Two Frequencies & an Inversion
TWO FREQUENCIES AND AN INVERSION -July 12, 2022
It’s really something to wake up with my face drenched through from tears, to feel the ground of my heart so utterly turned over by the plow of reality, yet still I long to live.
I’m living in a world of strange paradoxes. Opposites.
I get these little signs and hints that my beloved is still near. Which holds both gut wrenching pain, and makes my whole being smile. There isn’t a word for this emotion. But I experience it frequently.
Love longing.
Grief is a wild ride.
It decimates all illusions of safety.
Ruptures our relationship to life itself.
Steals the fantasy that we control even the most infinitesimal things.
Brings us nose to nose with human frailty.
With the fragility inherent in it all.
Breaks the spell of normality. Shatters it.
Has us feel so raw and exposed to the elements. That it’s impossible not to notice to how much life we’ve kept at bay, prior to grief coming to our door.
Grief is a great revealer. It shows us that Life is more simple, more elegant, more meaningless, more chaotic, more painful, more beautiful, and more broken, than we ever thought possible.
There are no anecdotes here.
No earned wisdom can be applied to make the suffering less acute.
The Self-help aisle is useless.
There isn’t a class or bullet-point list we can unleash to overcome our grief.
No weapons to deploy. Because it cannot be conquered.
It’s breadth and girth are all encompassing.
This is life-long, left undone, spirit work.
The Earth quakes, opens up, and swallows us.
That’s where I exist now. Cradled in that chasm.
And so I’ve done, what all philosophical grievers do, I’ve been meditating on grief & longing.
And how spacious and open handed they are.
They ask nothing from us.
We can’t grab our grief & longing, and pin it down, any more than we can direct ourselves into a happy, open hearted, juicy life. It doesn’t respond to instruction.
Longing & Grief, just are. 
No escape. Can’t be fixed.
I’ve begun to feel into the different layers of frequency that can be embodied on this plane of existence.
The paradoxical nature of the space I’m in is so exaggerated, and so primal. I feel like I’m on the charnel ground of the senses. This is a great place for an exploration. Because I’ve never been so full and so empty at the same time.
And so…
I’ve noticed in my “getting on with it attempts” how some activities are brimming magic. They are, for lack of a better word, sentient, alive, “le piment de la vie”.
The way making love is. Or being overcome by beautiful music, or smelling a baby’s head, or getting into a warm fragrant bath, or drinking fine wine and eating delicious food.
And some activities are life negating. Like “trying” to satiate desire, ignoring our hunger, chastising our humanity. Working off of a list, mindlessly running errands, distracting ourselves with social media, concerning ourselves with what others might think. Fitting ourselves into an cultural cutout.
One provides a life of wonder, Eros, and ecstatic enchantment. And the other is robotic and numb.
Or in other words, we could say there are two basic frequencies. Life giving, and Life Negating.
The grand paradox of them all is that death itself is life giving. It lends itself to that frequency.
Grief, sadness, and longing, or suffering towards some meaning, belong in the soggy hearted - cracked wide open, Eros, category.
And what have our lives been these last few, isolated, fear driven years?
An exercise in Numb, robotic, Groundhog Days? Culture has anesthetized us. Inverted our model of priorities.
Made to-do lists important, endless scrolling sexy. Safety a badge we wear with honor.
Told us our productivity determined our worth.
Asked us to choose a side “Be like everyone on this side, and you’ll be ok, because we have the truth”.
When in fact, because truth is verb, it belongs to Eros. Eros doesn’t have a side. It’s a frequency.
We’ve used all the wrong measurement tools.
It makes me recoil in horror to see how much I had previously invested in the monotonous, magic-free, inversion. Because “Responsibility and Maturity” are mandatory purchases like buying a car and a house.
I hadn’t thought about practicing paradox with those two investments.
Grief and longing lend themselves to flourishing.
I now have a magic filled nightly walks, when grief is present.
I notice the way the sunlight moves through the tree branches and hits the ground. How the wind moves the grass and enhances its color palette. I’m aware of all of the winged ones who walk beside me.
Without the grief, I walked monotonously to get my allotted steps in for the day. Zoned out.
Apply this same formula to everything. And it’s the same. It’s a template for life negating normality.
I can’t go back and change what’s happened. All I can do is try and thrive where I’m at.
But there is life here. Where death is also present.
It’s awoken something in me that was sleeping.
And it can do the same for anyone.
There is so so so much to grieve right now.
The Earth. Women’s Rights, The World we are leaving to our children, our own childhood.
Grief & longing can always be with us to inspire us, to make the ground fallow again, if we allow it.
When it starts to bubble up from the depths of soul, it’s release can be nothing short of ecstatic.
I am finding so much gratitude for the life giving nature of death. It redeems something immense from the nightmare of loss. Because somehow, magically, something significant is gained.
Art by: Peter "Brownz" Braunschmid
