defeat as portal to expansion
romancing what is, indulging fear, and releasing to the present
beloveds,
I am already on the other side of devastation. Can u believe it?
i can (not). life is funny that way.
There is always more love, it just changes form. and then there is room for new love. Grief is an inevitable part of this process. We can have many different relationships to grief and the process of change.
If love—fear is a paradox, then i feel deepening my capacity for being in relationship to my fears also deepens my capacity for love: for types, amounts, feeling, sharing, and expressing love. There is magic in intimacy with the unknown. The latin and french origins of defeat are undo or to be undone. Thru defeat* i have found freedom, joy, and deep connection. It feels good to release grip and meet what is. To romance the present regardless of how it looks is a whole love language for me. I like the idea of ‘romancing’ rather than ‘appreciating’ or ‘celebrating’ because it does not imply a spiritual bypassing or glossing over of what is present — just an intimacy with it. Of course, from intimacy, pleasure often blooms. especially for me. I crave multidimensional intimacy so deeply.
Bayo Akomolafe often shares a piece of Yoruban wisdom: “in order to find yourself, one must become lost.” and that in the anthropocene of western modernity we are in a crisis of being too found… too defined. To be defined or certained is to be stagnant, unchanging. but change is life. and so we gradually dissociate more and more from ourselves and environments when we do not hold space for change in our realities — for the unknown. And often the unknown comes with a healthy bit of fear. This is our nature working for us. An alert system that tunes us to needs and possible challenges along our journey.
In becoming truly “lost” or “defeated” in a sense, we become available to the new and vastly different realities/perceptions available to us.
A year and a half ago when i sensed shifts and the magnitude of changes coming for me i experienced overwhelming anxiety. The spirit of my human father gave me a deep and true piece of advice: let it be the wild and amazing trip of your dreams. I did not have to plan, strategize, or contort. just release my grip, and allow what was already in motion. To be in collaboration with life instead of bracing for it. In releasing myself from resistance i flushed into my life in a more aligned and invigorated way. On the other side of devastation from feeling totally groundless and sometimes disorientingly submerged, my feet are making soft contact. from a box too small to soft and fluid temporary contact points like stepping clouds. The awareness of impermanence is sobering. I feel i’m finally seeing a lover fully for the first time: the multidimensional, multifaceted, wild ride of life. If we are with something fully it will inevitably change. If change is life, might love also be a type of change? If conditions change and we want to stay in relationship (regardless to what) mustn’t we also change? Aren’t we changing already? Perhaps love is a blending of change and relationship…or maybe that is intimacy. just a part of the vast expanse that is love.
What i know is that stagnancy and definedness are symptoms if not traits of supremacy culture. To lose ourselves, to be ever-finding, to remain fluid and connected is radical defiance. To romance change and fluidity codes into our realities freer futures. Perhaps there is more love and life in defeat than in victory.
*defeat in this case means total release as in a “losing” of my calcifications and projected desires that are not responsive to present information.
~ read To Find Your Way Get Lost by Bayo Akomolafe or visit his website
~ listen to Bayo Akomolafe on the Finding Our Way Podcast talk about Hope, Questioning, and Getting Lost where he shares about the crisis of being found