common understanding of what it means to love it would have been easier to create love.
[…]
Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired destination we chart the journey, creating the map. We need a map to guide us on our journey to love — starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love.”

Many of the more culturally recognisable (dare I say, Disney-planted) hallmarks of Love appeared to be lacking in my external world when I was growing up. My family were, and are, unquestionably loving people in their own practical, self-sustaining ways; there was never any question of me having a roof over my head and food to eat and physical safety and room to run around (and climb the odd tree or cliff face) where I needed it.

However, my emotional intensity and sensitivity of being came with its own Room of Requirement’s worth of stuff (for the fellow Potterverse nerds), and I wound up spending lots of time alone trying to contain it, eventually concealing bits and pieces of myself away inside it to spare others the burden of dealing with me.

To drag this metaphor out even further — amongst my peers, I may as well have been Harry Potter in Muggle school: my hair and clothes were always wrong, my social skills awkward and rusty, my overall disposition ever a little odd; I just didn’t quite fit, and had few friends. Girls tormented me, boys didn’t like me back. I spent most of my time in the library or computer lab, in safe and silent solitude; out of threat and mockery’s way, but by no means in nourishing exchange with those who might begin to teach my tender soul what Love looks like.

As far as I could see and experience in my fleshly form: Love felt withholding, intimidating, forthcoming only once certain conditions were met and contracts between my acquiescent inner being and appraising external environment were struck, quick to disappear. Impossible to harness and learn from, foggy in terms of its form and accessibility. (And therefore likely qualifies as a threat for my nervous system to target at every possible turn.)

So, to ask the hooksian question:

How does one define, and therefore demystify, Love; our starting point on the map from which all our future choices catalyse and come back to themselves?

And, to add a spin from my kinesiology session: What is left when it seems as though all the rest — the Disney chips — are taken away? What does want to be born, known, grown in Love’s perceived absence?

Truthfully…fvcked if I know.

Or at least, I didn’t have a good idea until very recently, when The Alchemist and other such resources around the topic of Love made their way into my world, my awareness — not to mention this session in question, the result of which you will read about shortly.

But hey, as bell hooks also says: “We believe it is important to search for love’s truths…To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice.”

So, others don’t totally get it either — permission slip. (Maybe it’s a bit like the Tao in that way: defined by its inability to define, its just-is-ness.)

With that said of how stupidly little I fathom about the literal energetic undercurrent of our entire world…here are some key points, notes, and teachers that have reoriented me when I’m lost in Love’s map. (That I plan to work into chapters of abovementioned book sometime, somehow.) Maybe they will reorient you too, if you’re similarly daring in acknowledging your unknowing.

➺ Martha Beck on Real Love versus “Spider Love”

In a post on her website, Beck relays a folktale about a king who banishes his third daughter from his kingdom because she described her love for her father “as meat loves salt,” where her two sisters delivered “flowery speeches of filial adoration.” Beck explains:

“This story survived throughout Europe for a very long time because it is highly instructive: It reminds listeners that in matters of love, choosing style over substance is disastrous. It also helps us know when we’re making that mistake. Salt is unique in that its taste doesn’t cover up the food it seasons but enhances whatever flavour was there to begin with. Real love, real commitment, does the same thing.”

Collectively, we seem more readily likely to recognise expressions of spider love — grand, flowery and full of fireworks, ultimately quick-burning and bordering on possession, even corrosion; “…lov[ing] others the way spiders love flies…capture them, wrap them in immobilising fetters, and drain nourishment out of them at peckish moments.”

Our attempted possession and entrapment of many things, material and immaterial, is merely our attempt to feel and give Love to ourselves and others in the only ways culture taught us — which slowly smothers and kills our spirits. I find it helpful to be reminded, by those like Martha, of the humble (yet more enduringly substantive) “meat loves salt”sentiments:

I can live without you.

My love for you will change.

You’re not the only thing, and everything, I will ever need.

I won’t cling to you like my life depends on it — like, say, Rose and Jack on the floating door — and will sometimes let you go in order to set you free.

We are not one person (and ought not strive to be).

And so on. They read like apathy, maybe even cruelty at first glance — but when we don’t crave Love, partnerships, friendships etc. like oxygen (or flies to a spider), we can see them more clearly; we can better tend to them as we make a priority of tending to ourselves; and we can embrace myriad iterations of our loved ones, making repeated choices as to evolve alongside them, like the inosculation (new word for the day!) of trees.

➺ On that note — from The Alchemist:

“You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love…the love that speaks the Language of the World.”

