Homing In

retreat as the life

less manifesting a future, more remembering the vision that’s always been there

I’m a trial and error kinda gal. I mean all creatives are—art is just making things that didn’t used to exist. Art is trial and error.

Life is also trial and error. Day after day, life itself throws us moments and experiences and sunrises the likes of which have never been seen before. There’s a reason creation is what some people call god. Something formed a day that didn’t used to exist.

So why is it—how is it—that the world around us definitely doesn’t care for trial and error? If by trial we meant a thing I tried I’m in. But that’s not usually the vibe. It’s more, If at first you don’t succeed, you’ve wasted this precious life (jk, it usually means you’ve wasted money).

We all learn by throwing shit at the wall. We don’t call inventors or engineers failures, though their entire jobs are trying things that mostly don’t work.

Error? How can something be error if you’re setting out to find out. I certainly believe in harm and damage and heartbreak, but I don’t call those failures. The places we harm ourselves or others are what I call assignments. Opportunities for growth.

I used to think I was the only one who woke up each morning feeling already at a deficit. Like I had to prove my right to exist, and with my track record re: productivity I was dead in the water before I began.

I’m starting to understand my experience isn’t unique. That many wake up to a schedule full of meetings and payments to make and deadlines to meet and find themselves facing so many possible failures.

What kind of world tells a person that we only learn by making mistakes but FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T YOU DARE MAKE A MISTAKE? Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be from Earth.

This, my friends, is no way to live. It is a way I cannot live. Saving my own life has been largely one big arc of understanding that I can say no sometimes and actually need to say no a lot of the time and actually maybe need to make next-to-no promises ever again.

I’m just beginning to access the experience of creating just because. Last week a friend gave me a massive canvas and I stared at it for days while I “planned” what I was going to paint. The first day I hated everything that came out. I’d formed an expectation and expectations don’t do try and find out.

Mercifully, the next day I remembered the fuck-it switch. The switch that eradicates agenda, lets the wild out. That is the portal to peace and transcendence. Sometimes things happen on the canvas I like.

That clusterfuck, by the way, was without any input from the world. I told no one my plan and not a soul on earth needed anything from me. Still I wrestled the dumb loop of trying to control instead of surrendering. Pure madness.

This is why I make very few plans anymore. I’m trying to live just for today. Actually tho. I need to wake up each day and find the day. Discover it. If I’ve already decided what’s going to happen I close myself off from actual life. If I wake up believing the day is already mapped out, what is there to live for? All I’m left with is trying to will something to match up with my projected outcome or timeline and for me that’s a special kind of hell.

It’s also not the truth. If I say yes to coffee with you tomorrow at 2pm, that does not make coffee tomorrow at 2 true. It’s a projected expectation I may well not meet.

Here’s a secret. Most people who bail when they get overwhelmed are not people who never learned to be responsible. They are people who have felt overwhelmingly responsible for far too much for far too long. People who probably started to believe as children that they had to hold the whole world together or it would implode. Not materially, but emotionally. Energetically and psychologically.

I didn’t write for months after my trip to Greece for expectation-related reasons. Before I went I announced my plan, invited you to contribute to my plan. What I discovered when I got home was the crippling weight of collective expectation. Everywhere I went I was asked about Greece. I felt the pressure to demonstrate I’d been productive. People had invested in me and I needed to have something to show for it. That old familiar feeling: I have failed the world. The weight that threatens my recovery.

Was announcing my trip to Greece a mistake? Was accepting money a failure? Of course not. I was excited about the trip and you were excited about the trip. It was trial and error, information gathering. I learned something valuable. Because I’m easily overwhelmed by a sense of indebtedness or responsibility to others (real or perceived), going forward I won’t publicly announce the events of my life until they’ve passed and I won’t accept money that’s attached to an outcome.*

***

At the end of October I moved out of the cabin where I’d lived for 18 months. The decision to leave came in the middle of the night, a moment of clarity that living alone in the woods and walking in circles trying to manage myself was starting to feel like isolation. I felt bogged down by stuff. Paying rent wasn’t sustainable. It had served me beautifully, was the nest that made recovery possible, and it was time to move on. I had a a couple cathartic burns, eventually threw in my mom’s journals I’d been lugging around for 15 years. She couldn’t be less interested in being a posthumous burden.

The time since has been all throwing shit at the wall. Listening to myself, to my inner guides. I now know Greece was a training ground. I took myself to the other side of the world and maintained the ability to prioritize my recovery. Noticed what felt jarring, what felt sacred. Honored my need for rest in the face of pressure to be productive. Was unapologetic about prioritizing prayers. Trusted myself to create home wherever I went.

When I got home I followed my “angels and allies” (borrowed from Steven Pressfield in The War of Art) into a fun and creative version of home, one where I got to sample collaboration, conceive of a place where the sacred was honored and protected. And I followed them out again when it became clear the arrangement wasn’t sustainable. I followed them off-island and back twice in one week and in and out of the 15 places I have stayed since Christmas.

