The last of three(!) parts. Phew, we made it, and I'm honoured you have taken the time to cross this desert with me. You're a legend along my own Personal Legend.
Lauren I’m enraptured by your writing! I read all three parts today between my babies naps and bedtime. It’s amazing how similar our paths have been, spiritually speaking. Reading a bit of your journey has been refreshing and nurturing for me. That bit about balancing this all while trying to remember when the bins go out exploded my heart wide open. I’m so blessed to be on this journey with you! Let’s rock🤘🏾
Awww, shucks...I'm so touched you made a point of reading them during (what I'm sure is) your incredibly precious quiet time! Means the world to me you would not only do that but also make your presence known :)
Aaand now I'm super curious to start learning more about your spiritual journey. Reading through some of your Substack notes (I've really gotta get better at posting those), I can already tell you're hecka into astrology; me too, hehe. And I might embarrass myself here trying to recall...but I also remember reading something a long while back about you training to be (or becoming) some kind of doula(?) though not in the traditional sense of the word. Whatever you said back then, it intrigued me. And you intrigue me now! So...very much looking forward to continuing to connect through words and witchiness. Let us, indeed, rock this casbah!
(P.S. Thank you, re. finding balance with the world's troubles while trying to remember bin night...I say that absolutely as someone who never fails to forget what night the bins go out, haha!) x
Yesss words and witchiness!! Hehe omg I can’t believe you remember that! That was when I first started my spiritual facilitating work ~ I coined myself the consciousness doula because I see what I do as helping us birth a new Earth/ Reality. I offer lunar cacao ceremonies in my community and a host of other spiritual wellness services. It’s also been a wild and expansive ride🏄🏾♀️
That honestly sounds like a hoot. Wish I lived closer so I could attend one! And I'll likely be picking your brain about your line of work sooner or later ;)
I really like the idea of figuring out what our Personal Legends are as we walk into, yes, increasingly terrifying times. I've been ruminating lately on what the role, responsibility and story of a person is, and how we weave these personal understanding into a Collective Imagining of Humanity during such fracture & fragmentation of culture.
Can't wait to see where you weave this story next in Chapter 1!
Well...glad to meet another card-carrying member of the Ruminating on Humanity Club, hehe. I'm also glad that's the message you carried out of reading this; I definitely found that getting three instalments into a prologue made me question whether the feck I actually got my point across it all in the end!
But yeah, that is absolutely the kind of subject I'll be spending many consecutive chapters attempting to pick apart; trying to figure out for myself where our humanity/authenticity and Personal Legends fit into (rather, stand out from?) the framework of an old world order that appears to be readily collapsing around us.
As always...thank you ever so much for reading and taking the time to comment. You're one of few at the moment, and it's lovely to know I'm not just dumping my soul's work into the void unnoticed x
Ah yes, the Poetry did it to me, or the Ruminating on Humanity brought me to Poetry, or Humanity brought me to both. Chicken & egg...and there I go Ruminating again!
I felt that point & it resonated! I think perhaps some things demand to be 3 part stories, and a prologue is definitely allowed to be one of those things.
Is the Personal Legend a mythos that keeps us separated from a Collective? or is it a finding of our 'Place' or 'Part' within that? I'm of both minds on it- as I'm sure you have been too!
