The Hierarchy of Specialness
Notes from the Love Frontier
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“What does a great love even mean? Just because a relationship ends it doesn’t mean it’s a failure. True Love is a love that changes you, a love that shakes you to your core, a love after which you are never the same . . . “
~Carrie Bradshaw, Sex & the City
When I first started this Substack just a little over two months ago, on my birthday, the Fall Equinox up here in the Northern Hemisphere, I had a plan. I wanted to feature excerpts of my two personal essay projects, one a documentation of my ten year (plus) True Love Project, chronicling the adventures of loving the world one person at a time as a conceptual art project & the other, an series of essays on fragmented, momentary, platonic & often aborted love, love that rang true, perhaps even more true than “successful” committed relationships. Much of this writing has been already written, hard drives & boxes of scribbled on manuscripts, journals & photo documentation & I looked forward to sharing it as I attempted to finish both projects in book form.
Two weeks later the world cracked open, much deeper than the time before & the time before that, revealing a path beneath the undergrowth of our reality, one that we may never come back from. Two weeks after that, I missed a step in the dark, carrying a black wig & witch hat along with a bag of groceries, & broke one ankle in two places, severely sprained the other.
I’m the kind of person who asks why? Why is this happening now? Not because I feel sorry for myself but because I believe in magic & God, in signs & messages, indicators of the way forward.
I have laid here for the past 5 weeks, staring at the play of light patterns against my walls, the increasingly naked branches showering leaves outside my tiny cottage. The night I fell, the air was warm. Now I put the heat on in the dark every morning.
The same heart & mind that wanted to share with you stories of my brainiac amor had her heart broken. Again. I was literally paralyzed. Laying on the floor of my living room because it was easier to get to my knees there, with crawling the only way to the bathroom & to my coffee pot, the two non-negotiables. To crawl & to still have faith in my arms to somehow miraculously haul me up to an impossible balance without putting weight on either foot, just leaning forward immediately, putting the full weight of my body against anything strong enough to hold it & even then just for a minute, to lower myself to pee, to pour the hot water. If you are wondering, I pushed the coffee cup across the floor back to my bed & propped myself up to enjoy. The whole process each morning took almost an hour.
I’m not telling you any of this to feel sorry for me. I am getting better every day & my family has been my rock. I am beyond grateful to these beautiful women I grew in my body. I just wanted to report the full effect of gravity’s embrace on me at this vortex moment, that the earth pulled me down hard, pulled me out of the fray of the world into a forced meditation, forced stillness, forced surrender. I did not go down easy but I got used to it. Humbled. Still working on it.
In this time of utter catastrophic suffering, the atrocities witnessed via my tether of internet, in the projection of otherness everywhere, I have been thinking about love. It is relevant. I have been thinking about the constant overwhelming need to be special even when we protest otherwise. How primed we are for this. Almost more than the hyper-productivity of capitalism or perhaps fueling it, the need to seen & held & safe drives the human. Nothing wrong with that. What becomes difficult & separating is the narrative that provokes this. The stories we have taken in through our parents & their collective trauma, through the culture.
Somewhere in the love mechanism came the desire to be the only one, to be the chosen one, to be the absolute best in the eyes of the beloved with no substitute possible. The belief that this is survival. Perhaps survival of the fittest. The most loved. It can make you crazy, the presence or its absence of this imagined rarefied existence. It can make you want to kill someone. It can make you want to die. I know this sounds hyperbolic but there are literally thousands of songs, movies & commercials that illustrate & confirm this, going back as long as any of us can remember.
The hierarchy of specialness is a privilege. To have the time to worry about these things. You have time to worry about these things when you have enough to eat, when you have housing, when you have some perspective, a landscape to survey, time to worry what others think of you. So much concern about how others see you. And then of course, now we have social media to break it all down to what appears to be some kind of numerical translation of worth. Phew.
As desperate (& familiar) as this may sound, from my place on the floor this is where I can see the crack in the darkness. I may be naive, but I find it hard to believe that the current rent in the fabric of our reality will be mended so neatly that we will not remember, that things will go back to normal, as normal as some may believe we went back to after Covid (almost 7,000,000 dead globally & still counting, I can still remember the pyres of bodies in India). And yet, I do have people in my life that wonder, when will I get over this current malaise of empathy. I am sure you do as well.
I love them but I don’t know what to say.
We have complicated minds, us humans, we can make ourselves believe almost anything. But our hearts, our hearts do not lie, particularly when we realize that we are actually not that special after all. Of course we are all special, every single one of us. but not more special. The greater our capacity for feeling, of holding the impossible realm, the greater our capacity to do one little thing today, to have the difficult conversations, the more love we are, the more in love we are with each other. There is no deficit. There is no grasping. This is the love economy.
Some other things I have been thinking about:
~ This essay OUR JOB IS TO MAKE REVOLUTION IRRESISTIBLE by Seedaschool. Beautiful. If you do one thing today towards change, start by reading here.
~ This continuously:
~ New (old) forms of divination & prophecy. Now more than ever. The Mothering Change online IChing readings. Blowing my mind every time.
~ The world is on fire & I still need to make a living. I am sure you can understand. It is very hard to advertise safe & loving projects at this time but no one will benefit if I can’t pay may bills. I feel like I have to say this, because it hurts my heart to even imagine the disparity. That said, I do have a few new things you might want to check out that I can promise that it will expand your ability to love & serve & rest & create new possibilities (descriptions below & links above). Believe me I am very grateful that I work for myself & can continue to speak out & still work.
~ High Garden, my sacred coaching container, will be beginning it’s new season on the Winter Solstice (December 21). If you have ever wanted me in your back pocket, whispering in your ear that everything is going to be alright & borrowing my mind & spirit to illuminate your path, NOW IS THE TIME. Interviewing for the last few spots now. Drop me a line theloveartist@Gmail.com
~ I was not sure if I would be leading a Love Immersion in Costa Rica this year, but when I received the invitation from Posada Natura, that enabled me to lead & teach in the jungle in their intimate & grass roots sanctuary, I said Yes. Maybe you will too. Let’s pray together. February 19-24 🌀 Presence & devotion in a femme-centric, trans/nonbinary inclusive ritual space. Link above or write me for more info.
All about that love economy, enchantress ! 💎💎💎💜💎