Category: Blog

EMBODIMENT

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1.

I don’t want to be anywhere other than in this body right now. In every ache and tense muscle. In every uncomfortable step. In every fluid movement guided by a melody somebody was kind enough to create. I want to dance in ever expanding circles. Slow and sensual. Wild animal like. Unrestrained. Unlearning each day these strange restrictions we placed on physical movement. Unlearning inhibitions. Unlearning the last ties to shame for having a body at all.

What an incredible miracle to have this precious flesh to move around in. These beautiful bones linked to one another so precisely and with such care. The tenderness of tendons and ligaments holding everything in place just so. The sweet regeneration of cells. How much this body sustains and facilitates. How much this body loves me.

Thank you feet, thank you knees, thank you thighs and hips and belly, thank you vulva, thank you red organic organs, thank you heart, thank you arms and fingers, thank you spine, thank you neck and skull and brain, thank you skin and hair and nails, thank you nose and ears and eyes and tongue, thank you voice, thank you gravity, thank you space. I am none of these things. I am in lifelong relationship with all of these things. How do I care for this body as much as this body cares for me?

And see, then, how the notion of body expands, in wider and wider circles, to encompass all matter within and all around. I want to embrace embodiment with such enthusiasm I re-member myself as every living thing. And so, to live, completely.

2.

I am a self-facing performance
Looking in on an amalgamation of patterns
Singularity and multitude depending on the way the camera focuses

I want to meet you, but get caught in my own way sometimes
My arms reaching while my eyes look swiftly over your shoulder
I notice how often we hug each other (closeness)
And then upon moving out of the embrace we avoid each other’s gaze (distance)
But I want to look you in the eye as we separate
Maybe something about two bodies disentangling is too painful to acknowledge
The fundamental grief of humanness is that we cannot merge our-selves completely
(Oh, we try, we try, it’s nice, but
You come, and go
And I have to go to the bathroom)
I will never know you wholly
I can just revere your holiness

In solitude I deep-dive easily into metaphysical overview
It’s peaceful there and it’s resolved like God
Cradling the whole thing
Except
That work is already done
It’s already been completed

Now it’s about meeting
And being met
Now it’s how my human heart sets itself ablaze in the profound mystery of the Other
Reconciliation of difference
A balancing between physicality and Spirit
Presence and absence
Love and the false void of human suffering
(Real or not real; it matters very little in the realm of experience)

I am an open book with some pages still stuck together from bad weather over time
(Humid, cold fucking cellars and poor maintenance)
I will tell you my story and you may tell me your story
And I will close my eyes to see your life move like a picture reel in front of me
And this is how we tie our separated threads
Together

I Love You
It’s the bravest thing I have to offer
A steady safe plateau floating in a vast particle sky
A pliable Universe in every possible direction
Raise the sails, unanchor your plans
This – is going to be fun

One Hand Washes The Other

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“One hand washes the other,” someone said to me years ago when I bought an old car from him for less than it was worth but all I could afford. It’s been a phrase I’ve thought about a lot. It’s sometimes distorted in superficiality: Quid pro quo. “We strike a deal that benefits us both”. But it always sounded much more profound to me than a smart arrangement to gain some profit. It sounded to me like a fundamental truth about life itself.

I am not anyone without the other. We witness and help each other grow. A collaborative effort. A co-operation. We are all elements of life unfolding. Of creation itself. And thus, we are interconnected.

In Buddhism this principle is also called “interdependent arising” – everything exists because of everything else. A giant web of InterBeing. Oneness.

I have been supported and guided and encouraged by others. I have teachers and mentors. I am alive and well only because of other people. The internal and external are intertwined like that. They cannot be separated.

“One hand washes the other.” With that phrase in mind I started working on a degree program in Integrative Counseling last year. What can I do to be of service? What is most needed in the world right now that I can offer?

I believe what is most needed in the human experience right now is conscious connection. To ourselves, each other, our planet, our purpose. As an Integrative Coach and Counselor in training, that is a process I can witness and support for other people. I can’t do the work for anyone; the journey towards connection to Self is a deeply personal one, but I can be present for it. As others were present for me when I needed that.

Ram Dass once said: “All you can do for another person is be an environment in which if they wanted to come up for air, they could”.

When I first read those words my heart started glowing; that is what pure love sounds like. It is also the essence of any form of counseling to me. A place to come up for air, to remember yourself, to allow for things to shift if they need to shift.

