I’ve been on a bender the last couple of weeks, and yesterday I finally got clean.
To be fair, my ‘benders’ these days look nothing like those of my twenties. My benders back then were a way for me to feel comfortable in my own, crazy skin. And these days its to feel sufficient discomfort that I do things I’d not normally do.
It’s coffee, OK.
And I know that sounds crazy and I know you’re like “a bender must surely mean 3-5 coffees daily and not sleeping at night and eyes wide like dishpans.
But no.
My bender was me, drinking one and maybe two coffees a day. But everyday, for the aforementioned couple of weeks.
And what that does to me is so insanely confusing that I’ve landed in a space of utter surrender.
For starters; my sleep score, HRV and resilience score on my Oura ring had all increased (that’s great). But my mood and capacity for self-care had decreased (obvs, that’s bad). Some days I knew in my marrow that I felt bad, that I wasn’t my normal bubbly self and that I was choosing less healthy habits (like researching ad nauseum ‘how to do instagram’), and yet the ‘facts’ stacked that I was a bloody superstar (my ring actually told me that).
In this world of growing metrics and facts on tap, it’s becoming harder and harder to discern mentally what is up, and what is down. What is right, and what is wrong. Or further, what is right for me, and what is wrong for me, right here, in this bless’d moment.
I wrote about this in The Joy Decision (my book of short stories). There’s a story called The Factory and it’s a dystopian future where facts have replaced nature and anyone with a brain for containing facts, is promoted. There are no emotions. There is no access to the ‘self’.
And it’s not lost on me that this precise crossroads is what I grappled with over the weekend.
My head bloated with fact and reason, yet my body devoid of intuition.
I feel blessed that I know there is a way back to intuition. I feel blessed, especially, to be a woman and to have grown in a culture where, despite the myriad of ways women are oppressed ‘women’s intuition’ has remained in usage.
But finding it, when my head was spinning from caffeine madness and data excess, became yet another exercise for my brain. I concocted elaborate rituals and engaged every tool upon my altar. My mind still spun.
It struck me, as I walked down my rickety back stairs. My house is old, and the paint is not a colour that anyone would choose. The stairs lead from the back porch and are exposed to the weather, so they have a 70 year patina of Queensland rain and drought.
And yet, I walked downstairs and thought to myself, ‘God I love my house’.
It was like a jar lid loosening, just enough for me to grip it, turn it, and find the glistening jam inside.
My way home. Back to myself. Through the observance of beauty.
The more that I sit with it, the more it makes sense and also, feels so unwittingly simple that I can’t imagine how I could lose it.
I guess, in a sense, my experience of beauty is so subjective that of course, it has to show me a slither of beauty within myself. When I thought ‘God I love my house’, nobody else would say that. It’s only me. And beauty reflected that back to me. Almost in appreciation, she curled her hands and reached into my heart, held it, and said ‘you too, are that’.
And when I step into nature, yes, absolutely I believe the power and vibrations and frequencies surrounding me are magic and hold me in their medicine, but also, observing, and recognising the beauty enriches me.
From the minutiae to the massive, it seems to make little difference what I observe, only that I observe.
To stand awe-swept, horizon to horizon painted by trees and the blue haze of eucalypt forest can stir the soul similarly to finding, precariously shooting from crumbled mortar in a brick wall, a darling viola flower.
It was a strange sense, realising that the simple experience of receiving beauty opened me up to receive more of myself (although, are we all not beauty? When not bound by the critic within?), and therefore receive wisdom.
Is intuition always within us? Or is it something we open to? That it’s ‘feminine’ in nature, energetically, does elude to a fondness for opening.
I’d always assumed intuition lived deep in my cells, my DNA a cottage with all my ancestors and their wisdom sitting around the fire, keeping it aflame. I’d assumed that by being in right relationship with my body, that I could locate and access intuition (much like how I find words when I write), but this feeling- of observing beauty and then, afterward, feeling my intuition like a slow and steady stream of air filling my lungs… it felt like an external offering.
How do you experience intuition?
Do you feel it’s something that lives within you, or something that happens to you?
How important is beauty, in your self-care practice (and I know this doesn’t need to be said here, that by beauty I don’t mean hair and makeup and fashion per se, but it could also mean that)?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and experience.
Ps. I literally JUST realised yesterday was the new moon in Libra, which is very much about harmony. Ruled by Venus, beauty’s most adored advocate. What an adorable little synchronicity.