LOVE as the root system.
a deep re-orientation.
Something’s been happening to me over the past few weeks.
There’s been a profound kind of ache in my bodymind, a sensation of liminal stagnation —stillness — that when probed even a little, reveals itself to be a swirling mass of chaotic unravelling.
Eclipse seasons always come as a catalyst for something. And this one, with it’s extreeeeeemely intense astrological significance, is fundamentally changing me.
Maybe not “changing”. That’s the wrong word. This eclipse season, I am remembering myself.
It sounds really cheesy, but it’s a remembrance of Love. To remember the self is to remember Love. To come home to the body is to remember Love. To reconnect with the irrepressible spirit of creativity is to remember Love.
what it meant to forget
I’m not sure exactly when or how this happened. But little by little, I forgot what it meant to be alive. Ever so slowly, my sense of Self wrapped itself around the NO in my body.
It was like the immune system of my soul went into overdrive, and all of the rage and the repulsion I was feeling as a result of being alive, aware, and empathetic in the end-stage capitalist hellscape of 2026 collapsed in on itself, creating this explosive, volatile, fiery NO that spilled out onto everything.
The NO became my root system. It served as my anchor into my humanity, and my sense of who I am.
The NO as a root system is not sustainable. Not for me, anyway. I don’t have the constitution for it.
It turned me into someone who hated empire before I loved humanity.
Someone who hated AI and everything it represents before I loved the divine essence of creativity and connection.
Someone who hated animal agriculture and fossil fuel consumption before I loved the gloriously ancient and interconnected ecosystems that hold all of us here.
Someone who hated ignorance and bigotry before I loved curiosity and genius.
Someone who hated desecration, exploitation, and extraction before I loved the sacred.
Hatred and NO was coming before Love and YES.
(Not more than. Just before. But before was enough to fuck me up.)
Even writing all of that out, I feel a hot sting of humiliation in my chest and stomach. I had unconsciously become someone who embodies the very cynicism and reactionary addiction to the cortisol-adrenaline-dopamine loop that I consciously rally against.
This calcification of the NO in my body was slow, and subtle. I truly didn’t notice it happening until suddenly I fell into a deep spiritual and emotional sinkhole, and couldn’t figure out why.
what it means to remember
I’m experimenting now with actively planting the YES at the bottom. Letting the YES be the foundation that everything else rests on, instead of the NO.
I am re-orienting into a root system of Love.
This doesn’t mean that the anger and the disgust and the repulsion is going anywhere. Of course it isn’t. We can’t meet the world honestly and robustly unless we have the NO.
But, for me at least, the NO can’t be the driving force. I can’t sustain it. I need the YES to feed it. I don’t know precisely when it happened, but I lost the YES.
I know now that this re-orientation was happening for me under the surface of my awareness for a good while. I know that the part of my spirit that exists beyond and underneath my ego, in all its infinite wisdom, had tracked this shift and was adjusting before I was consciously aware of it. In hindsight now, I know that this was in fact the “cause” (or, to put it another way, the context) of the deep spiritual and emotional dip I’ve been experiencing for the last little while.
I have been excavated.
And truly, as soon as I clocked what was happening and started to give it words, I felt an immediate and full-body sigh of relief.
I need to be someone who loves, first.
Someone who loves humanity so very much that a burning hatred for empire can’t help but pour out of that love.
Someone who is so utterly devoted to creativity, to play, to whimsy, to the genius of the irrepressible spirit of aliveness, that a rage against everything that seeks to destroy or extract or suppress or replace it can’t help but express itself.
Someone who is so deeply in love with the sacred, with the land, with the interconnected cycles of Nature that hold all of us here and make poetry of our stories, that a righteous fury against a paradigm of desecration can’t help but move.
At some point, they switched around. Love and Devotion scooched over to the passenger seat. Rage and Hatred took the wheel.
No more.
My spirit has re-oriented itself into a root system of Love.
Thank fuck for that.
who are we, when we are Love?
This rotting and (for me) poisonous root system was shaping the way I relate to creativity and service.
Just like with the dawning realisation that I had accidentally calcified around the NO in my body, this too is embarrassingly obvious in hindsight. I honestly don’t know how I didn’t notice it before.
In my personal life, in my conversations with beloved friends and comrades, when I’m sitting in community, when I’m holding 1-1 sessions, or facilitating group spaces, I spend literally the whole time talking about myth and cycle work.
(The cycles of womb, breath, body, earth, and stars.)
Like, the entire fucking time.
And you, dear friend, reading this now, you likely wouldn’t know that.
Because for some reason, I just stopped talking about it publicly. I literally forgot why I am alive. I forgot that myth and cycle work as liberatory praxis and the map home to the Self is the how the spirit of my Aliveness wants to scribble its own signature onto existence.
Little by little, I started accidentally hoarding the YES, and only sharing the NO.
I became someone who used my public voice only to name and rage against everything we need to be naming and raging against. But that which called me back to Love? The YES in my body that everything else came from? It started feeling too precious and delicate to share. And the wild bit is that I genuinely didn’t notice that this was happening.
As soon as I did, it was like my spirit suddenly clunked back into place. I came back into my body with a rumbling thud, and I laughed out loud.
No wonder I’d been feeling so disconnected. No wonder I couldn’t work out what was missing, when everything I’ve been sharing and expressing publicly has been so very true to what I know, what I value, what I champion.
It’s been woefully incomplete. Having the NO as the root system upon which everything else stands had eroded my sense of purpose until all that was left of it was the need to disrupt and destroy.
I was in ceremony this morning. Praying to the Holy Guardian, the Mother, and the spirits of my ancestors. In that space of receptivity, I heard clarity come so clearly it almost felt like an actual voice saying actual words to my actual physical ears.
Leila. You’ve lost your way. You came here to love. That which comes from love can no longer be kept close precisely because it is so precious. Lead with love, let rage follow. Rage will always follow. But the first and the last must be Love.
I am committed to being here with more of me. With all of me. With the part of me that is Love.
And if this is stirring anything in you, it might be your nudge to feel into your own inner root system. Notice what’s planted there. And if it needs re-orientating, this is your invitation to begin.
Love you. Thank you for being here ❤️
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