When I was travelling the world for the majority of my twenties, I was often wracked with a sense of guilt that I was somehow betraying my loved ones, or neglecting connections that would soon forget me, because I was not physically in place continually reinforcing them — as though I were tending a garden versus letting a rainforest grow freely and wildly. That my capacity to give and receive Love was broken, because I felt a greater need to (as Fatima from The Alchemist spoke it) “wander as free as the wind that shapes the dunes.”

This anticipation of loss, or like I needed to stay put and conform, always felt like such a heavy price to pay…and I eventually had to accept that perhaps a lot of the “love” and connection I once experienced was not real. Or at least, not the kind of Love that marries meat and salt, or sustains the Soul of the World; it was more like the aforementioned spider love.

Love should never hold us back…only set us free. Love would never paper over one’s unique Personal Legend — their reason for being — but embellish, like a gorgeous golden watermark on French papier. Next.

➺ From Dusk Night Dawn (well worth a read) by my favourite Anne Lamott

(which I painstakingly transcribed into my Notes over repeated listenings while walking between villages in rural France):

“Trust me on this: We are loved out of all sense or proportion. Yikes and hallelujah.

Love reveals the beauty of sketchy people like us to ourselves. Love holds up the sacred mirror. Love builds rickety greenhouses for our wilder seeds to grow. Love can be reckless — Jesus is good at this — or meek as my dog, or carry a briefcase. Love is the old man in the park teaching little kids to play the violin, much time spent tuning, the children hearing their way into the key he is playing…

Love lumbers like an elephant. It naps on top of your chest like a cat. It gooses you, snickers, smoothes your hair. Love is being with a person wherever they are, however they are acting — ugh. A lot of things seem to come more easily to God…

The hope is knowing that this Love trumps all, trumps evil, hate and death. It makes us real as life slowly sews us our human shirts. We are being shepherded beyond our fears and needs to becoming our actual selves. This sucks and hurts some days and I frequently don’t want it or agree to it. But it persists, like water wearing through a boulder in the river. Hope springs from realising we are loved, can love, and are love with skin on. Then we are unstoppable…

Love is not a concept. It’s alive and true, a generative and nutritious flickering force that is marbled through life. I can hold it in my hands whenever I remember to, stroke its ivory belly, hear its crunch, its rustle.”

Motherfvcker.

Love shows us our sketchiness and keeps choosing us anyway. Love recognises imperfection and does not judge us for it — in fact, is defined by its absence of judgement.

As my kinesiologist reminded me: When we judge, we’re in fear. And when we’re operating from a place of fear, we’re not in Love.[^ I’m going to asterisk this and add a caveat, because…I absolutely get my kinesiologist’s point, and can think of many, many times where my immersion in states of egoic fear, projection, and judgement have ultimately created an unnecessary barrier between me and those I could be meeting from a more open and forgiving, less wary and hypervigilant standpoint. (I can also think of many instances in which operating from a place of fear has, e.g., spawned atomic bombs and disfiguring poisons and underground paedophile rings.) However, I also refuse to believe that, say, someone sitting by the bedside of one they’ve spent a life with, holding their hand, is not scared absolutely shitless, whilst being so immersed in Love for them that it physically pains. So…I suggest the quality of said fear is important to keep in mind here; all fear isn’t prohibitive, though it certainly can be blinding.]I judged myself for not understanding Love or being able to visualise it; I judged Love for not showing itself to me in the ways I thought it should.

Love shows itself in everything, everywhere — in the dusty corners and jagged cracks where it appears at first glance all is forsaken, uncertain, or unforgiven. In the grime-encrusted palm of a homeless person begging for change, in the duffle bag eyes of a tired mother putting food on the table for foster children as well as her own, in the waning of one’s sense of prowess.

“Love is being with a person wherever they are, however they are acting” — therefore, being with ourselves wherever we are, however we are acting. Not flinching away; choosing to stay and stroke the truth of any Self situation.

➺ Love bites from Iris Murdoch and J.D. McClatchy;

they speak for themselves pretty conclusively and spectacularly.

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” — Murdoch,

and,

“Love is the quality of attention we pay to things.” — McClatchy.

(Don’t even get me started on Iain McGilchrist and his observations on how the quality of the attention we pay to things, specifically our relationships between them, determines the quality of our lives; topic for another newsletter, probably.)

➺ On Love as presence — perspective from a desert seer and a multiverse-jumper

Said the seer to the camel driver in The Alchemist:

“When people consult me, it’s not that I’m reading the future; I am guessing at the future. The future belongs to God, and it is only he who reveals it, under extraordinary circumstances. How do I guess at the future? Based on the omens of the present. The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve upon the present, what comes later will also be better. Forget about the future, and love each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children. Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.”

