Lube up and surrender

What's your strategy for getting through these times?

Quick announcement: I’m touring in Eastern Canada in April!!!

Hit up the show page to check out locations. If you know people in these cities, please share this with them. I fill venues because people like you spread the word. I so appreciate your hype!

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Anyone else feelin’ raw dogged by the Fire Horse?

Strapped to a gallop while trying to steady your arrow? Aiming for…what exactly? Your wildest dreams? Justice and accountability? Turning up the volume on joy and creativity to out-sound rage-bait spectacle? Planting and tending new stories of community care and resilience, casting potent spells so they take root in the soil beneath fire and brimstone?

The inner and outer worlds of those around me are in motion. The texture of that motion is so varied. Like, now is not the time to assume I understand what reality is like for someone from the first two sips of a conversation.

All the witches were saying, “Once we’re through this snake shedding business, into the year of the Fire Horse, things are going to speed up. strap in.”

Inner, outer, global, local, work, family…all of it seems to be ramping up. This from a friend recently…

I promise I don’t mean it in a rapey way, which sadly needs to be explicitly stated, thanks to all those shocking but not surprising you-know-whos-and-whats.

But I feel like my practice right now is about how to meet intensity with an accepting and open heart. I don’t mean acceptance as complacency, but as the doorway to right action.

This season for me has been the culmination of all the threads of my life, hitting peak intensity at once. Work. Mothering. Marriage. House holding. Community Care. Relational deepening. Creative edge. Excavating, touching on and reckoning with some core wounding and healing threads that weave through all of it. OY.

I’m attempting to be very discerning about what I say yes to (I have a weeeee bit of a tendency to fire hose my face). I’m not succeeding at this.

When I’m in something, I want to be in it fully. Full heart, full presence, co-create with reality. It’s much harder to steady ones full engagement when reality is a shit show. When every news cycle takes you out at the ovaries, and everyone you care about is wrestling with very big shit.

Add to that an inconvenient literal shit show. Our septic backed up, displaced our tenants, and now I have TWO open insurance claims and renovations underway. The other is from a garage fire last year, which we thankfully caught before it spread to the house. We lost most of everything inside.

I love a good metaphor. Is Fire and feces the theme I wanted for 2026? Big fat nope. But I’ve got these mantras on repeat: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it” and “lube up and surrender”.

Both of which, for me, are about not resisting reality as it is.

I don’t mean surrender as a form of collapse or like allowing horrors and BS. I mean, what’s most helpful in navigating what seems to be an increasingly intense time, in every area of my life and how those areas intersect with the wider ecologies of things, is to first accept them as reality.

Some parts of reality as it is feel like blessings and miracles. Opening in gratitude, resting in and leveraging these dimensions of reality can be personally and collectively resourcing.

Some parts of reality as it is I feel I have agency over. I can apply my will and energy and influence these aspects of reality in generative ways that seem to have a positive impact.

Some parts of reality as it is feel disorienting, enraging, terrifying, overwhelming and trigger a sense of urgency in my nervous system. For these parts in particular, I’m practicing slowing down instead of speeding up.

I’m doing my best to ask myself what I need to be able to meet what’s called for wholeheartedly and with presence with all these aspects of how I experience and engage reality.

To “Lube Up”. How do I resource myself, relax, open, stay awake to what’s happening and not just what I wish was happening? Find pleasure, creative aliveness and joyful expression while working with what’s here?

To “Surrender”. To fully be with what is, as an interior centring location. From that place of surrendered acceptance, I don’t deny or resist reality, which can feel counterintuitive. Especially at a time when collective active resistance and healthy fight are being called for.

Which is where “if you can’t get out of it, get into it” feels enlivening. Like, what’s happening that’s underway at the micro and macro levels, and what does it mean to get into it? What attention, action, energy and pace are needed?

There are certainly things I know are “mine to do” that feel hard or scary, and I’d rather retreat to the forest with a bag of weed and a pint of raspberries, but instead I’m leaning in with all my heart.

Some things catch my attention that shout, “Look at me! Handle me!” and I have to bring vigilance to saying not my pig, not my farm, which is SO HARD when there’s so much harm (and I love pigs and farms). But not flexing this discernment leads to dilution—or disoriented collapse.

On the work and art front, there have been several seeds that have all taken root at the same time. It’s beautiful, fun, aligned and correct. And it’s been a lot.

This past week, I launched a new creative membership called the Backstage Pass. If you missed it, or missed the moment to get in there, reply to this email or send a note to support@cheladavison.com and we’ll send you the details. It’s going to be a slow burn, which is the pace I need with that offer right now, and I’m really excited about what’s been seeded with the people there. One of the members said that they’re there to learn how to both lead and be led, and those are the dimensions of the creative impulse I’m most interested in dancing with and that feel called for in this wider moment.

Tell me about you. You being fire-hosed by the fire horse? Life intense? How are you coping with the world stage? Got any practices, rituals, or mindsets you’re trying to steady yourself with?

Thanks for being here.

Love,

Chela