It is my ongoing responsibility to clear up my environment to be able to welcome others for a cup of oxygen if they so choose. Imagine if everyone would work towards that goal? What would our world look like? I joyfully uphold and unfold that vision into reality.

For more information about my work as an integrative coach check out the page on Clarity Sessions. If you have questions, feel free to reach out through this contact form.

Collective Grief Work

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If we do not grieve, as human beings, our Soul dies.
If we do not express our fury, it metastasizes.
If we do not rage against injustice, injustice will eat us alive, one by one.

There are different types of anger. James Baldwin (one of the most visionary writers in U.S.-American history) distinguished between 2 types of anger: The anger that stems from fear and the anger that rises up from a person in the face of oppression and injustice.

We have to learn to recognize the difference. Within ourselves and in other people. You can feel the difference if you pay attention.

A Black woman yelling that Black Lives Matter holds a different anger than a white man yelling at protesters that they should be arrested. The first is a righteous, justified, holy response to oppression. It is real. The second is an expression of fear: the fear of losing control, or power; the fear of disruption of the status quo. It’s “anger” as a placeholder for something else.

James Baldwin said: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain”.

That pain – underneath it all. If we do not address that pain, if we repress it in an attempt not to feel it, our Soul dies. Once our Soul is numb and deadened, we are capable of so much violence. As individuals and as a collective.

Look at the state of our Earth, our societies. How much harm we cause each other and our planet. One of the reasons this destruction is possible is because we have – for generations upon generations – refused to deal with pain. It is like we have repressed grieving for so long we barely even know where to begin.

The reluctance or refusal to feel pain means to accept that this pain will be projected onto others instead. This is a natural law. We can’t escape this. Pain travels along in subtle or unsubtle ripples of violence if we do not scoop it up and address it, unfold it, sit with it, feel it. In family systems, social inequality, addiction, oppression, genocide or ecocide: It will boil up somewhere – and it will do harm. Everything is connected like that.

Here, my (only) hope for our world is this: May we grieve. Feel the discomfort. Feel the unbelievable sorrow of all the harm we have done to others and the harm that was done to us. It’s a prerequisite for accessing true joy or peace. We have to go through it.

I am the descendant of oppressors and the oppressed. Both of those lineages carry so much pain. It is messy and complex. May I feel it and move through it to release it. May I live unafraid of discomfort.

This is a matter of accountability. Maturity. Care. And ultimately: A matter of Liberation. For everyone.

Paradise Is Here

Yvet Youssef

I bow down and kiss the ground in gratitude. Searching for something? Look around you. Touch the soil. Gently place your hand on the bark of a tree and close your eyes. Feel the caress of the breeze on your skin. Listen for the melodies rising from the Earth. We get to live here for a while. Does that not blow your mind?

How we have managed to live lifetimes of bondage in rigid social contracts of disconnection remains a mystery to me.

No more. I am done. I am done struggling for a false sense of belonging to a system I distrust. If it makes me recoil there’s something wrong with it. If it makes me expand it’s the right path. That’s my compass. And I will not settle for anything less to make others feel more “comfortable” – undisturbed in normalized states of perpetual covert depression.

Because Paradise is here. It’s all around us. So is hell; it is created in the human mind and projected into material reality under the watchful gaze of human suffering seeking to multiply itself. I have felt myself at times drowning in it. But if the trees can still bear fruit, if the seeds can still grow, if the desert can still produce flowers; so will I.

[This writing first appeared on my Instagram account (@yvet_youssef) in November of 2018. Sometimes I need to remind myself.]

So IL

Yvet Youssef

The open space
The sun-hours
The rock formations
Driving with The War On Drugs blasting from a crappy car stereo on an empty highway
The awe-inspiring storms
The lightning bugs
The jukeboxes in dive bars
The rawness of everything

I lived in the United States for most of my adult life. It feels so far away these days. Dissociative recollection. Like a strange dream. I can’t follow any news about it anymore because it feels so out of my hands. Out of my hands now. I say: “God bless America” out loud and really mean it, because boyohboy could it use some blessings. It’s out of my hands on so many levels.

Still, everyday, a handful of memories place me right back in Shawnee National Forest in golden sunlight, or on the edges of Cedar Lake, Highway 51 to a friend’s house, Longbranch coffeeshop and a quick trip to Goodwill to get some outrageous $2 sweater I might not ever wear, the purple trailer, boys running on the back porch, the corner of that old couch with a cat purring on my legs. Out of my hands but still woven through the pronunciation of every word I speak, the ways in which I see the world, how I smile at strangers.

