It's pretty standard practice to believe what we are told by our parents. Even kids like me who still question everything--even that which I can "see," was wont, until pretty recently, to believe almost everything my parents told me, even though they have told me many different things, at different times, depending on the circumstance. Truth favors itself over consistency, so what lasts are their "lessons" which have been reinforced by my short, wide life, full of hard knocks to the face, coupled with soft petal landings that disremember every sorrow.
The true story of a life, in live action, is what compels me--sure, I read and find stories spilling out of every possible device--and have begun to build Be As You Wear: The GoodHood Company, as a mobile and manifesting laboratory of life lived from where we are, as we are, as we wear.
Our hoodies, the making and manufacturing of our trademarked heart (symbol and bodily), the programs we provide (without charge) to prevent life ending addiction before it starts, and 24/7 mentoring, crisis, and intervention support are the tests of and the testaments to our favorite capital letter V, for Veracity, for Verification--for Validation. These 3 V's very often present as the opposite of what we want to believe, so, if you are like me, you have tried a lot of drugs and some prescribed medications in order to make "sense" out of what meditation teaches--which is to not "unsee," but to watch, without denying, without analyzing, without picking and choosing.
At some point, when it came to be in fits and starts that drugs of any kind didn't help to change the scene, I'd go out miles for a run in the middle of the night to play chicken with long haul truckers in order to alter what I perceived, and sometimes, that's been a healthy thing--to run and smoke some weed-- but only once the chemical "doping" became an activity of dropping in and not of dropping out--of going deep rather than casting the wide net in which I had become ensnared--thinking I could save others from despair, without using the tools built to save myself. Even today, I cried my way through the end of Yoga practice and confessed to my incredibly gifted teacher, Samantha Lucas, how desperately I long to "get out, out, out." The Veracity is Verifiable for a moment, because she Validates the small v, "varieties of feeling" that arise from being THIS close to life. In the face. In the face of fear, Yoga. In the face of joy, Yoga. In the face, Union of breath and movement and breath and stillness, which is really all Yoga means--believe this: on and off the mat, every moment comes loaded with potential for Yoga.
At some point, radicalized by the "stories" of the year 1968, I got tired of living the energetic life of "healer" and "teacher" as a "professional" in a world gone raving mad without the professional practice of what drives us to begin with: LOVE. Every single body is some body's baby, and if a baby body lives long enough to know its name, to take food when offered, to drink when thirsty, well, then, LOVE is at play--oh so plain and simple.
Now, I can't very well call myself a Professional Lover, nor can I profess my love for all things--to refer to myself as an Authority on anything farther away from me than my own nose, smacks of fraudulence I deride--when despair sets in, my ribbon dance of so-called unconditional love is ensnared by amnesia--like this morning, when my SI Joint flickers into a violet purple fire of rage--I want to KILL everyone. So, my approach to professional teaching and learning is rooted in LOVE as defined by the authentic exploration of all the horrendous tyrannical stuff inside me, and also in the practice of how to survive and thrive in every single circumstance, even when LOVE seems to have been "lost."
What I know, is that LOVE is never leaving; what I have lived through is a war on LOVE, waged by the emotional and economic injustices perpetuated by institutional and individual (but not personal) greed in a world where there is no standard for the value of "currency." Given our tacit agreement to tolerate "collateral damage" when fighting over resources to secure our individual and collective (but not personal) amnesia, I find myself raging about how much authority we have given to a few people in deciding whose life is worth it--when, under the hood, we are all the same junk boxes with built in self-cleaning organs that are all plugged into the currency whose only solid standard is the heart beat--that's it folks--"you can hold your breath, but you can't hold your heart."
You heard it here, and have felt it for more than the first time, that currency--the dollar in your pocket is at once priceless and at once absent of value. With no definite standard, of which the 1.00 US Dollar Bill has none, the paper accounting for 100 cents of equally arbitrary value, means only what it means to you--big power. Huge. Keep it or spend it? Compound the interest or compute the difference if 1% of the population continues to build wealth by exploiting the love and labor of the 99%?. It's really our choice, and the future is of our making--crazy, liberating, freaking cool--right? Be somebody's baby, grab a rattle, and make noise about bodily net worth!
What's infinite is worth so much of all and nothing, we can barely conceive of it without developing concrete forms on which to demonstrate or standardize the truths we hold to be most evident. LOVE, a life based on LOVE, alone, IS the sought after thing. Connection between people of any kind is the cure; it's where the V opens, and all can enter without retribution.
For so long, reading Shakespeare saved us, -- Queens, our Kings and Courtesans--all food for worms. There is no social or economic order, other than our idea of order, also called the "status quo." Without a standard, there is no quo, and no choice for me, but to practice being a pro at living this one life.
Buy a hoodie just for your body; get good with where you are, tears and all, and give another kid a chance to drop in before dropping out.
Don't need another thing? We agree. Scoop up a patch, sewed by hand, and have it delivered for the cost of a letter. Verified and valued at what money of no kind can buy.
Love & Sweat, some Tears,
athena