Feed Me Something Real

Clarity is not cruelty.

Dear Reader,

I've had less time to write these days. Still, I feel the need to speak, even when the words aren't fully formed. I want to show up here with that same tender imperfection my art keeps teaching me, letting it spill freely into all corners of my life. I want to be heard the first time I speak. I want more physical space to stretch into. I want to live by my own rhythms, no longer tolerating, sacrificing, or bending myself in ways that harm me. I've done that too long, in almost every relationship. I want a home that feels like a ceremony. Morning with herbs and flowers. I want more presence, an art practice that is rooted, and a community that uplifts and mirrors each other's truths. I want to see Palestinian children—and all children—laughing, going to bed safely in the arms of those who love them, right there on my screen. I want to see a free Palestine. I want to see communities with full, happy bellies. Where Indigenous elders are our leaders. Where land is returned and waters run clean. I want to see joy that doesn’t come at someone else’s expense. A world where our aliveness is honored, not extracted.

I'm tired of men. Even as I write that, a wave of guilt rises in me, but I need to say it anyway, in the open. I'm tired of carrying the emotional weight for men: father, partner, friend, collective.

I'm raising a boy who will one day become a man. And it's because I love him so infinitely, so deliberately, that I'm finally clear: I can't keep pouring that kind of love into everyone. It takes a great deal to tend to a person with care. My devotion to him has shown me the limits of my giving.

That kind of love: whole-bodied, all-seasons love, is sacred. And I no longer have the desire or capacity to carry emotional loads that were never mine to bear, especially for men.

And speaking these boundaries aloud has been enough to end a few relationships.

People who say I'm rude or mean when I speak plainly, when I share my feelings, or when I draw a clear boundary are no longer welcome in my life. People who remain silent about Palestine, or who still repeat the language of "both sides", are not welcome in my life. People who perform connection, who perform calm or friendliness only as a way to draw closer to my energy or access my world, are no longer welcome in my life. People who cannot practice reciprocity, who are not in kinship with the wider web of life, who take more than they give, who extract without tending, are not welcome in my life.

I have reached a threshold.

It's the age. It's motherhood. It's the way water has shaped my intuition. It's the psilocybin I've been walking with. It's the hypersensitivity, the ADHD, the vastness of the love I feel. It's the grief I swim through. It's the ache of the world in my body.

I want more.

And saying that I want more has become its own kind of practice. A practice in trusting my body.

Somewhere along the way, I learned that wanting more meant that I wasn't grateful. That to want more was to fall into the deep well of human greed, of endless desire, of not-enoughness. I learned that wanting more should bring guilt.

But my desire for more is not rooted in emptiness. It's a soft internal drumbeat, steady and ancient, rising.

The water of my art, the water of my body, is remembering that I'm here to live. Not just to manage things. Not just to manage a household or bills. Not just to manage my art, or the rhythm of each day.

There is tenderness rising. And there is rage, too. They move together now, side by side.

There is a pull toward beauty, toward ritual, toward depth and truth. And there is no more room for politeness when I'm on fire.

I’ve been in a conversation with something older than language. Something that lives in the soil and the stars. It feels like another stage of the wake-up call. An initiation into a deeper layer of self-knowing. The psilocybin has been working through my body, not the mind. A full body purge of what no longer serves. My gut is recalibrating. Clearing long-held emotions. Neural knitting. Emotional composting. Revealing hidden fatigue. Shifting out of shutdown. Reintegrating into the web of life. I’m napping more. I'm energetically hungry for nourishment. For rest, for safety, for beauty, for friendships. For myself and others. I'm letting this curiosity, this hunger, guide me. To feed me, to feed us something real.

My wanting more is a call from the earth, the earth that is also my body. This longing is not selfish. It's a dream seeded for all of us who are aching for another way. For those who want every living being to know safety, to feel love, to be held in tenderness, to taste joy in this one brief and beautiful life. We were never meant to live like this. Not in a trance of consumption. Not hooked into devices that dull our senses. Not following the lives of strangers while forgetting our own. Not drowning in noise and calling it normal. Capitalism is decaying the soul. Patriarchy is stripping the sacred from the everyday. It's cutting down what should be protected. The future we need is a world led by the heart, a world of kinship, care, and collective tending. But to build it, we must first want it. We must want more. More than comfort. More than convenience. More than the illusion of endless choice, more than shelves lined with skincare and powders and lies promising wholeness. Freedom lives closer to the ground. What we’re called to tend. What we’re bound to protect. Freedom is something we belong to. People who truly know that are being annihilated. And the rest of us coerced into obedience, lulled into passivity. Into moral apathy. Our life isn’t made for consuming, but for communing, with one another and with the living world that keeps us.

What do you truly want right now? Feel free to share it here and be heard.

Love,

Vanja

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