The Mess Is The Medicine
an invitation to chaos from The trickster
Leanneisalive is a weekly reflection on claiming embodied liberation by unleashing your aliveness, escaping oppression, and leading others to libeation. Sometimes it’s a rallying cry, sometimes it’s a teach-in, sometimes life is life’ing and I don’t post that week. But I’m always glad you’re here. 👋🏾💗
There is no neat and tidy way out of oppression. Insisting that life must be neat and tidy is oppression.
A sprout’s first leaves burst out of the seed coat that sheltered it, destroying it’s womb-like home. A human baby bursts out of its host parent covered in blood and poop and mucus. Liberation must burst out of oppression, destroying oppression in the process. This violence causes all of us living inside systems of oppression to fear for our safety and wellbeing.
It’s ok to be scared of the violence of birth.
Birth is not neat or tidy or numb. It is blood and screaming and ripping apart. But notice that birth is happening. Do not miss this important, broader truth. Humanity is birthing a new paradigm; the paradigm of liberation.
We can see this newness as people fight tyranny with drag performances, humor, whimsy, and lwater guns turned on cops, and transmuting the lies into memes and songs and joy. People are not just protesting, they are seeing the ridiculousness of oppression and they are laughing at it.
This is new.
This is different than fighting oppression because we understand oppression’s cruelty. We are laughing at oppression because we understand oppression’s absurdity. This is a broader, and therefore more liberatory, perspective.
This is perspective of The Trickster.
In cultures across the world, The Trickster represents balance/ harmony achieved through the chaos of evolution. The trickster brings forward-movement, at any cost. Any humans who oppose life’s messy evolution will be reminded in hilarious and embarrassing ways to honor The Trickster and The Chaos as a sacred aspect of life.
Life must continually evolve to avoid stagnantion. Oppression is the stagnation colonized people are left with after we demonized chaos/trickster energy and tried to force life to stay “safe,” “sane,” “stable,” and “the same.”
It’s a mess.
Today we experience the brutal stagnation of the forced maintence of the status quo. We live in the outcome of the refusal to let life evolve.
Conflicts never resolve.
Mindsets never evolve.
Pain never ends.
Injustice never stops.
Life feels old and tired.
We need the medicine of messiness now. The medicine of chaos is change.
Your assignment, Brave Ones, is to pick a trickster energy and learn about it.
Personally, I connect with Legba, but you might have heard of Raven, Coyote, Anansi, or others. Find your people’s personification of trickster energy and talk to it. Say whatever is true; even if it’s “I feel silly talking to you, you’re not real” or “I’m scared of your chaos.” Trickster energy appreciates honesty.
Chaos can evolve our problems quicker when we’re honest.
Fight your way out of the colonized belief that humans are alone, superior, and all-knowing. We know very little about our universe. If we die knowing that we know very little, we will be the wisest of the humans.
This is your message that you have something to learn from trickster energy.
Don’t miss out…
All the smart folx are doing it…
Only the weak will be left behind…
