ascending the down staircase

Shaylee Edwards
4 min readJan 9, 2022

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I guess I could start by saying I love you. I do. In my heart. It’s beautiful. It feels like a deep, radiating familiarity.

Original Photo, New Orleans 2021

The next thing I could tell you is you aren’t going where you think you’re going. Or rather where you want to go. Or rather-rather where you Think you want to go, God bless you.

This whole business of ascension is, imho, an ironic little trip back to here. Where you haven’t gone up, so much as down. To the ground. Where life is happening and has always been happening, but you come to be here without all the nonsense about it.

I want to tell you too that you’re gonna love it.

That the journey up can also be experienced here. Ground zero. Right now. You don’t have anywhere to go. Even as you’re going somewhere, even while you’re ascending, you don’t have to go anywhere. You and now can still be perfectly enjoyed.

It took me a long time to come to put enough of myself aside that I could be Here for it. Shaylee, god bless her too, really wanted to be special. She really wanted to get it right and be good. She really wanted to earn it. I love her dearly. With my heart now, as I do you.

If you can learn that one thing, to love yourself with your heart, you’ll skip a lot of nonsense. And if you can’t, then what you’re going through isn’t nonsense, it’s perfect. You can’t skip anything you can’t skip. I only tell you because I need to be honest with you. I need to tell you that there are trap doors and inside-out things because, well, there are. And loving yourself from your heart is one of them.

See how I call me out up there? /Shaylee/. As if I wasn’t her. I’m not. I, as I’ve seen myself to be, don’t exist at all except entirely as everything. When I say ‘I’ then, I mean more or less the witness riding around in the body/mind/soul of Shaylee. Shaylee’s separate because I really can’t control her. I can only love and enjoy her. When I do that, I don’t really need to control her. Rather, I don’t want to.

Trying to control yourself and the world are a huge waste of both yourself and the world. Except when they’re not. Like with the skipping, it’s not being wasted if it’s being wasted. If it could be other, it would be other. I have to tell you this though so you know that maybe, just maybe, there might be another way to do it.

It’s really tough to see some of these things at first because you really want to be you, you as you know you. Mostly, at least as far as my explorations have gone, because you’re not sure what you’d be otherwise and that’s enough to scare you right into a Tuesday in March of 2045.

Have you ever thought much about that? What you might be if you aren’t what you think you are? There’s a lot that comes with it. A lot to digest around suffering, yours and everyone's, and then what to do. If you aren’t what you think you are, and things aren’t what you think they are (and things are even further in truth from your idea of them than you are from you), then what the heck are you doing here and .. what should you be doing here?

I’d love to tell you. I’d love to answer that question once and for all because, well, whatta remarkably useful piece of info, right? But to tell you, I’d have to know. And I can’t.

Pro-tip #2. If you can, find peace in the discomfort of not being able to satisfy some of your most nagging and deepest questions. They’ll motor you along your adventure, but if you think you’ll be able to find any concrete answers to satisfy that incessant agitation, good luck. The only peace to be found is *in* the agitation, not its resolution. At the end of everything, as I’ve seen it, is just everything. A big ol’ circular reference. You can’t answer the big questions in the loop, you are the loop ❤

And from there, I don’t know what to tell you except to love yourself. Really. EVERYTHING you do, are, feel, think, have, don’t have, don’t do, etc etc. You have no idea how you should really be and the ideas that you do have squash the intelligence that you are. If you can come to love and appreciate (or at least not reject) your dirty spots, they’ll tidy themselves up. Nobody tells you that. But *you* don’t have to do anything. Things really do themselves.

It’s a very intelligent whatever-we’re-in and just like the human body and the earth heal themselves when we stop fudging them up, so too do your problems. Rather the problems you Think you have. There’s a lot there to unlearn because it’s the opposite of what you’ve built your life around. But don’t worry, it’s actually pretty natural once you get the knack of it.

To get the knack of it, just want to.

And/Or read my next installment. ❤

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Shaylee Edwards

Divine realizations translated to easy, practical mental habits so you can love yo'self and do your thang while you're here, baby.