And it’s funny, for it is such a difficult country to live in. Social conditions are so harsh, cruel sometimes. And yet, I became so much softer there. Every seed of sweetness in me grew sprouts while I lived on that land. Not because of it, maybe, but through it, perhaps, somehow, inextricably together. Those seeds continue to grow; I will make sure they keep on growing.

And I say: “Y’all Folks take real good care of yourselves out there now, ya hear me?” And I hope you hear me. And I hope you do.

A Dark Night, A Dawning

Yvet Youssef

Once, in a tense room, palpable dark energy, gloom and suffering surrounding us. Turmoil like a storm that just refused to pass. A room I had made for rest and sweetness, suddenly so heavy.

And in that unbearable weight I looked around me in disbelief. Looked at a person I loved more than I had ever loved anyone as the whirlwind of chaos seemed to spring from the ground beneath his feet. And the only words that I could speak: “This is not my frequency. This isn’t mine. This is not my frequency.”

He told me to leave. And at a certain point you just have to listen even if it’s not making any sense. At a certain point you just have to believe the frequency.

I took a long path down to the bottom of everything. I took my time. And all the way down there, what had appeared to be a solid impermeable ending turned out to be liquid. I stuck my hand through like they do at strange portals in sci-fi movies, baffled. On the other side was an open space, a receptacle of Everything that’s ever been and ever will be, and it was all Love. Just Love. So I began laughing through the tears. There isn’t anything to fear here.

That relief, like a secret, found in the depths of pain; it has forever changed me. You have to let your heart break first. You have to be willing to lose everything. Surrender to it. As the Sufi mystics say: You have to burn down your house, chop off your head, lose your mind. And then: Freedom. And there: Love. One has to chuckle at the simplicity of it all, and how torturous the path towards it can be.

I create from my experience. I take the tuning forks to my heart until I reach a clarity. This is my work. My only real work: To eradicate all barriers that prevent me from experiencing and expressing Love. It’s an ongoing journey. I don’t delude myself with thoughts about arriving somewhere. That’s not the point right now. My objective is growth. Evolution. That’s the frequency I want to harmonize with. To move. To keep my heart wide open and dance with whatever arises.

There is healing to be found in this world. I just have to release the palms of my hands from the tight grips of control to be able to receive it. There isn’t anything to fear here. Breathe easy for a moment. This moment. Plant a flag here. Mark it with highlighter and neon post-its and fairy lights. Adorn it with flower and song. Remember this.

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Speaking Words of Wisdom Without Having to Die First

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We tend to gobble up wisdom from dead 13th century poets. From deceased men we call philosophers whose work is nestled safely in the stone strata of our human history. We celebrate the wise sages who can no longer speak back. We like our wisdom antiquated, with a layer of dust that we can feel proud to wipe away before somebody else did. “Look what I found; a profound word, it’s so old!”

But wisdom, spoken from living mouths, feminine, passionate, creative, poetic, loud and confident, sensual and vital, alive – iiieeekkkkk oooh nononono… suddenly wise words evoke staggering, heals in sand, stubborn arms crossed, scorn, ridicule and judgement.

“Don’t you think you are a little arrogant for saying that?”
“You sound so sure of yourself, you think you’re all that?”
“I don’t like it when people speak like they know some sort of truth.”
“It’s not that you are wrong, it’s just that you think you are right that’s problematic.”
“Ugh, you sound so teacherly, it’s really annoying.”
“I am just so allergic to those vague spiritual terms.”

And so we float around in pools of ad hominem fallacies. The grand orchestra of silencing the living, so that they refrain from shining too brightly, too confidently, too much empowered. “Nobody shall at any point here think they have something of real value to add to the conversation,” as we raise our hands and take an oath of mediocre superficiality for the sake of all things mundane and undisturbed.

I suppose a dead poet’s words of wisdom have transcended the chains of personality, of character flaw; their words now live on their own in a timeless vacuum of abstracted knowledge. But, they arose in a living human, a real person just like you and me. Not a saint, not an exclusive-collector’s-item-edition of the human form, not a special rarity: A real person. A poet is a living being. A mystic is a living being. A philosopher is a living being. They are not separate from us.

