Becoming Supernatural
Dear reader,
We have a beautiful and powerful full moon upon us these next two days, and I hope it provides illumination and clarity for us all. I’m sharing a few new insights and thoughts on energy and creativity and resistance and becoming supernatural.
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Next time I’ll have a new chapter for you from Library Confidential and a few more updates. Thanks for being here.
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I read a lot of different newsletters related to writing, coaching, and creativity, and one that I always enjoy is Steven Pressfields’ Writing Wednesdays.
If you’re not familiar with Pressfield, he wrote - among many things - the War of Art, which is a classic in the canon of creativity and writing advice. Pressfield often talks about the concept of Resistance, and the many forms it takes.
As I look back on my life, I realize that one form of Resistance to my writing was choosing a “writing-adjacent” career - as a librarian. I could do everything with books. Be around them all day. Connect them to people. Read them, love them, advocate for them, collect them, stack them up. But secretly - I wanted to write them.
Another form of Resistance for me more recently was putting a lot of effort into my teaching and workshops.
The thing is, I love working with people directly, but I didn’t like other stuff, like the challenge of maintaining a website, and paying for technology to support all the marketing stuff. When family and personal needs popped up, I had boxed myself into a corner and didn’t have the scheduling flexibility I needed.
So, I gave up the teaching and the fancy website for now and I’ve consolidated everything down to this Substack.
Simple! No stress! I agonized for months over the decision, and I really didn’t need to.
But it’s Ok. The positive result of letting go of certain things is that it created more space for my work. Plus, a bunch of good things showed up almost immediately.
Inquiries about consulting and book proposals, possible ghostwriting and editing gigs, and even Tarot card readings. More opportunities to connect with people on a similar energetic wavelength. More creative collaborations are popping up. It’s definitely confirmation that I did the right thing. I don’t have to say yes to everything. But I don’t have to say no to everything, either. I’ve got some space.
Library Confidential is coming along, and my fiction project (The Vine) finally has some meat on its bones. The family history project (The Many Adventures of Little Giacomo) keeps expanding in magical ways. Even the screenplay ideas are blooming again. Woo!
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Finding more time also involves making sure that I create an energetic space around me.
Sometimes, my desk is too distracting. Family, pets, all the things. Plus, sitting at it for a while makes my shoulders ache and my knees hurt.
So lately I’ve taken myself to a comfy seat on the back patio with my laptop.
In the morning, after lunches are packed and the dog is walked and carpool is done and laundry is started and the dishwasher unloaded - I go work outside in the Phoenix heat.
It’s shaded, at least. It’s not like I’m digging ditches.
I sweat and I type. I have a little fan that blows on me. I listen to birds and the sounds of the city waking up. I drink my coffee and sometimes eat breakfast out there.
Doing this every day for an hour or two until I can’t stand the heat has helped me make progress. It’s helping me push past the doubts and resistance.
I just saw something this morning about the concept of “aggressive patience”. That you show up and do the work every day, consistently, even though you know it’s going to take time. That eventually, by being aggressively patient and just focusing on the work that needs to be done - you arrive at the place you imagined.
It’s amazing what shows up when you make space for it.
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Anyways, back to Steven Pressfield.
He wrote in this week's newsletter that Resistance is often inversely related to the goodness of the work you’re doing.
In other words - the more resistance you have to it means you’re on to something big and important and maybe even life-changing.
This makes me feel better somehow. If you’ve been avoiding your creative work, maybe it makes you feel better too.
Because if he’s right (ha-ha) then we are working on some really amazing stuff.
Aggressive patience. Just do the work. Walk the path.
Anything is possible if you believe it is possible. But you have to show up, even if it’s on the back patio in the middle of a Phoenix summer.
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I’ve believed in magical things and wild possibilities since I was a small child, and I’ve been, I guess, mildly psychic my whole life. I write a bit about it in my first book, Adventures of a Metalhead Librarian.
In so many ways, and for so many years I’ve had informative dreams, I’ve received signs and symbols and had wild circumstances and coincidences that fall my way. I feel like I attract this stuff, these situations.
Beginner’s luck. Good guesses. Deja-vu and familiar circumstances. Thinking about people and having them show up somehow. All of it happens to me all the time, like an everyday thing. It’s way beyond coincidence.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a better relationship with my intuition. I’ve learned to trust the hits of information that seem to arrive out of nowhere. I can read people, I can read the energy around them, their physiology and the words they use when speaking.
Trusting these insights and abilities came in enormously helpful as a librarian, and it’s been a huge part of my writing experience, too.
I’ve been into this stuff for years, but a book I’ve been reading has been really firing up my brain.
Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe DiSpenza. It’s a beautiful book that explains so much.
Like, I knew all this stuff from having read about it in different ways from different authors over the years, but I like the way he connects everything. The Quantum Field. The Field of Infinite Possibilities. The Generous Present Moment.
Everything is energy. Our bodies emit our vibe, our voices speak specific energy, the words we use have energy, our thoughts are powerful. We are antennae - transmitters and receivers. I actually write about this in my second book, The Magic Key, as it relates to memoir.
And we can tune in to the Quantum Field through effort, and practice, and belief.
One thing is for sure, after reading this book, I want to start meditating. For reals. Not just daydreaming, lucid dreaming, or my nightly astral travels. Something a little more intentional.
Once you understand that your brain waves can be trained into energy states that support physiological healing, and that by training your emotions to reach forward into the Field of Infinite Possibilities instead of backwards into known habits, traumas, assumptions - you begin to fully harness the power of your mind. You begin to create your future.
It’s what I would call a master concept. While reading this book, my librarian brain made all kinds of connections.