There is a monologue from one of the best movies ever made — Everything Everywhere All At Once — by one of the main characters, Waymond Wang (Short Round from the second Indiana Jones film, fun fact), which never fails to hit me in the feels. If you’ve seen the movie, maybe you know right away which one I’m talking about. If you haven’t, watch the whole damn thing and pick your jaw up off the floor, thank me later. But at the end of it, spoon-fed over several scenes, is this absolute jewel:

“So, even though you have broken my heart yet again, I wanted to say: In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”

Love. Is. Presence.

It can be as maddeningly simple as that.

Letting go of the notion that Love should be easier, less messy/terrifying/enraging/confusing (pick your adjective), more grandiose and glamorous (there’s that Disney influence again), fulfil one’s every need and desire, right everything that was ever wronged about you or the world — and is therefore not real if these things aren’t entwined with it — however, is…indubitably difficult.

Even more difficult still to keep one’s faith in the sentiment that “God loves his children” when there is, objectively, so much that can fvcking suck in any given present moment…and stay anyway.

I have heard staunch atheists like Stephen Fry make their case against the existence of God (which, to me, is just another word for Love; don’t throw a Bible at my head) with statements like, “If God truly loves us, then why do we have bone cancer in children?” If God truly loves us, why do we have bigotry, systemic oppression, the Epstein files; these kinds of things? These arguments used to trip me up too; it seemed silly, even reckless, to believe in True Loves and Higher Powers — much less enjoy them, enjoying life in the process — when they would allow such atrocities to slip past their watch.

The conclusion I eventually reached, after picking up The Alchemist and watching that film and collecting other such shards of divinity, is that these “bad” things happen in order to draw our attention and point out what can be improved; powerfully, in the present moment.

Pain can draw us deeper into connection and presence with another, just like weeds attempt to draw us to what in one’s garden soil needs improving. Pain — the fleshy underbelly of difficulty, mess, confusion, unfulfilment, rage, all the rest — is not as bad as we are taught to believe, and opportunities to step inside it are calls to bravery; opportunities to better know ourselves and the Life condition. Just like the big picture problems I mentioned above can serve as opportunities to band tightly together and live in accordance with our deepest values and heart’s desires, and show the misguided masses how to do the same.

This only happens, though, through minor improvements to each moment — each offering of mess and stress — over time. (There is a Something for Kate lyric I remember hearing long ago that I sadly can’t locate the exact wording of now, but goes something like this: “Every second is a chance to start again.”)

If we are not paralysed by anxiety about the future, or depression about the past, or judgement of anything and everything in between, then we have much more in reserve to make little changes in the moment that amount to substantial shifts over time; in society, in our relationships, within ourselves. Actually see the omens, however unsightly, that are trying so desperately and lovingly to guide us.

After all, as Evelyn, the protagonist of EEAAO, says to her daughter Joy (after Joy tries to leave because she doesn’t “want to hurt anymore”):

“You are getting fat. And you never call me, even though we have a family plan. And it’s free. You only visit when you need something. And you got a tattoo, and I don’t care if it’s supposed to represent our family — you know I hate tattoos. And of all the places I could be, why would I want to be here with you? Yes, you’re right. It doesn’t make sense.
[…]
Maybe it’s like you said. Maybe there is something out there, some new discovery that will make us feel like even smaller pieces of shit. Something that explains why you still went looking for me through all of this noise. And why, no matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always, want to be here with you.”

To which Joy asks, tearfully: “So what? You’re just gonna ignore everything else? You could be anything, anywhere. Why not go somewhere where your daughter is more than just this? Here, all we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense.” And Evelyn replies:

“Then I will cherish these few specks of time.”

In this way…we make the Soul of the World better or worse, depending on whether we become better or worse.

➺ Santiago on Love that nourishes the Soul of the World

The boy, Santiago, from The Alchemist, has a conversation with the elements and tries to convince them to help him turn himself into the wind. (Long story as to why; I’ll let you read it for yourself if you want to know.) And to the Sun, he says this:

“Because it’s not love to be static like the desert, nor is it love to roam the world like the wind. And it’s not love to see everything from a distance, like you do. Love is the force the transforms and improves the Soul of the World. When I first reached through to it, I thought the Soul of the World was perfect. But later, I could see that it was like other aspects of creation, and had its own passions and wars.

It is we who nourish the Soul of the World, and the world we live in will be either better or worse, depending on whether we become better or worse. And that’s where the power of love comes in. Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are.”

