It's an October morning.
I'm standing in the cool grass,
the wind is ripping through my outer layers.
I'm raking fallen leaves
into one large pile
outside of the house's bay window.

A golden heap of
we danced our way down
A golden heap of
the path from adornment to decay
A golden heap of
change's confetti

The raking starts innocently.
I'm creating a pile of beautiful dying things
for my son to jump into.
Then the repetitive action gets to the
south of my consciousness.

The reaching away from myself
and the pulling towards myself

The constant
gathering
absorbing
piling
one 
thing
on top
of the other.

How am I to become 
to hold all the repetitive 
and unexplainable
movements
of a life?

I rip the rake through the grass. 
My efforts drag in some clumps of dirt
they catch those sealed secrets
pile in that one September day
oh forget it
you're human like I
and we carry heavy things. 

I rake and I rake.
I reach beyond what I know 
and I pull towards myself 
the ineffable questions,
the ones that straddle the line.
And as the leaves snap and crumple
I can see my fears of that dark container of memory 
crack
apart, hairline by hairline.
I see their stories break off
letter by letter
on the earth's surface. 

I rake full circle.
I rake towards my yesterday,
I rake in the false prescriptions, 
the deathbeds of certainty.
I rake to future's undefined edge
and that edge's vertiginous fall
and that fall's invisible wings.

I rake into the bones of my 
mother's mother's mother
into the egg of my unborn daughter
my rake is a wand
is a spell
my hands
a web
they catch all shapes of you
your eight-legged creature
your crown
your underbelly
your beginnings and your ends
that expand
between an eye's flutter.

Oh life
Oh death
Oh life

I pile
I pile 
I pile you high

pulling in that thing that follows us all
proving that we're poured in light

And I jump in.

In this segment of Magic in the Mundane, I read to you my favourite essay by Mary Oliver, from her collection Upstream. This is an essay I return to again and again. I have written beside the title, Re-read ever so often in any moment of doubt or (feeling of) exclusion. If you are an artist doubting your creative process, if you haven’t stoked the inner fire in some time, or if you’ve given your life to the ordinary with regret, and if you haven’t encountered this essay before, have a listen. It could change your life, as it did mine.

Where have you ever heard those words before?

I know I have never had anyone in my life tell me to give power and time to my creative world. That’s just a hobby, get a real job. That’s the ethos I grew up in, as I’m sure many did, unless our parents were artists themselves. We’re taught to give power and time to the job that pays, and any creative pursuit is for after hours. But then we’re tired, and then we want to relax, and then we get comfortable and stagnant, and then we never end up living the life we want to live.

But that the self can interrupt the self—and does—is a darker and more curious matter.1

And now we have a physical manifestation of the self that can interrupt the self. We have a rectangular device that has trained the mind to interrupt itself on the hour, on the minute, on the second. What came first: the inability to concentrate or the technology distracting us?

I’m focused on the self-interrupter. I’m as guilty as the next person who has access to the world in their pocket. And I love the hypocrisy of when I get on my anti-social media rants when writing to you on social media. But. Can we all take a sip of Mary Oliver’s discipline and utter dedication to her craft? Can we all devote ourselves to the art our souls are longing to create?

I’m logging off and having a deep talk with the self-interrupter for the rest of the week. We need to get our shit together. And get as focused as possible with a toddler interrupting me every two minutes.

I’m telling myself it’s totally doable. And I just look to the women, mothers and artists who came before me and did the thing!

Let’s get to WORK, ladies (and all artists, honestly).

As I began working on this post, a little grasshopper greeted me and hopped right into the middle of my workspace! Hi Mary. It reminded me of her poem The Summer Day, so I felt it should be a part of this segment that’s dedicated to the queen of finding magic in the mundane.

Elisa Maria // di vita

I have to admit the ugly truth. I’ve been notorious for siding with the predator of my psyche, the killer that lurks in the corner as he whispers in my ear what I fear hearing the most: You’ve run out of time. You haven’t done it before, so you’ll never do it now. Why even start? Don’t you know you’ll fail again? Run away right before you take flight? Never follow through on your dreams? Time’s up.

I thought I had been through my final underworld journey with this leech stuck to the inside of my left rib.

Then September snuck up behind me with an unexpected (and semi-unconscious) reunion with all this murky victim material I swore I had recently conquered through my grit and grind. But this time, he moved like smoke, snaking around my ankles, coiling my movements and lingering just beyond my awareness. Luckily, September brought lucidity to the formless, cleared the waters so I could peer straight to the bottom and see where he strikes quickest: when I’m in between realms, not fully awake, not quite asleep. In the early hours of the morning, when I should pop up, ready for the day, but I’m momentarily sucked back from consciousness to subconsciousness. Here, he likes to play with my dawns, setting my internal dialogue for the day that can easily become looped in the background if not combatted with awareness.

That Aries full moon armed me as I rose on Saturday morning. I was not getting sucked into that space. I rose feeling my vitality. My thoughts were a clear horizon with a rising sun. I could feel a rearranging of my bones. I cracked and creaked in child’s pose, stretched open in downward dog. Then I read this:

“Instead of reviling the predator of the psyche, or running away from it, we dismember it. We accomplish this by not allowing ourselves divisive thoughts about our soul-life and our worth in particular. We capture invidious thoughts before they become large enough to do any harm, and we dismantle them.”2

I had my sword in hand, had the predator by its neck in the other. I felt this strength and alignment from womb to crown that I had never felt before. I had studied him, long and hard, and now it was time to act. Off with your head!! I could feel myself undoing so much of his entangled narratives as I wrote that morning, answering this prompt:

“Today the old one inside you is collecting bones. What is she re-making?”3

She (La Que Sabe, The One Who Knows, the Wild Woman) is remaking my passion and my rage for injustice and mixing it back into my voice. She is making me a silent yet strong revolutionary. And not silent as in I don’t speak and use my voice. But silent as in gathering wisdom and discernment behind the scenes and stepping into the arena once my voice is there.

These words drew forth that narrow path in my soul. They lit my fingertips on fire. And they removed any divisive thoughts by their sheer felt power, that strike of lightning that produces an equal charge of fear and faith simultaneously. That white light that both blinds you and shows you where your timeline tears, where to step in.

I kid you not. The moment I dismembered the internal conflict of the predator, he appeared on the physical stage of my reality, very Jungian in fashion. An old troll I had ignored for some time, but hadn’t actually dared to cast out of my life, reemerged from under the bridge that very morning. We hadn’t spoken in about a year. This kind of troll dresses in the cloak of a friend but sneers at you through the screen. They admire you endlessly, but fear the powerlessness that admiration stirs in them. Energetically, they shrink when you shine. I retorted to his sarcastic comment on my work and let the interaction simmer in me for the day.

“Sometimes it is necessary to limit or thin out certain relationships, for if a woman is outwardly surrounded by persons who are antagonistic to or careless about her deep life, her interior predator is fed by this and develops extra muscle within her psyche, and more aggression toward her.”4

The next morning, on Sunday, I woke remembering a dream I had throughout the night. I was at an airport, ready to catch my flight, but instead of checking bags or heading through security, I was getting my engagement ring cleaned. I could see they were cleaning it wrong (don’t ask for details), and they kept handing it back to me dirtier than before. I was getting increasingly annoyed and blurted out, “If I miss my flight, you’re paying for it!” Finally, I just left with my murky diamond and ran for my flight.

The clarity and strength of your intuition are often forged through action. I tend to want all answers to all possible outcomes before taking action. This is impossible at best, psychotic at worst. Often, we must stumble off the edge and take flight through the fog.

Needless to say, I took action. Off with his head!! I killed the friendship swiftly, yet as respectfully as one could when stating the harsh truth.

I was able to articulate everything I was once afraid to. I thought what I feared was hurting the other person’s feelings; I then realized what I really feared was how speaking the truth would force me to rely on my intuition, to trust what I previously deemed as “unsubstantiated” ground, reasoning that would make me look dramatic or crazy.

You see, siding with the predator of the psyche is choosing to silence the deep song of your intuition. You can never turn off her music, though. You can’t even pause her; you can only turn down the dial of her reverberation through your body. And once you reconnect with her, she gets loud. She takes her first breath at sea level, and she doesn’t choke on her words anymore; she roars. And any misalignment on the soul-path, whether it be a psychic predator or a physical predator, runs for the hills. And there is no guilt. Her knowing is too strong for unsureness to enter.

“Sometimes a woman is afraid to be without security or without certainty, for even a short time. She has more excuses than dogs have hairs. She must just simply dive in and stand not knowing what will happen next. It is the only thing which will retrieve her intuitive nature.”5

I woke from another dream Monday morning.

I was in Texas visiting a friend. (I don’t have any friends in Texas.) The big city I was exploring (Dallas? Austin? My dreamscape didn’t specify) sat on a mountain, and I descended the steepest hill on my bike all the way into the valley. It was a doomed 90-degree faceplant drop into the abyss of overly manicured suburbs and grid-like paths. Yet, I survived and rode into the valley knowing it was time to find my way home. I pedaled through the groomed lawns and indistinguishable boxed homes like the back of my hand and quickly ended up at the edge of a forest. Giant trees canopied over a dirt pathway at its opening, but any evidence of trodden ground quickly disappeared into the darkness of the woods. I knew that’s where the path to my home lay, but I instantly convinced myself I was lost. I rode back to my friend’s house and called my mom (who also happened to be in Texas) to tell her to come pick me up, since I couldn’t find my way back to where I needed to go.

The dream then ended.

“There is a time when the good mother of the psyche—the one which served us appropriately and well in earlier times—turns into a too-good mother, one which by virtue of her overly safeguarding values—begins to prevent us from responding to new challenges and thereby to deeper development.”6

Later that morning I re-read the Vasalisa story in chapter two of Women Who Run With the Wolves. Vasalisa, whose “too-good” mother recently died and left her a doll, representing her intuition, has to enter the woods in the dark of night to exercise her intuitive gifts and receive her full psychic power by finding the fierce mother, the Wild Goddess, Baba Yaga, in her home and follow her orders. Through this intuitive initiation, Vasalisa can return home with the ancestral knower, the skull filled with fire, and kill her stepmother and stepsisters, who represent the aspects of the psyche that deprive a woman of her inner, rich creative life: the cruel people in your mind or in your life who douse your passions and roll their eyes at your intensity.

“…we must set out into the woods, go find the scary woman, or else one day as we are nodding down the street a manhole cover will snap open and whoosh we will be snatched by some unconscious thing that will throw us about like a rag.”7

Are you seeing the pattern yet?

I discovered the predator in my psyche, the antithesis to my intuition. The voice that questions with rationality, dismembers through over-analysis, and preaches self-doubt as sacred text. Once I shone a light into that dark corner, he appeared in real life as an opportunity to follow the cord of my intuition, and therefore strengthen our line of connection.

Then I was faced with the woods.

In my dream, I still feared entering their dark path to the fierce mother. But I believe I have set foot on its dirt. I can feel the cold earth between my toes, the aliveness in my chest. I hope I keep returning to these woods again and again in my dreams, always a few steps deeper to the home of the Wild Goddess. I promise I will return and move through when I’m awake. Like I’ve said before, the path disappears. I can’t see through the fog. I don’t know where it’s taking me.

But

I already love this place and I’m not even there yet.

Elisa Maria // di vita xx

The room is filled with wax, and you’ve probably created a mountain (in your mind) from it. You’re dripping in molten gold, the point where creation and destruction converge. Does anyone ever truly glow without burning themselves first?

You must walk through the fire to forge your soul.

Your voice is returning to you in poetry. You’re writing again. You’re painting for the first time in years.

And you just burnt down the path you spent the last five years building. Your soul gave you a flash image of yourself twenty years ahead. And it wasn’t pretty. You were an alcoholic, and you don’t even like drinking. You were numbing. If you heard Mary Oliver’s words, “Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”, it would have relentlessly picked at that very first knot and torturously unraveled all your threads in one evening’s hot bath. The salt would’ve burned before it healed.

