Nourish

Mind

Noorish the mind with wonder, allow it to swim in a pool of imagination. Point it towards the notions that grow it, not the old wounds and lessons, or the promises of glorious ends. Accept the motion of our being across time, its place in our own personal and collective spaces. Embrace the entirety of your past, open yourself to the entirety of the possible future, the beauty in the struggle, the dreams we intentionally and practically choose to move towards. If we don’t accept and choose our own struggles, the direction of circumstantial resistance we point our growth towards, the world will choose and blindside us with its own struggles. Sometimes these obstacles are unavoidable, the unknown is vast and just as intricately nuanced, wondrous yet elusively difficult as the experiences we’ve come to make known. Acknowledge all that has shaped you, but let it go, move towards something new, something more fulfilling, something that opens up your life force to new horizons, rather than the recycled bubbles of experience we relive vicariously through in fear or doubt of living again. Embrace the pain, the fear, the doubt, move along side it, do what you will inspite of their presence. They’re here to protect you from danger, from the world, from yourself. The inevitability of suffering is what we sign up for when we opt to live intentionally, so might as well do it on our own terms, with the clarity of an unclouded and playful mind, and the courage to prioritize our goals, our ambitions over tending to the doses of discomfort that ensure our growth; the scars we hand in when we’re asked if we truely ever lived.

Heart

Poor your heart into the moments and the thoughts that align with your Spirit’s pursuit. Our hearts are volatile, and we can’t really control how or how much we feel, but it’s useful to be able to step back in observation of our passing thoughts or passing affects, and choose whether to animate them with life, let them pass through, or tend to them if they keep responding to something the same way, hanging at the centre a lesson our spirits refuse to move forward without first learning. Human beings, we’re funny like that. The past gives us foundations yes, but we refuse to move on from it until we’ve allowed ourselves to heal, learn and grow from it. We’re geared towards personal change and collective evolution, and I think that’s brilliant. These anchors to the past or these trauma based response patterns can be overwhelming though, so facing the emotion honestly, as it is originally sourced rather than through the lens of the emotions we’ve layered around this initial affect, is really important. An incomplete trick to feeling through what we have to learn from in this difficult emotion or mental realization, is withholding our emotional response to it as a neutral and impartial observer. This practice can really help whelm us to this ball of yarn we wish to untangle; this isn’t to be confused with rational and calculative intellectualization of our affective dilemma - we can’t substitute feeling through our pain with observing it impartially to learn why it’s been reocurring. After that, don’t forget to nurture your Heart with real love. 

Spirit

Noorish your Spirit with faith, with the release of our attachment to our mortality, our desire to immortalize ourselves or live on through the memories or imaginations of others, by surrendering to the experience of Life, the journey from the One, through One, and to the One. As long as we’re here, there are no ends, only means. I am a medium for my spirit’s expression within an ecosystem of spirit that move as the passage of human history just as it is animated by the lives of other plants and animals. Within a Spirit that moves towards Allah, the final instance of my and collective existence, not solely of our bodies, but the motion of the spirit that was instigated with temporal creation, and that ripples across time and space every time a living being makes a choice. My being actualizes what it observes potentially, in turn, my internal sets of beliefs and values are just as causally significant within the spirit as my acting on them. A single act of of authentic and intentional good inspires another and another, and another.. Same goes for distortive and ostensible acts of wrong. Individually our impact on the surface of our lake can only be so big, collectivley, we start pushing waves, civilizationally and cosmopolitanily, we eventually start moving stars. Nevertheless, the call of our spirits is first and foremost a call for Love, quaint, genuine, and communal love. We can’t hope to care for our loved ones if we aren’t able to care for ourselves. We can’t care for the advancement of our communities if we don’t start by caring for our circles of friends and family, our people before we’re ready to meet and support the people. Our spirits know we’re going to die, it understands our mortality, even if our bodies and hearts struggle to stomach or familiarize themselves with death. Why were we designed to migrate between the bedrock and the Light if we have no choice but to leave it all behind when Death visits us? To make sure we truely live I suppose. We would never have known the value of time if we could never lose it, the importance of caring and supporting our loved ones if they could never be taken away from us, the worthwhileness of living, truely living through the eyes of stroms and warm afternoons, living true, living raw, if we were never at risk of losing it all, of losing our self and the chance to love while we still can.

Notes on anxiety

Noorish your spirit with meaning for its existence with love, with purpose, with the embrace of the Grand Loving Spirit that houses us All. You angst about the storm, the one you’ve seen on the horizon, it looks just like every other storm that turned out to be a stubbed toe and a tipped popcorn bag. As for the real storms, when the tycoon comes it would have come and departed just as all the previous tycoons have, with one thing remaining constant. You. You’ve always made it through alive, to see a brighter dawn, you survived stronger, with a gentler heart and the scars to prove it. When and if the threats we woe before their time arrive, our fears and self-doubt wouldn’t help us, we hesitate and we get stuck fighting two battles, one against ourselves, and the other against the world we’re frightened to navigate. That’s tough, even for the most seasoned warriors. Discomforts and resistance teach us about who we are. Most truely, when the partner for this Dance is a life-long friend. We remember and grow along the path of where we’ve been. Also worst worst care we die? Bet, lmao. Actual worst case your loved one dies; all I can say to that is brace yourself for a real life long mission of painful or beautiful remembrance. That’s when we really learn what death as to teach us; love while you still can.