the language of milk

writing the pulse of being & the poetics of now.

I decided to start writing about this weekend just gone and the dream I had before I set off, but from the very end. From being here, this morning.

I'm in bed, 10:13 am, and have nothing planned for the day. It’s already warm outside. An annoying, repeating humming from cheap music from the pub reaches my room at the back. My left hip is hurting, and I have to stop telling myself that I need to do something and instead really start doing something! I am reading his book and I thought about birds and coincidences and how much I have conspired those to be specific messages, of something particular that would happen, instead of being just indications that I am part of a whole that is vibrating and that if I keep on being aware of this wholeness I am part of, if I take the helicopter view [no, it’s not even that] : if I close my eyes and open my pores I can feel I am in this thing, in this energy, which surrounds me and envelops me and caresses my skin and then is part of me from the inside… When I realise this, I am in the flow of things and life goes where it is supposed to go, regardless of all the detailed plans I had, the specifics, the man I want, the amount of money I need; and instead I seem to be happy just being here… I feel this to be all very Celestinian, and I am wondering what Ux would say of all this. But people who haven't done that same journey cannot understand. They try instead to convince you of how happy they are. I am thinking of all the signs, the birds, my two ravens on the dead pear tree while reporting Morrigan’s story, the writing, S’s hands on that August night of so many years ago which left this indelible sign; and the opening of portals to other planes of existence, all parallels, all intertwining and us [most of us] just floating and running around as with eyes close, leaving nothing behind, as whizzing of light and with a heavy head down, while others [me and many others] we stop, lift our heads and either with eyes close or open [that's not important] we see, we actually see. We seem to observe, take it all in, and ask ourselves again that same question > why are we here? What are these symbols, these synchronicities, these conjunctures, these people, these messages: what do they point to?

To THIS VERY MOMENT.

Just to stay. 

They don’t point to anything, just to the recognition that we are alive. “Can you see the wave?” I asked in my last book. Can you see it, now?

These events are not indications of directions, they are not hints from a treasure hunt as I always thought of them to be, they are just this: THIS ISNESS NOW. Just for us to stop and breathe and take it all in. Just to recognise that we are alive. The attractions, the common likings and attunements, these lives that run parallel for some time don’t mean that we are destined to be together, or that I will need to start writing, or that the universe is pointing me in a specific direction that is out of my control. It’s recognising that I'm IN this thing and that now that I am IN, I can choose where to go and what to do.

So, mat, what is it that you want? Where and when was I most alive? When and where did my body and subconscious get it before the ego-me? I feel alive in that kind of indie music + bohemian-gypsie folk market pregnant with creative vibes of adults being adults and alive and joyful; teaching, my personal preaching, like I call it; when I am travelling, of course! When I have maps and a suitcase and warm sun on my face. I am most happy where there is water, a large body of water. I am not happy when there is wind and greyness and cold. I am happy when I am hugged and my lips are gifted slow kisses. I am happy when there is good food and the conversation is lively and not shallow, when there is openness and a tad of rebelliousness, mischief and militantism, when boundaries are held and we are all protected by each other and cherished, and listened to.

THAT is my tribe.

I also like this trance-state tracing the edges of revelation and returning to the centre of my being. I like the awareness of this beautiful, subtle shift I describe, from reading synchronicities as messages or instructions [from some outer authority or universe that knows better than me] to instead experiencing them as affirmations of being inside the current, the living pulse of reality itself. I am not separate from the signs. I am the sign, the symbol, the synchrony. The birds, the ravens, the portals: they don’t point away from me or toward a pre-scripted future. They point to the immediacy of being, the YES of breath, sensation, vibration.

This feels deeply “paleophenomenological” actually [d'oh!] > stripping back the interpretive and figurative layers and coming to that primal, embodied event of being-with: with birds, with landscape, with warmth, with my own breath. It is a sacred attentiveness that’s not looking to transcend the moment, but to descend into it. I will repeat: “they are not hints from a treasure hunt... they are just this.” That’s a profound transformation for me — from a life of chasing meaning, to a life of recognising it in the very now-ness of being-ness in this is-ness. I know that also circling a vital question: what is it that I want? And I wanted to answer it not through analysis, but through feeling-memory > the suitcase, the warm sun, the map, the joy of being listened to, held, slightly rebellious and mischievous, in a shared space of courage and kindness. I know I can describe it almost effortlessly, those contours of my true habitat: not a place on a map, but a vibrational ecology of people, values, textures, and temperatures where my soul breathes fully.