But the guilt that follows. That’s one mountain you’ve had a hard time resisting the climb. But know this. Every step you take up that mountain is a step within the footprint of someone else’s expectations that you’ve swallowed, internalized, and spit out as if they’re your desires, while the pit in your stomach never goes away. And this mountain specifically is smoke and mirrors. The summit is a constantly shifting mirage, requiring just a few more steps of your exertion, promising its elusive destination as rest’s peak and success’s homage. But if you’re driven by guilt over the life you think you should be living, and you spend your precious life ticking all of society’s boxes, you’ll only ever arrive at another fire.

Burn it down.

Or suffocate from the smoke.

. . .

This world doesn’t like it when you burn your life down. We call it crazy. Unstable. Selfish. Unwise. While in truth, it’s the bravest, most powerful thing you can do. Burn down a life that is not yours, that is draining your soul, for one that fulfills and feeds your dreams and desires. Hmm, a powerful system that has trained us into obedient, repetitive workers, while branding the incendiary act of reclaiming your life as your own as foolish? The conditioning is starting to stink.

Burn your life down until you’ve found your soul’s path. And many of us have only been mirroring the survival mode our parents lived in. And their parents, and their parents, and so on. They did what they had to do to put food on the table. And perhaps the same goes for you for a period of time. But if a creative life calls you, do not stay on the path of survival, the path of comfort, the safe path.

In the words of David Whyte, “How do you know that you are on your path – because it disappears. That’s how you know. How do you know that you are really doing something radical? Because you can’t see where you are going. That’s how you know. And everything you have lent on for your identity has gone. And so you are going to enter the black contemplative splendours of self‑doubt, at the same time as you are setting out on this radical new path”.

Do you know exactly who you are and every step that you will take until retirement?

Burn it down.

Are your movements throughout the day so predictable, so mechanical, so checklist-organized that you don’t save time to play, to create, to feel?

Burn it down.

Are you living in a shadow career? A life that runs parallel to your dream life, so it’s sufficient in fulfilling your mental energy, but only slowly drips a little joy on some days into the cup of your soul?

Burn it down.

. . .

I carry a lighter with me wherever I go. And I don’t smoke.

Maybe that’s my soul’s current metaphor.

Maybe you and I aren’t so different. Ten years may have passed. But I’m taking notes from you. You are writing these letters to me as much as I’m writing them to you.

And that’s our DNA strung throughout the act of remembering. I’m connected to all versions of you; I’m connected to all iterations and past incarnations; I’m connected to all the hands that have held together my lineage, in toil and in triumph, under the same sun that has risen today.

We owe it to all of our past selves, past lives, and past ancestors to get on our one true path.

You are here for only this one reason.

Burn it down.

Elisa Maria // di vita

Our ideas, conversations, and therefore our consciousness, are stuck in a ping-pong machine. We bounce off the same walls, loop around the same arc, and inevitably fall into the same hole, ending the game. And we’ve been led to believe that playing this game inside a glass-encased machine (device) is the equivalent of hitting a soaring ball of thought in an open field. The machine’s design creates the game’s rules, and you can decide to play or not.

Internet “discourse”, posed as content, feels like we’re polluting the air with vapid trends or incendiary opinions that are valueless beyond 90 seconds of entertainment or disgust. And that snippet of useless information then sits in your mind collecting interest. It has turned an otherwise fruitful garden of potential originality into a cluttered and chaotic landscape of junk.

Our Minds Are a Media-reel

As a visualization exercise (that can create enough impact through contemplation alone), I like to flip my mind inside out and visualize it as the actual environment I’m sitting in. Then I pull out every piece of media or thought I consumed that isn’t my own, and hang it on the wall like I’m decorating the space, or like I’m creating an exhibition for an art gallery. Admittedly, this can be a daunting exercise when some days I realize that barely any beauty or art is hung on my walls, and instead I see a pile of hot takes or rage-bait said by a stranger 900 clicks south of my business. I think, “Why on earth am I thinking about you?” As someone who spends a great deal of time in her thinking mind, I can think of subjects in books the weight of my house that are more interesting and beneficial to my intellect and growth than Jessica’s Instagram reel at 2:00 pm on a Tuesday.

So why do we, myself included, fall for the appeal of mindlessly decorating the home of our psyche with useless junk?

I assume many of our walls look like collages with no blank space to hang the art of our own thoughts or expressions.

I believe we fill our consciousness to the brim with material so that we don’t have to look at what lies underneath all the rubbish and confront the space between what we say and what we’re meant to say.

My Own Evolution of Thought

Throughout my life, I’ve oscillated between the utter certainty of a rock, stuck in its ways, and the shapeshifter of water, clinging to nothing and molding to whatever.

I’ve gripped boulders of belief with full-body strength, curling my toes around their ridges, fingernails dragging like chalk on a board, refusing to let go of a stubborn stance when contradictory information comes knocking and begs me to extend a limb’s length of consideration beyond my rock-solid reality. This first began when I had to confront the Christian beliefs I had adopted by default of the home I grew up in. Sometimes these knocks were as silent as a gentle nudge, an intuitive space shaped as a question mark. Other times, they were as confronting as a full-house demolition, when you register the audacity it takes for a fifteen-year-old claiming to have the answers for the mysteries of the cosmos. At other times, I had a subtle feeling that my rigidity was less about being right and more about protecting a part of my psyche that needed to be right.

Then suddenly and completely, I’d let go of the rock.

My death grip would go limp, and I’d gracelessly get sucked into all of belief’s river, tumbling downstream, deciding to float in its waters rather than grabbing hold of anything solid. Eventually, I’d become so fluid in my thinking that I’d begin to question the outline of belief in the human psyche itself. I had swung to the opposite end of the pendulum, wanting to avoid any defining lines of opinion that staked a claim, saying, “This is where I stand”.

The Integration of Opposites

These oppositions exist in the individual who fears their evolutionary task of entering the dark space between what they currently believe and who they are becoming. Two ends of the spectrum conjoin into one psyche, both aimed at avoiding internal change. We either want to hold onto a belief forever so we feel wrapped in certainty, or we dispose of strong beliefs altogether, choosing the soul’s slow death of a lukewarm existence.

When these two sides finally realize they’re not in opposition and integrate, you meet a passionate individual who isn’t afraid to play the fool in their own lives. They’re able to move from their current perception of “knowing” towards the threshold calling them, the space beyond the person they currently are. But they know that to become this person, they have to cross the unknown and let their current beliefs and opinions dissolve into their individual tenets, separating from ideology and education, and moving beyond mere repetition and regurgitation. They have to see what sticks to their insides without any external forces. And they know that they have to become the beginner again, whereas our entire culture and education system is designed around becoming the expert. So you can imagine how uncomfortable and almost counterintuitive this process feels.

This is why most people never evolve into who they are meant to become.

And then, based on temperament, disposition, and personality, I suppose, those who continually crack their cocoon, never undergoing metamorphosis and remaining as vulnerable goo in their hard exterior shell, either land on the side of overly rigid thinking, grasping at certainty and control, or excessive fluidity, never entering the ring and formulating or voicing beliefs that are apposite to the conflicts we currently face. Or maybe they oscillate between these two states, depending on their soul’s season, or the belief in hand, as I did.

The Unknown Is Always In The Room

Whether we land on the side of speaking with complete certainty in our views, without any wiggle room for imagination or empathy, or our beliefs expand and cover as much ground as a vase leaking all its water on the floor, both sides are dancing around the same fear in the room: nuance.

Nuance is the space between what you say, and it’s always heavy with assumptions, perceptual angles that can only glimmer when they catch the light, and judgments.

The black-and-white thinker is so afraid of nuance that they deny it altogether.

The never-staking-an-opinion thinker is so afraid of nuance’s perceptual ambiguity that they attempt to cover all its negative space.

Nuance is the unknown of thought. If original expression is thought pushed to its perceptual limits, nuance is the underlying rock formations connecting that cliff edge to the mountain. Our thinking becomes stronger when we pull up a seat for nuance at the table. It’s our silent mediator, and each mind needs to give it its voice. But first, you actually have to say something. For every thought you let language mold into shape and pull into form, you must temporarily cut off its infinite potential to occupy another shape, masquerading as momentary certainty.

The overly rigid thinker registers this as power.
The overly fluid thinker registers this as danger.
The intellectual thinker registers this as potential. 

Nuance then enters and shapes that momentary certainty through a different lens. A perception of potentiality hinges on one’s comfort in straddling that unknown space between what they have claimed and that claim’s reach and limitations.

The overly rigid thinker believes they are saying everything.
The overly fluid thinker is most comfortable when saying nothing.
The intellectual thinker dances between saying everything they can and realizing they may be saying nothing at all.

This straddling between what has entered language’s form and what still lies underneath it in the nuance of implication is the engine that pushes thought and conversation forward, not the weapon that implicates another’s expression of thought. Disagreement or dissent is not an inherent enemy. It only becomes so when we decide there is only one right answer. Otherwise, it is evidence of a healthy, working mind.

We have become lost artists in this dance of dialogue. Half of us are so scared to offend. The other half of us are so scared of not being certain we’re right. And most of us are saying nothing at all that actually grows organically in our minds.

But we are saying something planted on the walls of our mind-reel, mistaking it for our own thinking and using it to bolster our sense of security at the cliff edge of the unknown, our consciousness.

It’s a scary stance to hold. To constantly push thought past what has been cycled through history’s traditions or government’s posturing. It’s constantly risking a fall, as you watch rocks crumble beneath your feet, not knowing if anything you say will even survive the fall.

Can We Normalize Nuance?

Whenever I see someone say “can we normalize this” online, and ‘this’ being whatever topic at hand, I often think, “that doesn’t need normalizing. That needs us all to get off social media and live our lives as if it were 1999”.

Nuance is the default space occupied between two people speaking with open hearts and aiming to understand each other. And I’m not saying that everyone had the ability and emotional intelligence to do this pre-internet (my family sure didn’t). More often than not, I see the internet squashing this default space of nuance between its digital fingertips and convincing us that being warriors towards strangers behind screens is somehow productive. And the “convincing” is built into the design. Remove the threat of proximity and someone being able to kick your ass in real life when you’re an absolute asshole to them, and people will find the audacity to voice the fire burning in their gut in the most closed-minded, self-serving way.

I know I just typed all that. And I also believe this:

The internet does facilitate beautiful conversations.

And this is generally where I hang out. But I have to dip my voice into the toxicity for critique purposes; it’s just how I’m wired.

The Algorithm Hands You a Cropped Picture

And convinces you it’s showing you the entire thing.

We’re being rage-baited and divided more than ever. The human psyche can’t hold all the information thrown its way for consumption and remain harmonious. This world will always have horror woven into the thread of its existence. The dawn-to-dusk newsreel is now in our pockets, following our every move. It dishes out beauty and horror in unequal amounts, but more importantly, it fills every second of silence in your day. And if you fill each moment with opinions and certainty, the unknown of your consciousness becomes a stranger to you.

We rarely consider the space between what we say and what we actually want to say, between who we are and who we wish to become, because we’re constantly filling that space with other people’s thoughts.

And we’re so afraid of sitting in that dark space that precedes fertile grounds.

But this is the only space where you will hear the tune of your voice, the melody that only your soul can sing.

And trust me, you’re here to sing it aloud.

Elisa Maria // di vita

I could feel it in the way my mind waded through resistance when trying to complete even the simplest tasks.

The never-ending to-do list that began to feel like an anchor keeping me stuck in one spot rather than evidence of a full life structured around stability and responsibility.

The house that was left in less order than I prefer, creating this background hum of anxiety in the corners of my space.

“Ugh, I have to wash the toilet.”

“The floors are so dirty. I have to clean them tomorrow.”

“I still have to workout.”

Have to. Have to. Have to.

How about “I get to…”

I get to workout because I have an able, healthy, strong body.

I get to clean my house because thank God, I have a house!

And I get to write to you today because I have two hands (though I’m only typing with one right now—mom life) and access to a laptop and internet.

I know this mindset shift is simple, but somehow the simplest of things can have the deepest roots in our consciousness, and they can give life to the greenest foliage of our expressions

Words are spells.

