Excavating The Porous Boundaries Between Art and Love. And How Aliveness is a Form of Resistance.

This week, I take a walk through Eagle Rock, California, and reflect on what’s been surfacing—grief, impermanence, desire, and the wild fucking ride of trying to stay present when everything’s changing.

I read a poem by the late queer poet and kindred Andrea Gibson, and share the ache of not just their loss, but the mourning of all the selves I’ve been… and the paradigms I’ve outgrown—romantic dynamics, old definitions of safety, professional identity, my life in LA. Maybe you relate?

At the core of this episode—maybe this whole podcast—is the idea that aliveness is resistance. Not spiritual bypassing. Not performance. Just the act of staying with the mess, the grief, the beauty, and the bullshit as it tries to open us.

I also start to unpack what love without possession might look like, and how I’ve shifted from trying to secure external scaffolding (a home base, marriage, etc) to cultivating internal rootedness.

Side note for anyone with abandonment trauma: I fully get that “uncontained love” can feel like chaos or reenactment and I’m not saying any one way is right or wrong. I don’t go deep into that here, but know I’m holding that complexity in the background and change my mind about shit on the daily.

I also scratch the surface on the topic of resentment, too— how it stifles love and creativity, but not what it might be trying to say underneath, which will be touched on more in a future episode. This one’s about opening, not closing.

I wrap up up with Mary Oliver, a few tears, and a reminder that pleasure and play are powerful. In a future episode, I’ll dive deeper into that and how play can be post-capitalist strategy, trauma alchemy—and basically ocean logic in action.

Thanks for being here. I appreciate you. Truly.

xSylvia

Referenced in this Episode:

• Andrea Gibson – “Slip Your Mind”

• Mary Oliver – “When Death Comes”

• “Man will choose the familiar hell over the unknown any day.”
  – Referenced quote (often attributed to Thomas Merton or Anaïs Nin, origin debated).

• “Coincidence is the universe’s way of remaining anonymous.”
  – Commonly attributed to Albert Einstein (mentioned near end of episode).

• Audre Lorde – Referenced re: The Erotic as Power and sensuality as resistance.

• Dr. Mindy Nettifee – Poet and thinker mentioned for insights on grief as transformation.

• The Nap Ministry / Tricia Hersey – Referenced for the idea of rest as resistance.

• FreePlay - Improvisation on Life and Art book mentioned by Stephen Nachmanovitch.