Do you feel guilty or are you grieving? I wish someone asked me that 30 years ago. Guilt, feels, sticky, wet, heavy, like, fog. Grief doesn’t float in the air like that, it takes you down under. But at least you come out clean. Guilt is like when the snow melts and you realize it makes the past look dirtier because there’s nothing but mud underneath. But it feels so good to bury yourself in it, like a blanket or a coffin, just some place for you to escape from life because you’re not brave enough to plant something new. Guilt implies fault, fractures, zones of weakness. New land forming looks like destruction pero no es culpa mia, mami. Feel the boundary lines in the tiny cracks of fascia all the way down my legs. Feel the tectonic plates in the scar tissue around my spine that’s hundreds of miles deep and long (this is where the grief hides). Any sudden release of energy can become an earthquake, active tension triggered into momentum. The Earth doesn’t feel guilty about violent acts of creation. Nature can’t be blamed for change. So why would I walk around like a zone of weakness, as if guilty as charged as the friction?

The world is your oyster this year. Immeasurable richness and luxury await those with the patience to reinvent their defenses layer by layer. It will look like goo and slime, gross and inedible. But you will slurp it up like the finest delicacy because courage is expensive. It makes you feel good to eat the secretions, to get high on the increase of your raw desire.

The world is your oyster this year. Natural pearls are extremely rare. Most of what you’re sold (told to create) has been artificially manufactured and while the process is the same, true pricelessness comes from what could not be otherwise contrived. When summer comes what was once shut tight inside will be revealed by knife and hammer. But you cannot afford to sit and wait to be revealed by force.

The world is your oyster this year. Round and round and round until you shine with the iridescent glow of integrated awareness. You’ll find treasure at the bottom of the ocean when you’ve given up self-inflicted suffering for the pearlescent shimmer of transmutation. Do not seek reclamation. There is nothing to “take back” and no rights to reassert. There is no former, better state. There is only change.

The world is your oyster but if you crack it open you will find nothing there to satiate your longing. Let yourself be pressed and squeezed. Let yourself be an irritant. There is nothing to lose. You decide what can be gained. Being consumed is tempting, but it’s not better than being alive.

The world is your oyster.

Be the pearl.

-Your fungi covered log of grief

-Your bowl of fruit covered in moldy guilt

-Your collection of russian dolls you hide yourself in

-Your marriage

-Even the scared, scarred person you used to be

is dead.

Congratulations on your loss.

Love,

Ariana

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