Mushy Like Mash Potatoes

Learning to love my way through life
Thinking only takes you so far
Breathing into my heart
Breaking the bricks, breath by breath.

Being a blob, underrated
Puddles
Tears
Floods
Love

Mushy like mashed potatoes
I’m good with that.
Are you?

Piece by Roxy Paine - Scumak - > AI Edited

Temporary

I woke up at 9:00 a.m. and did something a little different. Despite my heart's uneasiness—the urge that drives me to go, go, go and do, do, do to distract myself—I went to the washroom, brushed my teeth, and then went back to bed to continue reading The Beautiful Struggle. I am living and feeling two lives at once: the past of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the present of mine, which, for a moment, intensifies this feeling in my heart. Is this feeling anxiety, or is it something else?

I’m still learning to identify and name the swirls inside my heart. I suspect that each swirl is unique, each with its own identity and name. But my emotional vocabulary is limited to one word: anxiety. Maybe anxiety is a collection of emotions that add up to this name? Maybe. One thing I’ve learned over the past couple of years from surfing and the ocean is that no wave waves forever. Each wave has a beginning and an end. Some waves you ride, others you let pass, and some waves will knock you off your board into nature’s washing machine, where you can only pray to come out on the other side in one piece.

I feel like that in this moment.

The other side is yet to come. I’ll be swirling around in this for the next few weeks or maybe even months. But I have learned to come out of these moments a better "surfer" of this body of water called life.

I am the moon, and my life is the ocean. I am both the cause and recipient of these waves. Whoever and whatever I am, I know that this moment—however much it may feel overextended and seem like infinity—is, like all others.

Temporary.

It can only last forever if I try to control the vibration of the pebble I skipped across the still lake. It, too, will settle but will never be the same again. When it settles, all will be anew, inside and outside.

It’s only been an hour. It feels like hours have passed. I got a lot done: laundry, dishes, brunch, a little maintenance of my place, and of course, some writing. No music, no media, just the sounds of domestic instruments and the hum of vehicles outside my window. This is my nature at the moment. Not the sounds of insects and birds in the Amazon, or the ocean waves of the Pacific and Atlantic, or the markets in Spain, Morocco, and Nepal. In this moment, my nature is surrounded by industrial sounds—the nuts and bolts of the Western world.

I would be lying to myself if I said Ta-Nehisi Coates has not inspired me to move closer to my dream of being a full-time writer in the months to come. This is my dream. To travel and write with a partner by my side. This is my dream. Like Paulo Coelho and Haruki Murakami, Ta-Nehisi Coates is unlocking and activating new parts of me at a cellular level, one sentence at a time. His words, his story, are a key to the tucked-away and locked-up memories in my internal basement. What a gift. I’ve been searching and waiting for this over the last few months, maybe even years.

Inspiration.

We all need it from time to time. At least I do. I realize that I’m fortunate and lucky to have come across this angelic being who exported this book, The Beautiful Struggle, into my consciousness. I’m surprised that despite all his interviews promoting his new book The Message over the last couple of weeks, including the one on CBS, people still haven’t heard about him. This is mind-blowing to me, and it’s also a reminder of why it’s important for me to keep sharing my work, my writing, and my experiences. Why? Because I still carry this thought that the wisdom I’ve cultivated over my 47 years is of little to no value to the outside world because it’s old news. This thought is subtler now compared to the past, but it still likes to visit unannounced from time to time.

Everyone of color, particularly Black and brown people, should at least know his name, even if they don’t read his work. His interviews are powerful and inspiring. His ability to do what others in the soup haven’t—open up a platform for the voices of the suppressed and expose the hypocrisy and naivete of the American public—is remarkable. Yes, there are others speaking out, but Ta-Nehisi Coates seems to have broken down new barriers and reignited the flame of discussion for the Palestinian people.

Illusion? Perhaps.

Nonetheless, we truly cannot stop speaking about it. This is not just a fight for the Palestinians; this is a fight for the soul of humanity and the soul of our mother. I don’t know when we’ll come out the other side, when this washing machine cycle will end, but I know there is another side. Karma is brewing, and that bitch is going to cum hard. It seems like an eternity on our clocks, but in the time frame of the divine, it’s right on time.

