A change of Heart + Desire for Completion
“Leaving Before I Arrived”
I left Detroit mid September for a job in Alaska that was everything I’d been looking for, so I was shocked when I got up there only to realize (three days in) that something was off. Despite being a mere 5 min walk from the national park and the chance to work with an incredible team of people doing REAL rooted work, I couldn’t shake the offness!
But those of you who’ve known me a while now know this isn’t the first time I’ve traveled far to live an intense island life. I haven’t lived in the same place for over a year since 2019.
“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.” — Maya Angelou
I feel at home in motion and have always recognized the freedom inherent to it, but it’s time to confront its limitations: when motion becomes chaos; when it prevents containment that could lead to depth and transformation.
Intensity for Intensity’s Sake
I’ve been drawn to islands because of their specificity; they are “cauldrons of evolution where species diversify to fill empty niches.” Smaller, isolated spaces ask you to change quickly, and I’ve wanted to be changed intensely. I’ve leaped at the chance to be affected, gravitating towards intensity for intensity’s sake, jumping from portal to portal. I’ve prided myself on this shapeshifting ability and have no regrets on where this has brought me. I’ve adapted greatly! Alaska felt no different. I knew I could be a fishing mountain summiting rain boot sloshing hunting soggy woman. And not just be this but love being it!
One lifetime isn’t long enough for all the versions of myself I want to be!!
Maybe it was turning 26 - lol so dramatic - and sensing the preciousness of time and limitations of who I am. Arghhhh god is change, but in which ways do I want to change and why? I know, only a year in, Detroit had just begun to rearrange my insides. A somatic therapist said to me this year that the nervous system desires completion.
Community garden behind our house (Detroit 2024)
Ali, my mechanic, with stranger (Detroit 2024)
Maya in front of the abandoned Packard Plant (which used to cover 35 acres of Detroit’s Eastside)
“I think that in keeping your options open, in refusing to commit to things — career paths, relationships, anything — there is that feeling, isn’t there? that you retain the control because you haven’t allowed yourself to be pinned down to enter your life completely. You’re holding back, you could walk away from anything at any moment. And, it feels like your maintaining the control of the situation but because time just keeps on marching on, if you do that for very long you end up using up large chunks of your life you never get back just holding back from life. So, burning bridges, making irreversible commitments is a counter force to that because it acknowledges your limitations, it says, ‘I only have one life to live’, it says, ‘at some point I have to go all in on something’, it sacrifices that lovely feeling of being in control because you haven’t committed to anything. And what you get in return is to enter more fully into the real experience of being alive while you still are.”
~ Oliver Burkeman
Wandering next to the Sound with Tabea
In a way, Detroit is its own kind of island. An island created by decomposing industry. It asks a lot of you: learn how to find beauty in unexpected places, learn how to find beauty in decay.
move or be moved
motion ends or starts
with you
be amused or
be toed
between like
a stone
yes you
could belong anywhere
im sure but
decide to belong here
for nowAs ridiculous as I feel, I’ve been so blessed to be so supported in leaving for Alaska AND in coming back. THANK YOU!!! I love love love you.
I do feel as though, for now, there is no better place than Detroit to be thinking / doing around what it means to reclaim attention and creativity and labor. This is what magnetized me here in the first place. In the spaciousness of decay there is no option but to confront old ways of being and imagine new futures. You have to recognize the precious opportunity of deep focus on what’s right in front of you.
So yes, for now, I am a techno dancing red light running corned beef egg roll fiend. BACK IN THE D! I don’t know what completion will look like, but I trust I know how it will feel.
Seattle as Threshold + The Wound of Home
Of course, since I was nearby, I needed to stop in Seattle to see Ava on my way back. This is the third time Seattle has been a threshold between roads, holding me to my deepest potential and reminding me just how wide my heart can bear be. Wandering next to the Puget Sound, a dear friend now, I hear whispers: wider, wider, wider, wider, WIIIIIDDDDDER!
And from this cracked open place, I can now admit to myself: there’s many times I wish I left. Conversations. Rooms. Relationships. Towns. In not leaving, I abandoned and betrayed myself. But where else was there to go? Perhaps that’s why it’s easy to leave before even arriving: the wounds of home.
I’m grateful to have been so serendipitously presented with a crossroads. Deciding to leave Alaska (to be clear: it was completely safe, just not right for what I need right now), placed trust back inside myself — literally completing me. A cycle ended. I left. I had a home, here, full of me, under all circumstances.
Stone from Gitte, Freddie’s mom, who I spent an afternoon with in Copenhagen this past May
In May, I was gifted two stones with holes formed by hundreds of years of erosion. Gitte said they had healing properties. That they’d call back the parts of my soul that had wandered and gotten lost. I put them both on necklaces, hoping to be adorned by their magic. I lost the first less than a week later, wandering around my hometown. I retraced my steps, but eventually gave up, knowing. It worked. I didn’t need it anymore.
Of course, baby Vero, I’ve been looking for you everywhere else! Come here, my love. There’s no home for you in this place. There should have been. But there never was. We can leave now.
I lost the second stone in Sitka. Again, wandering, of course, because “exactly what you run from you end up chasing.” It probably returned to the sea where I called my mother crying. She said stick it out a while. She didn’t know where to put herself either.
(Running) Vero: What about here? Or here? or there? no…here!!!
(Still) Vero: You can rest now.
Taking Specificity Seriously + Integrating the Transcendent
The last two years have been very internal, devastated, anxious, yet punctuated by frequent transcendent experiences. The loss of big love was an entrance to all the other griefs (psychological, ancestral, ecological, political, spiritual - is there a place grief doesn’t touch?) that lied beneath the surface of me. The safety of this relationship gave me permission to fall apart and feel how much there was to grieve in our 3D reality. Why is it so far from what we know it could be?
