Last Sunday afternoon I opened my eyes and inhaled out of a peaceful nap with Joshua. A clear voice whispered quietly from somewhere deep in my psyche, “this life is magic, make it yours.” I smiled and nodded. Joshua woke a few moments later and wordlessly, we heeded that message, making our magic, our Love. Two pieces of the eternal web of life finding bliss in our natural state of unity, of oneness.
In the post-coital haze, I looked down (from the toilet of all places) and saw the most stunning prismatic rainbow I’ve ever seen. I’ve never been big on esoteric meanings of natural phenomena. But in those tender moments a truth coalesced: pain and difficulty are all part of making Love. Magic. The dark and the light. It’s all essential.
One of my favorite casual writers, a woman named Blair Speed, recently wrote:
“Sometimes, life asks so much of us that we have to arrive as more than we ever have before. We grow…excitement and terror at the possibility of life (effort) seems like a very real response to the human experience… be open to it all. The practice of not binding ourselves by perceived limits or possibility but to be open to the unknown.”
This fall season of our new life in California immediately demanded more of us than we anticipated and we’re in a phase of warp-speed growth. We’re adapting to life in a small town and the bi, sometimes tri-weekly long commute into the city. We’re learning how to be intimate under less than ideal circumstances. And we’re hyper-focused on our health and healing with a tweaked approach to diet, strength training, and a renewed interest in circadian biology. (Joshua and I dive into many more details in our podcast, How to Love, which comes out twice a month. We’re also now posting brief audio videos to Instagram and TikTok.) Yes, we intentionally laid the foundation for this evolution, and yet now that it’s here, both Joshua and I have felt immense strain. Instead of buckling, we’re learning to alchemize, to be with it all. We’re further exploring infinite love and the misperception of our finite lives.
Love is infinite, so is life. Yet we rarely experience this infinity. Most of us live everyday crushed by that which is finite. Everything is a crisis, a burden, an emergency, a struggle — that’s a false lens we’ve been conditioned to look through. Life is Love … which is loss, and pain, and pleasure, and joy, and ecstasy, and agony. As one of my recent favorite films indicates, life is Everything Everywhere All at Once, and the only way to make sense of it is Love.
P.S. Sit in the chair. That’s one of the imperatives from Joshua’s How to Write Better course that’s stuck with me for years. His program is full of wisdom, but it’s the simple directive to “sit in the chair” that’s most helpful for me. Writing is something I’ve been avoiding — tap-dancing around it for years now — so this was a fun and slightly nerve wracking return. One of Joshua’s other favorite tips is to delete the first paragraph of whatever you’ve written. That’s what I’ve done here. This was the first paragraph, but after deleting it I realized it’s a much better post script.
Thanks for being here, I’m grateful.