There's an adapted quote from Antonio Gramsci that's been floating through my algorithms for a bit that I keep coming back to in these discussions- "the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters"
As for 'order', I'm not sure it's an inherent part of how I see things, but I'm interested in the journey that you're taking us on. I am so curious and invested in stories that are exploring what the old or current world is, what a new world could be, and what the monsters of our time are. It's an honour to read a story like that which comes from the heart of a friend x
Firstly, I'm very looking forward to venturing into more of the poetry space. Certain poems and poets are popping up a lot throughout my research; and by lovely chance I happen to have spontaneously made friends with an elderly man at a recent dinner party, whom I bonded with over a poetry synchronicity (I had only within days been looking up and reading East Coker by T.S. Eliot for further pondering and later inclusion in this book, and he randomly brought up T.S. Eliot's poetry during the conversation...alerting my attention to all Four Quartets of which East Coker is but one part!). Since then, we've been exchanging emails and weirdly in-tune in terms of the poets/poetry we've been reading and sharing (Rumi, David Whyte etc.). But I'm still very new to most...and believing more and more that poetry holds a kind of power and key-code to the universe of which I was not previously aware. I'm sure you would have more than a few words to say on that! If any pops up in your consciousness that might be relevant to what I wind up writing about, I'd be thrilled to know about it :)
Re. Personal Legends keeping us separated or "in place" within the collective...really good question! I would have to mull over it more; however, my initial understanding or belief around them so far is that they...I guess, kind of pulse in and out with one another? Interweaving and drifting away and interweaving again, moving apart and magnetising back together; co-existing while never interfering with one another (the alchemist specifically says to the boy at some stage that "anyone who interferes with the Personal Legend of another thing never will discover his own"), in a perpetually dynamic state of "belong[ing] no place — every place — no place at all" to adapt words from Maya Angelou. I'm becoming more and more convinced our Personal Legends are a continual losing/drifting away from/seeking and re-finding ourselves and our buried treasures, as well as those in one another — not unlike in the final pages of The Alchemist, and not unlike the existential concept of the "cosmic joke" (which I think of as monks and the like having a good chuckle at the absurd extent to which we, seekers of some description, exert all kinds of effort and stress and fling ourselves out and away and all over the place looking for something we think we're missing, only to find it on us like we had the keys in our pocket the whole time) — while gradually realising that the losing/seeking is nevertheless significant because it helps us see and appreciate beauty in the world, and all there is to hold dear to our hearts and one day stand to lose. If all of that makes sense...I'm curious to sit with and investigate the concept of now being a time for monsters, however! I'm interpreting that as: we're entering a time of great liminality and guaranteed uncertainty...so we may as well be led by the beck and call of our unique inner rebels that refuse to conform to convention. Convention's dead, so let's fkn let loose! Do some rabble-rousing, haha.
Thanks for the extra tangent to pursue, and sorry for the wall of text in return! Guess you gave me some good questions to think through and I decided to try and answer them on the spot :P These are the sorts of questions that fully consume my headspace at the moment, and I'm really glad to use this opportunity to connect with others who are thinking the same way. And then turn them into future chapters. Your input is, as always, much appreciated x
Lauren I’m enraptured by your writing! I read all three parts today between my babies naps and bedtime. It’s amazing how similar our paths have been, spiritually speaking. Reading a bit of your journey has been refreshing and nurturing for me. That bit about balancing this all while trying to remember when the bins go out exploded my heart wide open. I’m so blessed to be on this journey with you! Let’s rock🤘🏾
Awww, shucks...I'm so touched you made a point of reading them during (what I'm sure is) your incredibly precious quiet time! Means the world to me you would not only do that but also make your presence known :)
Aaand now I'm super curious to start learning more about your spiritual journey. Reading through some of your Substack notes (I've really gotta get better at posting those), I can already tell you're hecka into astrology; me too, hehe. And I might embarrass myself here trying to recall...but I also remember reading something a long while back about you training to be (or becoming) some kind of doula(?) though not in the traditional sense of the word. Whatever you said back then, it intrigued me. And you intrigue me now! So...very much looking forward to continuing to connect through words and witchiness. Let us, indeed, rock this casbah!
(P.S. Thank you, re. finding balance with the world's troubles while trying to remember bin night...I say that absolutely as someone who never fails to forget what night the bins go out, haha!) x
Yesss words and witchiness!! Hehe omg I can’t believe you remember that! That was when I first started my spiritual facilitating work ~ I coined myself the consciousness doula because I see what I do as helping us birth a new Earth/ Reality. I offer lunar cacao ceremonies in my community and a host of other spiritual wellness services. It’s also been a wild and expansive ride🏄🏾♀️
That honestly sounds like a hoot. Wish I lived closer so I could attend one! And I'll likely be picking your brain about your line of work sooner or later ;)
I really like the idea of figuring out what our Personal Legends are as we walk into, yes, increasingly terrifying times. I've been ruminating lately on what the role, responsibility and story of a person is, and how we weave these personal understanding into a Collective Imagining of Humanity during such fracture & fragmentation of culture.
Can't wait to see where you weave this story next in Chapter 1!