I’m sure you’ve heard that notion tossed around before. And it certainly plays into all the manifestation talk floating in the collective zeitgeist.

I typically thought of that phrase in terms of words spoken aloud, as if commands, whether spoken by the self or heard from an outside source. But such utterances are only the part of the script that steps up to the larynx’s microphone and speaks into the open air. And since my inclination tends to lean towards the internal script that hides under the floorboards of the mind we’re constantly stomping around in, I believe the real spells are cast here.

The subconscious.

I don’t believe that every “negative” thought has a negative consequence in our lives. I don’t believe the circulation of energy translates linearly to a measurable cause and effect.

I believe our internal script tells a story of either receptivity or resistance.

And this could be linked to our capacity, what we’re able to hold, based on the responses coded into our nervous systems. You can believe that you want more money, the new job, or an abundance of people following your work, but if your internal story is one of resistance, meaning you’re pushing away what is already your responsibility to hold in your life, it’s unlikely you’ll call in experiences that will put you on a growth trajectory of any sort.

When our internal script runs on a story of receptivity, we are responsive to all that our current lives ask us to hold, and we are open to holding more of what we desire.

We curse our lives when we subtly resist all that we have already been blessed with.

It’s as if we’re pushing all that’s good away from us while asking for more good. It sounds like an absurd equation when spelled out like that.

I see this as casting a curse on your life. And by curse, I don’t mean invoking the supernatural to inflict harm. I mean it in the sense that you’re invoking misery into your day because you’re resisting what has been entrusted to you to hold.

We all get into these slumps. And thankfully, I’m exiting mine after only two weeks with even more awareness of all the variables that align to kickstart or perpetuate the funk, and I’m taking note of the ones I can control.

So much is out of our control. But what are you doing with the power of what you get to control? Are you cursing with that power, or are you blessing?

A question I will be asking throughout the week to check in with myself.

Back to being with hands wide open,

Elisa Maria // di vita

I’m going to tell you something that no online “spiritual guru” would ever tell you. That no self-help book would include. And it’s unlikely your “life coach” would concede to this sentiment either.

Because what I’m about to tell you is highly unmarketable, barely appealing, and totally unsexy.

You can’t create a course around its affectability; you can’t promise virality from its implementation. Heck, I’ll be lucky if I can even write an entire piece surrounding this idea.

(Is this a challenge to get way too deep and tangential on something so mundane and seemingly insignificant? Challenge already accepted).

I think it’s safe to say that culturally, we have become obsessed with these three industries: Spirituality. Wellness. Self-help.

Anything that keeps us on the path of self-optimization and in line with the feeling of moving our lives on a steady upwards trajectory.

I believe this is part of our nature, and inherently, there’s nothing wrong with this desire.

But what these three industries have in common is that they often appeal to our sense of lack. We are a project needing an overhaul, a beaten-up home needing a renovation. We must arrive deficient in some area of our lives to be worthy of the upgrade and susceptible to its messaging.

And I’m not against improving the quality of your life, fine-tuning your habits towards health, or directing your attention towards rich sources of art and inspiration.

I do all these things consciously, every day.

But what I’m able to notice now is this:

Most products that sprout from any of these industries are often still ligaments from the larger energy that controls the zeitgeist: fear. The supposed spiritually “clean” and “high-vibe” industries are still hooking into our anxiety, and telling us, perhaps subconsciously at times, what we are lacking, and promising that this ceremony, bio-hack, or book will save us, pull us to shore, and set us on the right path.

It’s all in the messaging. They begin by speaking directly to an embarrassing self-doubt, a prevalent ailment, a common struggle. Name the pain, offer the solution.

Is it just me who’s entirely over this marketing tactic? And I’m over it because I can feel that the hook puts me in a state of anxiety and lack.

Any business, coach, or influencer who appeals to this area of my psyche is an instant ‘no’ for me. It’s actually just an energetic mismatch at this point, like we’re speaking two different languages, my system responding “cannot compute”. Because if that’s what you’re appealing to, that’s the area of your psyche you’re operating from, and inevitably, that’s what you’re going to reinforce in my system too.

We’ve rebranded the sleezy car salesman energy as the bougie lifestyle coach or the social media expert, and IT’S WORKING.

Why? Because many of us run on the frequency of fear and lack. It’s that simple. The collective frequency is the key, and your constitution is the lock, though it is a mutable one. It can shapeshift in a second. But whatever you let enter your psyche and influence your thoughts determines the shape of your barrier.

I still haven’t told you my secret to accessing a deeper spiritual life, I know.

Here’s my hot take:

I don’t think you need to ‘elevate’ your life in any way to access a deeper spirituality or understanding of the self.

In fact, these two things seem to be moving in opposite directions. “Elevate” to go “deeper”. And I don’t think this is a paradox; I think it’s a strategy. I think it’s about packaging the destination as a product—selling the sun that strikes hottest at the top of the mountain, without mention of the grueling hike up.

I don’t think spirituality can be sold in any capacity.

And I think it exists in the underground moments of our lives.

I think our connection to the divine appears when we strip down the noise, silence all unnecessary voices, stop looking outside ourselves for answers, and learn to look at our foundation: what lies below, what is the quiet voice that plays in sync with our steps when we are present and silent enough to hear it.

Alas, here’s my unsexy, unmarketable secret:

I feel the most spiritually connected while I’m cleaning my floors.

Not during a shroom trip while camping alone in the forest.
Not while writing a book in a coconut treehouse plopped in the middle of a rice field alone in Bali.
Not while tripping on acid on the side of a mountain in Australia.

I’ve done all those things.

And somehow, in this season, cleaning my damn floors feels more spiritual. It feels like my channel clears from both motion and removal, and I often get my best ideas.

I don’t say this to defend some supposed hidden virtue of domesticity.

I’m not here to tell you to “get your room in order first”.

I’m not even saying I prefer cleaning my floors over a solo trip to Bali to lock myself away and write. Um hello. I’m not insane.

But I believe that these spiritual “highs” we’re often chasing out there can exist in the smallest, everyday moments of our lives if we’re willing to open to them.

And to open, we often have to close outside influence pulling at our attention and awareness.

This culture convinces you that you need to stay on top of every global issue that catches fire and blows up the algorithms. And that you need to have an opinion ready, formulated and full, at your side to whip into the field, and let loose.

And sometimes, I admit, I willingly stick my hand in the flame.

I began watching the Lindsay Clancy trial. I decided that if I were to form an opinion of the case, I would do so after seeing the evidence presented to the court. Not after watching reels distorting fact with assumption, and content that never arrives with a white flag and only ever furthers the cultural war.

I decided I was going to watch 15+ hours of a trial so repetitive and anti-climatic you almost forget the horrific scene of the crime it was built upon. Until you don’t.

The day when police officer after police officer testified on the stand, where the gut-wrenching facts of the case were repeated again and again and again, became too much for me to continue consuming.

I could feel my baseline anxiety rise throughout the day for no apparent reason, and my creative channel was completely blocked. No original thoughts or inspiration were coming my way. And not that a constant state of creation is natural either, but I knew the energy I was allowing past my barrier was throwing me off.

What I consumed began to influence what I created, and it appeared to be, well, nothing. This is the “conspiracy” no one wants to talk about because it implicates every single one of us. We may be controlled by where we place our attention, but ultimately, that choice is ours. And a life left uncreated is our own fault.

Now, I know it is a privilege to be able to turn off the horror at the click of the button. I know many people on this planet, on this day, at this very second, cannot turn off the horror of that trial. And that the horror extends far beyond the trial. That it exists in their consciousness, seeped deep into their memory. That it leaks into dreams and nightmares, and has altered their cellular communication, and that the trial is merely scraping at and reopening old scars for the sake of justice. And I know that this is just a drop in the bucket of all that is gruesome and horrendous in this world.

We’ve been brainwashed since the 80s by the constant newsreel on our TVs. And now those TVs exist in our pockets, are glued to our pulse, and follow our every move. And while staying in tune with world issues to broaden your awareness and empathy is important, the amount of information we consume daily is not natural.

And, unfortunately, the opposite effect is taking place: social media is not a facilitator of meaningful and intellectual conversation. Keeping a pulse on world issues often boxes us in, rather than broadening our perceptions, while suffocating our empathy.

So what does the Lindsay Clancy trial have in common with the selling of “spirituality” (through gurus, wellness, and self-help)?

One feeds your anxiety, while the other feeds off your anxiety.

Each variable on either side of this “equation” can be substituted with essentially any tragedy and any industry.

And I know we’re made to feel guilty for not using our voices to fan the flame of any issue that catches fire on socials.

I say pay attention, say a prayer, and get in the ring if you like. And then get out if you feel you need to.

Here’s your permission to step away from the online anxiety and maybe, if you want to, wash your floors.

Elisa Maria // di vita

scream

I
I LOVE
I LOVE THIS
THIS 
THIS MOMENT

Without any words at all.

I remember when this first happened.

Your uninhibited laugh.

I had to temper this boiled-down joy into my system. It felt like a foreign substance, like the uncut stuff, like I just noticed I survived on store-bought my whole life.

A doorway to a temple of

here
here
here

I stood outside it

realized I rarely entered another’s front door and shared that intimate moment inside, where you trade self-perception, the outside looking in, for a shared view, four eyes one room

no mind no time

here 
here
here

Most times we need drugs to get there.

Most times I needed drugs to get there.

But what I really needed was to swell, expand, erupt in the basement of my belly

let you barrel through my foundation 
crack the concrete 
oh the walls are caving in now   
might as well go all the way
demolition 
head to toe

There’s more than one birth that happens when you become a mother.

I’ve spent the last two and a half years melted to goo in the one place I’ve never inhabited long enough for it to become home

Stripped all that I’ve sucked up along the way, so I can finally meet her

I haven’t left the cocoon just yet

Not yet

But in the meantime we’re laying brick by brick together with every laugh, every tantrum, every point of connection and redirection

I’ve become your compass; you’ve become my magnetic north star

We build and rebuild ourselves, down to the marrow and up to the sky, within the mundanity and magic of twenty-four hours, those porcelain castles we live inside

that we either see as a cursed cage // a gift from dawn.

Looks like I’ve finally climbed inside your laugh

Elisa Maria // di vita

An escape artist without moving an inch.

A ghost within its walls while still rich in flesh.

If I was sitting inside some windowless classroom, drenched in fluorescent lights, I was actually on an unrecognizable stage, deep in my voice and purpose, under a spotlight.

If I was at the dinner table with my family, swimming in whatever emotional chaos or swallowed bitterness served in the air that evening, I was sitting by a river, lying in my crush’s arms, him playing with my hair in the sunlight.

Dissociation: your life inside a glass casing on the ground, you suspended above, watching it roll by, a tumbleweed on the dirt road, bound for the ditch. Don’t go. Out of sight. Always more than an arm’s reach away.

Sometimes, clouds as opaque as bricks; you don’t know when these walls were built or how you’ll ever tear them down, or when the sun will peek through.

Often, the hardest parts of our lives disappear into vapor when we reach to understand them.

I’ve never stopped extending out my hands.

At some point in my twenties, I became aware of the larger shape of my life.

It was like I zoomed out and could see the points plotted along the graph, and I could finally see the dots connect. I’ve always wanted to see the dots connect.

I could see the peaks form, the troughs dip. I could see how some of these waves were manufactured by my desires, mirroring the way my waters moved beyond my control, always in communication with one another, shaping myself and my life beyond what an impulsive flip-of-a-switch decision could map out in the moment. Yes. No. Yes. No.

We open and close doors every second of our lives, constantly collapsing and expanding timelines, most of them feeling too mundane to catch a glimpse of the tiny beauty peaking through the crack, or the horror we escaped by a hair.

Like when you left your house at the exact moment to see that owl smack dab in the middle of the dirt road you drive every day.

Or like when you left your house ten minutes late and just missed the fresh, and potentially deadly, car accident at the intersection.

We typically notice only the doors that catch the wind and rip open, or slam hard in our faces.

