shifting wholeness

today’s tea is anise – nettle- dandelion – mint. Wake up and ease the belly and lungs.

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A gorgeous Erotic Reading Circle last night — stories read from cell phones and paper, blog posts and s/m and sex in long-term relationships and more! Carol and I both read our stories from her book, More 5 Minute Erotica. Next month’s Reading Circle meets on the fourth and last Wed, Feb 23!

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This is what came to me last night, or this morning, really, when all of our alarms started going off — and bear with me, because this might end up being something that seemed really profound in the dark of early morning, but in the (closer to) light of day, is really not that interesting, kind of like when you’re stoned and every connection and link between you and the universe is suddenly made visible, or, no, you realize that no links are necessary because you are the universe and the universe is you — and it seems utterly profound until you wake up the next day, lungs clogged and smoky and thick and head pounding, looking at the notes you scrawled–“Universe-me! Us! No bus lines needed!”– and trying to reconnect with the sense of wonder that had flooded through you the night before.

Anyway –

This is what came to me: pangea. Pangea is the way all the continents fit together, before they drifted over the last 200 million years to create the continent arrangement on our planet today. Pangea was the parts all together, before various traumas and tectonic plate shifts caused them to break apart and rearrange.

This is what I thought: we’re pangea when we’re born. And then we break apart. Life breaks us apart. And when we say we want to come together again, is it that we want to reach that Permian state, regain it, reshape ourselves into a single whole? Or is there a way of understanding this new arrangement as also a whole — these parts and the liquid/loss/longing/sorrow/ache/joy flowing in between and amid them: this is what makes us up now.  This is us, undivided.

When I think about all the different parts and selves, I think about wanting unification — and then I think about my language and my metaphors. Must there be a pangeal unification in order for me to feel ‘whole,’ or is there a way to understand myself/selves as already unified within this one me — or as potentially already unified, in communication with one another, if not actively, then psychically, washed over by the same fluid stuff of history and desire?

So, what do you think? This could be the prompt: What is the tectonic arrangement of all of your different selves? I’m not talking only to people who identify as multiples (I don’t identify as such): all of us have different aspects or parts of ourselves: work self, parent, friend, child, student, girl/boyfriend or spouse … do these selves know each other? How do they relate to one another? What does each think of the others? If you are a multiple, how do your different parts relate to the various social selves in you?

Thank you for all the parts and interconnections that have held you together, and that you carry so tenderly. Thank you for your deep and persistent creativity, and for your words.