I woke up to the song ‘Moon Over Montana’ by Jimmy Wakely. The Man sent it to me. He’s meeting me in Montana soon. I’m counting down the days until I get to wrap myself in his arms. Today is the last day I’ll have to myself before everyone else arrives on the land for our Summer Vision Quest.

I’m enjoying the time to myself, but I’m ready to get back to some form of work. Give me a task, please. When I’m not working, I’m scrolling Instagram too much. Working actually helps me be in my conscious self. I’m built to work.

Country music baby

The Man and I love country music. And not just new pop country (I did show him the song 'Cowgirls'), but that old-school desert romance country. The kind with a steel guitar and vocals recorded on wax cylinders.

Country music is all from the heart. I mean, where can you get a song anymore that’s crying about Oh, the wedding I’m at isn’t mine, and I’ll never get married. We’ll meet again by the roses in the valley of the moon. Mona Lisa, you have my heart. It’s the kind of music that sings in the simplicity of loving. That takes the hurt with the magic that only the heart has. I think we’ve forgotten how to really love and be loved in this country. Maybe it’s an issue everywhere, you tell me.

Longing is manifestation magic

The country singers knew something we’ve forgotten. That the longing of the heart is the magnetic core needed to make anything really good happen. Longing for love is one of the greatest (and sometimes hardest) things we can do, but it’s that longing that brings it in. Hey, I’m over here, come find me.

My own heart’s been longing for love for so long, I could write my own crying country songs about it. The steel guitar wails for a reason. The Man is everything I want, and I go to sleep and wake up longing for him. I know he’s not perfect (although he has yet to show me he isn’t) and that we’ll fight at some point. But that doesn’t mean my heart was wrong or silly. The heart is meant to magnetize, to open. To carry the immense void of possibility and potential that pure love is.

I wonder how everyone else’s longing feels. Can you hold the sensation? It can be agonizing, yes. It’s also where all the magic is. You think we would have any part of the world without longing? I find that people can no longer hold the longing (I couldn’t either until I did my healing work, but it was one of the first things that came back online, and strongly, in my journey).

Longing shouldn’t make you weak either. I used to be unable to hold it. It would debilitate me. I would cry. I was filled with more grief than joy. Grief from my family, my dad, my past loves, from boys in middle school, high school, college, and the working world…the list goes on of the reasons the heart is so filled with grief on this land. And when you are, the purity of longing, the kind that draws in pure love, can’t get through. This is why grief recovery is so important. Grief is the trauma of the heart.

For a long time it was, well, I long, but I’ll never get it. Rather than holding the longing as the desire of the heart, knowing that in the longing, in being in it, you will get what's on the other side, we can push the heart down and away. Stop doing that, we’ll never get it anyway, so stop wanting it. We tell the heart to shut up. We try to turn off its innate function. How stupid you are. We try to say, well, I can’t seem to get what I want, so let me try this polycule with a married man, or even better, tantra!

Longing is manifestation magic. You really believe the person who longs for love never gets it? No! They do, dammit! Don’t be such a piss head. We wouldn’t have all this damn good vintage country without it! And, we wouldn’t know the long history of unconditional love, without it.

One of the greatest things we could do, as a culture, is to find that pure, soft, longing love again that I haven’t heard written about in any modern song. If you know of a good and recent love song, send it my way. We have to call love back in fiercely and unapologetically. Healing a nation to create a culture that loves again.

If you want to listen to the vintage country inspiring me, follow along here on Spotify.

The soul will never be ready to be taken out back and be shot

I said this on a phone call with my sister yesterday. She’s been having a hard time making a major decision in life. She loops and loops. Her ego fights, like mine does. This phrase, the soul will never be ready to be taken out back and be shot, was about not choosing something that you already felt disdain, disgust, pressure, or discomfort from.

If you don’t want to do it, you’re not gonna be able to force yourself through it. The noise of indecision, ego, and identity can make us do things we actually don’t want to do. We have a deep inner knowing that if something feels like it’s killing your spirit, it’s not your path.

Let me repeat that again. If a decision feels like soul-death, it’s not the right one. No amount of logic, ambition, or identity attachment can make it right. Joy, vitality, and aliveness are the compass.

That’s all for today.

I’ll walk for miles searching for you,
Val