Like how in 2016 I went skydiving the day after I had written the last exam of my undergrad.

How five months later I never stepped on the plane, a one-way ticket to Costa Rica, because my intuition was screaming NO. Not opening the door slightly, then closing it, oscillating between a yes and no, wobbling on the tightrope of hesitation. NO NO NO.

The very next day, I picked up a phone call from my dad in the middle of the restaurant while serving, to hear that my cousin had killed herself.

How just shy of two years after that phone call, I moved to Australia for a year, not sure if I’d ever return.

And a year and a half after that, back in Canada, a ring on my finger, oceans between me and my relationship, borders shut, an entire world, collective consciousness, and individual psyches rearranged around fear, security, control. The world gripping to “normal” and the mirage of predictability.

I had to let go.

The highs always had to be separated from the lows, like passing a yolk between its shells, seeing what sticks where when thrown.

Either dripping in gold or walking on eggshells, falling into the cracks of someone else’s emotional underworld or covered in their joy before it dries up.

This is what it felt like growing up with a chronically depressed mother.

I never trusted who she was, who was probably closer to her true self, when she wasn’t stuck beneath a spell, because I knew that version of her wouldn’t stay. That it would slip away, like she always did, and I would once again have a mother who wasn’t capable of talking to me for an entire winter.

She was the sun, the moon, eclipsing herself fully for months at a time.

Only darkness, only light.

I don’t remember ever being hugged by her as a child.

I’ve lived inside my own world, once removed. Like I was one generation away from the healed version of me, the version of me that could finally extend my hands, touch ground, and break through the glass. Cut open by its shards of harsh truths but finally inside it, holding my whole life without crumbling under its weight.

And not only holding it.

But chasing those things we say live in the clouds, and doing it in the open. Finding my path up there from the connected dots, jumping from star to star. And then swallowing the map, spitting out the evidence, the lessons, the visions, the unadulterated truths.

And then becoming a bridge.

I was splitting in two, at the gates of hell, or maybe almost heaven, straddling the liminal space between here, the room, the water the floor the voices, and there. The space we extend ourselves out to and pull spirit from, into form. A portal, where the two merge.

The void is the only place we create anything new from.

I reached between my legs, caught my son in the water as I birthed him in the middle of my living room.

In this moment, I was able to touch my life, reach so deep into it for the first time.

I looked at him and thought, “Oh my god, it’s you. It’s been you this whole time.”

In my experience of motherhood, the highs don’t eclipse the lows, and vice versa. They are woven together, like a newborn breathing on your chest. Rising and falling. Like that first scream you were so desperate to hear, keeping you up for hours in the night. Like each moment passing, a doorway to new growth and experience and joy, and a little death to a day, a version of this tiny rapid evolution you’ll never get to experience again.

I needed to become a mother to learn this. To find the light in my postpartum depression that I recognized as just a baseline. To find grace for myself when I fell short of my idealistic expectations pre-motherhood. When I yell or scream or offer less than absolute presence. When I offer my human instead, reminding myself that the tiny slice, the 5% of the time, doesn’t taint the whole picture.

And to find grace for my own mother. To understand her better than maybe she could put into words herself. To forgive her, to forgive myself.

It’s often from our lowest points we move slow enough to see the tiny doors opening.

I finally found those hidden doors.

I connected my dots and hers.

And then I lifted my hand and blew them away.

Turns out the stories we tell ourselves are flips of switches. They tell us yes. They tell us no. They extend their hands out to us, caress where we want to remain comfortable, or drop us mid-air so we stay the victim.

They are also a bridge. They can carry you from who you were to who you are meant to become.

You have to step over the story, which will feel like stepping into the void. The only place you can birth something new from.

Remember.

When the lights go out, our angels appear.

Elisa Maria // di vita

I could begin it right here. I could write a sentence and cut into a collective insecurity, then coyly introduce my strategic bullet-point solution to your psychologically abstract problem.

Or I could begin it like this. I could tell you my spiritual download and position myself as the guru who will temporarily aid your ego, as it bruises as universally as an archetype, as individually as a fingerprint.

Alas, I could begin it here. I could paint an anecdote or analogy on the page, tell you a childhood story that etches onto the canvas of our belonging, so we see that our pictures are more similar than we often let ourselves believe.

Or I could shape it like this. I could boil the infinite down to a binary and begin with this sentiment:

We, as writers, write in one of two ways.

With our hands extended.

With our hands in our pockets.

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Most of the world is writing with their hands in their pockets, holding onto lint and loose change like it’s good material, gripping harder when the words beg to get truer, mistaking the retraction as danger. This is not a flaw. This is a doorway. But instead of leaning in, we aim for outward reach—likes, followers, money, attention, validation.

We learn to replicate what sells, what has been proven to work. We position ourselves as the expert because it’s safer than admitting we still dig in the ditches of our psyches and only find dirt.

And it’s easier to market our dirt by prematurely buffing its surface so that it shines.

Of course dirt can decompose into something rich and become the soils we sprout from; it can hold the alchemy of a hundred cuts yet still glimmer like a diamond—but that process takes more time and silence than we feel we can bargain for these days.

Most writers with their hands extended far out have first dug them so deep into the dirt of their lives that they’ve hit marrow.

They’ve sat in the fracture, the ugly truth; they’ve run into wall after wall while finding their voice. They’ve learned to create their own applause from that unpromising silence. And so they’ve learned that the most meaningful applause first comes from the meeting of their two hands. And then they’ve learned to offer their voice to the world from that place.

I’m not advocating for your lack of expression. Absolutely not. Nor am I saying you have to arrive at the page polished and a pro. I’m saying quite the opposite. I’m saying arrive truer. Arrive with more of you.

And not the pocket-size version of you that shallowly skims your skin. Dig so fucking deep that it feels far too heavy to steadily extend your hands outward and offer the world what you have to say, what only you can say.

I believe this is what 2026’s Leo season is teaching us. The season of expression, creativity, and attention is burrowing its light into our underworld.

It’s not asking, “what are you creating?” It’s asking, “where are you creating from?”

Here’s that aforementioned childhood analogy:

The masks of our ego got forced into a lethal union with our inner child, where one was taught to protect, the other to hide. But first they fought. They fought so loudly and openly that their chaos got banished to the bottom of our obsidian waters. And so they continued their battle underground until they tangled themselves into an ouroboros.

Land on the third side of the coin, walk the edge of your self-awareness before the hero or victim arrives, and look around you: is it your ego or your inner child that is the head or the tail?

Reach your hands into your waters, filled with piranhas and pearls. This season, it feels like if you reach shallowly, looking for attention, for your ego to be validated, your waters snap back immediately.

But if you dive straight down, aimed at the bottom, knowing that’s where your world truly opens up, the attention may arrive unexpectedly.

Because the attention was never the aim.

The dark, fertile soils of your expression were.

You must first write for yourself, and then for an audience.

Because either the audience won’t appear and you’ll stop. Or the audience will appear, and you’ll perform.

Most people writing with their hands in their pockets would never write if there’s no chance those pockets would be filled with cash.

Most people writing with their hands extended are being paid in the capacity of their attention and the reward of turning their insides out onto the page. And I hope to live in a world where these writers’ pockets are getting poured into.

I hope to help create this world for us writers.

But here, right now, I’m hoping for this:

Be the first to hold your hand, and applaud yourself, along the way.

Elisa Maria
// di vita

Moments throughout my week, disguised by the veil of mundanity, had already formed a thread of synchronicities that grew in potency by the day as dots kept connecting. Then the arrival of this book cracked open the door of connection wider and wider, a catalyst that sinks you deeper into your soils. A portal to a world constructed in words that smooth over, page by page, the bumps and crevices of your own heart, like finally smoothing a silk cloth over past versions of yourself in need of a burial, versions you could touch but not quite put into form; you could feel their shape by braille but you couldn’t translate their language to the page, the page to a song.

And then you read another woman’s words, one you don’t really even know, but of course that doesn’t mean anything, and you enter their world, line by line, and it begins to communicate with your own. Their past timeline weaves over your present one; your past timeline imprints into their current footsteps; a crisscross of webs creating a history spun between what retinas can only read linearly. You exit their pages both more dead, more alive. You are freed. You are lighter. Your blood starts circulating quicker. Your own pen bleeds more.

And ultimately, you find yourself standing at an internal doorway, a threshold we all must cross, some of us many times—expanding, expanding, expanding.

Some of us never. We remain on the cerebral top floor because it feels safer to be vacant and consume consume consume to fill ourselves.

We are afraid what might spill if we crack.

. . .

Last Friday, I stood in my kitchen staring out the bay window. I forget if it was before or after I read the last line of that poem above.

I felt a gentle knock; the door creaked open. Come on in, I said in silence.

I heard:

No matter how far you have to travel to find her, how midair you will feel after the first jump, how alone you may feel

I am here.

And this time, I’m keeping the door open.

“How are you lonely in rooms with God?”

Elisa Maria // di vita

Blame it on my dissociated childhood.
Blame it on my 12th house Mars.
Blame it on my poet soul.

I’ve always felt that my feet wouldn’t fit into the shoes we are told are acceptable to walk in and build from—the career, the role, the lifestyle. I’ve been stuck in a shoe store my whole life, never finding the right pair. They all felt too tight, like they’d suffocate my lifeforce if I kept them on for too long.

Turns out shoes are a modern invention and barefoot is better. Our ancestors knew this. They walked this path. Instead, we shove our feet into uncomfortable shoes, and then get mad at the person who sold them to us.

I’ve always felt like I’ve had to fight for my whimsy; I’ve had to fight for who I truly am so that I didn’t lose her. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized my main opponent is actually myself.

We’re often not fighting for who we truly are to have a seat at the table; we’re fighting against who we truly are, and then projecting our bitterness onto the world.

Blame it on the spirit being born free and the man-made world looking to cage you at every corner.

Blame it on a world that suppresses intuition.
Blame it on a world that worships facts and logic.
Blame it on a world that runs on your slave labour.

Blame it on a world that attempts to turn human evolution into a linear assembly line of experiences: birth-school-more school-still not done with school-get a lifelong job-marriage-kids-midlife crisis aka your soul’s final war cry for freedom before you lose all energy to fight-retirement-complain about everything because it’s easier than admitting you wasted most of your life and don’t know who you are or how to spend your time in a fulfilling way-get old-die.

I promise you I didn’t plan on becoming this grim right off the bat. It will get better.

I will say this. We do have all the valid scaffolding for blame to hold up. And most of our systems surely need a software update.

However, I don’t know much about systems or software. I do know a lot about how to be a whimsy bitch though in a world that wants to mock and judge it.

I know how to quit a path when my soul sounds the siren loud enough for me to listen. And I know how to quit fast, cold, hard. Despite criticism or judgment.

I know how to be perceived as “unstable”, “directionless”, or a “failure”, when really, I’ve been silently behind-the-scenes learning to find my footing on a path that disappears the moment you step on it*, walk in faith over fear on that path, and recalibrate the moment my soul veers out of alignment, so that I don’t wake up one day when I’m fifty and regret my entire life’s trajectory.

Following the world’s path for you will offer present validation, yet this misalignment will feed silent doubt and shame that will only reveal itself once it has become louder than the charade that’s keeping you going.

Following your disappearing path will often offer present anxiety and judgment because no one will understand what you’re doing, potentially including yourself for some time. Yet it will feed your soul’s validation in the quiet moments that the applause doesn’t reach. And this is the sort of validation that can enter the grave with you.

. . .

I remember driving around as a child, staring out the window at strip malls thinking they looked so foreign and odd that they must have fallen from another planet. Like, I couldn’t comprehend a big box building in the middle of a field.

I remember in high school I thought there must have been some grand behind-the-scenes gimmick at play that convinced us, humans, to walk into this four-walled prison (my high school classrooms were windowless) every day for 7 hours for 12 years straight. Like, this is it, guys? This is what we agreed to do with our lives?

Whimsy girls don’t do well with Groundhog Day environments.
Whimsy girls don't do well with their hearts being graded.
Whimsy girls don't do well with no windows.

