Dusk descends in electric pinks.
The moon grandly debuts as half-full, tinged in rose hues.
Half-full moons, or waxing moons, might be my favorite.
I like the story she tells.
An encouraging acknowledgement of the effort made, the path taken and still messily and reverently traveled. Mid-step on the trek, dusty and a bit hungry and committed to curiosity, I look up to see the half-moon, and feel that she’s got my back. She’s cheerleading me onward.
The half-full moon reminds me of the progress made, and how if I soften my gaze enough, I can see the trace of the actual whole moon, remembering that it’s just an illusion that she’s half-full, just like it’s an illusion that we are anything beyond perfect as we are, right here and right now. Perspective has the power to keep us caged and limited, or to liberate us and allow us to witness our incarnate wholeness as we learn and evolve.
And in Marfa, in the tiny town far off in West Texas, I am reckoning with and receiving a wind-spirited dose of perspective. Traveling into the expanse returns me to the truth of my own vastness, and the choices that are always available to access and live into that truth of vastness.
I didn’t journey to Marfa for this medicinal recalibration. I came to write. I came to keep a promise to my twenty-four-year-old self. She was wildly enthralled by the unexpected and raw creative life-force energy that seemed to serenely thrive and mischievously play here at the foothills of mountains and particularly on the back patio of a dive bar where a swing waited to be swung to the spectacular stars.
There was also life-changing (and that’s not an overstatement) sourdough toast. And a daydream to come back and have a stretch of uninterrupted time to write cozied up in my heart.
And I tended to that vision and still tend to that vision while here.
I even planted an intention for my trip: Creative Liberation.
And I am being liberated creatively, but it’s not what I anticipated. (But the toast is still life-changing.)
The creative liberation is happening internally, a spirited clearing and cleansing of the inner terrain. This is the prep-work, the fortification of the foundation so I can do the work of receiving. But I’m not hyper-focused on cutting through energetic blockages so I can then rush back out to the external world to produce and achieve.
The creative liberation is a homecoming to the ecstatic intelligent life-force of the Universe that is present within me (and you, always).
The creative liberation is like that half-full moon, a gradual spotlighting of distortions and delusions that have been previously in the dark, in the shadowy basement of my subconscious.
And in the waking dream of my visit to Marfa, I’ve enrolled myself as a student, listening and answering the impulses and nudges that life wants to take me.
And in the wonderful humor that is the Universe, I’m promptly guided to watch Hulu documentaries at night in my casita, an adobe situated in a feline run back-alley.
From SNL’s superstars to Cambodian refugees who become Donut Kings, all the documentaries, despite their distinct and seemingly diverse themes, carry the same warning: Know Yourself, First.
Don’t let the outside world define you. Don’t mistake external success as the lasting source for lasting and complete happiness.
“She didn’t know she was lovable,” is a stinging line from “Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivin,” and while the friend is specifically speaking about the larger-than-life political journalist, I see this troublingly echoed throughout the documentaries: people, so luminous and capable and gifted, who achieve the fame, the wealth, the buzz of surplus success, and yet, they self-destruct, self-sabotage, get eaten away by addiction, by a disease that is the body’s manifested cry to stop and rest and live differently.
Sitting in the casita, the outline of the moon shining through the window screen, I’m overcome by how lovable they are. Even and especially in their darkness. I am like the half-full moon, their half-full moon, and I can see the perfection in their messy humanness, the wholeness in the fragments of a life lived.
Their stories meander with me under this fuchsia fused sky. Their stories hold a mirror to my own.
In “Freestyle Love Supreme,” a documentary about the improv hip-hop troupe starring Lin Manuel Miranda, the “Hamilton” creator tells the camera simply, “I knew who I was before ‘Hamilton.’”
And this is my creative liberation: I am getting to know the spark of universal creativity that is expressing itself through me.
The half-full moon speaks to my own journey, of getting tripped up in my own shadows, and pivoting to retrace steps back to a radical self-acceptance that is complete and welcomed inclusion. I am rebalancing after a lifetime of over-giving, of unpacking and healing the shaming around my most basic needs. I am mothering myself. I am scooping up the inner child and asking her sincerely what she needs and responding with kindness.
I am becoming wonderous and curious about how my preferences, my desires, my deal-breakers and my needs that when met propel rejuvenation into my highly sensitive and highly intuitive wiring.
I’m learning that I don’t need to apologize for who I am and how I optimally operate. And life here in Marfa seems to present movie-like moments to send winks of confirmation for these inwardly healing steps.
“It’s not weird. It’s different,” gently corrects the dashing paramedic on the road back to El Paso. Our paths cross in front of the towering posterboard renditions of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, the dreamy movie stars who shot the Texas saga, “Giant” on location in Marfa.
We’re both admiring the art installation in the middle of a stretch of plain, and he’s asked for my Instagram handle, and in a splashing verbal flutter I spill that I’m weird, that I don’t have one, and he speaks like the half-full moon. Reminding me of the progress I have made and the progress I have yet to make when it comes to unconditionally accepting and showing up as myself, unfiltered and expressive while remaining in embodied energetic sovereignty.
The creatives depicted in the documentaries voice feeling weird, too. And in fact, it’s this very weirdness that signals out their brilliance, their special way of seeing and interacting with the world that galvanizes new and needed understandings about comedy (“You Laugh, But It’s True”), city planning (“Citizen Jane”), even communicating through text (“The Emoji Story”).
My preferences, my deal-breakers, my needs are not weird, they are unique.
When I meet my needs lightly, with bright curiosity, I relax out of resistance to myself. I create an inner spaciousness, a honeyed heart-talk that makes generous for room inspiration, ideas, insights.
And living life, letting life live through me, will give the breath for those creations to manifest when they are ready. And right now, my creative liberation is half-full, my readiness resting in releasing, healing, restoring back to a wholeness barely outlined but there in that fuchsia fused sky.