Love Letter to the Intimate Web
Much of my ritual writing and research art-making in the last two years has been sourced and unfolding in the esoteric realms of intimate relating – soul correspondence and ethnography that take the form of “love letters” and ritual-art projects/gatherings. These happenings produce artifacts of intimate disclosure – confessions – written to particular people, attuned to and arising from the middle of the relational field created by bodies in space. These are my “Love letters to Reality”, written to the 10,000 faces of the Beloved, infinitely refracting from Source.
Experimentation in raw territory of soul can feel vulnerable, tender, asking to be held and protected with care. At first, it can feel embarrassing, even shameful, to share. These risks are sacred. For example, in the collective art project “Church of the Intimate Web”, the artifacts we create are held in a “vault” of safekeeping, shared only with trusted confidants (spiritual friends) until these artifacts feel ready to be released into the commons.
At the same time, the sacred activism of Collective Soul-Making straddles a fine line – this red fissure, this intimate crack – in what Adriana Forte named the “The Dance Between the Private and the Public”. I learn from my soul research again and again that one cannot run away from or hide away the truths of the psyche through the “abstract” and the “objective”, or the “private” and the “secret”. For me, to be present with and willingly disclose what is most immanently intimate in my direct phenomenal experience is liberation – it is the transversal line of flight into new potentials, it is a portal to metamorphosis. To meet and befriend the felt risk and terror of the human body that exposes its naked, trembling heart to Reality – to friends, family, colleagues, community, cosmos – is the ritual act of cosmopoiesis. To keep on falling in love as the Sacrifice that re-makes Sacred World.
So I commit to sharing my “artifacts” here when they desire to be seen – each one born out of the agony of eros, coming in many shapes and forms: beautiful mutants, beautiful worlds.
The letter below was originally written July 2024, to the Church of the Intimate Web, several weeks after coming back from a gathering held in Vermont.
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Dear Daniel, Dechen, Jared, Jeffrey, Sofia-Jeanne, Mitra, Sarah-Marie, Tyler, Sabra, Anders, and Marcelo and the “Church of the Intimate Web”,
One of my key creative expressions in the Church project has been the art of writing love letters. This epistolary form allows the “shape of love” to arise in this art project, where I write to you out of love and desire for mutual disclosure. Through second-person correspondence, I share with you the intimate phenomenology of eros, tension and soulmaking pathology that wants to be transmuted into meaning and insight.
I write to the 12 of you because you are the soul-bodies that gathered together in Vermont at Skymeadow for two weeks in June 2024. The occasion itself came through spontaneous impulse towards an in-person gathering of “burning hearts”. This unique configuration of bodies was coordinated out of the blueprints of eros; Daniel, Dechen and I contemplated deeply on who we wanted to invite, allowing the quality of “rightness” to co-create the conditions of clarified desire.
So I want to write to the “Church of the Intimate Web” not as some kind of abstracted thought-form, but to reflect how the living intimacy of this project is uniquely particularised and actualized through each of your souls, bodies and personhoods (and finger puppets). I’ve been nursing this love letter in my being, nursing it, metabolising it – as someone would trace their fingers longingly over the memories of a past and future lover(s). This is the letter attempts to weave together the imprints left upon by each of you on my body in kairotic time-space – the harmonic composition of 12 unique dyadic relationships, each whole cosmos in its own right, each uniquely brimming with the density and fullness of what is enfolded in that latent Potential.
Oh oh oh – how easy and dangerous it is for me to fall in love with the “ideal image”, the theophanic vision of that Latent Potential, to favour the fantasy, hope, and numinous possibility in it, and in each of you. Yet truthfully, the seed of this letter is born of acute pain and heartbreak – the full circle homecoming to Reality that includes both the peaks and the vales, paradise and underworld. I want to be rigorous in my honesty and transparency with the wholeness of my lived experience since the closing of the Church of the Intimate Web gathering at Skymeadow in Vermont; to see it all perfectly, especially the shadows and the difficult parts. My mantra comes from Bonnitta Roy: “Everything seen perfectly is loved.”
Something tells me that my experience, in the uniqueness of its labyrinthian depths and particular flavours of agony, is not mine alone, but gestures to a deeper, transpersonal pattern that wants to be shared. Even though tender and vulnerable, I sense that it is an experience that wants to be soul-made into an expression of what it means to love all of you, and to fully surrender in my love and faith in the Divine.
The first three weeks back from Vermont were profoundly painful at dimensions that feel difficult to describe. As I arrived back at my house in Toronto, I was alone. I was feeling physical nausea and exhaustion from pregnancy. My partner left to visit his family in Berlin, and my parents were travelling in inner Mongolia. I went from sharing sacred space and communal meals with a group of 11 other beautiful, heart-aligned souls in rural Vermont to feeling isolated in the city, surrounded by people but feeling profoundly alienated. I still talked to Xavier everyday on the phone. I saw friends when I could muster up the effort and energy. All of this is so mundane and “normal” on the surface that a part feels mildly embarrassed to be “complaining” about this. But none of this could alleviate a profound sense of depression that I felt energetically possessed with, as though a dense gravity was steadily spiralling any aliveness down into a black pit of futility and despair.
