Spirit Of The Stars
Earth Guardians, If You Don't See Light, Be Light.
Dear Ones,
If you don’t see love, be love. If you don’t see light, be light.
Wake up autopilots! Victims of distraction and overscheduling. Let us come to our senses. Pesky senses are glorious windows to our beautiful spirits and souls.
We made it here to this final month. The curtain is closing soon on 2023. Mischievous 2023! Be gone, you theatrical wild card. Leave your blinding illuminations behind.
‘Twas the year I became an author. Well, not the real kind but an author of sorts. A vintage storyteller of storied lives.
The past three years of 2020-2023 are a blur. One big blobby blur. I emerge a different person. So different that I question my species.
LAWS OF NATURE
I confess. Intergalactic things mystify me. I am fascinated with celestial bodies and bodies of water. Bodies ruled by bodies. As a kid, I threw stones at the moon. That was before the whole sky fell.
The wall of my childhood dwelling displayed a big poster of the moon. A bewildered child and masterful puppeteer. Gravitational ruler of the formidable seas. Canopy of my dreams. Is my compulsion to exist near an ocean from this childhood imprint? Am I as riddled as the sea?
I believe in the stories of the stars. I believe in the movement of the tide. I believe in grand nature.
*Nessa Tip: Be more aware of the sky. Support your local sunset. Make it a regular point to enjoy starry nights, sunrises, sunsets, and whatever beautiful phase the moon is in. Like Persians and ancestral people, I celebrate solstices and equinoxes. I pay attention to natural cycles. It helps me understand the passage of time on earth.
My childhood fixation with the moon waxed not waned. I took up biodynamic gardening without even knowing it. It is a growing methodology focused on cycles of nature. I use my instincts to lunar garden by the phases of the moon. How cool is that? According to pi:
MIRROR NEURONS
I am in touch with your collective unease and buckling fear, dear sapiens. Most say I feel too deeply. I say my hyperactive mirror neurons plumpened. I love Cook’s definition. Mirror neurons:
“impact our ability to grasp new skills, acquire knowledge, and form deep emotional connections with those around us, even helping us understand why people do what they do.”
What are your mirror neurons up to these days? Feverishly busy, I do hope. Learning, accepting, and course correcting perhaps?
We need a humanity guide.
We need a guide on how to lighten the collective load. How to care for the pain and the beauty of our interconnectedness. How to hack into our shared humanity during the awakening. How to gain new skills to carry us through metacrises. How to tend to the quality of our present moments together. How to be present with both pain and joy. How to flow with and not against the current of being. How to recognize the natural river of life and step into it gently.
How can our care-worn souls live better?
Are we at an inflection point with our views on interconnectedness, pain, rest, and creativity? Do we know that we humans are one species? Do we know that we are tethered to Mother Earth? Do we know that pain is a teacher. Do we know that rest is generative? Do we know that imagination will help us be more human?
How do these questions land on your tired, defiant, and rebellious hearts? Check out a great manifesto: Rest is resistance!
It’s no good unless it grows. It’s no good unless it’s real.
Fall seven times and stand up eight. -Japanese proverb
What appears a dead end is really a new dawn. Stop licking breadcrumbs off of knives.
We rise as we fall. Like dying stars. Phoenix hearts with tin man’s blueprints. Conducting heartbeats through our coagulated bodies.
Who knew we can heal at scale by accessing the goldmines within our hearts?
U.S. SICK CARE SYSTEM
I can’t change the rigged demoralizing “healthcare” system. It is rigged like a casino. Foolish old me for thinking otherwise. Big forces snuff out small ones by design.
Healthcare in the U.S. lands a bit like organized crime or a circus of greedy ringmasters. It is no wonder that David Lynch's 1980 picture The Elephant Man is one of my favorites.
It feels criminal that perpetrators infiltrated the healing spaces of our humanity. Who let them in?! Show them the door and heed them no more! Turn your attention to growing new harmonious healing spaces. It feels criminal even if it was not the original intention. It feels criminal that our conditioned powerlessness normalizes highway robbery.
*Nessa Tip: We all have stories of how crappy the U.S. health system is. How far away we are from the art of healing. How we think it should change. How we wish it was different. How we can become part of the change. Send me your ideas/thoughts. I want to tally humans out there to help pivot my offerings.
This Beck song Lost Cause fits right here.
