GG Eaglestar

There is a time to move, and a time to be still.
Just as there is a time to breathe in,
And a time to breathe out.

In the season of planting,
Set your intentions.
In the season of harvest,
Splendour in the joy of it.

What follows is a time of rest and regeneration.

Just as there is a time for
Primal union
There is a time for
Birth.

In the dark
We sleep and replenish.
And in the light
We dazzle, we
Dance.

I’m excited to exist with you in this shift.
I’m excited to weep and mourn the memories of the past,
Together.

Not excited like
woohoo, let’s wallow in the grief
and carb coma from pasta and tteokbokki.

But excited like, holy fucking shit,
Look at what we went through,
And we’re out the other end,
Look at where we are about to go.

The horizon is visible now.
And the light is peeking through.
I can feel the beauty about to flood in
And tuck me in
And cradle my infinite heart.

For I love you,
I love me,
And I love everything that was,
And ever will be.

~

I’ve been thinking about this word often.

I’ve been thinking about visiting doctors and leaving disappointed (no offence to the docs out there, hear me out for a sec).

I’ve been thinking about nature and about give and take. Actually, scrap that, I’ve been thinking about give and receive.

We live in a culture built on give and take, but to give and receive, is more natural. One is balanced, and the other is depleting.

Most of the reasons why we go to the doctor come down to lifestyle. Our common health issues are consequences of imbalance. How we eat, how we move (or don’t), how much stress we hold, how little we rest, how we numb what we feel and how we override the body’s signals.

We’re seeking medical advice for the life choices we make every day. It’s not the doctor’s fault, it’s the system we’ve built in mainstream society. We go to the doctor to treat our symptoms – IBS, can’t sleep, too many kilos, my head hurts, can’t breathe, odd heart palpitations, nauseated, dizzy, sick. We get some pills, and we come home, and don’t change a thing.

Our priorities are confused.

We grow up taught to appease outdated systems that were created long before us. Systems that hold up the structure, that require us to give our time and energy in a certain ridged way, for safety, for water, for food, and for survival. These systems were once useful, they were once balanced, but no longer provide enough for our basic human needs. Now, we have to work overtime, just to get it done. And at the end of the day, we may not even be able to afford the unprocessed food in the health aisle. The affordable food is full of weird ingredients that cause us to go back to the doctor and get more pills.

It’s ok though, things are changing. We must accept the era we were born into. I’m not saying we should agree, but save your fire, because you’ll need it for the real battle (the one inside).

Sometimes things that work before, don’t work now. We are finding our way. It’s uncomfortable and scary and may feel catastrophic, but this is actually how resilience is built. This is evolution.

So how do we shift our priorities when we’re exhausted just trying to survive? How do we sleep soundly when our brains and bodies are trying to keep up? How do we hold the pressure of our own expectations and those placed on us? Always behind, constantly striving, pushing, rushing. Got to hustle to make it rain. Apparently.

I know this intimately.

The hustling worked, and when it rained, it poured, yet I was exhausted as fuck. I was weak and I was ill. I pulverised myself in the polarity of it.

Coming out of that now, I realised that I didn’t break, even though my teeth did. I was grinding my teeth so hard in my sleep that a few of them cracked, and they had to be replaced with porcelain. The wariness of my skin, the stiffness of my neck and back, the night terrors, the muscle cramps and spasms, the imbalance of my gut biome, the substance abuse, the insomnia, the anxiety and depression, the migraines, the vertigo, the volatility of emotions, the relationships that suffered, the constant churning in my stomach, the ACL reconstruction…

The exhaustion. That’s what I exchanged for the dolla bills. For the system of give and take.

Was it worth it? Yes and no. The rewards were real. Though the cost on my body will stay with me for the rest of my life. But so will the wisdom, and the clarity. That is priceless.

I learned this: if you base your worth on what you get back from what you give, then your worth becomes tied to how much you do. However, if your value isn’t measured by your output, you’re allowed to be worthy all the time, even when you’re resting.

Practically speaking, if you want to stop tying your worth to your earning potential, then step out of the pressure cooker.

Stop expecting to receive, in a system that is built for extraction.

Look elsewhere. The trees don’t synthesise carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen for us, they do it for themselves. We just get to breath because of that. That’s a balanced exchange.

We are living in a shift. The Earth is rearranging herself to mirror our extraction. We’re in a literal pressure cooker. A big transformation. Life’s not meant to be give and take, it’s meant to be give and receive. It’s meant to be circulated through. Living in true prosperity is to exist in symbiosis. We were never separate from her.