Duchess of air
Someone sent a message on Tumblr asking, "How do we save ourselves?"
“Spirit does not experience the limitations that we do.
Her reality resides in a different domain and only extends into ours. The world of duality is our creation, not hers. Separation is our experience, not hers. She resides in a realm of oneness that is formless and timeless. Yet, she is able to reach into our world and have her impact through our consciousness.”
— Wayne Ellis Hartman
I still adore a cigarette with my espresso first thing.
But I’m back better than I was when I last saw you. I dipped my feet in fortune’s spring. It was only for a brief moment but beauty-of-life related epiphanies have this way of sticking to you like blessed mud. Priorities have shifted. I used to talk about the desire to do and be XY or Z but it was without any true sticking-to-it-ness. I was feeling a bit like mist this evening after a conversation with someone I care for that left me confused and darkened. I was very much the fog rolling over the hilltop, very much the music you lose in a dream.
DETOUR POINT: I want to talk about some mundane things, because it’s a pleasure and because it makes this all seem more cozy and familiar. I still am in love with simple pleasures. I deep cleaned the house this morning, went to the grocery and bought strawberry kefir, fresh sourdough, and kimchi because I am entering an era in which I try to revive the gut health that I’ve massacred with empty stomach black coffee and sweet alcohol.
Farmer’s market garden mornings have been lovely, a little rainfall and overpriced coffee in paper cups (steamed milk, espresso, a synthetic toffee with a buttery sugary smell). Indulgent bleeding hearts, pale blossoms, and all that jungle green. I feel like I fell into Neville Goddard at just the right time, honestly, it’s been life-saving. Life is now two chapters: before and after. The same can be said about Italy, which I’ve decided to return to for language school in due time. In anticipation of my twenty-eighth birthday in June I’ve bookmarked Neville Goddard: The Deluxe Reader because I’m going to gift it to myself, along with a wine red Canon Powershot, a leopard print vanity bag, Amore Caffè by Mancera. Little celebrative…….frivolities.
Someone asked me the other day on Tumblr, “How do we save ourselves?” and it got me thinking. I have some time to write about what I’m thinking, so I’m going to answer this question. I like to remember that the English “advice” comes from Latin’s “videre”—to see—so if I give you this advice it’s not a prescription, it’s only my way of looking at things in this moment.
How do we save ourselves? How do I think it works?
By remembering our own creative inheritance.
Works like a charm every time.
What soothes me like no-other when I am down and out is the simple fact that life is creation. This thought is like silky starshine, gentle rainfall, silk & silence. Earlier tonight I was reading Café in Space: A Literary Journal, and in it there was written, “Growth is life. Stasis is a form of death.” I thought about how much energy, new young triumphant energy, can be sourced from becoming cognizant about, and militant towards, our own thoughts, our own patterns of thinking. Thoughts do create this music, these dark harmonies. Watching the rushing ancient streams of thought circling halo-like or cackling around the mind and following them down to the larger, active pools of belief within ourselves.
The pools, let’s assess them objectively then, from a higher viewpoint, from the purer viewpoint, maybe after a few deep rounds of in-out-in-out breathing, asking, “How would I describe myself if I was all that I want to be now? How would I think about what’s happening if I was all that I want to be now?” and sitting with the answer. And not editing the circumstances, not fighting the shadows, but just changing where we are positioned within. Organic, spiritual space. If you are not being all that you’d like to be, if you are still waiting for the world to give you permission to be all that you are, then your pool has been poisoned. The pool, a body of belief. You always know the bottom of the pool by its surface—that splashy red tile turns the mirror into blood. I can’t cover the wet top in Aruba blue paint; I must go down to the tile, the bottom, the belief.
I might lose you completely in saying: You alone are the antidote. Be willing to replenish always all that is self-enriching and blissful. Neglect and dry out any idea that diminishes you, “diminish” meaning it makes you small. You must be your own subtle detective. No one else is here to figure out the mystery of you—it’s delightful when they try but it’s not their debt to pay when the hankering heaviness of not living as you’d like to live starts piling on and on, and your shoulders drop, your voice lowers eternally, your laughter fades, you narrow your once miraculous vision, and you turn out more and more bleak, hopeless, the velvet black losing all of its luster. It all becomes so familiar that you forget that You are not It. Like when Truman Capote wrote, ““It was like the time he'd failed algebra and felt so relieved, so free: failure was definite, a certainty, and there is always peace in certainties.” I don’t want to discredit the fact that life can be marvelously heartbreaking. Circumstances can be so heartbreaking.