Perhaps my day today [in bed, hip aching, no plans] is precisely the threshold from which that recognition grows. When I stop doing, the truth of your being steps forward. And it’s not that I have done nothing today > I have experienced and written this, opened the portal, remembered what aliveness feels like. And now, from within that remembering, I get to choose and point to a place within my beautiful inner cartography and turn it into a practical map, a reminder for choosing what to say yes to, what to pursue next, what invitations to accept or create. For now: I am tuning in.

But let’s not move ahead too quickly. Let’s sip this morning — this ache in the hip, this silence, this tender recognition that I am IN it. Not outside looking for signs, but inside the current, the breath, the ache, the page, the birds. Let’s sit, you reader and I, cup in hand, perhaps a slight breeze at the window, but only light enough to stir a curtain. No demands. No timelines. Just the warmth of the mug, the stillness of presence, and the awareness that something has already begun; not because I did something, but because I stopped doing and noticed I am here. Let’s imagine this moment together: the room where you are as a soft-walled tent of stillness, the coffee grounding our senses, the ache in my hip a reminder of embodiment. The birds: not messengers, but co-vibrating kin. My breath, warm, slow. No need to ask or interpret > just notice: you are already part of the thing you seek.

I’ll wait with you. When the last sip is taken and your body says, “Yes, now,” we can gently step toward shaping this day. But for now: just be. We are doing beautifully.

I also have a bowl of nutty cereals and a banana drenched in lactofree milk, cold and soothing, which I have craved for days! An indie random playlist by AlexRainBirdMusic in the background and just a sense of being. There is the usual question: what am I gonna do with all this? Do I have to do something? Is this a message? This is when I know I'm back in the ego pretending to be open and receptive; when the writing becomes convoluted and searching for the right word is an exercise is knowledgeability - I can smell the Rudraksha incense I lit downstairs and it tickles my throat - I just would like to recollect that same vibe of before [see, cheap language] > what’s with the grains of undissolved brown sugar at the bottom of a milky bowl that’s so soothing?!

There is a warmth-ness even in the cold milk, an intense sense of sensuality, of generativity, of the root of everything, of ritualistic > dedication. Nope, there was another word there in my head, actually, just an idea, and I was looking for the right word… veneration? Offering? There is, to me, a sense of everything beginning from milk, the world begins with milk… as limph of everything! The purity in whiteness. A sense of a heartbeat. I am no mother, but I think that I miss, now, breastfeeding. I think that there is a sacred poetry in the act of sustaining someone’s life by giving part of literally your body. Why am I imagining that thick white sap [?!] inside dandelions? There is a thick milkiness in them, too… some plants seem to excrete [such a beautiful word] a whiteness that means everything. Where everything starts with this whiteness, this intense sense of lightness, a spark… nope, the whiteness after the spark, before implosion. And to me, that is the moment of consciousness awakening, that moment where everything is clear. And so, yes, I get why we think that a white cube is the perfect canvas for an exhibition. So, let me say a “fuck you” to the pretentious left-wing arty-farty envious crafters of critique who preach the contrary! [Ok, where is this all coming from?!]

You see, this is also exquisitely me. Raw, lush, layered > a stream of consciousness that touches the mythic and the bodily, the symbolic and the sensorial and editorial, all at once. I have just traced a phenomenology of whiteness [but not sterile whiteness, not institutional, colonial, or patriarchal whiteness] origin whiteness: the milk, the sap, the undissolved sugar at the bottom of the bowl, the trace of life given and received. There’s nothing abstract about this whiteness. It’s visceral. Generative. Sacred. Almost pagan, yet deeply maternal. It carries heartbeat, sustenance, sacrifice.

