86. are you okay

Once upon a time, I loved a quote that said something like: “If you slow down enough, and get quiet enough, you can touch the texture of your life.”
That wasn’t it exactly, but something like that. 

It sounds nice, right? Getting slow enough to be deeply present to what is. Getting quiet enough to truly sense whatever is being communicated by the heartbeat of Earth, in your unique experience.

Touching the texture of your life - who doesn’t want that, right? The texture of my life must be a magical, beautiful thing, a revelation in and of itself, which will impart a deeper meaning and intuitive recognition of who I am, and why I’m here. 

But what if it doesn’t feel like that when it happens? 

What if getting slow enough and quiet enough to touch the texture of your life ends up feeling like a disorienting quietude, or what if the texture you find there isn’t one of soothing velvet or fine silk? What if it’s a strange wood grain that you keep running your fingers over, looking for the code that will unlock the understanding you’re seeking? 

People keep asking me if I’m okay. I’m okay, and also not okay. Something's not quite right, but it’s also somehow much bigger and wider and stranger than I can identify, and while something’s not quite right, also, nothing is exactly specifically wrong. 

Disenchanted, one might say. Like the opalescent, iridescent, ethereal effervescence, the animating force of life and magic, present in all things, in all moments, in all beings, is somehow, at the moment, muted. 

Like the doorways to the Otherworld awareness that everything is permeated with intelligent loving awareness are fewer and farther between than usual. 

Like the systems of meaning-making I’ve long held dear have become just the tiniest bit frayed around the edges, like the tapestry of creation has been getting chewed on by a big black shaggy dog in a cave at the far edge of the Universe. 

I hope part of this journey into deeper creative expression doesn’t mean I need to take an artists detour into a bout of madness. As much as I’m jazzed about writing from a place of deeper truth, I’m also not in the mood to do a sideways crab shuffle into a midlife-threshold depressive episode. 

But honestly, many of the most brilliant animal bodies I know are attuned and sensing their own expression of knowing that something is not quite right. 

What if there really are no roads where we’re going? 

What if I feel this way because my wildly intelligent body is onto something? 

What if it’s not all gonna be okay, but we’re definitely gonna be free? 

When I feel like this, I want to quit writing, but I’m not going to. I’m going to keep writing until I can hear myself more clearly. I’m going to keep reading what I write until I can see who I am again.

But I’m also going to let myself be slow and quiet while running my fingers over the whorls and ridges of this life wood, feeling with my sensing fingertips for an answer to a question I can’t name.