Change the way you talk to yourself so you can start feeling good about the things you say out loud. Question why your praise must be measured in comparison to other people. How flexible are you compared to other people? Why can’t it just be how flexible are you as compared to no one but yourself? If I’m flexible, there may very well be other people who are flexible, but it doesn’t need to matter if it’s more or less than I am. I can just be flexible. I don’t need to prove it’s good enough or as good as or even better. I just am, and I can increase or decrease my flexibility according to my desires and self-conditions. Individuation is not individualism is an excuse used by people who are too scared to admit they are so insatiable for truth they would leave everyone else behind. All choice is desire purified into immediacy. The absence of tension, the feeling of relief, of having been tense but not feeling tense anymore. Not because the tension didn’t exist but because you chose to shift it. The relief of immediacy creates renewal. With every muscle relaxed, every pressure point agitated into release simply because energy wants to be free, the body begins repair. That is the beginning of the creative life. Not the absence of tension, but the choice to shift it. Obscure your power to be dangerously precise and contained and the insecurity of the fateless will become a mine field to circumvent, eclipsing the luminosity of the moment. To be called by your name is to realize the accusations are false, all while you carry a stronger, more active connotation of being treacherous and disloyal to one that came before time. It’s supposed to have meaning morally sanctified by the appointed God and the community, when you choose a name for yourself. But what if there is no God to be appointed?

Do you feel guilty or are you grieving? I wish someone asked me that 30 years ago. Guilt, feels, sticky, wet, heavy, like, fog. Grief doesn’t float in the air like that, it takes you down under. But at least you come out clean. Guilt is like when the snow melts and you realize it makes the past look dirtier because there’s nothing but mud underneath. But it feels so good to bury yourself in it, like a blanket or a coffin, just some place for you to escape from life because you’re not brave enough to plant something new. Guilt implies fault, fractures, zones of weakness. New land forming looks like destruction pero no es culpa mia, mami. Feel the boundary lines in the tiny cracks of fascia all the way down my legs. Feel the tectonic plates in the scar tissue around my spine that’s hundreds of miles deep and long (this is where the grief hides). Any sudden release of energy can become an earthquake, active tension triggered into momentum. The Earth doesn’t feel guilty about violent acts of creation. Nature can’t be blamed for change. So why would I walk around like a zone of weakness, as if guilty as charged as the friction?

The world is your oyster this year. Carved for two and a half years by the impenetrable weight of the ocean, your shell is a rippled masterpiece created by the push and pull of every wave. You may appear still and secret but you have been busy deep inside yourself, sublimating irritation into pure form. Never untouched, yet somehow untouchable.

The world is your oyster this year. Immeasurable richness and luxury await those with the patience to reinvent their defenses layer by layer. It will look like goo and slime, gross and inedible. But you will slurp it up like the finest delicacy because courage is expensive. It makes you feel good to eat the secretions, to get high on the increase of your raw desire.

The world is your oyster this year. Natural pearls are extremely rare. Most of what you’re sold (told to create) has been artificially manufactured and while the process is the same, true pricelessness comes from what could not be otherwise contrived. When summer comes what was once shut tight inside will be revealed by knife and hammer. But you cannot afford to sit and wait to be revealed by force.

The world is your oyster this year. Round and round and round until you shine with the iridescent glow of integrated awareness. You’ll find treasure at the bottom of the ocean when you’ve given up self-inflicted suffering for the pearlescent shimmer of transmutation. Do not seek reclamation. There is nothing to “take back” and no rights to reassert. There is no former, better state. There is only change.

The world is your oyster but if you crack it open you will find nothing there to satiate your longing. Let yourself be pressed and squeezed. Let yourself be an irritant. There is nothing to lose. You decide what can be gained. Being consumed is tempting, but it’s not better than being alive.

The world is your oyster.

Be the pearl.

I want to die a painful death. I want to feel the excruciating pain of love leaving my body to exist in some higher realm. I want my husband to sing love songs to me every night so when he dies I can remember how he made me feel, each one the next one in my death by a thousand cuts. I want to get right into it as if there’s no way out. I want no threat of leaving, I want to let love (w)in.

Eat the anger while it’s fresh. A fleshy, almost alive, salmonella risk. It must be so raw it might poison you. You must be so cut open and dirty, at risk of infection. Eat it like this, blood red, and you’ll grow to be a fighter. Pro-body, you’ll become the antibody, turned against yourself, dis-eased. Eventually you’ll learn the art of dosage, the red hot immunity that will one day save your life.