Frances Weller writes about the 5 gates of grief:
Gate 1: everything you love, you will lose — either by your own disappearance or theirs)
devastated not knowing you, growing with you
Gate 2: those parts of us that have never known love — the psyche longs for wholeness
devastated by my imperfections, the ways I’d hurt others (and myself)
Gate 3: the sorrows of the world — we are inseparable
devastated by genocide, by war, by empire
Gate 4: what we expected and did not receive — culture fails to materialize things we require
devastated by what we deserve
Gate 5: Ancestral Grief
devastated by amnesia and silence
I began to believe I was grief and struggled to see anything beyond it. But now I’m sure I’m lucky to have fallen so fully apart, been completely unraveled very young. I have a new relationship to my aliveness.
Broke my heart now it’s always open
broke my heart now it’s always open!
I’m full of gratitude; this tender togetherness introduced me to the divine — god! And its absence forced me to find god within myself.
“Love brings a spiritual awakening, and the loss of it produces profound despair. sometimes that loss severs us from our sense of divinity — a state that can hardly be tolerated after the expansion and heightened awareness that love has brought."
— Anodea Judith
It’s forced me to gather every bit of strength and agency to rebuild myself — with so so much help in the process — and develop conviction about how the specificities of my wounds can be a salve to the collective.
It killed me, preventing me from identifying with the past.
The other day I wrote in my journal:
more than anything even recognition or being certainly wanted forever or feeling or sureness of my goodness or perfected defenses or you i want to create more than my own life i want to live a constant collaborator with Creation my attention wielded uncompromising ferociously like a wand
Jane texted:
I feel like most of the great art that has ever existed has been someone’s attempt to cross that chasm between you and me whoever those two you's and me's are
A story as old as time: The Failure to Merge! The heartbreak of attempting Oneness while still in a body is the artist’s initiation…
Longing is language. Language is illusion. Childhood is coincidence. Eternity is childlike. Crying is laughing. Obsession is breathing. Falling is drinking. Feeling is eating. Laughing is crying. Dying is being born. Purity is poetry.
Richard Rudd writes about the tragic comedy and myth of true love:
With vanity your lower self falls in love with itself, and with purity the Higher Self falls in love with itself. You might say that purity is when the Divine falls in love with You. This can only happen when you come within the sphere of Divine love. Your behaviour, your thoughts, your feelings, the very air you breathe must resonate to one purpose — what the Sufis call falling in love with the Beloved. The Beloved is not something out there — it is the essence of your true nature, and you do fall into it because it resides deep within you.
When your heart finally remembers its own original purity, only then will you finally and willingly give up your existence.
Trusting vision, discipline, and goodness
So it’s time to be more external now; shift into doing and apply everything I’ve been processing. For a year, I’ve been quietly working (soul vomiting) away on this world web home, scared to be seen and commit to doing or being anything. Doubting that I have anything to actually offer.
I don’t know exactly what’s next, but I know I would always regret not trying to forge my own path and hodgepodge something together from the questions in my heart. Seeing my friends do this — ya’ll amaze me - has given me the courage to do so. The truth is no job will pay me to create what needs to come out. Nonetheless, it needs to come out. Without any external direction, what can I offer the world? What if I source my power internally? What if I am fully devoted to Creation? Every day?
When I show up to create, I’ve noticed that beyond distraction, the next obstacle I hit is worthiness. Am I good enough? Not good enough like “will what I make be any good?” Who cares if what I make is good. But am I good? That’s a scarier question. Am I worthyof creating? Am I a worthy collaborator? Can I stand in the truth so firmly that Creation possesses and works through me?
My breath answers yes. I’m already here aren’t I? Alive? Creating something with this sack of cells and water every second. We’re so good that we’re born!!! Here, in heaven (some might say), just to create. To bring goodness into physical form.
Gpa Larry collage
Grandpa Larry reminds me of the miracle of this. He tells me about what he would have made with more time, more presence: the great American novel, the motion picture, the basement aquarium, fatherhood. Not for fame or legacy or anything like that. But because he knows next time he’s here it will be different. A completely different life. Different body. Different time. Completely new material to work with. That will be its own specifically unique miracle. It’s own life with its own details that could only make…
So what will you make of this?
I’ve spent the last few years finding the rhythm of my voice, working on my words, moving in poetry. Reconnecting to my ancestors. Rolling around in my shadows. Releasing old stories to make space in my body for new ways of being. Animating! Making my social sphere smaller, more aligned and generative, so I have more energy to commit deeper. I’ve been an apprentice to grief, to Aurora Levins Morales, grandpa Larry’s ghost, and psychedelics. I’m nervously excited to apply what I’ve learned and hold space for others’ psychedelic integration + ancestor work.
How you can support me in this next era
Remind me that my service to the world is in more than just listening but in creating, sharing my voice and vision. Ask me what I’m making. Ask me what I see. I’m always (5 virgo placements) taking in all the details…of everything.
Some recent essays:
Some works in progress:
Family of Goofy Bodies - a thank you; a collection of poetry on shaking and somatics and ancestry
Texts with Grandpa - a ritual text conversation in poetry between my grandpa’s ghost and I
A musical about technology :)
and please!!!
TELL ME HOW I CAN SUPPORT YOU IN WHATEVER LIFE IS CURRENTLY ASKING OF YOU. I WANT TO BE THERE! I WANT TO TEND TO THE FLAMES OF YOUR FREEDOM, LISTEN TO YOUR FEARS, AND LOVE YOU THROUGH THE PROCESS OF CREATING WHATEVER SEEKS TO COME THROUGH YOU!
Could not be here without you.
Ridiculously,
Vero :*
