Hello from the last moments of my birthday.

I wait a long time between these because whatever it is I have to say, I always wonder if you might be better suited discovering it in your own life (and then I could kick back and read your newsletter instead). I also find personal essays sort of severely grating to write because you have to commit to being an authority, and in this case, an online spiritual person. Poetry is much easier. Everyone writing a poem is pretending to be God, and isn’t ashamed of it.

Setting aside the strange anxiety of my & others’ bodies decaying, I’m generally glad to be older. I’m glad to have experience. I’m glad to know how to get a stain out, and apologize, and teach. I’m glad I understand others more. I’m glad to know how to take care of myself. I remember wandering around from 18 to 23 like a traumatized animal. I’m glad to not be chronically drunk or high, and not to live in the morally gray world that came with it.

And I’m glad to spend my days like this. When I was a kid, my timeline was something like married at 25, baby at 27 (I remember these were my M.A.S.H. settings, which we played incessantly on the hour-long bus ride from school). Also publish a book and be a famous actor. I’m glad to do what I do now, which is mostly attend to my mind and try to help people. I really don’t do anything else, except watch TV. Don’t be impressed—for all the hours I put in trying to think of others, I should be a master by now! But I’m patient. Once I make watching TV a way to help people, I’ll really be on my way. Watching Secret Lives of Mormon Wives will be an ecstatic act of love any day now.

I’m glad to not be so angry anymore. It takes a long time to undo that, many years for me. And it’s not just time that does it (actually, I don’t know if time does much at all). I feel more and more grateful for people from my past. I’m grateful for Debbie, my first grade teacher, who taught me yoga for the first time. We would lie on our backs in a circle and wheel our feet around, imagining we were biking somewhere beautiful. There was a local artist whose house I’d go to for “lessons”—we mostly played around with her supplies, and she’d make us toast with spray-on butter. In our group of regulars was a guy named Phoenix or Wolf or something like that. Sometimes, the teacher would take us for rides in her rickety van and find a speed bump to go over really fast so we’d fly up in the air. I had a lot of artists in my life, and people passionate about life. Dancers, writers, school administrators, musicians, actors, rabbis, Christian moms, community organizers, camp counselors, therapists. There are hundreds of people like that who shared a little of their hard won wisdom with me, probably thousands.

It didn’t always seem like that to me. I believe that I begged for answers long enough that I became a good listener, and that’s why people appear as teachers to me now. Each one polishing the stone. A little bit of diamond here and there. Thank God.

There’s plenty I don’t know. You really can’t know something until you’re ready to. I try to become ready to know something.

I’ve started teaching yoga, which is one of the bigger shifts in my life since I stopped drinking. I was never disciplined, or wholesome, or elegant enough to be a yogi, I thought. Sometimes I leave clothes on the floor, or eat takeout at midnight. I could definitely still drink a Monster energy, and I could probably even enjoy it. In the end, I’m grateful I learned the philosophy before studying the physical practices deeply. It’s safer, in my opinion, to develop ethics and then let yoga help you do that better, versus getting really good at ritual, diet, asana, and still being unkind (and maybe not knowing it). It has been an extremely beautiful and rewarding experience.

Yoga teacher, NYC cafe operator, online spiritual person. All strange titles to me, as inside, I am and have always been, an abstract mass of private introspection, and sometimes a town bard. However, I’m becoming willing to let love turn me into anything.

All my best,

Rachel

All day long, I watch my pendulum mind swing between answers. Desire, dislike, desire, dislike. Back and forth it moves, and the world adapts accordingly like sand shifted by wind.

In the morning, the object is beautiful. I try to catch its eye. I flirt and negotiate with reality to tug it closer. I imagine the sweetness of having it.

The sun rises and the object isn’t what I thought. The shape is wrong, not what I wanted at all. The morning was a fantasy; I see it as it is now.

And the sun sets and I really see it as it is: lovely. And the sky turns black and I really see it as it is: lonely. And it rises and sets and rises—intoxicating, stupid, cruel, precious. No, it’s that, I say. That, no that, no really it’s that. A magician tugging the cloth off the box to reveal another cloth and another cloth and another cloth. I’m the best audience member; I have horrible short term recall and I keep forgetting that he just pulled off a cloth.

The first ripe peach of the summer is ecstasy. No, it’s bittersweet because it will be gone soon. No, it’s frightening because it means I’m another year older. It’s home for the worm. It’s sticky. It’s sweet. It’s beginning. It’s ending. I’m holding the same peach. I’m holding a thousand peaches.

I think about my death so much it becomes strange, like a too-repeated word. Peaches end, but not me. No, you too. That can’t be. Me?

It’s true. Someone dies and it’s a hole ripped out of the world. It’s happening right now. Can you hear it? Listen and listen; it begins to sound foreign; a dark mantra I’ve lost the meaning of.

Here I am, going between addiction and disgust over a peach. Well, it’s not just the peach. It’s you, too, I’m sorry to admit. I didn’t like when you looked at me weird on the subway. I wanted you desperately enough to hurt you. I hated you desperately enough to hurt you. I was bored insufferably enough to hurt you. I took the peach for myself, or I gave it to you and expected it back with interest. Meanwhile, the peach has gone bad and I only have so many summers left in this body.

Someone asks me what unconditional love is. It’s when the object doesn’t change. It’s when you look beautiful in every light. I hold the pendulum so still the universe dissolves into a single point. I watch you bite into the fruit, juice running down your lovely chin, and the sweetness pours into me like it’s my own mouth. I don’t need a mouth. I taste pleasure by seeing yours.

When you love like that your death is not a hole ripped out of the world. You become like a song inside a channel, like the moon on the lake. The body that dies was a cloth the magician pulls off to reveal…

I don’t want to spoil it. You’re the magician, anyway. You figure it out.

Eat the peach. If it’s just a peach, then it ends and so do you. You could make it a sun that breaks you open until there’s nothing but light. Eat the pain. Eat the ecstasy. Make it a sun, a song, a sound—familiar, stunning, the clearest thing you’ve ever known.