No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I've never mastered it. I only know how true it is; that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp
Living small is no longer an option if you’re reading this. Any clenching, waiting, obsessing, doubting—any lowering of yourself, any claiming of an unwanted, subjugated position in relation to what you desire, in relation to what you’re here to experience, create, and live out—release it! Arrivederci. And get closer to what you desire to experience and who you wish to be; step into the arena, demand the fog to clear; lay claim to the fertile lands of yourself and your life. This tiny little blink in which you are here to discern, discover, and express what is YOU. We are usually aware of that inward gnawing that comes on full-force when we’re not living, expressing, being ourselves as ourselves. You might feel at times, when you’re not yourself, like discarded ornamentation. Unknown. Unseen. Unloved. Unheard. You’re not clicking with anything, there is no resonance. Spontaneity has departed. Worry is all over, like a plaster, like mold. Infected, cannibalized.
It is necessary to see with eyes that are truthful and truthful eyes are loving eyes, in the end, even if they are also able to see (and desire the correction of) defects, sabotage, dissatisfaction. All is creation, all is calibration. I love the word calibration. To correct, remedy. I love the word remedy. Try not to forget that dissatisfaction is as directive and delineating as desire is. “By building her world out of pure dreams of fancy, rather than using images supplied by memory, she brought about the fulfillment of her dream.” *
I’ve been feeling this itch, dissatisfied. I have this itch to be adored—coexisting with this guilt about the audacity of this desire to be adored, the desire to be elected as rare and chosen and wanted, to be seen as valuable, indispensable. That guilt is what leads my awareness to the existence of a body of belief. The body is composed of decades-old ligaments, all on a similar wavelength of: I am undeserving, I have to work a million times harder than everyone in the world to be loved, I have to be queen of the world to be important, I have to achieve something spectacular to be chosen, I have to give everything I have to be worthy. See? I am here always calling on myself to remember that I am free and safe to feel how I want to feel in my mind now in this moment without waiting or searching or looking for any external confirmation whatsoever. Like this—I choose my state. Love. I make it within myself. I choose it within myself. I am love, I am wealth, I am opulence, divinity, attractiveness, good humor. I am gentle soul-nourishing soul-strengthening care, I am diligent, I am deserving of good things, and so on. Replace these words however you’d like. But see?
I remain as my reminder. I have to remember all the time: I am loved, I am special, I am brilliant, my life is beautiful, I am blessed. I depart from the momentary evidence of my senses. I renounce what suggests to me the contrary. I surrender to a total litany of these thoughts. An infant in a cradle, I take in the voices. The voice becomes me and the dark circumstances take care of themselves. This is how I have saved myself.
This is a topic that could really go much further. I can’t hit every angle now.
I’m captivated by this idea as the subconscious as the image-pusher! I’ve tested it in a few areas. The photocopy machine; this intelligent faculty that listens, listens, listens to our input (conscious thoughts and beliefs) and pushes out into four-dimensional reality that which we are giving it. Your subconscious is not here to reason with you and it does not fight back.
Militancy and a measure of strictness don’t have to be negative; they are the wands of perfect clarity. I love limitation in an architectural sense, I consider living one’s best life to be a sort of architectural practice. When you’re observing your mental state, what you’re looking at is the brick, mud, sticks, metal, vine, the wild and foraged material that you’re building life with.
It’s helpful to remember that “state” comes from the Latin “status” which we’re familiar with. It’s your rank, your standing, your condition. And in life, in your subjective reality, only you can elect yourself into a state. Only you can claim and enact your status. Are you powerful or powerless? Are you loveable or abominable? Where you place yourself on the hierarchy within will always find resonance in the world beyond—it will be proven to you. I’ve conjured such miserable scenes for myself but here I am, unblemished. I’ve slowly (torturously so, I’m a sedated jungle cat with these things) come into the realization that I am only ever experiencing my life from within my own subjective reality. And everything is only now. There is nothing outside of now. I have always heard this said but I couldn’t really grasp the implication. All there is is now. I choose now to be what I desire to be. I do not need confirmation. Everything is created from now. My subconscious, or God, is hearing my proclamation of what I am now. My I AM is what I receive as experiences in material space-time.
“…we are as artists expressing our innermost passions, fears, dreams, and desires through the essence of a mysterious quantum canvas. But we are the canvas, as well as the images upon the canvas. We are the paints, as well as the brushes. In the Divine Matrix, we are the container within which all things exist, the bridge between the creations of our inner and outer worlds, and the mirror that shows us what we have created.”