Wisdom is not something anyone can own. It is something we can choose to tap into, to cultivate a relationship with, to grow towards. What name do you want to give it? Awareness, Consciousness, Presence, Loving-Kindness, Divinity, Spirit, Unconditional Love? Whatever word you want to use, it is never dispensed for the sake of personal gain… not if it’s true wisdom (because, again, nobody owns it!) That is not to say that people cannot earn a living from sharing wisdom, or that all philosophers, witches, sages, truth-tellers and mystics should live in destitute poverty in order to be taken seriously. Nah, that’s an old-school myth rooted in a paradigm of scarcity and lack. It’s time to move on.

The intention of sharing wisdom is always loving. Have teachers and gurus abused their power? Yes. Remove them from their pedestals. Obliterate hierarchies with a spirit of Radical Equality. That means you do not place anyone above or below you; it means you do not place yourself above or below anyone. That’s not to say we cannot point out when shit is messed up. Compassion is not coddling or infantilizing. It just means we recognize and respect the inherent worth of life in all its forms. Learn what you can from those who offer their teachings to you. Don’t dwell for too long in resentment around the wrongdoings perpetrated by human suffering. Inquire into the nature of that suffering, look it in the eye, see where it is coming from. Recognize that same pain within you so that you can make the choice not to pass it unwittingly along to others. The most honorable job in the world and, I believe, our greatest responsibility.

Understand that the age of esoteric exclusivity is over. You don’t need some sort of membership to an elusive secret society shrouded in mysterious shadows to know a thing or two about the grand scheme of things. No. The field of mystic knowledge is wide and open, and anyone can at all times choose to walk around there to touch its vibrant dancing grasses. We all have access to wisdom. It’s the very same source those deceased mystics and poets tapped from: A collective consciousness, a Universal Truth, simple, clear, all-encompassing: Love. That’s it. Do blockages to this Love exist within us? Yes. Do we sometimes stubbornly refuse to feel it? Oh, hell yes. Do we still have access to it if we are willing to open the window a little bit? Absolutely.

The reason why these living mouths, these luscious humans, these blood-pumping-sweet-hearts would even dare to speak words of wisdom, is to further the human cause. It’s for the sake of Evolution. It’s for the sake of Everything and Everyone. We need each other to grow and heal and evolve. That’s what I know I came here to do. And I want your heart-glowing-sparkling-wisdom, sweet one. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Let us infuse each other’s wise words, weave ourselves into the fabric of our shared existence. So we can Love each other and ourselves as fully and deeply as we can muster in courageous tenderness. I am not asking for much; just everything you are, just your soul-fire, just your reasons for Being. Thank you very much.

Love and Shadow Work

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“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

– James Baldwin

If I love you, I don’t want you to be stuck, I want you to grow. If I love you, I don’t want to get stuck, I want to grow with you, for you, for all of us. To me the very purpose of being in a relationship is to grow with someone. I have no interest in tranquility if it is housed on a gurgling cesspool of unconscious dysfunctional behavioral patterns. Such tranquility is a farce, it is not real, it is not peaceful. Peace can only ever arise from making conscious that which hides in the shadows of our being. Carl G. Jung referred to this as shadow work. And it is precisely in (conscious, self-reflective) partnership with another person that such work is particularly feasible. Why? Because when I see you – truly see you – day in day out, and if I am the slightest bit aware, those shadows of yours are going to announce themselves to me sooner or later. We all have them. In this inevitable process I will feel those shadows hurled at me with sharp clarity, at which point I can say: “Hey, you! Look at this. Here’s something to dig into because it hurts me and others”. And you, dear one, can do the same for me: “Your behavior is painful to me, let’s address what is happening here”.

And guess what happens through this type of relational labor? Peace happens. Peace happens within the awareness of the chaos. Peace happens within the acknowledgment of the pain. The moment we are conscious of our destructive and dysfunctional behavior, is the moment we can heal it, is the moment we can breathe a sigh of relief. That is what it means to me to be in a loving relationship; to trust someone to respectfully call out my bullshit because that person cares about me enough to see me do better. If we can lovingly do that for each other, Love will continue to grow, intimacy will continue to deepen, life will expand in richness and in meaning. To Love you is to see you and to support you in becoming the best possible version of yourself, which in turn helps me become the best possible version of myself. Such Love is evolutionarily, reciprocal, and regenerative.

