A letter to launch an idea
there's a curtain on the door to my digital boudoir that reads 'anna and her ideas admitted only'
hey <3
I know that I can do this but I notice there is fear.
but fuck it, here is why Iām here ā
I spent one night and one day with my darling friend, Jade. Our friendship is still frankly quite new to my life but in that way that has felt ancient from the first day that we met. We can talk incessantly, and she inspires my heavily, and today she did so by reminding me something that once I had believed but had forgotten. As a truth made its way back into my heart, but in her voice, I instantly believed it even harder.
It is an idea about ideas. A conversational, imaginational musing in which we place the idea on the podium beside the force you might call god/s. Imagine ideas are ineffable entities, embodied only for an instant in something more than merely ether when they tickle your consciousness as electromagnetic current dancing across the brain tissue.
In this view, to āhaveā an idea may be, to be graced, to be visited, to be chosen by a presence which asks you if you will choose it back. It asks you, an alchemist, if you might have the means to grow what-was-never into solid, together. Consciousness affords us the power to receive, and furthermore acknowledge the receipt of such an offering. Consciousness affords us the power to review, respond and reciprocate the energy of an idea.
It is one experience to take the arrival of an idea for granted completely, the repetition of such a habit possibly contributing to the building of an energetic wall against their otherwise persistent arrival. It is another to entertain an ideaās arrival with sense of whimsical welcome before letting it go back into the ether again. To meet one with a respectful gratitude, a reverence for its apparition in your attention, and the intention to accept or respond, is another entirely.
Both former scenarios are examples of circumstances Iāve found myself to feel cyclically trapped in a repeat of, for several years each within my quickly lengthening life. I am not ignorant and I am not ungrateful; I have been chosen by some fucking beautiful ideas. I like to imagine them as immaculate lines of creation that were whittled for a while through my mind as an idea was lead by its own exhaustible charge, perhaps rushing from point to point between the multiple magnetic poles of the atoms which kiss across my brain folds. It is something like an ember burst from a great bonfire. Rushing through nothingness on the back of a reaction that burned so hot and so bright for just a moment, that it pummelled on a whim to the where the fuel which birthed it could not feed it. It is as if it believes in its real and serious potential to set down and grow elsewhere than the source from which it came. Bright and hot it burns perhaps lightyears away from its fiery parent, tiny, yes perhaps, but one darenāt say pathetic as one simply canāt deny that the rogue flying ember is the one to catch the eye. It glows and throws through space in hope that it will meet the ground it needs to come to light again.
You see, ideas burn inside me but I do not feed their dying heat. I am rarely uninspired but often insufferably unmoved. And it has grown frustrating watching my ideas burn out, knowing that I do have what theyāre needing. I am that fuel that they need feeding.
I fumbled it, okay? I let meditations on my own creativity and power nourish a particular egoic character in me, one who believes that she can afford to be lazy and detached in the mental boudoirs where her dreams dwell. They are dark adorned rooms of glowing candlelight and textural drapery. They are ignorantly detached from the potential for exchange and connection that buzzes through space. Perhaps the smoke of incense is too thick or the hearth fire too hot. Because ideas arrive here, they do. And in droves. But it is then as if while surrounded by an orgy of passionate lovers, she were to choose repeatedly to make them watch her touch herself half heartedly, until they all inevitably grow bored. A selfish, lazy lover she labours only to convince herself that she is satisfied, pleasured even, by the upkeep of illusion that her presence there alone is enough to keep her hot. She feeds a drunken habit as she surrenders to the seeking only of the validation offered by each loverās glamorous arrival. Sighing āwell they mustnāt be the one,ā when they turn to leave and go. But divine lovers (and ideas the same) do not retreat in regret or in shame that they could not please or even grieve that she would not let them try, not really. True love is secure in its offering. They simply float to the next room and find a lover who will honour and respect their presence and offer for exchange. So to this sexy lavish mental space Iāve painted, ideas arrive, yes. But they do not cum. Because you donāt āhaveā ideas. You host them.
And preferably less selfishly than does this lonely matron I describe; my over-indulged egoic self, who is left only ever to imagine her creative desires as fulfilled because thatās all she can seem to do to get herself off and say goodnight. What else is a girl to do to distract the ringing emptiness?
Jade reminded me that the presence of an idea in the consciousness is a holy, holy gift. A lover, a spirit, a child, a chance, asking if youāll choose to love it back. Asking if youāll grace it with your powers to make solid another of the infinite potentials in the ether. Might its choice in me be made on no more than the chance, that it might be fed and watered should it ask this mind to dance? Or might they set out for the very minds they know to have the matter to nourish them?
Should one respond to such sacred stuff as the arrival of an idea with gentle seriousness, a beautiful new entity may be born into our world. Should one take such grace for granted it shall flit off to another with the power to manifest it.
I have been treating my ideas like cheap, empty lovers; jacking myself off to the high of their arrival and indulging in the flattery of their having found me to be alluring. But this is not the kind of spirit that I really want to be. What a waste of my being to ignore such a pure expression of creation flowing through me. To have an idea is to be invited by the divine to share the experience ā no, the duty of creation. I feel I could go as far to say that the idea is both the most trusting and supportive offering from that force which channels up and through our grounded bodies here on Earth. Ideas, and those of us responsible enough to take them seriously, to handle graciously and responsibly, those of us lift each other to heaven.
I wonder what I could do for the world as I lift my chin to this perspective that it is my spiritual responsibility to nurture a relationship with my ideas. To ask them what they want to say and what they need from me to do so.
So welcome to my new Substack. I promised the idea Iād come, and I promise Iāll be back.