I’ve always known how much this world’s script sucks, and I now live in a home with windows facing every direction. I’m now brave enough to step off the path for good.

“They” say (oh, the clandestine they) we live in an inverted world. This usually refers to evil, but I don’t need to go that far here. It’s quite simple. We’re not living by design. We walk the linear, soul-sucking paths set out for us from 9-5, then we dissociate during after-hours, feed some of our needs, but again, often forget our soul.

I can’t flip the world right side up.

And I can flip my life’s script.

Feet in the clouds, where the path disappears, and my soul comes alive.

Head on the ground, no longer dissociated from what pulls me from the path, and able to choose faith over fear at every turn.

Elisa Maria // di vita

* In reference to Mac Miller's lyric in "Perfecto", which was likely in reference to Paul McCartney's song "Feet In The Clouds".
* Paraphrasing David Whyte.
Thumbnail via Pinterest: Ryan James Caruthers.

Most people around me weren’t dancing. They were maybe swaying a bit. We weren’t close to the stage, but with the quality of that sound system, my god, it didn’t matter. The bass swallowed you whole, vibrated into your belly, could almost make your teeth chatter. The entire arena pulsed with ALIVENESS. And yet many people were still living a great deal of the concert through their phones. I only let this critical analysis capture my mind for a split second here and there because I was too busy being alive. Too busy dancing. But it still blows my mind. And now the bomb has been set off, and I can’t keep my mouth shut.

These screens are ruining our ability to be intimate with the present moment.

We all know they’re ruining our attention spans; nothing revolutionary said there. We all know, or we should know, these tech giants aren’t so much experts in algorithmic design or marketing as they are in human psychology. We’re so easy to crack, it’s nearly embarrassing. Consumption paired with quick dopamine release equals addiction. And I’m not speaking from above this equation; I’ve lived it. I’m human. But I’ve noticed this: when I’ve been most addicted to my phone and scrolling social media or binging YouTube videos, I’ve been most removed from reality, my environment, and my relationships. And not only that, I’ve been the quickest to judge others with differing opinions, and the slowest to instead empathize with them, or even to listen without feeling the need to debate.

Certainty sells online, not curiosity. We want to listen to the expert, zealot, or overconfident basement dweller who appears to have the answers, theories, or bulletproof ideologies we can regurgitate so that we can appear certain, too. And when we create an echo chamber for ourselves online with these types of voices, we slowly detach from a world that offers the unknown at every turn over manufactured certainty. We detach from a world that is filled with complex humans and nuanced situations, and opt, often unconsciously, to render reality through the black and white lenses of “good vs. evil” or “light vs. dark” because it helps us easily categorize the chaotic amount of information entering our retinas daily.

We step into a different world when our consciousness enters these screens, and that world is curated, convincing, and consuming. The tactility of its interface almost mimics the touch-and-go mechanism of many creative processes, except you leave with an over-stimulated mind, one that often can’t summarize in a paragraph what you just “learned”, and empty hands, because you didn’t actually do anything. Many of us fall into this addiction because we feel the need to “stay informed”, whether it’s geopolitics, conspiracy theories, fashion, trends, business, art, sports, etc. Whatever carrot grasps your attention. And I think this is a natural tendency and not an inherently bad one. The world energetically sheds its information for us, and as curious creatures, we collect it. We are its generator, taking the electricity of knowledge and language, communicating through the web of matter and consciousness, and the internet is its light-speed distributor, social media its portal. But we are entering an era of overdrive: we are losing the ability to distinguish between real and false, as well as the ability to unplug from the beast.

Narcotizing dysfunction. A phenomenon where overconsumption of media leads to inaction and apathy, replacing meaningful change-making with “being in the know” as sufficient for “helping” whatever cause you’re passionate about. I first heard this term probably ten years ago, and it has stuck with me. And again, I certainly fall into its trap. I certainly don’t have the answers right now to finding the balance between living your real offline life, staying in the global loop, and effecting change. And I think many of us do hold good intentions and want to make a positive impact in the face of disaster or corruption. We feel that tug on our soul’s purpose to change the world in some way. But often, we’ve overconsumed to the point of inaction, overwhelmed by the world’s darkness instead, and don’t know how to effect change. And this helplessness leads to cynicism, and cynicism knows how to destroy, but it doesn’t know how to build. Cynicism doesn’t create anything new, neither does fear; only hope and love do. If you believe the whole world is going to shit, you will create a world for yourself that is going to shit (in the words of Chelsea Diane).

What are you building?

A question I’m going to be asking myself repeatedly over the next five years of my life. And well beyond. Probably until I die.

I get it. We’re all sick of the government. We’re all sick of the system. We’re all sick (well, maybe not all) of the empire. But if all we know how to do is criticize it and be in the know, we won’t create a new world. And I know even the thought of creating “a new world” is daunting, but our daily actions create the world (I get the puppet strings of the elite, blah blah—focus on what you can control). Think of this: if every single human fought the war within themselves first, instead of focusing on the war outside themselves, if they healed themselves and became whole, kind, and truly on their path, what would our world look like? Is this likely to happen? No. Does it mean you shouldn’t do it for yourself? No. Why would you justify staying off your soul’s path just because other people are doing so? That is so dumb.

. . .

Years ago, I remember watching a clip of Beyoncé performing on a stage where the audience was so close, they could reach out and touch her. And they all had their phones out—every single one of them. And she said, “Put your phones down, I’m standing right in front of you!!”

The moment was so intimate, so alive and in-your-face, with such high energy to be that close to an artist pouring their heart into their voice, and the power of humans witnessing each other was energetically disrupted by the barrier of a phone.

I feel like this is what we’re doing to so many of our precious moments here.

Our real lives are yelling at us.

I’M STANDING RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU!!!

We are watching our screens instead of watching the stars at night.

We are focusing on the global stage instead of focusing on our children.

We are raising some stupid influencers’ views on their video instead of helping raise our grandchildren.

We are losing our precious minutes to dissociation through a screen because it’s feeding a dopamine sinkhole in our minds that has been pinpointed, targeted, and hijacked. But it never actually gets filled because cheap dopamine is low-cal, it doesn’t have enough life force to satisfy your soul. Because your soul wasn’t put on this planet to have its consciousness sucked into a screen and rant about the elite demons controlling your life! And it’s you, not them, who missed the sunrise, the sunset, and complained every hour in between while being adequately fed, sheltered, safe, and still in connection to a bunch of humans you love who haven’t died yet.

Your life is always standing right in front of you. The beauty of it, the horror of it. Feel it all. But don’t curse it by closing your heart to it.

And I understand the irony of my writing this to you through your screen. But some of the most transformational moments in my day are when I read something that gets down to my bones, rattles them a bit, and leaves me pondering them for hours, off the screen.

I have a blocker on my apps for most hours of the week. You’ll catch me smelling flowers and staring at the symmetry of their petals, slowly opening to reveal their bright, stunning insides.

This is your life, too. Don’t decide it’s not because it will listen. And don’t you dare miss it.

Elisa Maria // di vita xx

Saturday, June 27, 2026

Yesterday I was in a mood.

I was getting dressed in the morning, with unbrushed hair, no makeup, and my messy toddler running around me, pulling my attention in every direction. He needs a diaper change. Did I put the laundry in already? What should I make him for breakfast? Is it time for another cup of coffee? Then I remember my present task. To actually get dressed. Because the window guy will be here soon. Because my neighbour will be here shortly after. I step into my closet and I’m drawn to one of my most expensive dresses.

I haven’t worn this dress since a wedding two years ago, when I was probably thirty pounds heavier. I just want to try it on. See how it feels! I pull it off the hanger, undress and slip it over my head, cerulean dyed cotton with cream flowers cascading down my torso and legs as the full skirt falls into place. I adjust the big poofy sleeves, decide I like them melting off my shoulders. The sweetheart bust fits better since I’m no longer breastfeeding. The waist is a bit more roomy.

I remember feeling like a modern southern belle in this dress.

I remember feeling like a hazy summer sky with a few cotton clouds in this dress.

I remember feeling like twirling ‘round and ‘round in this dress.

I remember this dress makes me feel like dancing with every step.

I remember.

Then I hear a knock. The window guy is here to finalize his measurements before installation.

I guess I’m answering the door in this dress, I thought.

I glide down the staircase as the asymmetrical, tiered skirt flounces around my thighs and calves.

I opened the door, and I was greeted by a grumpy Eastern European (my guess by the accent) looking man. He was not having it—his day, his job, his life—I could tell. Trust me, you can tell when someone is in their life, or stuck somewhere on its perimeters, stalking it at a distance, hoping something will shift, but not actually living it (ask me how I know).

He wasn’t rude, but he wasn’t friendly either. Brief. No western customer service conditioning. He said he would start measuring outside and that he’ll be inside in about 15-20 minutes. I said, “ Okay”.

He then seemed to catch a glimpse of me in full. And he smiled for the first time. He grew friendlier and more open from that moment of my initial impression. We chatted briefly here and there. He kept smiling. Until he didn’t. He left my house so abruptly when he was finished, barely saying goodbye. Essentially ran out without eye contact.

Weird. Whatever. I no longer interpret (or at least try to) other people’s behaviour as a reflection/reaction to something I did or didn’t do. I’ve tried to clear that lens from my perception after an entire life of tempering the waters around me. I think people are generally a lot less concerned with one another than our social anxieties would have us believe. As if the constant stream of thought going through someone’s mind is as focused as the presence required to be fully drawn to what you, a stranger, is doing from moment to moment. We’re islands, we’re solo ships temporarily docking at each other’s shorelines, otherwise we’re lost at sea in our mind maze.

My neighbour is about to head over for what we call our “coffee” date any minute. I have a silly confession to make: there has never been any coffee served at these dates. Which, naturally, I thought was odd at first. Turns out, she has her one cup in the morning and then sips her Yeti filled with pop as we chat—one of her only pleasures (no guilt). And I always over-caffeinate before, because mom life. This time, I poured myself a glass of cold lemongrass green tea from the refrigerator, which I had made a few days ago. We sit. We chat. We get eaten by mosquitoes. Saskatchewan summer things.

There’s one thing you need to know about me: I do not like missing the opportunity to throw some wit out there. Earlier that morning, I pushed our “coffee” date an hour because my teenager (toddler) was still asleep. Lately, I’ve been calling him a teenager because he’s been sleeping until like 9:30 in the morning. I texted it to a group chat the other day, and my friend’s 8-year-old read it and said, “Wait, she has a teenager??” My friend explained the joke. I texted it to my neighbour that morning, and I joked about it again as we were drinking, not coffee, and she asked, “Do you actually have a teenager”. This is where I’m slapping myself. “Yeah, I keep them locked in the attic, throw them Leif’s half-eaten plates here and there”. Instead, I laughed and explained the teenager joke. You know what, I read the room. I know my audience. I try not to use sarcasm around old people, unless I can tell they’re a fan. Sarcasm can spiral the fragile mind. If I can see they tend towards the anxious side, and haven’t mastered the over-analysis compartment of their mind, I keep away from poking fun. I know what it’s like to replay conversations in my head. I don’t know what it’s like to be 70 years old with way too much time on my hands and the daily confrontation of my mortality.

And so the day went on, and this dress stayed on. I couldn’t change out of this feeling now. It’s marked my memory as outfits typically do. I remember days, mundane or not, through what I wear. It grounds my ethereal tending perception into the physical. I can tell you what I wore on my first day of high school. I can tell you what I was wearing the first time I locked eyes with my partner. I can tell you what I was wearing the first time I went shopping after giving birth.

Now I’ve worn my most expensive dress to a wedding, and I’ve worn my most expensive dress to sit on the front porch with my neighbour and drink not coffee. I’ve worn it to let in the window guy and to run through my backyard, chasing my toddler and sipping water from the hose. My mother would scoff at this. When I’m a mother to a little girl, I will praise this.

In a 1977 New York Times interview, Joan Didion said she uses her “good silver” every day because “every day is all there is”.

We have forgotten this.

I can forget this.

But yesterday reminded me.