In my last/first newsletter, I referred to a phenomenon in psychology known as “tension of the opposites”, which I likened to what I’ve come to know as the Going Away/Coming Home cycle in my own life: a paradox of somehow being at home while away, and yearning for a kind of soul-stretchiness — of being “absolutely beyond myself, my previous limits and known capacities, like a rubber band pulled taut and on the verge of snapping back” — once more whenever I did finally return to actual “home”. It’s a lifelong tension I have felt within myself, like I’m perpetually being pulled apart by two, seemingly, competing halves of my being.

What helped me initially recognise how to attempt to save myself from being psychologically drawn and quartered was, of all things, the Wheel of Fortune card in Tarot. My teacher, Lindsay Mack, likens the WOF to a bike wheel: there’s the centre, the spokes, and the tyre. When the wheel is in motion — in any situation of big transitional change, of tension between what has been and what could be — we have a tendency as humans to focus really intently on the spokes or the outer wheel. We want to know what’s going on, what’s coming, what’s going, what connects and makes sense of everything that confuses us.

And what this all but guarantees is we’re going to be subject to the full intensity of every damn bump, jolt, shock, dust cloud, and pot hole in our paths — really be rattled and thrown about — as opposed to drawing our attention closer to the centre, where impact is contained.

Further from our centres, we tend to freak out, react from a place of fear, make “worse” decisions that pour toxicity into the Soul of the World…when much spiritual wisdom tells us — from many different angles across all the time as we have learned how to speak and read books — that at the core of our being, we are Pure Love. We make our world, and others’, “better” through repeated choices and expressions of Love, from our orderly and authentic centres. Not from the outer wheel; from fear as manifested through absolute chaos and carnage.

Trusting in these loving centres of ourselves — the eye of the spiral of wherever we find ourselves in our own home/away cycles, betwixt light and dark, “good” and “bad” — means to fully embody the tension in the duality between our competing parts, and therefore offer true compassion to those who need our help, not our hatred.

At the time of writing, I’m in the middle of an intensive 12-day permaculture course, and the subject of duality is brought up a lot. My teacher, Ian, insists that until we accept our own capacity for that we might judge as bad/ugly/intolerable/unacceptable/disgusting/contemptuous (pick any adjective), then we will always be brought down by that in our relationships and worldly circumstances; never developing our ability to offer true acceptance and compassion, or making a lasting difference from a place of Love.

This is how we make our peace with an imperfect world — its “passions and wars”, its shittiness, its pain — and compel ourselves to keep taking action.

Make no mistake: it is only through shedding our outer layers of resistance, fear, shadow, shame, and so on — by living out each layer, each half of the cycle, in its entirety; venturing out, leaning in, and letting go — that we obliterate the barriers against this truth of Pure Love at our core and sink deeper into it, like a warm bubbling spring…which is ultimately the end point of all Personal Legends.

That is why, as The Alchemist teaches us, our hearts talk more with those who are trying to realise theirs. Everything strives toward evolution, including Love…and we are more than capable of living it into more corporeal being through our lives.

➺ On Love via creativity;

to the crux, the culminating question and point, of my kinesiology appointment: So, what is left in those times when all else is seemingly being stripped from us, and Love cruelly absent?

As I said, the answer to this one stumped me for most of the session. It taunted me with its barefaced evasion; I tried my best not to add more evidence to the pile in my mind of what I have quietly suspected all along: that Love does not love me back, as much as I long for it (and still felt increasingly stupid at my continued floundering on the map, to hark back to hooks’ analogy).

From one prompt to another I jumped with my kinesiologist, she more determined than I was that I would eventually land on an answer — one that my muscle testing was clearly spelling out, and she waited patiently for me to get. Eventually, she offered up one word: creativity.

Slowly, memories trickled in of my timid little being sitting lonely in the school library and in my classes. Barely speaking or being spoken to, but with an endless stream of mental imagery for me to daydream, doodle and create ever present; my relentless shadow companion in multicolour, charcoal, smudges and shades of graphite, strokes of paint, taking my hand when others turned me away.

Oh.

My creative fire is what was left when the hallmarks of what I had been sold as Love were sparing. Pure potentiality is what was left: a blank canvas with all that white space to fill with whatever the fuck I wanted to be there instead; my own notions and definitions and dreams of Love, which could never, in fact, be taken from me. My clear starting place on the map.

So…back to Martha Beck.

Her most recent book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose addresses the epidemic of fear throughout our culture in modern times, taking readers on an intentional journey from this gridlocked place into the tantalising grasp of kindness toward eventual transcendence, via…art, of all things.

Beck describes her experience of spending an entire month doing little other than drawing during the covid pandemic — fully immersed in her right-brain hemisphere, she remarks that this time was not unlike, if not more intense than, being led on a shamanic psilocybin journey — slowly transforming thought and anxiety spirals into creativity spirals instead. At the end of it, she couldn’t summon anxiety if she tried.