My mom used to called herself a “vagabondess for beauty.” I am also that. I’ve schlepped candles and blankets and my morning prayer trinkets all over this rock and have ensured a cozy home for my daughter every weekend.

It’s been exhausting. Brought me to my literal knees more than once. It has also deepened my trust. In my capacity, not to survive deficit, but to live from truth. To say dear fear, no thanks and go in search of the next right thing. My capacity to break my own heart for my survival.

To walk away from something partially perfect is to choose pure, uncut grief. There are no villains when you choose yourself. Just truth and the truth is sad.

There is also potent empowerment. These bones now know we no longer self-betray.

To call all this failure would be absurd. Trials? For sure. But these last months have been about the very thing I’ve been after for as long as I can remember. Fortifying and protecting my spiritual health at all costs. Actual freedom. Real-deal sovereignty.

***

Last weekend I went to church, which is not something I do. It wasn’t about Bible verses or beliefs. I went to church because I wanted to stand in a room already designed for the divine. A sacred space I didn’t have to create or protect alone. I went to church because I wanted to feel held.

I slipped into a pew bathed in sunlight just as the singing began. I looked up to the rafters and the tears of relief were immediate. That. Whatever gets captured in a church’s rafters—that is as god as anything. Beneath rafters, belonging is assumed.

It turns out I’m exhausted from trying to hold the spiritual alone. All my talk of permission for all these years has really been about permission to live a spiritual life. I feel increasingly protective of my inner life in this material world. Which makes sense, I treasure what is sacred and don’t want it desecrated.

But it’s also bullshit. The church moment was another signal of unmanageability. All this having no home has me running around saying, It’s cool, I totally got this. And while I’ve proven I can make home anywhere, I don’t got this. I can’t keep holding the image of sanctuary alone. I don’t want to. It’s too much to ask of myself to be the one to create it and protect it and also live inside it. That is isolation, the primary reason I moved out of my cabin.

What I’ve tasted in the past weeks of hopping around is the empowerment of being hosted in my sovereignty. There’s a difference between being offered a place to crash and being offered a space in support of your becoming. I am PROFOUNDLY grateful for every single human who has offered me anything over these weeks, but it has been a special gift to receive the energy of sanctuary.

When I don’t know where I’m sleeping that night, everything is I am failing the world. It’s all I’m too much and I’m in the way and is this allowed? I lose the plot and still insist I’m trusting the universe.

When I’m in a home where I feel held, where I’m welcome and loved and also not indebted, the sovereign self emerges. I move differently, with reverence. I clean as I go, dress with intention, feel expansive love for all. When I’m in sanctuary spaces, when no one is checking on my progress, I become holier. That’s where the fire is lit. That is the wellspring from which my contributions are borne. When I’m held by the sacredness of a space, the sacred in me multiplies.

For how long have I been longing for a part-time monastic life? I regularly listen to friends talk about personal overwhelm and I stop them when they tear up. That, I say, that yearning is not a pipe dream. That’s a spiritual non-negotiable. You are allowed to need that. Begin there.

So I begin here: sanctuary is no longer the exception. Going on retreats is not a time away from life. I need retreat as the life. Going forth can be the event. The default life is an empty chapel where I’m held and can therefore become my fullest self and go forth with so much to share. I’m not just left alone to be me, but supported for it.

In All the Way to the River, Liz Gilbert buys a church and lets her then-friend Rayya live in it. That’s the vibe.

For weeks now, I’ve been envisioning my future. All this as a community offering for others. Where you don’t have to earn to belong (money or validation). Where you’re honored for the roles and contributions that arise in the absence of expectation. Where everything is addition, not deficit.

A place that supports becoming. A place made up of service + spirituality + art. Something that runs like a monastery or artist residency or cultural stewardship arrangement. Where home is provided for those whose roles are considered valuable to the whole.

I’ve been over here loftily dreaming of a center for seekers which I may well build one day. But not as someone who doesn’t know where she’s sleeping tomorrow. Not from a place of proving how scrappy I can be and still remain grateful and loving.

It had not occurred to me that I might need to experience it first. Maybe I can’t create sanctuary for others until I have received my own spiritual home.

A place where my belonging is assumed. Where the sacred is a given and also not my job to hold. That sounds like home.

Your Optional Assignment(s)

1. Listen to Rosalía’s Lux.

   The whole thing. All the way through. This album was the soundtrack of my winter and I only realized how globally massive it’s become after reading this month’s Vogue. Consider listening in the dark (as critics were asked to).

2. Make a list of places—buildings or rooms or meadows—where you’ve felt held by something beyond you. Visit one today. If you can’t, go somewhere you suspect might evoke something similar.

*Those of you who were paid subscribers to this newsletter may have noticed I turned off payments. I’ve played with the money issue and in the end I couldn’t bear the idea of new subscribers facing a pop-up that even suggests paying to read. Not opting in still feels like a deficit and that goes against ‘you shouldn’t have to prove yourself to belong.’