Maybe the new season has not brought with it a fresh kind of stepping out. You did not wake up anew, and instead awakened to more wavering in what was, a greater need for retreat and solitude, and a deeper sense of horror regarding matters that are entirely beyond your control. Through planning, cleaning, re-entering spaces after time away, or even starting something entirely new, there remain fractured remnants like fragments of broken glass that reflect what was, and what could have been.

Memory is an imaginal hotel. Each episodic vignette is a room to visit; to stay, to fuck, to sleep, to cry, to laugh, or to clean. Endings in life will make of me the maid. Anytime it’s a new year, or you had a break-up, or you lost your job is an opportunity to don your sexy imaginal smock and clean out the corners of your mind. Cue ‘Summer Breeze’. It is my experience that matters of uncertainty, decline, grief, and contraction are frequently neglected and/or rejected from what we carry forward. Or, in cases where they are addressed, it is primarily in service to control, growth, or improvement. What I have found, is that the only real path forward requires nothing less than transforming both sides. And this requires that I integrate fate with free will. That I take my destiny in my hands, and quite simply get to work.

Take the elevator down to the basement to collect your cleaning supplies. As life goes on, I am repeatedly made aware that the weightiest parts of my inability to emotionally contend with the events of my life routinely arise from something else that I’m attempting to avoid. As I continue to mature, I try look to what I’m actively avoiding as items of fruitful interest. Be it personally, in families,workplace teams, or even culturally - dark themes are easier set aside until they amass a certain level of intensity that requires direct engagement. Recall the brief frenzy surrounding the television drama ‘13 Reasons Why’ that came out in 2017. The series was not particularly artful, considered, or masterful,but it became popular very quickly because it directly addressed a phenomenon that at the time was being avoided at all costs – teen suicide. The show came out a year before one of my friends died from suicide, a detail which was at least avoided and at most denied in all the funeral proceedings, and an event that created the most tangled and complicated emotional experience of my life so far.

I have a very low threshold before the need to address what has been avoided begins to assert itself through physical symptoms. If left unattended, what has been avoided begins to pull focus, bringing all desirable growth to a screaming halt. But if I can hold true, all that amassed potential provides a temporal slingshot into a well imagined, chosen future.

Take the elevator back up to G. While collecting your master key from Serge at the front desk,you spot a crust punk lurking by the elevator. As you pass him, your apprehensive smile is met with a warm grin and greeting. From another angle,punks are always so gentle. There’s that endearing sub-cultural phenomenon of presenting toughness and darkness on the exterior while housing within an expanse of warmth and generosity. Black clothing, neck tattoos, big boots, and safety-pin accessories are consistently worn by some of the most incredibly warm, personable, creative, and sensitive people I know. When did we learn to separate truth from appearances? If we see clearly, it’s all there in layers.

Take the elevator up to the tenth floor.

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