jasmine garland: slow

day six: rumbler strips

This morning, I started learning how to drive all over again, in a good old stick shift. The clutch accumulates and releases power, brake, clutch, brake. Being deeply present, having your mind trying to pay attention to five different things at once, ignoring your ringing phone and then feeling anxious that you’re not being available to your phone, and then wondering how weird it is that being fully in the moment, operating a vehicle, with no portals of access to yourself feels almost wrong in today’s world. I would always tell my girlfriends, “I want a man with whom I forget I have a phone on me.”

Every single day, as I go about the world, take trips, meet new people, try new things, exist as a human woman, I notice how micro-details of every experience that we have in this life are five times more difficult for women than they are for men. Every movement we make, every day, is layered with anxiety, hypervigilance, caution, being prepared to defend oneself against assault and the anticipation of danger to a degree that men never have to experience. It is normal for us to live in this way. It makes my blood boil when encounters with this truth remind me of certain weird boys I’ve come across in this life who are so buffoonesque in their ignorance of how much they don’t have to ‘carry’ at all times while simply existing. Being in the presence of such males turns my body all the way off and disgusts me deep down in my heart.

They don’t even realise how much less risky literally everything ever is for them. They are oblivious enough, living in their cozy, spacious bubbles of male privilege, that they approach us, handle us and demand unfair, skewed expectations from us as though we are but littler versions of themselves. Take, take, take. Offer nothing. They conveniently cherry pick opinions formed on the fictional premise that we live in the exact same world as them, when in fact, even the most mundane experience of going downstairs to buy bread in your own neighbourhood is not coloured with as many layers of physical and energetic vigilance for men as it is for a woman. When I am deepest in my luteal phase, I feel a rage towards such creatures that is ineffable. It’s very interesting how boys cosplaying as grown men remember ‘modernity’ only and only when it comes to what they can take from a woman’s wallet.

My instructor makes me practice starting and stopping the car, inch by inch, paying attention to several details all at once. Hypervigilance comes only too easily to me, from years of practice of simply existing in India in a woman’s body.

He explains to me how it is very easy to accelerate, but what is more important is to have your foot near the brake at all times, instead of hovering over the acceleration pedal. To be ready to stop, or pause, whenever necessary, is of far more significance. Accelerating and gaining speed takes but a feather-touch, he says. It is in the slowest state of the car, in the first gear, where you need to master control. “To be able to have control over the slow is what is most important to practice.”

I almost lose track of everything else he’s saying as the poetry of this fully lands in my body.

Inspite of all my years of making myself almost emblematic of slow living in my circles and communities, I still struggle the most with feeling powerful, centered and “in control” when I slow down.

The current Mercury retrograde is showing me that more than ever.

I have always scoffed at Mercury retrograde paranoia, btw. I still do. You’ll never find me whining online about the retrograde. But I have studied, and felt, and experienced, the cosmic churnings intimately and eerily more than enough times in this life to know that there is deep truth and wisdom in practicing gentle alignment with the astrological flavours of reality.

I still equate blazing, intense, insane, fast and furious “momentum” with my dreams and my projects, the getting up everyday and pushing yourself no matter what hustle bro stuff, with “Good.” I do enjoy it very much, until I reach day 18 or so of doing that, and spiral into intense depletion and fatigue, as I am right now. When the reality of being a woman, in a woman’s cyclical body, dawns upon me. The Great Mother humbles me. My body cannot help but wax and wane like the tides and the moon, and I will always be rerouted into Her rhythm and it’s wisdom. I can never override it. I know the price I will pay if I override it. My hormones speak to me clearer than ever now. Cyclical living, and acknowledging the unique feminine psycho-somatic and biological experience I inhabit, is not a whimsy option that I get to play with because I happen to self-employed and into this stuff. It is my body’s truth, and the older I grow, the higher the price I pay for ignoring Her.

I still feel like a failure four times a day during a lull, a plateau, when I don’t achieve multiple tasks a day back to back, or in situations where life lovingly forces me to slow everything down, and not start every new idea all at once.

I will honestly admit, I returned to driving classes because a part of me yearns to feel like I am in the driver’s seat and in control of at least a vehicle, if not anything else at all anymore. Lol.

I know that this particular luteal phase and the bleed that will follow is going to be the densest, mentally and energetically, that I’ve experienced in quite some time. I am in deep gratitude of the fact that all of my seeds sowed in feminine embodiment, feminine wisdom and feminine living — going against the grain of a world that asks you to live like a man and move like a man at every level and you’re a failure if you don’t — have borne fruit that I can feel, without having much to show for it. Cyclical living has blessed me with fertile, roaring, beautiful ovulations and deep, lush, regular bleeds, with none of the complications I used to have in my early twenties, the most burnt out part of my life.

I am gaining mastery of the slow, nowadays, more than ever.

I deleted all scrolling apps from my phone this morning. For the next few days.

I have a whole lot of deep cleaning to get to, before any of my work ideas can actually sprout, thrive and bloom.

I am living days that seem like I am doing nothing and going nowhere.

But deep within, like yin, so much is stirring. At the slowest.

This is my month to show myself, that I can gain mastery and ‘control’ even over the slowest part. I can still have moments where I feel pleasure, joy, delight, sexiness, beauty, excitement. It is the toughest thing in the world to do this in first gear, at the slowest, with the fear of the engine going off at all times. But it is juicy.

Love,

O.