Tail swishing feral kitten trying not to bite myself...

There are watercolor clouds above the horizon, periwinkle blue and pink and lilac, and I watch crows land in the bushy, wide-girthed, earth mother tree that mushrooms out of the concrete, protecting our block.

My mao came today on a walk with us. I didn't know he was going to, and I guess A didn't either, but then walking to the gate he was all like "so, tell me about how you've been feeling," and I knew.

Processing deeply. Trying to sit with and bring kind patience to the parts in me that have felt so isolated and misrecognized, and respond like a feral animal to the proposal of collaboration. It's hard to feel this caged part of myself, because while the rest of me exalts at the idea of Altcorp and working with kittens, when it feels more real and immediate, as it does now, that feral part of me hisses and paradoxically wants to keep my distance.

It tells me that people have always hurt me and that it's no good to try to collaborate with them because they won't see me. That others are doing the work already and I'll be overlooked, drained, and unappreciated.

When it's up like this, I literally feel annoyed by the news that anyone is out there doing the work. Because it immediately ricochets back to "why am I not out there? why don't I get to?"

I have been trying to tell this wounded part that I hear what it's saying, and I know it's been trying to protect me. Sometimes it's hard, because I feel ashamed that part of me could feel like it, as if the Plan could be an isolated endeavor. But my mao tells me it's okay. That the path has been hard but that it'll get better, and I'm working through it. He says I know I am. I do know. These weeks have felt like an acceleration, a heightening of the inner work I've been doing for years, at once exciting and also super annoying.

It makes it almost easy to believe maos when they say that A's brother is coming in a month's time. Because that is what they've been saying (!).

Also, my mao affirms the Projector truths, says that we are meant to do glorious things, and that we don't need to make those things happen, they will come to us. He said that we are magnetic points for an interlocking system that is coming into being. For the "workers of the world" who will come to its call.

When he says things like this, hope rises in me and the hurting, grinding places come to a temporary halt, and I feel such a sense of ease. It's exhausting to fight with myself all the time, to resist these possibilities because of the resistance that's been planted in me, the capitalist and generator lies. The model minority striving that says - nothing is easy. Nothing comes that isn't hard-won. You have to take things into your own hands and beat the tremendous odds. Those things fall away for a moment, and there is a stillness of knowing another way.

Yet I am afraid that accepting this vision of ease & of calling kittens to us, would come out of egotism, which in turn comes out of the pain of not being seen. I.e. how do I know that when I feel the longing to lead that it's my path, vs. my wounded parts desperately trying to be worthy, and better-than? I am trying to be conscious of that pain of unworthiness in me, and work through it, and heal it.

This is my way of saying, Isabella, that I'm really excited about everything you wrote about in your last post. And also some of the things have been bringing up resistances and discomfort within me, and I'm trying to meet those things with love, and not shut them down. My mao says I should talk to you about it. But it does feel intense, because of that lingering inner judgment that I "shouldn't" feel these things. So this is my compromise - writing here, knowing you'll read it.

<3 Tessa

the view from our window when I started writing today...