Faith and a deep knowing keep my hopes alive. I see beyond to the other side, and I see a sunshine and the rays of a new sun.

Sabur. Sabur, Sabur.

How Long Has it Been?

Staying small. Thinking small. Caught up in mundane thoughts.

Are you staying in your own shadow? Still don’t want to be seen? Still want to fly under the radar? What would it feel like to live above it?

Is there a connection between the freeze-and-flight response in the search for love and the hesitation in sharing your work? Do both require the same flavour of vulnerability and openness?

Why do I freeze when people see me? When they show genuine love for my work and way of being?

I recoil, uncertain.

Who benefits from staying small? From thinking small? From being caught up in mundane thoughts? What are these mundane thoughts?

Staying in the shadow is tempting; it’s the home of the exiled. But what parts have been exiled? What parts are yearning to rise to the surface, to sip the air of wind, to feel the heat of the sun and the light of the moon?

How long has it been?

It feels like lifetimes.

Her Colours

She expresses herself in so many ways, but it’s her non-verbal communication that truly captures me. Her eyes, her smile, and her energy embrace me in such a way that I can’t help but go in for a big hug. She supports me with just a single glance. She’s had my back since day one.

As I write down why I came here—why I spent all this money, travelled thousands of miles to this beautiful land, to stand in a room full of strangers, surrounded by glass walls with views of beauty, trees, sunset, and the sound of birds—I realize there was only one reason. When I wrote it on the large blank white page on the wall, I scribbled as small and faintly as I could, so no one would see, not even me. It wasn’t a conscious choice; I didn’t notice what I’d done until I turned around to look at the other thirty-five people. From halfway across the room, I could read what they wrote, but my own writing? Barely legible.

Costa Rica - Pura Vida Retreat Centre - Goodlife Project Immersion Program 2014

It was a tiny, faint green scribble. I didn’t want any of these strangers to know why I was there. How profound it was to see what my deep internal self had revealed. I’d always felt it, but seeing it written down in this way was like a slap in the face—like someone throwing a bucket of cold water over me. A wake-up call.

I let out a nervous laugh and smiled, the way I always do when I feel uncomfortable. I looked to my left, and there she was, standing beside me, looking up with those big blue eyes, her beautiful head of red curls glowing with perfection, and a beaming smile that said, "I support you. I’ve got you."

That was the moment my journey into the next phase of my life began—a journey where I would finally express my own colours fully and start supporting others the way she supported me.

Crossroads

I feel something stuck inside of me, an uneasiness in my stomach. I'm not sure if it's mine, hers, or both. She’s going back today. It’s one thing to know what we want and develop courage outside the environment where challenges exist, but it’s another to go back into that environment—into the trenches—and execute the plan, the change we desire. Disconnecting is hard because hearts are broken, and relationships are impacted. That’s why so few do it. We don’t want to get uncomfortable, and we don’t want to hurt others. It’s so fucking hard.

We’re raised a certain way, through the lens of others for most of our lives. When we can no longer live with that queasy, uneasy feeling, we come to a crossroads. Do we maintain the status quo for the sake of others, or do we destroy everything to save ourselves? To reach out and pull ourselves out of the quicksand before it completely engulfs us to the point of no return. What we don’t realize is that if we don’t save ourselves in this lifetime, the next one will be a rerun of the one that preceded it.

So, would you want to live the life you’re living today—the life of suppressing yourself—if you knew that the next life would be exactly the same unless you reach out that hand and rescue yourself?

Hell, to me, is repeating a life lived unauthentically, living for others at the sacrifice of our own self. The biggest misconception is that focusing on the self is selfish, that we should help others and place their needs above our own. But our capacity to love and help others is limited by our capacity to love and help ourselves. We can’t fill others' tanks while ours is on empty.

I feel better after getting this out. I think I’ll type it to her. It will be the last journal entry she receives before her flight. Is it possible that I already love her? Is it possible that all these random little moments connected us? If someone is guiding and helping me, thank you. Thank you for the guidance, for the little nudge in the right direction. So many mini crossroads, and fortunately, I was encouraged to flow in the direction of this woman who captures my heart.