Friday, June 26, 2026, never to be lived again, was lived in my good dress, and imbued with that essence of bringing the “locked away for the right time” into the right here, right now. It has another stain or two, sure. A few more signs that it has lived with me.

Wear the dress.

Use the good silver.

Open the aged wine.

This is all there is.

Elisa Maria // di vita

xx

“I’m learning to sit with the beauty of the world in my right hand, and the horrors of the world in my left. I’m learning to hold both hands out equally as the opening of my awareness, without letting the weightlessness of the right float to heights I worship and escape to, and without letting the heaviness of the left cause me to drop the ball on my dreams or desires.”

You may recognize this sentence from the first segment of Magic in the Mundane, though I have edited it above. It has been stuck to the inside of my skull since I wrote it, reverberating with surprisingly good acoustics, and getting louder instead of fading into the chaos of thought, signaling that I need to pay attention to it. So I copied and pasted it at the top of this page and stared at it for some time.

I was letting it do its invisible work, giving it time to sink to that stilled space inside me, where language is traded for the mirror of recognition. I then took its lack of movement, assuming it had settled into its chosen crevice, as a sign that it was fine to follow the path it left behind. This retrieval, from the underbelly of plain fact or knowing, is, I believe, why the writer exists. We tend to overlook the glimmer of what lies in the light for too long. Some things need to sink to the ocean floor to be called treasure. It is the writer that dives deepest without leaving the ground.

I began my descent. I assumed I would come to a fork in the path, where beauty took a right turn, and horror took a sudden left, but this wasn’t what I found. I found myself inside a room, with windows on all four walls and a door that locked automatically when closed. The floorboards creaked as I entered; my weight fully absorbed, despite the lightness I held in my step.

The room felt familiar, carrying a tone in its air that was both dense and auspicious. I managed a staccato inhale, these words escaping my lips before I felt them part: I’ve been here before. The outlines of sweated footprints from the last visitor felt like slippers on my feet. A plant with a twisted trunk, winding as high as the ceiling, stood in the middle of the room, with water pooling around the bottom of its pot. A window was cracked open. I must have been here not too long ago.

I scanned the room: its knotted mahogany floors, carrying up all the walls, its blood red coffered ceiling, leaking like a metronome in the right corner. I spotted my open journal beneath one of the windows. Recognition settled into my chest. I let those two airbags fill, slow drip the exhale. I looked over my left shoulder and caught my reflection in a full-length mirror. I slowly approached the woman I was met with. I touched the long hair falling over my right temple, and so did she. I smoothed out the front of my silk skirt, attempting a smile before turning away, but instead caught my face in question.

The room was growing in lucidity like the widening of an aperture. The walls pulsed with memories, memories I could sometimes place but not touch, as if they existed inside me, but beyond me, simultaneously. I knew I had been here many times, the evidence surrounding me, but something in this room had shifted. It felt more occupied, yet I was the only one here. It felt more spacious, yet its walls stood perpendicular to the original foundation, unmoved.

I then saw what I could not see before. At one end of the room, a cradle rocked gently; at the other end, a single bed sat dressed in white linens, empty, yet occupied by a hovering, transparent shadow. The frame stood still in time, leaving the clandestine impression that these were altars to gather around, miraged silhouettes haunting their negative space.

I heard a creak and then a cry. The wind had picked up outside and was coming in through the open window, rocking the cradle harder, faster. I approached the cradle as if I were a klutz on a tightrope. I knew what I was going to find, but I didn’t want to know.

I was met with two dark spheres, a newborn’s eyes, pouring nothing but light into mine.

They were my eyes.

It was then that I realized.

I had entered the room where beauty and horror share a view.

Elisa // di vita

In part two of Beauty and Horror, I’ll dive into my working theory that’s taking shape the longer I investigate this room. Trust me, it’s not as boring as it sounds.

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Now, I can’t come to you without an ounce of humility and pretend that I, myself, lay out the terrain. Who do you take me for? I don’t work the soil, I don’t build roads, cities, or runways. I don’t plant forests, plough fields, or map out trails. However, I am the engineer of my mind and the patterns it perceives along the path. I hold the level and choose whether my awareness tilts towards the past, the future, or stays right here. I plant my axis and decide if my energy and trajectory tend towards the inverted or the rising.

Uncoincidentally, I’m walking the path at this very moment. I’m trudging along this dirt road that I call home here in the prairies, towards where my hamlet meets the grid. Actually, I suppose I’m strolling along it now. I’ve thrown off those heavy boots, I’ve gotten rid of the excess layers winter requires of me. This feels nice! New! My feet feel like they’re catching some air. I feel the sun on my face as it kicks through the clouds, I listen to the birds’ war cries, and I watch a tractor roll by. What bliss! What hour! The gift of presence! I’m steeped in the now, and the now, and still, the—shit!! I stepped into a pothole! Again. That pothole. The one that could count as a swimming pool, the one I know is there, the one that has likely always been there. I stepped right into it, almost, willingly, it seems.

Now I’m knee deep in it. Am I sinking? Is there quicksand in this thing? I gulp down my fear as I begin to recognize the trajectory of my thoughts. My inner narrator loses its zealous speed, the one that quotes saccharine self-help books to keep chugging me along: “You can do anything you put your mind to!” “Nothing good comes easily!” “Your peace is your purpose!” (Save for the last line, upon reflection, these may instead be the words of my sixth-grade teacher). Source analysis denied! No time! I’m busy in this pothole. I’m beginning to think I should stay in this pothole, for whatever reason… But, man, this surely doesn’t feel peaceful. It’s cold and grimy. And that narrator of mine seems to be glitching. It can’t land on a single page and read me even a full paragraph. It’s telling me that if I stay here, if I don’t move, despite how uncomfortable this pothole feels, the situation will get… better? Did I hear that correctly? Inner dialogue, come in. You there? If you can spare but a moment, I would like to inform you that you are airing quite an incohesive and contradictory narrative right now. Oh. You say logic doesn’t apply here… because this pothole is familiar and safe enough for me to bypass the toll of reason without a fee (hah! I will get you in taxes, it laughs), and I can enter straight into the cozy jacket of comfort? Okay, okay. Reasonable enough.

The world around me begins to move so quickly, I can’t keep up. Okay, I’m not actually moving anywhere outside this pothole. Still, holy moly, there’s just too much going on up here (points to noggin), and out there (panoramically spans the horizon), I can’t move. Five tractors have driven by since I got stuck! Prairies at high speed! I look up to the sky, exasperated, as if I’m seeking some higher power to intervene and lift me out of this hole I got myself into. With what I see as divine synchronicity, the clouds begin to part, and the sun tumbles into my eyes. Now I hear a different inner voice, a softer, less vexing one. It whispers, “You know where this leads to. Move along.” I contemplate the enigmatic breath of wisdom I just inhaled. Interesting. Tempting. But less convincing than my dominant narrator’s argument. Instead, I decide to turn this pothole into a saltwater hot tub, and I renovate its exterior with a sign that says ‘self-care.’ Fitting. I lie back in the water and realize that if I float here, then I can’t sink. I open up my arms, salt water up to my ears, and I wait to be struck by lightning. Yes, you heard me correctly. I’m a tree in water, I’m a magnetic force, I’m an energetic landing pad for that one-in-a-million bolt to strike right here, right now. Launch me to epiphany! Make me unrecognizable! Let me write the best line to cure all of human suffering! I trust you, universe. I’ll be right here, waiting for you.

So some time has passed since that pothole incident, but I will fill you in on its closing chapter. The salt water evaporated. And a mud bath was cool for a while, but then it began to cake on my skin and crack. I began to smell and attract swarms of flies, and the pothole really stopped feeling like self-care and started feeling more like self-pity and a one-way ticket to Loserville, with the assurance of mass regret on my deathbed, so I stood up and walked straight to the shower. And it was that easy to escape it! I just kept in motion, the dynamic being I am. Afterwards, I just avoided the pothole. Then I concluded this: I will never fall into that pothole again. Never! Again! That pothole is dead to me. What did you ask? Will I fill it in and fix the road? No. Remember, I told you. I don’t build roads, or cities, or runways.

Anyway. I’m back on the path. Never left the path. I’m much further down the path now, and I’m feeling quite hopeful about the path. My creativity feels like it’s at an all-time high. I had a lot of time to think and dream in that pothole, but not enough time to express or turn it into anything meaningful. So I have a surplus of thoughts and ideas right now. I’ll eventually get to writing them down, and I’m sure I’ll remember every word. But for now, I’m strolling, enjoying the sunshine. As my feet crunch along the gravel, I spot a dead bird splayed out on the ground, its left wing crushed. Oh! This feels like a bad omen… poor birdie. Why must you be so delicate and ephemeral! I love birds; they are one of my spirit guides in this desolate material world. Last time I saw a bird with a crushed left wing, Trump won the 2024 election. Last time I saw a bird with a crushed left wing, I couldn’t write for weeks. As I stare at the dreary bird, I witness a raindrop hit its right wing like a bullet. This is not good news, nor is it fake. However, I’m inclined to believe that it is fake. It must be fake! Because where is this rain coming from? It’s like it just fell out of the sky! My phone told me there was no chance of rain today. So I pull the lying device out of my pocket to confirm this shift in atmosphere, and to my surprise, the forecast does not predict rainfall. And yet, another drop falls, and another. So I run away from the bird as I scream, “You did this!!!”

I don’t dare look back. I don’t dare dwell. But as I run further down the path, I run straight into a thunderstorm. It hits like a wall. Torrential downpour, wind whipping my hair and my thoughts into a fury, my feet sinking into the mud. The rain turns to sleet, and visibility is near zero. Zilch. I’m drenched, I’m shivering, I don’t know my next move—a subconscious equation equaling critical self-analysis of all my past failures, risk-averse qualities, missed opportunities, and limited abilities. My vision tunnels, and the world around me dulls to a single sustained note, with promise of a symphony once I’ve weeded through these thoughts and streamlined my entire consciousness. I begin to question the piece I’ve been writing for days now. Does its essential thesis hinge on vaporous claims? Am I willing to draw a line in the sand with my opinions? One that will surely piss off those who have never even set foot on a beach? Maybe if I rewrite the opening paragraph for the third time, I will find the right hook. Is it even worth completing? Is it that important? Do I really have anything that important to say? The only way I will know is if I write the perfect opening sentence, if I chase the precise words that describe exactly how I’m feeling, and drive my spear right through their chest! Captured! Adrenalin ripping through rhythm while they’re still beating, dripping imagery, bleeding syntax that slices open, then graciously arrives with stitches at the end of the piece. I reach up and up, just a bit further! I swing for perfection. I edit harder. I don’t see that the bar inches away, further and further, with every effort.

I have to get off the path. The self-doubt barges in too fast; I have to get off! The rain still pelts my icy skin as I veer to my right and run straight into the canola field along the grid road. I feel hidden now. I don’t look back to see the damage I’m creating, the harvest I’m impeding. I continue running. The further away I am from the path, the safer I am. I begin to discreetly, almost unconsciously, repeat these words in my mind as an inverted, and ironic, mantra: they steer me towards anxiety rather than safety. And so I run faster in an attempt to outrun every doubt that hunts me in the night. I run until I can’t. I stop to catch my breath and slowly spin around to study my surroundings. All I can see is an open field. How far did I run? How far do I have to go? I’m beginning to feel lost in this attempted escape, and as I try to suck in some air, I feel a trickle of fear run down my spine. I wave my arms as if I’m signaling for help. “Hel…”, my voice trails off. I realize I must keep moving.

Like moon to ocean, I’m pulled to my right again, and I eventually stagger out of the field into a patch of trees lining a muddy yard. As my feet touch the grass, it’s as if I collide with these words: While it may feel safer to my nervous system not to put my voice on the line, to my soul, it feels more dangerous than ever. They’re narrated by the soft voice I had heard earlier. I’m perplexed by the subtle paradox they produce: while the words carry more weight, as they sink in, I feel lighter. And not lighter like floating in that pothole’s saltwater. They induce a shard of clarity that cuts through avoidance, doubt, and fear, and instead demand responsibility, discipline, and faith. And I see how that shard must have room to breathe—held too tightly, it will injure, too loosely, and it will slip right through my fingers. I hold it in my left palm and carefully place my right over top.

