chasing safety

Hello, how are you doing?  I’ve been chasing safety a lot lately.  Chasing, seeking, trying to create or kindle, calling out to, summoning, crying about, longing for safety.  Wondering what it even is.

Why do I want it so bad?  Is it real?  Should I have it?

Yes, there’s no real safe, but I need something safer.  It’s relative.

capacitance

My elder housemate friend taught me about capacitance the other day.  I’ve been thinking about it since.  We can hold the discomfort of unresolved complexity and get energy from the tension.  It’s stressful but fruitful.  I would call it powerful magic, but I’d never heard the word capacitance before.

There’s a David Bowie song I like that has the line “we were so turned on by your lack of conclusions.”  It reminds me of that.  Holding countless threads, not needing to tie them up.

We don’t need to come to conclusions for a while.  We can let it brew. As we dwell in the uncertainty, maybe the facts will line up in a new way.  Maybe one day a new idea will arrive, and the whole thing will seem different, in a new light.  The troubling part might become delicious, or fall away.  Or now the whole thing is bad, and we scrap it entirely.

A shift will happen in our feelings, home, life circumstances, or the cosmos.  Then something new makes sense, and we’ll be glad we left it unresolved.

mystery

But it’s work, to keep so many open pools of possibility.  Many people can only tolerate a few.  How deeply are you committed to the Mystery?

My commitment to the Mystery is a big part of the radical mental health work I do.  Also the art I make.  The rituals and prayer, and how I do relationship.  My respect of all genders and queerness.

Neat, easy conclusions leave too much out.  In my writing I come to conclusions often.  But they are in service of bigger truths I keep pointing to that are less nameable.

chasing safety

Chasing safety means I want to be as honest as possible.  I used to think that hiding out and being silent was how to be safe.  Now I seek community and do the opposite of hiding silently.  I speak up and take up space.

Capacitance is deep honesty.  The truth is a mess, and a neat bow of premature resolution isn’t helping.

This is an embroidery I’m working on of Coatlicue.  There’s a tension of the unresolved in art, and the striving is part of the pleasure.