Well...glad to meet another card-carrying member of the Ruminating on Humanity Club, hehe. I'm also glad that's the message you carried out of reading this; I definitely found that getting three instalments into a prologue made me question whether the feck I actually got my point across it all in the end!
But yeah, that is absolutely the kind of subject I'll be spending many consecutive chapters attempting to pick apart; trying to figure out for myself where our humanity/authenticity and Personal Legends fit into (rather, stand out from?) the framework of an old world order that appears to be readily collapsing around us.
As always...thank you ever so much for reading and taking the time to comment. You're one of few at the moment, and it's lovely to know I'm not just dumping my soul's work into the void unnoticed x
Ah yes, the Poetry did it to me, or the Ruminating on Humanity brought me to Poetry, or Humanity brought me to both. Chicken & egg...and there I go Ruminating again!
I felt that point & it resonated! I think perhaps some things demand to be 3 part stories, and a prologue is definitely allowed to be one of those things.
Is the Personal Legend a mythos that keeps us separated from a Collective? or is it a finding of our 'Place' or 'Part' within that? I'm of both minds on it- as I'm sure you have been too!
There's an adapted quote from Antonio Gramsci that's been floating through my algorithms for a bit that I keep coming back to in these discussions- "the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters"
As for 'order', I'm not sure it's an inherent part of how I see things, but I'm interested in the journey that you're taking us on. I am so curious and invested in stories that are exploring what the old or current world is, what a new world could be, and what the monsters of our time are. It's an honour to read a story like that which comes from the heart of a friend x
Oooh, very thought-provoking points.
Firstly, I'm very looking forward to venturing into more of the poetry space. Certain poems and poets are popping up a lot throughout my research; and by lovely chance I happen to have spontaneously made friends with an elderly man at a recent dinner party, whom I bonded with over a poetry synchronicity (I had only within days been looking up and reading East Coker by T.S. Eliot for further pondering and later inclusion in this book, and he randomly brought up T.S. Eliot's poetry during the conversation...alerting my attention to all Four Quartets of which East Coker is but one part!). Since then, we've been exchanging emails and weirdly in-tune in terms of the poets/poetry we've been reading and sharing (Rumi, David Whyte etc.). But I'm still very new to most...and believing more and more that poetry holds a kind of power and key-code to the universe of which I was not previously aware. I'm sure you would have more than a few words to say on that! If any pops up in your consciousness that might be relevant to what I wind up writing about, I'd be thrilled to know about it :)
Re. Personal Legends keeping us separated or "in place" within the collective...really good question! I would have to mull over it more; however, my initial understanding or belief around them so far is that they...I guess, kind of pulse in and out with one another? Interweaving and drifting away and interweaving again, moving apart and magnetising back together; co-existing while never interfering with one another (the alchemist specifically says to the boy at some stage that "anyone who interferes with the Personal Legend of another thing never will discover his own"), in a perpetually dynamic state of "belong[ing] no place — every place — no place at all" to adapt words from Maya Angelou. I'm becoming more and more convinced our Personal Legends are a continual losing/drifting away from/seeking and re-finding ourselves and our buried treasures, as well as those in one another — not unlike in the final pages of The Alchemist, and not unlike the existential concept of the "cosmic joke" (which I think of as monks and the like having a good chuckle at the absurd extent to which we, seekers of some description, exert all kinds of effort and stress and fling ourselves out and away and all over the place looking for something we think we're missing, only to find it on us like we had the keys in our pocket the whole time) — while gradually realising that the losing/seeking is nevertheless significant because it helps us see and appreciate beauty in the world, and all there is to hold dear to our hearts and one day stand to lose. If all of that makes sense...I'm curious to sit with and investigate the concept of now being a time for monsters, however! I'm interpreting that as: we're entering a time of great liminality and guaranteed uncertainty...so we may as well be led by the beck and call of our unique inner rebels that refuse to conform to convention. Convention's dead, so let's fkn let loose! Do some rabble-rousing, haha.
Thanks for the extra tangent to pursue, and sorry for the wall of text in return! Guess you gave me some good questions to think through and I decided to try and answer them on the spot :P These are the sorts of questions that fully consume my headspace at the moment, and I'm really glad to use this opportunity to connect with others who are thinking the same way. And then turn them into future chapters. Your input is, as always, much appreciated x