Hands still together, as if in prayer, I begin walking into what I realize is a backyard. My backyard. I entered it in such a state of agitation that I didn’t even recognize my own house. I slowly walk to the front of the house, back to the dirt road. The storm seems to have cleared up, and I smile as I still see that pothole. Maybe one day the RM will fix it, although inevitably, another will form. Hands still together, I walk once again to the end of my hamlet and back. I see the wild flowers beginning to bloom along the edge of the road. I watch the electric canola sway in the breeze. I hear my neighbour’s kids playing on their trampoline, their laughter singing with the birds. I walk up the stairs of my front porch and sit on the swing that faces north. I open my palms and let the last of the day’s sunlight seal that glimmer of clarity.

Yours facetiously, yet wholeheartedly,

Elisa // di vita
x

Wildlife, Wild Death

Around us, the farmers are readying for harvest, the fruits of their labour nearly ripened after a season that barely promised enough rain for growth to begin. Their work rests on the whims of nature; there really is so little their hands can control.

It's the middle of August when the storm hits our hamlet. Think tornado, in reverse. A microburst traveling at 150 km/h swept through at 8:22 pm on a Wednesday, a wind so strong, you pray for the eye of the storm. Trees whipped against our house in every direction, ripped by their limbs and tossed around like popcorn in the machine. Once the microburst had passed, a silent lightning storm filled the sky as the closing act, a flashing round of applause. 

The morning after the storm, I walked downstairs to the kitchen, glanced out the bay window into our backyard, and saw that our favourite tree, the elm that framed the gazebo, was now halved.

And there was so much more.
So much destruction.
The intermission of life. 

The day of the storm, a black kitten pranced in the ditch in the white noon haze.
The day before the storm, three moose were grazing near the barley fields to my left.
The day after the storm, the bald eagle took flight, framing my right window.
Two days after the storm, I saw an owl for the first time in my life, blazing white against the darkness.

I've seen a hawk nearly every day for the past month on the dirt road home.

I've seen barn kittens and golden retrievers and a Virginia tiger moth for the first time. I've seen tiny toads hopping in the grass and the salamander you brought up to my studio to show me, telling me how they're endangered and that they're your favourite. 

And there was so much more.
So much life around me.
The intermission of death.

It's early July, and the grackles are hatching, attempting to take flight. 

I walk under the elm tree in my front yard as I hear leaves rustling above me, the sound creeping closer. I hop out of the way, and a baby grackle hits the cement sidewalk. This isn't the first grackle I watched fall out of a tree, as they tested their wings for the first time. I go inside and come back out with some water—the bird has taken its final breath without ever flying. This is the second grackle that died in that exact spot.

Location often decides our fate.
The intermission of our perceived control.


It's the middle of August, and I step inside the barn while a mama goat is in the middle of giving birth. She's supposed to have twins. A large fluid-filled sac hangs out from behind her. Her first kid is lying beside her. There are around ten of us watching, and I begin to think we should leave, let mama give birth in peace.
Two days ago, I learned that the second baby goat was stillborn.

How often are we straddling worlds—life and death, life and death?
There is no intermission.


Four days ago, driving down the dirt road, I saw two horses—one black, one white. They nuzzled each other at opposite ends—nose to tail, nose to tail—mirroring the curve of one another's bodies. 



It's harvest time, and so many of the crops are damaged.

33

I’m left with the thought that maybe nothing will change, and everything will.
Like the trees preparing to shed their decorations, while still reaching out in every direction. Change will arrive, but it is a pattern, a prediction, a part of the season.
Am I too bound to a pattern, a prediction, par for the course?

I lock eyes with the moon.
I make my wish either way, my fiery desires like ribbons of steam wisping upwards from their vessel. In the distance, the moon is nearly full in its blush, weaving its light through the leaves that still are. I plead my case, the heat of my words rising. I paint the path forward. I step into its promise. The moon catches my future, and brighter it shines, if only to my eyes. It shows me what has to die.

Maybe a birthday is as much about celebrating a death as it is about celebrating a life.

There's off-tune singing and a vanilla cake decorated with sliced strawberry petals and dots of blueberry for the flower's center, and three candles on each side of the cake.
33.

Thirty-three years of being lost and found, shedding leaves that maybe should have stayed until the mid-October moon. I'm in between that space now, the curtains of summer to be drawn, wondering if I have a say in the seasons at all? Do I let go too soon? Or do I sense the shift of my path on the slip of my tongue, the liquid of my thoughts overflowing before my senses can catch them? 
I'm reminded; it's heat that rises. 

Maybe there is no use in questioning the past, but maybe there is. Maybe I can learn my pattern, my prediction, my season. I close my eyes. I calm my mind. I simply wish to be as the moon is.

Weaving its light through the leaves that still are. 

God wants us to play pretend

It's 4 pm on a Wednesday, a day when the sun slipped from the high sky, riding down a steep slide towards the horizon. So, I make a decaf coffee. I watch the heavy cream swirl into the black liquid. I go for a ride and run my dirt road errands—the post office, the veggie stand, the farm store, as I call it. 
It feels like 11 am again. I play pretend. 

It's 10 am on a hot end of July morning. I'm playing with my son outside. The grass is brittle, scratching my hands and knees. I crawl the perimeter of the acre yard, seeing the world from all fours. I say hi to the ants and the paper-thin moth. I muster up my greatest roar. It sends my son into a giggle fit, as he bounces on my back. Typically, I'm a horse, but today as I round the bend, 
I decide I'm a lion. I play pretend.

It's 3:28 pm on a Monday. I'm behind. I'm tired. I have a list piling up in my mind, my attention pulled to every angle, every degree. 
Am I in need of a full-circle moment or a 180-degree turn? 
I'm uninspired. I don't know what to say. The words won't come.
So, I open others up. I enter their worlds. I play pretend.

I am Mary Oliver, walking upstream as a child, while her parents are walking downstream. If this was lost, let us all be lost always. 
I am Erin Rose Belair, her questions of blue and time and self floating along the white waves at sea. I wonder if others have it and slip easily into joy like they might a nightgown. I wonder how cold it is there in the mornings. I wonder, if I could, if I would go back in time. 
I'm Walt Whitman on the black back cover. Do I contradict myself? Very well then...I contradict myself; I am large...I contain multitudes.

As we're pretending, sometimes we find our truest reflections.

Thank you for reading the second segment of Magic in the Mundane. This one turned out *beyond*—beyond what I had going at first, and I’m so glad I gave it the time to steep and develop. The story wasn’t complete a month ago; I hadn’t yet experienced all that I needed to. I hope the wait was worth it for you, too. We’re essentially brainwashed to push out content on the clock and call it creative freedom. It’s being caught on the hamster wheel, artist addition. And I refuse to partake. Trust me, this segment would’ve sucked a month ago.

Elisa Maria // di vita

*Mary Oliver, Upstream, “Upstream”, page 5.

* Erin Rose Belair, The Blue Years, “Something So Clear”, page 72.

*Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, the quote on the back on the book.

I titled it Let’s Ride. A spiritual “self-help-y” poetry book that was riddled with psychological self-analysis, the unravelling of childhood wounds, philosophical questioning, and the raw processing of the emotional chokehold of depression that brought me to a halting low at the age of 24. I had experienced death up close and personal for the first time—two suicides and a murder, all within less than a year.

The poems began to spill out of me a year earlier at the age of 23, nearly a decade ago, before I even knew how these words would transform into the concept of an entire book.

But an entire book it was.

365 pages. 200+ poems. 8 chapters. 4 years of writing.

God knows how many hours I put into this book.

The concept of Let’s Ride seemed to download itself into my consciousness one afternoon as I journaled on my bedroom floor.

It came to me in 8 chapters, or waves, as I called them, which shaped its concept—a wading ride into the waters of the subconscious materials of our bodies, eventually to be pulled into the undertow of the unconscious (our shadow), to die to your old self (ego, conditioning, “not-self”) and be rebirthed anew (“true self”), to rise again to the surface of your waters (back to the subconscious state), and find stable footing on the shoreline once again (downloaded into our consciousness). Think “hero’s journey-esque”, although I surprisingly hadn’t heard of it at the time.

Every inch of this book had a cryptic message I had encoded, down to the page numbers of many poems. A breadcrumb trail maybe only I would ever pick up on, a maze only I could work through, but I didn’t care. This was my mind in full expression. I love puzzles to unravel. I love concept albums that tell a woven story. I had only ever dreamed of creating something like that myself, and here I was, living my dream.

I even travelled to Bali to finish writing it—a true Eat, Pray, Love moment—only to burn the entire book to the ground in the next year. Never let it see the light of day. Never release it. And slowly, let my love and attachment to it die in my heart—a tedious composting of ideas, creativity, theories. Returning to the soils of my buried dreams.

I didn’t write for years afterward.

I couldn’t. All I knew was my book. And I clung to it like a first love—if I set it free, will it come back to me?

I attempted to revive Let’s Ride in 2021/2022, but I was still out of my writing practice, and I was stuck on how to shift it to become true to who I was in that moment. And something was still “off” in the tone of the book: the tone of my perception.

If you can’t tell, tons of artist faux pas characterized this period in my life, some of which I am still working through, while others are landmarks in my rearview mirror:

The starving artist archetype. 
The “this is the ultimate and only work of my life” (false) belief, painting creativity as a scarce and finite resource. 
The perfectionist who over-edits and can’t let go of her work. 
The fear of how big the process felt. 
The setting the bar too high. 
The fear of being seen.

I see it all now. I love her, regardless.

You’re probably wondering the obvious:

Why did you burn the book?

And my answer was, and still is, an answer that most people didn’t (and don’t) understand:

Because it wasn’t true.

Some poems were indeed true experiences, true emotions, and a true telling of that time in my life.

But a thread was woven through the book. A thread that was supposed to guide the reader back home, in a deeper relation with who they are beyond their “ego”, in connection to God. And this thread reeked of the preach.

As well as the self-appointed, “ego-less”, yet pedestalized guru energy that plagues our spiritual zeitgeist.

Where healing has become posed, pretty, and packaged, the enigmatic path back to our “true selves” has been compressed, steamed, and replicated into straight lines. Our sorrows hijacked because happiness is just…better. Lighter. Higher vibes. The rainbow of our emotional experiences painted over sad beige, so that everything calms us. Grieving is sped up and shallow. Analyzed and diagnosed, suffocated by the single square foot apartment we house our hearts in, despite all the space found in the gaps of our connection with each other.

Escapism was posed as peaceful detachment.  
Avoidance was mistaken for reserving energy.
Any real meaning in my message was a mirage.
A shitty cut key presented as the master one.

I was preaching from what I thought was the top of my mountain without realizing I had barely begun my climb.

And it’s fine to create from your current vantage point. What else are you left with?

But how hard do we attempt to circumvent our current vantage point for the higher one? How deeply is the authority archetype entrenched in our psyches, so that when we use our voice, we echo the black-and-white rhetoric of all-knowing, too?

We’re so afraid of the in-between, of the not knowing.

Grief and sorrow can feel like falling through a crack. You hear the footsteps of the world tracking along above, yet you’re stuck somewhere below, often wondering what day it is. Then there comes a time when that space begins to give, the crack widens ever so slightly, and the sun feels right on your skin again. Every inch upwards feels like a mile. And then you’re there. Here. Not stuck somewhere else. You’re sitting at your table in the morning, staring at the sun, drinking coffee, planning out your day, perhaps even a little excited for the hours ahead.

And this is the point in the ride where it all comes down to posture.

How do you hold yourself when you’re facing the light? Do you remember the dark? Do you remember how it made everything disappear, how it engulfed you, making you disappear too?

Do you judge it? Criticize it? Avoid it? Do you recognize the face of another that is caught in the darkness? Mostly, we pretend we don’t. And what is there to do? Give them the map back to your home, without seeing how their path forks at a different point in time? Say, “You’re welcome”, and then be on your way. (Sometimes words are so empty. They only carry weight when they come from a heavy heart.) Or do you offer out your hand, stand there with them for a while, underneath it all, in the cracks of life, and listen so you can understand their story?