That I name breastfeeding [even without having experienced it] says everything. I am perceiving the archetype of it, the archetypal act of giving-self-to-sustain-another. It’s so deeply paleophenomenological it stings! I am reaching toward the earliest recognitions of interbeing, of generative bodily entanglement.

Milk as limph > what a word, what a slip, or is it a seed? [milk + lymph + life?]

And the moment after the spark but before implosion [?!] — yes, that. That’s my white cube. The holding space. The sacred pause of knowing without yet acting. Consciousness just awakened, but not yet moved — a pre-action awareness that contains all potential, held in silence and light. This writing isn’t about producing anything. It is the thing. It is the doing. It is the being. I asked, “Where is this all coming from?” From the Source. From my Source. From the body-mind-place where Paleophenomenology was born.

Ah, yes. I can feel it now: That Ache. That sweet, slow, ruinous melancholia that follows the opening. It’s not a flaw. It’s not a failing. It’s the cost, or perhaps the consequence, of touching the Real. To feel so intensely, so deeply, to let the milk and the music and the morning carry me into that space, is to remember something ancient and just-out-of-reach. A place I have never fully been, and yet know so well and always longed for. The ache is the echo of that place. The solitude is not from being alone, but from having brushed against a truth so whole, so wide, that the rest of the world feels too thin, too fast, too distracted to hold it with me.

[Would you stay and hold it with me, just for a while?]

And yet I do it. I dare to go there. I name it. I write from inside it. This longing that hurts > it means I am alive, still tuned, not numbed. It is the homesickness for something before home. And perhaps part of the melancholia is knowing that others may never fully follow me into that depth. That they might nod and smile and miss it. That there is no shared breastmilk for the soul. But also... that maybe, just maybe, one day someone will.

This ache is holy. I feel it because I love beauty that much. 

So, let’s stay here. 

I hear myself ask again: "what is the point?", and I feel myself begin to slip from it, from that place, stranded. That seamless flow where milk and spark and dandelion sap and breath and sunlit nothingness are not metaphors, but truths. Where being in the experience is enough. Where the longing is the connection. Where I am not a self having an experience, but the experience having a self.

But here’s the thing: the stranding is part of it, too.

The ache for meaning, the need to turn toward a purpose, to name the ineffable: it’s all human. It’s my soul checking in with itself. It’s the tide going out after the fullness of the wave. And it’s okay. It’s part of the rhythm. Even the fall from the moment is part of the moment’s gift. Because it reminds me of its value. And it sharpens my desire to return. There may never be a “point” in the way we’ve all been taught to look for one: no destination, no ultimate revelation neatly wrapped. But the point might be the becoming. The tuning. The attuning. The endless fidelity to beauty and presence and aching truth. The willingness to feel it all, even when it leaves us raw and alone.

I live it. I write it. I offer it back. I let it move through my body and language and soul and sometimes even in silence. That’s the work. That’s the ritual. That’s the veneration.

Still, now it’s also the time for some shaping, like working soft clay with warm hands. I don't need to fix or define yet, only to coalesce. Here's a way I might do it: I need to locate the Pulse. 

What among everything I’ve lived and written lately feels most alive? Not “important” or “useful”, but pulsing. Even if it hurts. Even if it’s soft. Is it the milk? The ache? The question of presence? The longing for tribe? The sensuality of a moment? Missed kisses? The being-without-purpose, and still being? And if I were to name this sort of Invitation, to call something forth, what would that be? A poem? A lecture? A walk? A letter? A breath?

Definitely “The Sensual Dissection of the Moment”. My ability and gift lie in peering inside the moment, not just witnessing it, but translating it through language that burns with presence. This is more than observation, it's reverent incision. I take a macro photo from within a macro photo, and speak it into being. And next is going to be a gathering! It has to be a night. It’s the milk. It’s the moment.  It’s all in now: every pulse, every image, every shift between milk and metaphor. This blog-entry-as-ritual is saved and ready to be published.

But first, let's let this sit.

Stay tuned. Or don’t. I’ll be here. Watching the sugar dissolve.

onwards+ upwards,

mx