Unfortunately, we are collectively pretty terrified of being uncomfortable. And if one thing can be said about shadow work: It is ridiculously uncomfortable. However, dismissing discomfort is much like closing the curtains to life. We have been duped by the sugary platitude of “Happily Ever After” to buy into the false idea that relationships are there to make us happy. As if it’s even possible to affix a transitory emotional state to a lifetime of perpetual changes. Philosophically we can likely agree that it is questionable whether it’s even possible to gain happiness through external acquisition. There is surely a correlation between wellbeing and having our basic human needs met, but there is a limit to how much joy can be derived from external goods and services. If happiness is an inside job, it should come to no surprise your new fling isn’t gonna give it to you. Yet in the realm of relationship we seem so addicted to this infantile storyline: “Godspeed ye innocent lovebirds carried into the distance on a sparkling carriage just smiling happily and chugging along ad infinitum towards an elusive horizon! Your coupling grants you entrance to the ranks of well-adjusted extras in a lifelong Colgate commercial!” Not only does it sound boring AF, it’s delusional as all hell. This is not fucking Pleasant Ville, you’ve got a life to live, buddy.

We are humans, we die, we lose loved ones, we meet sickness, misfortune, we grieve, we fail, we fall apart, we are wrong sometimes. Sometimes we are wrong a lot. Try to smile through that. Happy yet? What’s that? You are telling me you can’t sustain that radiant smile of yours for all of eternity? Is the denial starting to hurt? Is it beginning to feel weird? You see, I am not in this life to witness a staged performance of perpetual happiness. To be clear, I have nothing against ‘happy’ as an experience. Bless ‘happy’. I just believe we have been misguided to measure our success in life, as well as our sense of worth, on how long we can sustain a state of happiness. But happiness is not an achievement you lock into for life, it is a gift, and it arrives on our doorstep naturally when we align with our essence and learn against all odds to love ourselves fiercely and deeply. The only way we can love ourselves deeply is through a systematic dismantling of all of the places where we are in denial and full of shit. And yes, indeed, we can lovingly see each other through such a process*.

So, in lieu of a feigned smile, please give me your pain, your struggles, and your mistakes. Let’s work through the reality, the grit, the rawness, the really disturbing shadow of it all. Allow me to love you entirely and let’s be real about all the places where we have more work to do. Let’s dance through the truth of our humanness together. Let’s marvel at the messes we’ve made. Let’s shake our heads really hard. Let’s sit for a moment in how much it hurts. Breathe through it. That’s where freedom and laughter simply come to greet us on their own accord. It is such a glorious relief to surrender to the realness of it all. I am in this life for the remarkable joy of “Evolving Ever After,” instead.

* For the record, I am speaking from a perspective of personal relationships here, but this very same process holds true for our collective struggles as well. From the micro to the macro – everything is connected. James Baldwin has written extensively on the role of truth-telling in relation to racism and other injustices in our societies. True patriotism – the love for a country – thus resides in the people who dare to shine light on the horrible shadows of our nations, because only through such labor can we even start to imagine peace. Healing can only begin when we uncover the festering wounds of our collective past and present and start scooping the puss out. No, it isn’t pretty, but it is what Love does when it cares about something.

Antifascist Clubbing

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Going out in Berlin with borderline bronchitis while surprise bleeding a week off schedule, my dear friend and I stand in line to enter a club at 2 in the morning. I am generally not one for ignoring my body’s needs, but right about now I am pissed off at my perpetually failing immune system this winter, and my desire to go dancing in Berlin overrules this coughing, aching body. Just this once, just this twice, just this week, OK? I have never waited in line for a club before out of principle, but here we are. It is freezing outside, with that humidity that cuts through your bones. Berlin is gritty. We talk to two guys in front of us while figuring out what we are actually standing in line for. Who is playing and what are they playing? We SoundCloud through the list of DJs on a smartphone and decide it seems danceable enough for our taste and good enough to warrant our waiting in the freezing cold, for now. We will see how long this lasts.

We manage to reach the front of the line where a thin guy in a black hat starts speaking to us in German. I stare at him somewhat amused at how such a slightly built character can have such an intimidating presence. When it becomes clear he wants me to respond to something I say: “Sorry, my German is not good enough for this”. He goes: “Alright, in English then: We are a leftist club…” “Oh!” I interrupt “thát is why that guy is on the wall” pointing to a graffiti stencil of Karl Marx next to us. “Yes” he responds firmly, looking me directly in the eye: “du you like him?”
“I do, actually!” I say with an enthusiasm that is clearly out of place and does not fit the vibe of the location. More aloof, Yvet, this is fucking serious, alright? The guy continues to explain the politics of the club we are about to enter: “no homophobia, no sexism, no racism. Are you OK with these terms?”
“Absolutely.”