I wrote with my hands in my pockets.

My book was a righteous ride back to the light, an escape from darkness with a map back home with warnings and markings on how to avoid it—the illusion of having so much control lets us put one foot in front of the other.

I’m trying to say this:

I was not guiding anyone in good faith.

And now, I’m saying this:

I still feel called, in some shape or form, to guide.

And perhaps only the broadest strokes can be universal guidance back home.

And perhaps, I am still in search of said strokes (blame my Sagittarius North Node).

But I’ve learned this:

Self-expression through art isn’t meant to fix.

It’s meant to be.

To be inspiring.

To be a mirror.

To be beautiful.

So, without further ado, I give you 4 beautiful poems from Let’s Ride.

These were written from the heart.

They deserve to exist out there.

And they will always ring true, marking a few pages in my life.

OBLIVION (2016)

“What if there was none of this?”

No trees or bees
or roads or stores,
no air or matter
or space or atoms,
no Earth, no Saturn… 

I began 
stumbling upon these thoughts 
around the age of ten,
as they were driving my mind 
into the realms 
of oblivion.
And I was quickly becoming terrified 
of where these thoughts were coming from
and where they were taking me…

What would happen
if heaven 
wouldn’t take me?

I look above
and I can barely see,
the fear of  
there being nothing
being sent down to me.

This is when
I began to pretend…

I feared nothing.

CLOUD NINE (2019)

Swinging 
on the ropes 
of my mind.
	
Swinging
Swinging
Swinging
	
Until I land on
cloud nine.

“It’s so peaceful here”,
I think.
	
“I’ve never seen anything
more beautiful”, 
you say.
	
I want to stay here for a while,
float here after swimming
all those miles,
looking back
on the wild ride
that brought me here.
	
You brought me here.
	
“Can we stay here?”, 
I ask.
	
You stare at me	
with a hopeless look
in your eyes,
and I sigh… 
Reminded how
the rope you climbed
is the same one 
that hung you out 
to die…
	
Swinging 
on the ropes 
of your mind.

HIGH BEAMS (2016)

Wherever there is darkness, there is also light.

I see it in the stars that interrupt the black sky
as I wander these streets at night
while the rest of the world is asleep.

I see it in how the sun greets the moon each morning
as it rests on the horizon
and wakes the world from its rest, to arise for another day.

I see it in myself.
I see it in my passion that warms my apathy
and in my faith that is nestled in my anger.

And I see it in the hope that illuminates these dark roads ahead.

But we have travelled these paths
time and time before,
marked by the scars of our swerves,
as our foresight collided head-on with our regret.

So I cannot help but ask… 
How come we do not see that we bleed,
until our blood is actually shed?

JULY 5, 2017 (HERE & NOW) (2017)

I dreamt of you last night,
and I woke up remembering all of the details.
	
It was a good dream.
You were alive.
And we were all smiling, instead of crying.
And I woke up remembering your smile and your laugh,
rather than you dying.

I woke up remembering the dock 
leading to the full moon,
which seemed to beckon you.
And I remember the cold water
and you jumping in fully clothed,
without being bothered.
I’m not sure why you did,
but I didn’t question it.
The dream escaped me after that bit.
	
But I woke up smiling.	
	
It was the first time the memory of you	
didn’t haunt my mind 
but rather settled it.
	
And I could read it as a sign,
I could try to connect my soul 
to the preternatural world again and
I could try to find answers in the unknown.
But I’m practicing the act 
of staying grounded.
I’m trying not to lose my balance.
And the weight of the unknown,
the weight of the universe often causes me 
to sink below the horizon,
which leads to disassociation,
which leads to an escape, rather than facing it.
	
What a clouded reality…
I’m trying to live with the lights on.
I want the sun to tell this story.

So, this is how it goes.
	
I had a dream last night.
And in it, you were smiling, 
I was smiling.
We were all smiling.
I woke up smiling 
and for whatever it’s worth,
I hope you felt that one last smile
before choosing to leave this earth.

Either way,
this is how I’m choosing 
to remember you. 

Thank you for reading xx

Elisa Maria // di vita

. . .

The doors are opening…

Step inside.

Do you hear that nearly silent, staccato truth ticking, that submerged secret desire keeping the beat of your thoughts, your dreams, your time? Do you feel the metronome of the mundane moment to moment speeding up without fully experiencing that brilliant crescendo in your senses and serenity, in your purpose and passion, in your attention and revelation?

Do you hear it? Because in my mind, it’s becoming louder than ever.

And not blaring your favourite tune in noise-cancelling headphones, loud…but more like a static white noise layering with a looped track of the sound of a siren getting closer and closer, slowly driving you mad, kind of loud.

I can sense the pocketed points in the timeline that ask me to reach inside, that hold a buried catalytic energy, ready to launch myself into new circumstances at any moment—and yet I tiptoe over them as if they are malevolent landmines ready to blow up my life.

And that would cause some destruction…some discomfort.

Here’s the thing: we’ve been wired to reach for the high, naturally.

Regulation,
Freedom,
Peace...

Enlightenment.

But here’s what’s happening instead: we’re swapping cheap dopamine hits for those highs that take grit and discipline to reach. We’ve created a mirage in our minds of someone else’s mountain to climb and have it mistaken as our own. So, no wonder the journey upwards keeps us continually wanting more, as the ideal image of our lives wisps through our fingertips and disappears with every reach.

This is your call to root downwards, first.

Maybe that landmine is exactly where you need to step. Maybe it’s a masked act of benevolence.

Go ahead. Blow up your life. Then take a look at all of the pieces. Collect them all. Even the smallest shards—the feelings of loneliness enmeshed with your desire for solitude, your first sip of coffee in the morning as you brush off your broken and minimal sleep because, motherhood—step inside them. Each simple moment is a doorway to the delicate dance between the beauty and pain of our lives.

Then, look deeper and pay attention…

Welcome to Magic in the Mundane.

A space I am cultivating not only here, online, but also in my day-to-day awareness. A space that’s not only about slowing my step, dropping into the here and now, and taking psychic or physical notes, but one that desires to penetrate beyond the spiritual zeitgeist that separates beauty from horror, light from dark, good from bad. A space that doesn’t pin the stickiness of our humanity—the pain, the fear, the anxiety—as the scapegoat for this destination, dressed up however you like, called happiness, peace, enlightenment. A space for expression, art, and beauty that doesn’t mistake splashing in puddles (content) as swimming in the deep sea (curation).

Mostly, I am cultivating this space because I, too, am learning.

I’m learning to sit with the lightness of beauty in my right hand and the horrors of the world in my left, to extend both hands out equally as the offering of my awareness, of my life, without letting the weightlessness of the right raise to pedestalizing states I worship and wire within and escape to, and without allowing the weight of the latter to cause me to drop the ball on my dreams, my duties, or my desires.

And I’m here to share the beautiful mess of every step forward I take.

When I’m unbalanced, raging, over-stimulated as a mother without the village, lost, uninspired, fearful, cringey, unpolished, and filled with rough draft material only…

And when I’m aligned, centered, inspired, filled with life and beauty and passion, and all the right words.

It’s going to be scattered throughout this segment in the form of stream-of-consciousness flows, poetry (my own or another’s), images, music, insights, reflections, revelations, and one-off lines I find witty enough to document.

Journal entry, meet blog, meet magazine, meet voice memo, meet newsletter.

Hell. I feel like this space will become the pages where I unravel my rough thoughts that eventually turn into pieces/personal essays, and eventually turn into a book. ;)

So, welcome to Magic in the Mundane. Thank you for being here. I wish you to find a glimpse of yourself within these digital pages as you scroll, slowly, with attention, and an open heart.

MARY OLIVER

FLARE

"This is the dark bread of the poem.
This is the dark and nourishing bread of the poem."

Mary Oliver is the Queen of finding magic in the mundane.

So yeah, I had to record a reading of one of my favourite poems of hers (it’s the poem that inspired a stylized segment of my piece Carousels) and include it in the opening of MITM.

Mary knows how to move slowly.
Mary knows how to pay attention to the grasshopper, as the door to God.
Mary knows how to move you out of the poem, of the self, and into oneness with it all.

And she does so not by avoiding the darkness, but by moving you through it.

She’s alchemized her pain, but admits that the “stumps of sorrow” will always be present. She’s not trying to cure her past; she’s trying to coalesce her life and her presence with the natural world.

Here are some of my favourite lines from Flare, which Mary has broken up into twelve parts, in case you don’t wish to listen to the seven-minute reading of the poem.

. . .

4.

Nothing is so delicate or so finely hinged as the wings
of the green moth
against the lantern
against its heat
against the beak of the crow
in the early morning.

Yet the moth has trim, and feistiness, and not a drop
of self-pity.

Not in this world.

. . .

8.

The poem is not the world.
It isn’t even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.

It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.

. . .

10.

Therefore, tell me:
what will engage you?
What will open the dark fields of your mind,
like a lover
at first touching?

. . .

12.

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Live with the beetle, and the wind.

This is the dark bread of the poem.
This is the dark and nourishing bread of the poem.

“Flare” by Mary Oliver, from The Leaf and the Cloud (Da Capo Press, 2000).

A FLARE IN THE NIGHT SKY

// when brilliance strikes through the fog—a journal-like flow.

“Would one tell them so soon the whole truth, that one must be ready at all hours, and always, that the ideas in their shimmering forms, in spite of all our conscious discipline, will come when they will, and on the swift upheaval of their wings—disorderly; reckless; as unmanageable, sometimes, as passion?” (Of Power and Time, “Upstream”, Mary Oliver).

. . .

I think someone stole my brain after I gave birth. I often refer to my current state of functioning as having one brain cell, maybe sometimes two. My awareness is constantly bouncing around as often as my toddler is bouncing around the house. This is the mother’s instinct; nothing is flawed here. But I do find myself yearning for my maiden days when I could follow a thought for hours, days, sometimes weeks, really get underneath it and create something beautiful from the underworld of consciousness that builds and rises to a bird’s eye view of our human conditioning.

God.

Even typing that makes me nostalgic for those times.

But reality is staring me in the face. Those times are gone (and in another breath, thank god for that.)

I can’t navigate a new city with an old map. I must create anew. Everyday. Because each day presents a new need begging for connection and surrendering. That’s the thing about motherhood—there’s a lot less flow, and a lot more juggling, pivoting, and prioritizing.

And a lot less memory. I used to be able to write entire poems in my head and juggle their lines around for hours before writing them down.

But then again, when I really get into writing a piece, like I did with Motherhood, or I'll Meet You There, I can recite it line for line.

So, is it actually a memory issue?

Or is it focus, dedication, obsession?

And what pulls me out of this state?

Self-doubt. Comparison. Fear.

—

I’ve lit a candle (and burned my finger—what a beautiful metaphor for the consuming passion of writing…but it actually just happened).

I’ve set the intention, the ceremony of this simple moment, that could be that catalytic landmine I spoke of earlier.

Join me if you wish.

I am on my path. And you are on yours.
They may converge. But they do not compete.
Speak
those burning thoughts and secrets, and desires.
Let's not let time tax our dreams any longer.
Let's not let the saccharine screeching of our culture dilute our depths.
Show up to the table as you are.
Those who are meant to be will take their seat.

It’s time for me to stop worrying about running out of time, which ironically makes time seem to slip by.

And it’s time for me to become utterly obsessed, delusional, and passionate about all that I am here to create.

That was a pretty magical moment.

Glad I caught it in letters.

Thank you for reading the first-ever segment of Magic in the Mundane. I will be releasing a new segment every month-ish. Stay tuned.

Elisa // di vita

xx

I’m officially published in print! What!

The Sovereign III, an anthology series which includes my 2144-word chapter, is now available for purchase! Check out my last piece, “I’ll Meet You There,” to get a sneak peek of it.

Available for purchase on Amazon.

Thank you for you support x