Regarding my present life status: yesterday I visited the dispensary where I purchased three hundred milligrams of THC, ten of which I consumed in my vehicle immediately thereafter, finding the matter urgent enough to forego the six-minute drive home and double the recreational dosage. While I have experienced an inordinate amount of transition in a twenty-four-month period, I’d have to identify the foundational snafu as not knowing what the fuck I’m doing with my life.
Originally a bold and concerted choice, now in a, “this is fucking stupid I should do something before my savings runs out” stage, a life grounded in self-actualization - a choice to unearth and embrace who I actually am, identify what brings me joy, and employ them to positively impact humanity and provide for my material needs – is a wild kind of escapade. I recommend it for any self-proclaimed adventure seeker, adrenaline junkie or otherwise alarmingly left of center individual. Base jumping? Try telling my mom that I don’t have health insurance and today’s task list consists of writing poetry in the color of blue and telling a stranger she has excess energy in her Muladhara.
Base jumping? Try telling my mom that I don’t have health insurance and today’s task list consists of writing poetry in the color of blue and telling a stranger she has excess energy in her Muladhara.
The catalyst for such deceptively non-toxically positive foolishness (the culprit if you’re nasty) is meditation. Initially sought for empirically chronicled, physiological benefits, meditation brought me into alignment with something I call my “Inside Voice”. It has infinite answers and reminds me that life itself is an outlandish experiment to be savored and slurped until my belly is full – and then to go back for seconds. She is my hype women, guru, objective adviser and ride or die, wrapped in visions, voices and veracious deposits of wisdom. Less poetically, she’s a straight up treasure map for my optimal life. When I sit quietly, she speaks. When I fail to sit quietly for any prolonged period of time, she speaks at the greatest of inopportune moments. Therefore, I sit quietly pretty fucking often. Intriguingly, she doesn’t mind how often I say the word fuck which is not a habit I had imagined a guru would embrace.
Three days following that day I ate all the cannabis, I had decided to quit life, get a regular job that paid actual currency and tell my mom that the subject of me no longer required omission from Facebook family updates. The day after that, my Inside Voice kicked into Italian nonna mode. With little coddling and no conflation, she spoke.
“Your life purpose is of the utmost importance. Pursue it with diligence and your material needs will be met.”
Phrases and words like, “use your creative talents”, “make meditations”, “philosophy”, and “writing” pushed their way forward; I saw them in my third eye, heard them with my third ear, immersed myself in the joy they generated.
WHY DOES SHE DO THIS TO ME? I didn’t want that to be the answer. I wanted a 401k and a bunch of emails that said things like, “Did you read my last email?”, and, “I wanted to circle back with you on those numbers”. Monkey mind, ego, and apprehension surfaced. How will I make money? How much longer will this take? Everyone will call me a failure, irresponsible, nonsensical...lost. Maybe I am lost. Maybe there is no Inside Voice and I should learn to make a Flat White for suburban women named Melissa who go by Mo and want their Starbucks at exactly 156 degrees.
“These versus are the vessels of your destiny.”
And that brings us to now; remembering a recent poem, written in flow and ending with the line, “These versus are the vessels of your destiny.” Declaring this space, SMPLE, my creative laboratory. Incubating an artists’ collective, side hustle structure. Deciding to write things; poetry, articles, rambling manifestos about parking lots and maternal disappointments. Endeavoring to create things; meditations mixed with music laid over energy revitalizing frequencies, short bits of Inside Voice wisdom swirled with affirmations wrapped in chakra activating visual art?? Maybe they’ll be NFT’s. Maybe they won’t. Maybe it’s not as complicated as I’m making it out to be. Maybe base jumping won’t be that bad. I don’t really know yet. Today though, I’m all in on my Inside Voice; partly because sharing the journey may be part of whatever this is, partly because writing is one of the limited ways I can make sense of anything, and partly because my Inside Voice has never been wrong, even when her advice is hard to swallow so I swallow cannabis instead.
Update, my Inside Voice just advised that it might not be time for the artists collaborative yet. “There are more pieces to the puzzle”.
She’s a real cunt, sometimes.