ODE TO RAINBOW BRIDGES
When something you hold on to with dear life is gone, it feels like a passing of sorts. It feels sad to see the healthcare system crumble before our very eyes. The end is where we start from.
We are all experiencing some degree of sorrow now. Whether it is bereaving personal loved ones, sickness/death, human bloodshed, destruction of ecosystems, and/or demise of old structures. The heaviness of mourning stacks deep in our tissues.
*Nessa Tip: Somatic awareness is critical. Do not permit your body to be a storage facility. Say no thank you! Practice staying in contact with your body minute by minute. Shake out tensions of the day like animals do. Walk. Stretch. Use dumbells. Dance around your home. Just move all your joints. You do not have to go to the gym to release body tension. Practice rituals for your own daily release.
AFTERLIFE GIFTS
Final hour gifts spilled over from my stepmother’s deathbed. I didn’t expect the spillover. Never in my decades of deathbed experience have I witnessed a more graceful soul. Her fall with grace not from it.
This mother figure left me diamonds and pearls. In one case, she gifted the pearl of genuine belief in my wounded soul. No empty platitudes. I won’t forget the times she reminds me that I am only here for a short while. That love prevails. On her way out, she even tucked compassion into my broken crevices. Little by little. She used it as a salve. Does it sound like I am describing Mother Earth? Am I?
Can you see now why she occupies the sootiest chambers of my heart? Sometimes I imagine her and other angels as holy ghosts of my gut instincts. I imagine loved ones in my heart sweeping up corners with a broom. Sweeping up cobwebs of self-shame and doubt. Clearing space.
I “lost” so many loved ones to pain. Does that position me to speak on deep pain? Pain due to addiction. To self-medication. 6 humans to be exact. Why my life journey confronted rake me over coals type of pain is beyond me. As a wounded human, I grew especially drawn to wounded humans- naturally. It is no shock that my career stations me at deathbeds of wounds and addictions. Hundreds of suffering bedsides. Bedsides turned keys to unlocking secrets of human joy. Thank you, evergreen lessons. From the chambers of my heart, thank you.
20 years ago, even my soul mate Joey took flight from this planet. He was wit, love, brilliance, and devotion personified. I have hard proof of my claims. One year of cherished, full-of-life love letters tucked inside a glass coffee table. It was heroin they said. The venom that swindled my old friend Sunny’s life too. Heroin- that tarry weapon of mass destruction. Human poison. I don’t like the term overdose. Any dose of poison is overdose. Nevermind what alcohol did to my cousins’ tormented organs. Damaged in utero long before their baby lungs had a chance to draw a single breath.
*Nessa Tip: Take note of some things you may be addicted to. How your brain plays tricks on you when you aren’t paying attention. Fire up your mirror neurons for those who struggle with brain diseases of addiction. Do not enable them but aim to soften your judgment of mental health and addiction to help bridge gaps. Our epidemic of isolation has fueled our epidemic of addiction and vice versa.
There you all are- my memory angels. Up in the sky like stars delivering light to us earthlings. I am ok if that is not true. My imagination sustains me. This 2min 54 second reading of a Nick Cave letter is the most beautiful rendition of grief processing ever encountered.
*Nessa Tip: Writing prompt. Write down in no particular order the hardest life losses you have experienced. Get cozy with your grief. It can be about a relationship, job, death of loved one, death of a dream, death of how things used to be…anything. Try to find what about the loss was a teacher. How it subconsciously hurt/shaped/changed you? How it made you more resilient? I recommend that you listen to an inspiring song during the exercise.
Here is a fit for this post tribute song on grief called Saturn by Sleeping at Last.
May we believe in the stars again.
May all beings find peace.
Nessa
PS- Planet Earth 3 is here! Thank you to 97 years of Sir David Attenborough- an OG earth guardian!
PPS- If you like these posts and are feeling generous, feel free to like or comment so more people will discover it on substack.
Not sure where to start. I did not know about mirror neurons. They are so interesting and important to us humans. I love all of the pictures in this post, especially you and Joey. I do see love, happiness and innocence in your eyes. There are so many big and small experiences that mold us. My mirror neurons are feeling your loss. Empathy leads to compassion. Compassion, I suppose, leads to caring. Keep writing. It is a worthy endeavor.
Beautiful, Nessa. I’ve always loved the process of writing to navigate tough times. Your writing has inspired me to journal again, I love you!