Tag: being alive

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.]

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.

Antifascist Clubbing

Yvet Youssef2 Comments

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.

Ode to Dancing

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When I look around in the day to day bustle of human activity, I sometimes find myself marveling at how organized and ordered everything moves. But also. How limited. I think of my body, how privileged I am to be able to move all of these limbs so freely. And how I don’t do that enough.

One of my favorite activities in this world is going out dancing. For something I love as much as I love dancing, it’s surprising how little it actually happens. To be clear, this is not about dancing “well” or having some slick choreography, this is also not about the gaze of another. This is about feeeeeeeling the music. I love the deep melancholic techno beats, the psychedelic electronica, and the ancient rhythms from all over the world just the same. If there is any depth to the sound, it invites us to dive into it. And once you’re in it, once you have shed the inhibitions and boundaries of your strangely conditioned mind, you just feeeeeel it. It just moves in you and you in it. You become one with the music. At its best, dancing is an entirely sensual and spiritual experience.

While dancing, I have been asked this question by an interrupting stranger on several occasions: “What are you on?” And I have replied: “A glass of water”. It is pretty obvious that more and more people have come to this false conclusion that the liberating experience of dancing can only be achieved through the use of substances, with jittering jaws and horrible hangovers. I have seen so many people standing awkwardly on the sidelines until they were wasted enough to let go of their inhibiting self-sabotage and finally free to move their bodies.

Now, I am no stranger to that feeling of shame or shyness. But I am here to say that it’s a waste of life to feel bound by some elusive social contract that instructs you to constrain yourself lest you can blame some external additive for your wildness. It’s a total sham. If you have a body that is able to move in one way or another, the only thing standing in the way of the meditative ecstasy of dancing is your own mind. You don’t need anything to reach that state. You just need to silence that thinking brain, breathe, and feeeeeeel. There have been many times that my sober body was way more energetic and alive at 5 in the morning than all of the drugged up bodies running on empty around me. That’s because dancing actually generates energy, whereas synthetic substances drive you to peak and then drain your energy. For the record, I am not anti-drug in principle, I am just pro-vital-life-force-energy. And you have that running up and down your spine by default. It’s yours to use.

You see, the music wants to move you. It’s what she’s here for. And when you let her, when you relax your body, close your eyes, and allow the music to guide you into her gorgeous mysteries, you learn what freedom means, what pure joy feels like, and when the music is exceptionally good, you might even get glimpses of God.