Her fear-whipping formula is this: Kindness —> Art —> Transcendence (in that order).

Compassionate self-enquiry toggles us out of fear and into states of curiosity and, eventually, creativity, for these qualities originate from the same part of our brains. Using art to solve anxiety won’t work without the kindness piece…and kindness is pretty indistinguishable from Love, in my mind. Love is the root of everything that feeds the creative fire, which then allows us to transcend whatever is holding us back, keeping us small and scared. Transcend ourselves, our perceived limitations; that which keeps us from tending to our unique work in this world. Keeps us from pursuing the path of our Personal Legends.

Says Beck:

“I became fascinated with the neurological dynamics of anxiety — how it works in our brains and also in our behaviours and social interactions. I was particularly intrigued by the evidence that shows a kind of toggle effect between anxiety and creativity: when one is up and running, the other seems to go silent.”

So, not unlike the tension we touched on earlier of Fear versus Love — and anxiety is a more pervasive, distorted, future-oriented, lingering remnant of fear, spine-braided with our status quo. Remember: when we’re neck-deep in fear, our capacity to Love can become* compromised (see footnotes).

And I would suggest as well: our capacity to detect Love’s presence — to feel it as fully as one ought to their birthright — may toggle down while our creativity dwells in a shadowy corner of our existence, never being brought out into the light to come and play. When we dissociate from our reality — which is that is we happen to create our own — and the gates of what qualifies Love to enter our lives are too vigilantly kept.

An act of bringing forth what unique creative brilliance is within you — to adapt a passage from the Gospel of Thomas[^ "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”]— is a saving act, for you and those around you, and one of loving intent; while failing to do so out of misguided fear holds within it the power to destroy. Choose wisely…choose creatively.

➺ And finally, on that note, another synchronicity in my inbox this morning

inspired by Frida Kahlo — my favourite visual artist — and letters to her childhood lover, as summarised by the brilliant Maria Popova:

“Where does love go when it goes?

It went where it always goes — into the totality of her person. We make everything we make with everything we are, everything we have touched that has touched us back in that tender and terrifying contact with life we call experience.”

I love Frida because she personified Life and Love in this agonisingly exquisite way; wore and spoke her heart so unabashedly, through such repeated pain and betrayal that has snuffed out many a light, that her life itself became as much of a work of art as her renowned artworks themselves.

Come to think of it, I’m now recalling an exchange between Kahlo and her soulmate, Diego, as depicted in her biography (if you’ve not seen Frida, please make a point of doing so; if you’re not familiar with her as a person, you’ll not be able to help but fall in love with her) that tried to educate me on this very messy concept of Love so very long ago:

Frida (sighs): “I've lost the toes of one foot. My back is useless, I have an infection of the kidneys. I smoke, I drink, I curse. I can't have children. I have no money and a stack of hospital bills. Shall I keep going?”

Diego: “It’s practically a letter of recommendation.”

So...

Make everything you make with everything you are, have been and could be.

Let everything you have touched touch you back, tenderise and terrify you, actualise you, while teaching yourself that this is what Love truly looks like (and that is enough).

Let yourself move confusedly and clumsily along the map, becoming so fully lost and found again out in the open that your mastery of messy individuation is there for all to see; that your heart becomes a shard of divinity you will fearlessly and willingly share with others.

Be the better or worse with which you wish to nourish the Soul of the World.

Smaller shards capturing my heart right now:

➺ “This 14-Year-Old is Using Origami to Design Emergency Shelters that are Sturdy, Cost Efficient, and Easy to Deploy.”

A great example of beautifying what might otherwise be purely traumatising and ugly to behold. (Courtesy of the Curious About Everything newsletter #60 — thoroughly recommend this newsletter for discovery of all manner of nerdy, earthly delights.)

➺ Ren: a musical artist transforming pain into art in jaw-dropping fashion.

Start with this song (ideally accompanied by the film clip) in which he converses back and forth with his shadowy half — that which he is trying not to let rule his life. Feel the rawness and relatability in his attempted self-recovery. (Thanks to one of my dearest friends, Chris, for cottoning me on to this creative genius.)

➺ Check out this little shard (among many) I collected from my permaculture course, Noosa Forest Retreat:

an example of the beauty and bounty one can build within contained space (if a name like The Plummery doesn't pull you in, I don't know what would).

➺ A recently rediscovered poem from Rumi (which I’m using to motivate myself for tackling some big, scary things):

“Be crumbled,
so wildflowers will come up
where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.”

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