What helped was a dawning sense that something in the process of leaving our sacred field in Vermont had the archetypal flavour of a “Fall from Eden”. I dropped into the depths of felt isolation that was unlike anything I had experienced before. At first, it was simply a listless despondency that washed over my being that I could easily dismiss it as pregnancy symptoms. I barely left the house and scrounged food left in the cupboards. For days, I binge-watched Netflix films and youtube videos of people living simple happy rom-com stories. They were soothing and numbing to me: I wanted to escape my body and this mortal coil.
Yes, practices are great in theory, but not when the dwindling energy I could access was mainly directed towards getting out of my bed and feeding myself. At one point, I knew that I needed to get to my meditation pillow so I crawled over. As I was crawling, heaving my heavy body in this physically tragic state, I felt like a worm, cast down from the heavens to the cracked, dusty earth. This image was suddenly connected with the moment during our Collective Unfoldment session that Sarah-Marie hosted when I lay down, helplessly pulled down by the weight of something so heavy that I was physically pinned to the ground. I looked up, and saw a golden bowl floating in the sky, pulled upside down to rain down a waterfall. Tears from heaven pulled down from this earthly damning.
Later during the beholding of a friend’s presence, I was able to cry like a baby, like a child, helplessly heartbroken. Yes, leaving Vermont on the level of the soul felt like primordial dismembership, a tragic remembrance of being torn away from Paradise – from the Whole. But the grief also helped me to reclaim the memory of something I had lost, that we have lost in our culture. You see, the clear agony of this heartbreak tells me that we succeeded in this gathering, that my soul remembers and is mourning something that is difficult for the mind or even body to make sense of: we touched into something numinous. I felt the Love of God, my belonging to God.
This quality of love and wholeness was what I described to Marcelo as miraculous during our interview. The miraculousness of being held in a communal beingness that is so natural.
It deepens my intimacy with a flavour of wholeness that is possible simply through bodies in sacred space, being and becoming together. This is because the two weeks that we spent together is profound, in ways that I want to try to make sense of here. It wasn’t always easy for all of us. Yet being on the land in rural Vermont leaves a subtle imprint of being miraculous in its mundanity – checking in every morning, snuggling on the floor pillows, eating dinner, sharing our needs and desires with each other. This is sacred lifework. Yet why is this so fucking hard?
There is a way in which it’s truly difficult to open one’s heart to love and receive love, because it opens up to the genuine fear and true risk of the inevitability of its impermanence. This is something that Sarah-Marie spoke to, and wrote her music about. Something in the sacredness of what we touched together made something banal in my reality intolerable.
There is so much that that parts of me resist – and even hates and despises – in this world. And holding the tension of opposites in the kairotic synchronicity is to recognize that Paradise is always co-present with the Fall. Our innocence is already broken and lost. This Fall from Paradise was inevitable, portended, reenacted again and again. I remember Jeffrey saying that “it is hard out there” after he left and returned. When Anders spoke with gravity about the patterns of numbing that will inevitably happen after the retreat is over. To remember is to grieve. It can be tempting to let it stay forgotten, to push it down into the basement cellar. Yet the soul is relentless in her longing and remembering. I love what Mitra wrote recently: “There’s a part of us that remembers the sense of complete belonging, safety, and trust from the entire universe. We yearn to have that state of being again. Our eden of paradise.”
So I speak here of soul-body memory, of the traces that draw you to the depths of sorrow and grief, joy and aliveness even when our mind wants to crawl to the numbing alienation, addiction and anesthetization.
Our bodies helplessly remember. I remember watching Jonathan Glazer‘s film “Zone of Interest” (2023), how easy it is to live in a beautiful house, have beautiful children next to an concentration camp, and to ignore the screams of the suffering in the background. In “Zone of Interest”, at some point, the main character vomits without understanding. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing” (2012) , the director invites former Indonesian death-squad leaders to reenact their mass-killings. At first, they can completely abstract themselves from what they have done. But one of the killers just starts heaving and throwing up. These biomarkers are the phenomenological reckoning of what Bonnitta Roy calls the moral animal body, the wisdom of “anthro-ontology” when the Eye of Value opens in Cosmo-Erotic Humanism. Perhaps this is why we want to destroy the biological-corporeal-animal-enfleshed body – hide all the evidence. We leave the corpses of our latent capacities hidden beneath the floorboards.
Yet the body knows and never forgets. We are haunted by the hungry ghosts of the ground.