It connects to the work by David R. Hawkins in Power vs. Force. It connects Edgar Cayce, and Dr. Wayne Dyer and Masaru Emoto and Delores Cannon, Krishnamurti, The Silva Mind Control Method, Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Positive Thinking, Think and Grow Rich, The Secret, The Celestine Prophecy, Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, and so many books, writers and thinkers in that energy/metaphysical arena.
Being a librarian was always my excuse for being professionally curious about such things. I had so many amazing conversations with patrons over the years simply because I knew what they were looking for when it came to those topics and could direct them to other connected resources.
I’d have just seen something on an obscure topic or conspiracy theory in an alternative source that I’d never read before, and then a person would show up within a day or two asking about that very same topic. It was uncanny how prepared I was at times to manifest an answer to a question that wasn’t even fully formed or asked yet.
If something catches my attention - I pay attention. I did it as a librarian, and I think that’s what I do as a writer, too. A lot of times, my natural curiosity turns into a woo-woo experience. Sometimes big, sometimes small. At this point in my life - I just roll with it. It follows me everywhere.
You can’t force it. You can only stay in an open, receptive and flexible state and when that magic shows up, when you get a sign, it’s really cool.
It’s like, yeah. I’m good here. I caught that. Thank you.
Things always arrive right on time. When you start understanding the Quantum Field, you begin to relax and trust the process of becoming…supernatural.
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About six months ago as I was researching family history for another project I’m working on (The Many Adventures of Little Giacomo) I wrote down a name on a notecard.
I didn’t have any specific information about the name other than the fact that he had been the mayor of the commune in which my grandparents were born in Sicily.
The last name caught my attention because it was in my family tree from a marriage of a great-great Aunt in the 1880’s, but this man had served as Mayor in the 1970’s. I didn’t know if there was a connection, and the note got filed away.
And by ‘filed away” I mean that I am drowning in notecards and I don’t know how to organize them, or even why I use them, but I have stacks of them. I have a fetish for buying 4 x 6 note cards and I have ruled, blank and graph style for all of my note-jotting whims. I shuffle through them every so often to see if an idea might jump out at me.
(Now that I think about it, it’s like my own personal Tarot deck. Hmm…interesting.)
Anyways, two weeks ago I was going through my pile of notecards and this particular card with this man’s name fell out onto the rug, so I put it on top of the pile of notecards on my desk. It stayed there for a few days in a place where I could see it.
Then, almost like magic, a few days later, I got an email from Sicily. I’ve been researching family stuff for close to 15 years and have never gotten an email from a long-lost relative.
My third cousin (or is it a second cousin once removed? I don’t know) found me on a genealogy website. Her great-grandmother Adelaide and my grandmother Concetta were sisters. I have a dozen letters in my archives from Adelaide to Concetta, all in Italian/Sicilian, all mostly unreadable to me except for the most basics of the language.
I’m photographing them for my cousin because her grandmother, my grandmother’s niece, is still alive at the age of 86 and is thrilled to read her mothers letters. The cousin is translating them for me.
And the man who’s name I wrote down on the notecard? The former mayor? Out of the blue she mentioned the name to me and I was like - wait a minute! My notecard!
So I asked, was he a politician, or the mayor of town? Indeed he was. He’s her great-uncle, my grandmother’s nephew, my mom’s first cousin, which I believe would make him a first cousin-once removed to me. She sent me a picture of him.
This is why I write things down by hand - questions, intentions, lists, ideas, random bits of whatever - it seems to give them an energetic weight. At the time, I wasn’t sure why I took the note. But now I understand. It was a placeholder, a portal, and when it fell out, it was time for that information to arrive.
Sometimes you shuffle those cards and the Universe conspires to give you clarity on a question that wasn’t even fully formed or asked yet.
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As I’ve studied energy over the years, I’ve imagined myself leveling up. I can look back at points in my life and understand where I was operating from a lower place of fear, or shame, guilt, pride. I understand what experiences I manifested, and I take responsibility for it all.
But now, I’m very mindful of the energy around me and how it affects me. I have better boundaries than when I was younger.
It seems to me these past few years that people in general are angrier and more divisive than ever. Leveling down. There is a lot of dark, low energy that seems to be touching everything and everyone. We’ve all been through a mass trauma event, and people have changed because of it. Fear is powerful.
But so is hope.
When you start to level up, you can see everyone’s triggers, their weaknesses, their biases, their heart blockages - because you’ve been busy letting go and healing your own issues. You become more immune to fear, better at dealing with stuff.
You’ve passed through those energetic states already, and the walls of resistance between the fields. You may be drawn to lower, darker energy because it’s an old familiar energy, a past pattern, but we all know that if you stay there long enough you’ll start to resonate at that level.
So you realize, or at least I have - you really can’t cater personally to anyone who is lower on the energy scale. You also can’t take anything personally. People are in pain and you can’t save them. Just move along. Lead by example. Hope for the best for others, and mind your own energy.
Because you’re looking for resonance and are being drawn to higher frequencies and lighter souls. If there is dissonance, it’s not going to work. You know it deep in your bones. Alignment creates ease, it opens doors, it allows magic to show up.
Staying flexible and in an open and loving state is the absolute key.
It requires effort and intention, both mentally and physically.
Our souls pass so quickly through these temporary bodies, these temporary circumstances. We can live in fear and worry. We can live in hope and possibilities. Our choice.
We aren’t here for long on this ancient earth, so what are we here to do? To learn? To create? Who are we here to help, to meet, to support? What positive impact can we make by taking good care of ourselves and honoring our creative purpose?
Whatever your answers are, whatever you are called to do - make the most of it. Keep leveling up. Find your way through the Resistance. Fight the fear. Clear the space for yourself and do the work.
So I’ll see you out in the Quantum Field, Ok? Or the Field of Infinite Possibility. Or is it the Field of Dreams?
Whatever. I’ll meet you out back on the patio.
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