― Gregg Braden, The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief
Another detour, sorry, but “subjective” as in “characteristic of being submissive or obedient”—subjective reality is submissive to what then? Our beliefs, I think. Our consciousness. Our attention. Observation is an act of creation. Why is your snow black? Why are your flowers dying? Why is your lover a giant, and yourself a grasshopper? Trace the thought and lovingly eradicate the poison.
I no longer wade into the black waters.
I am winged, crowned. I float like water lilies.
Tonight I was briefly mist, but I let the mist bring me here and I’m thankful!
I cry for the splendorous joy that arrives in my awareness!
I see the web of life, a glimmering light of knowing; such a contrast to the darkness I had thought was all-surrounding. I drive home from work like a green jewel beetle, cozy in my shell. Rain collapses onto the windshield. Headlights are all drawing streaky streams of light over the world. I don’t know where I am while I drive. I move like in a magician’s hypnosis. Belief is hypnosis, I realize: I had been under a spell. The spell of dark childhood, the spell of deficiency, the spell of bad belief. Exiting—a bright pink dawn. Ecstasy. Bliss. Perfection. Not all of the time. Also human experience. I forget and I remember. Life is constant forgetting, remembering. On the road home, we all read each other’s flashes and pauses. It is southern Ontario. Dark sky and apple blossoms lit up by the shark-glare of hunkering streetlights. I am inside of myself remarking: everything in my life is perfect. Even the bad things. Extracting value from within the deep vagueness. I take long periods away, I am in sync with almost imperceptible rhythms. Like phases of moon, at times absorption, and then reflection, emittance…
I am at work typing on the ancient computer. I am in my imagination at the source of all things. Jungles, blackness, ecstasy. I am comforted by my dimensions: I feel no need to bring them out into shared daylight. I don't always need a name in front of you. I am something bigger. I do not need to be known by the world in the same capacity by which I know and recognize myself—in a sense I am my treasure; my knowledge of myself, the way I see the world—it is all refuge, dream, protection. My acceptance is my amulet. “You are so magnetic”—yes, we all are, the heart is a biological magnet. On which wave of this reality do you float and play and swim?
….one catches the elusive flow of images which are the key to his inner reality….
And what pictures are flowing within you?
What self-perceptions have you stuck unwanted, unaware, on the walls of life?
LOVELIST
The Divine Matrix by Gregg Braden. I really enjoyed this book; he’s the first scientist I’ve seen reference Neville Goddard and even though I think his marketing is disastrous (the YouTube SEO is abysmal and charlatan-like), this was a really wonderful read and so soothing.
Most perfect Vedic astrology website ever. Visually immaculate imo and SO IN-DEPTH. On top of astrology, these pages are so good.
Matching Energy: “A few mechanical basics on how and why to attract Other People, other Things, other Experiences, other Life-forms.”
Common Sense vs. Love: “How Adult Survival Skills Can Prevent Happiness.”
Validation: “insist on maintaining awareness of connection.”
Borrowing clothes from my mom! Lol these are her wedges and her leopard print top, I put the outfit on before brunch and then just went out with it on because……wait. I’m into this.
The Law and the Promise by Neville Goddard:
“Man believes that reality resides in the solid objects he sees around him, that it is in this world that the drama of life originates, that events spring suddenly into existence, created moment by moment out of antecedent physical facts. But causation does not lie in the external world of facts. The drama of life originates in the imagination of man. The real act of becoming takes place within man’s imagination and not without.”
The above * excerpt is from this book.
Salmon!!! I have fallen in love with salmon lately and I have to tell you, I use the air fryer and bake for three minutes and then air fry for eight to ten minutes after seasoning with lemon, maple, a splash of tamari, fresh dill and parsley flakes, sea salt, and black pepper. I ate this yesterday. I’m going to have the same thing tomorrow. If you want an easy salad recipe: spring mixed greens, kalamata olives, tomato, avocado, cucumber, sundried tomato, chopped fresh mint and dill, tzatziki. Olive oil/lemon/white vinegar to dress.
Amor Hardcore (album) from Isabella Lovestory. Had this on repeat for all of April. Love love love.
Until we meet again,
beautiful!! im a Rohini moon <3 :) love that website so much, im shocked it doesn't get linked more. music perfect rn
I’m in awe of the wisdom you’ve shared here. thank you!! <333