On the fermentation of failure

 Hello dears,

Holy fucking shit.

I could probably begin and end here, signed xRikke.

There are so many threads I could pull out that might all have meaningful offshoots, 

do I write about my sacred rage for the world?

do I write about the holy rebellion and resistance to the powers that seek to exploit and dominate and oppress?

Do I write about the tenderness of grief and the cracking open even and especially now?

Do I write to my women and survivors in this community 

who like myself have felt waves of walls-closing-in and out-of-body feelings as the collective shadow of abuse is being churned to the surface without much meaningful accountability or reckoning…

Do I write about the hollowing out… about what arises when life sort of “doesn’t work out”. When things fall apart. When all the dreams and visions and expectations we had propped up our identity around and thus oriented to reality from, buckles under the unruly tide of emergent interweaved existence.

Do I write about the magic?

If I look back through my life, I have interchangeably felt closest to God-The-Mystery and furthest away, during the lowest most challenging rock-bottom moments of my life.

Isn’t that an interesting paradox.

I am reminded of a Hafiz poem that I encountered very early on in my spiritual ‘seeking’ and have held close to my heart ever since;

‘Don't surrender your loneliness

So quickly.

Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you

As few human

Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight

Has made my eyes so soft,

My voice

So tender,

My need of God

Absolutely

Clear.’

― Hafiz (14th century Persian Sufi mystic)

At times in my life it has been the loneliness that has pierced most sharply, these days I might interchange loneliness for just the unbearable angst of existence and our world that comes to me in waves.

But what I want to say now is that, when things fall apart, when the life “doesn’t work out”, and I say it with these “” because of course - what do we possibly know about the larger intelligence and creativity and potentiality of the web of life. All we know, is that we had some ideas, we tried some paths, they didn’t work out, or they didn’t lead to where we had imagined they would lead, because why would they. But we had created a whole dense contracted circuitry of expectation and ideas around where we were heading and what that would look like and how we would feel once we got there, and life didn’t obey.

And what I have found, in this year of the snake just gone, in the final (not final) act of sheddings and deaths, as someone born in a year of the snake, and as a double scorpio connected to the mythological death and rebirth symbology of the serpent, - is that if and when I let myself come all the way undone. If I let it cut more deep, if I let myself be hollowed out, I make space for holy unknowing. I make space for a new story to emerge, a story that is not knotted up in contracts I secretly drew 10 years ago, but that is rooted in the truth of the creativity of the web of life as it spontaneously unfolds me.

And in the gap of failing or not knowing or being check-mated by life, there is God. There is grace.

God is Change as Octavia Butler wrote. I would also say, God is not-knowing. God is listening to the not-yet-revealed.We don’t often truly let the immensity of not knowing all the way in. It is too big. Too mind altering shattering. But sometimes life will conspire to take us to our knees and we will come face to face with what we might have so desperately tried to avoid, and we might find that underneath what we feared the most - was and is… freedom.

Not necessarily happiness, not its opposite either, but freedom. Freedom from the ideas we had superimposed on top of life. Freedom into life.

. . .

I hope you are screaming. I hope you are screaming and raging and shaking and crying and making love and going for long walks and slowing down when the energy seems to be accelerating.

On that note - if you didn't catch the HOLY EROS ritual we did, I have now uploaded it for purchase on my online library HERE.

I hope you are finding containers that can hold you in the unknown.

I had to put a pause to the emails and the things and the things. I am very much a cyclical priestess, and with everything going on the world and the final act of the year of the snake, this last bleed took me down deep, so I had to draw in.

For this reason I didn’t write to let you know that doors have closed for THIS HOLY LIFE, I only trust that those who wanted to be in would know of their own accord by now.

I am also sitting with what other offerings want to emerge… I am really all about depth to be very honest with you. I believe in slower longer committed work. In immersions, in retreats, in walking pilgrimages, in longer courses. I recognize in our day there is a lot of urgency and desire for quick peak experiences, a class here and a webinar there, and although I love to find each other online for the odd ritual, and I love finding these points of connection, the real juice of the work I offer and the work I am interested in, cannot be touched in an hour or two together. To go deep we need more time, more commitment, more space. We need a longer story.

PS. As I was unboxing last week what feels like the millionth attempt at home making over the last few years I was listening to the audiobook of Sophie Strand’s “The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human”.

And I can highly recommend… More about what chronic illness and healing is teaching me, another time…

But I will leave you with this quote: “Everything in my life, from flat tires to late appointments, is conspiring to make sure I am perfectly on time for another moment of contact. Not on time for human events, but for those truly important convergences between species.”

With devotion and for the rebellion,

xR