So leaving Skymeadow felt like a “Fall” from Eden. A soulful revisiting of what it means to fall from wholeness, to grieve and suffer dismemberment from sacred world, to lose the pre-conquest consciousness of deep connection, resonance and harmony with the Tao. I took the bite from the Fruit of Knowledge and I see Reality more perfectly. The intolerability of senseless suffering. I live what on the surface seems like a lucky and privileged life by Modern standards, but I feel more and more how this is a simple veneer, an impoverished substitute for what I most deeply long for. I’m not saying that I don’t feel gratitude for these gifts, but truthfully, I need more. I cannot settle for anything less than belonging to sacred world.
For me, our time together in Vermont was “Our Eden of Paradise”, a sanctuary that discloses with more clarity the violence of being in a world that ignores the sacred, that actively destroys what is true, good and beautiful. Hannah Arendt calls this the “banality of evil”, an insidious form of “anti-value” that is so normalised in our dominant culture. Now, having tasted the fruit of knowledge once again – this evil is impossible to ignore. I suppose that this clarifies my own mythos, my own metaphysics. I have faith that Reality is intrinsically Good. God is Good. Tao is Good. Yet in the realm of the human, we create evil out of the trauma of forgetting Wholeness; of continuing to forget because the grief and pain of this severance is too much to bear.
Yet I also know that I cannot simply live in paradise. The bubble we create together through ritual is a sanctuary, but it is not the world, it is not all of Reality. To taste Wholeness is to deepen the inevitability of breaking apart again. When Kwan Yin turned around before ascension into heaven, she broke into 10,000 pieces, vowing to remain in the earthly realm until all other beings have completed their path of liberation. Perhaps we are recovering the 10,000 pieces of this Bodhisattva heart, each broken part of a world soul that is longing to heal its dismemberment.
And the heart wants and desires and and needs so intensely – the Heart’s longing for God and Wholeness is powerful, majestic, cosmic, endless. If trusted, it unleashes the natural magnetism of Eros as a Force of Nature – broken pieces finding each other again through reverse-temporics, through magic – weaving the red thread that binds the Kintsugi practice of re-wholing. We seal the golden veins of potential in the cracks – this is the post-tragic consciousness and work of our time.
Yet, even this is hard to admit. It feels vulnerable to open my heart up on the operating table, to expose the tender nakedness of my desire. Inherited patterns in the process of putrid decay continue to whisper to me it is unsafe and shameful to need; but I am burning through the maggots – the hungry ghosts that eat away and try to bury this truth.
Oh God, I don’t know what to do with this tidal wave of grief.
It is beyond sense or reason.
Oh God, I pray that I can be broken open to cry.
Let this self dissolve into the ocean of tears.
I know it’s a gateway. My soul remembering something precious that it’s lost. Everytime salty water flows through the passageway of this body, it is a slow erosion of walls that separate me from the recesses of something deep: The truth that I long to love ever more deeply.
Let me warn you. Loving is so painful, so intimate – the exquisite ache, the heartbreak, the endless tears. Yet it is an opening to transformation, to liberation, to joy, to paradise. Before, feeling and being with the suffering of the world felt overwhelming. At the depths of my despair, in the deep depression of the source of aliveness. I felt hopeless. It felt as though I could no longer continue living, as though the only way to survive in this despair was to numb, armour, distance. Now, I feel blessed relief and liberation in the movement of tears, from feeling the aliveness of pain, in the visceral remembrance of being disconnected from the Whole.
Why do I write this love letter to all of you? Mitra said: friendship is the conditional gateway to unconditional love.
What is spiritual friendship? I don’t know. Yet I do know that I cannot love and be loved in its fully realised potential without you. I know this to be true for you as well. How can we expect each other to show up and be brave and strong in this time between worlds, to become trustworthy, wise and good? How do we find the courage to do the impossible again? To circle with integrity on the frontlines of war and violence as spiritual activists?
The only way forward is completely shattering the deeply held myth of self-protection and independence that I find myself still clinging to, that helps me feel safe and secure. The only way forward is to deepen my interbeing with the sacred, my continuity with the divinity of the more-than-human worlds, the realms of Animals, Gods, Nature and Cosmos. The only way forward is to re-member.
All this I write with a baby growing in my belly. This new life transforms and mutates me from within, confronting me with my deepest fears and attachments, giving me the opportunity to become “goo” in the process of metamorphosis, to release and to let die. It feels ugly when I’m dying. I feel ashamed to share this pain, like I’m supposed to be the “Perfect Mother” and “Perfect Friend”: strong, happy and unconditional in my care.
But all I can do is simply be in the messiness of Truth. All I have to do is be present in this time between worlds. This is how I love. This is the soul contract I have signed, to live in and inherit this body, this collective body; to see perfectly myself and all of you – no matter how intolerably perfect, no matter how perfectly intolerable. This is my love letter to Reality.
Cheryl
(two photos from June 2024, Skymeadow, Vermont – the “sacred ritual” of blessing and washing the feet, through myriad beings living together on this finite planet)
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