Words for someone new (7.31.22)

This is about redemption – reinvention.

About a week ago, I had a devastating career related occurrence that shook me deeply. I will say that did seem that it was being foreshadowed. I remember asking the universe for an earth-shattering change – but that can be a dangerous game. You have to be prepared for whatever that could entail, including the negative consequences. Naturally, that's what happened. It's the kind of thing that happens where it becomes so intense and encapsulating that you wonder in the moment if you'll ever legitimately recover. The better way to put it is that you are changed forever after the fact. You can know for certain that you will never be the same again.

I don't know if this is about hypomania, a knee-jerk pain mitigation, or the ripple effect puncturing my baseline strength level that I'm usually able to keep intact through hardship. Once in a while, when it shatters, it's like a bare hatchling screaming in to the blinding sunlight. Every musical idea is a revelation, and I have at least 15 of them in the span of eight hours. My business ideas, my melding of visual art exhibition – despite the fact that I have never been much of a skilled visual artist – with teaching the compositional process through phrase mapping in the way the mind cannot retrieve easily when rummaging through its countless files, my concept albums down the line with instrumentations I have no experience doing whatsoever, my dream literary projects about artist lives and the way they infiltrate my own, selling everything in my apartment and moving because my environment is all of a sudden suffocating me – it all spilled out in some giant messy coagulation. I don't know if its a good sign, a bad sign, or both. But to quote the psychological phenomenon of forward growth, something is moving. An undeniable shift.

I kept seeing the numbers 1, 5, and 7 over and over again. I'm not normally a superstitious person, but right when I was thinking about how I thought it was probably meaningless, my phone time read 7:51. Later that same night, I saw 11:57pm. And as I started to finish this piece, I opened my computer to see 1:57pm. Rather than trying to interpret some fully fledged significance from that series of numbers – you will find your soulmate soon! You will live to be 100! You will find financial abundance in the near future! - there is something to simply be said about precise timing. Astrocartography, which I recently discovered (and granted, is fascinating) can be treated the same way. It's not about who you're destined to fall in love with depending on who falls on a certain intersection with your globally charted Venus line at birth, or what part of your midheaven line passing over Alaska and the Pacific Ocean most strongly indicates notions of power or reputation. We frankly have no real basis to assign personality traits or virtues to certain lines, planets, or stars. But what occurred at the right time over what parts of the earth in perfect precision with your birth, where the stars were when you were formed – that part is real. There is something to be said about the natural settling of time and what happens when we surrender to where it falls – or doesn't fall. The curse is to expect that it will yield something positive or well deserved, when really it is the kind of surrender like the flip of a coin.

We always like to act like we can crack the solution to be prepared for anything. Maybe a handful of Shaolin monks can tap in to this, since it's their life incentive to become egoless and ever present with every turn of the world. But I don't think anybody really has it figured out. We don't move forward because we are okay – we move forward because we have to – and somehow, the past slowly dies out. This is what I mean when I talk about reinvention. Time is our tool, and timing is our savior. Our trust in that is the heart of optimism. So in my encapsulating despair, chaos, flurry of ideas and sleepless nights, scrambling for answers – namely, why is this happening to me? - I put it on the back burner until it is revealed by time. And so we wait, far longer than is comfortable, for the next coin flip, the next encounter, the newly discovered form of spiritual relief, all in its precise chronology. It's no doubt that it hurts. That part doesn't go away. But neither does the reinvention that follows. They chase each other day in and day out. It is the mere fabric of our lives.

For those who suffer alone, hugging your knees close to your chest as if to rest in your own arms and ask yourself for forgiveness.

For those who left their job to a world of question marks, the highly courageous but less than redeeming feat.

For those who loved so hard it broke them, leaving them purple, black, and blue, scrambling in to the night as if to outrun the present.

For those who meet somebody new in their life for once that strikes up the ever speeding heart and sends electricity amplified through your toes, right when you have forgotten the feeling ever existed. Until this very moment you intersected in time, given all that preceded, and the weight of the potential to become magic.

Through god we are born anew – and in other iterations, through the other side of the emotional turmoil, the painstaking regret we have to learn to surrender to the ever retreating past, to the next phase, to the long awaited redemption, the next checkpoint of resolve, the warmth rising in your chest in a long cold vestibule.

These are the words for someone new. Whether it is you or someone who will grace your life as if to fit right in the palm of your hand - hold it with the fascination of a newborn child, look in to your eyes and see god. Find the mirror and listen for it to speak to you.