Something in me actually quite appreciates these politics as door-policy. All performance aside, these should be the conditions for entering all public spaces. Just stating these terms with clarity at the entrance grants a feeling of safety, like an insurance, and that, I notice, feels remarkably welcoming to me.

We are allowed to walk to the next station two people at a time. Even though the two guys we were talking to technically stood in line before us they let us enter first as my friend joyfully exclaims: “ladies first!” Which she immediately half-jokingly, half-seriously withdraws: “or, maybe not, I don’t know if they allow that here…?” We arrive at the next station, right hand on an imagined Communist Manifesto, where our bags are searched and our phones get stickers over the cameras and we are told we can’t take photos inside the club. Onward to station three, the cash register. This is where the Marxist Idealism ends and good old capitalism requests €15 a person to be able to enter the club. I am not smart-assed enough in this moment to ask whether there is a sliding fee for low-income guests or if we are going to keep our leftist radicalism just slightly hovering over class issues for the sake of making a profit?

Anyway, when we are finally inside the typically old and dark and grungy smoked out rooms of the Berlin club scene, we dance. I am wearing my usual all-black attire, which in the Netherlands sometimes feels a little grave in comparison, but here looks so similar to the German Antifa uniform, I fit right in. Germany is interesting like that, there are still Punkers, and Altos and general rawness. You hear that Nethies: Too many smooth hipsters, not enough grungy Antifascist grit. The techno beats sound through the old industrial building doused in black paint and thick smoke. I dance the wild radical dance of a totally sober, sick, and bleeding body refusing to miss out on some live Berliner EDM. Like a leftist badass.

I am contemplating the performance of radicalism, the limits of leftist politics, the lack of leftist voices in Netherlands, the synchronous bullshit AND importance of it all. And I am imagining Karl Marx in line of a self-proclaimed leftist nightclub in 21st century Berlin, standing in the dark smoky hallways observing groups of drug-addicted youngsters huddling together in genderless toilet stalls with overflowing toilet bowls and never any damned toilet paper. Escaping from something, somehow. Or reaching for something, somehow. Would he laugh a giant belly laugh or sternly shake his head at the silliness of this scene? When in fact, we know quite well, it’s dead-serious, everything is so very serious at the root of it all. It’s just not serious like staged performative aloofness. It’s serious like the deeply human struggle for meaning while we are here in these bodies, making sense of our existence, or eagerly running from it. We are alive, all together now comrades, and it is horrible, and silly, and so much fun, simultaneously.

Also Netherlands, a footnote of gratitude: Let’s be long-term real here – thank you for the smoking ban in your clubs and public spaces ❤ ❤ ❤ I, for one, deeply appreciate it. I will take the sweat and fart stink over the total annihilation of my lungs and tar lodging into every pore on my body any day. I have washed my hair three times since Berlin, and I have yet to arrive at something that doesn’t smell like death. I love going out dancing too much to be slowly killed by it.

Prayer

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I am reclaiming my prayer from the dungeons of dogma and fear

It’s not that I have been godless after losing my religion at 15
It’s that my sense of God existed beyond scripture
Beyond demarcations of insulated groups
Beyond right and wrong answers from rulebooks
Misinterpreted and abused
For public control and political gain

I studied philosophy to get to the bottom of things
But there too
Limitations reigned the playing field
Old, white, deceased men deciding what was and was not intelligent enough to uphold the status quo of intellectual escapism

But this KNOWING
I can tell it doesn’t come from me
I can sense it does not belong to this body or mind
I have known this long before they sent me to confess my sins to a bearded stranger
Long before they told me my blood was too unclean for communion
Long before I was silenced and shamed for my desire, my critique, my questioning

God is in the depths of despair and in the heights of glory
God is in the wind through the leaves and the ocean waves crashing to shore
God is in the stars and the moon and the lines in my hands
As far and as close as everything
Always

God is in the simplest truth
*I love you*
The simplest truth
The most unfathomable majesty
The most intuitive path

A relief
A surrendering
An uncontainable smile
Birthed from cosmic knowledge swirling through this finite physical form
Able to perceive itself