Your Desire Is More Powerful Than Your Fear

Podcast Ep. 24

In 2021, I shaved my head months before answering the invitation to move to land that has been in my family for five generations. This photo was taken while standing on a well that was in the front yard of the family owned home in Dawn, Virginia — tucked in between the ancestral lands of the Mattaponi and Youghtanund.

Tune into this week’s podcast episode (on Spotify or Apple) where I reflect on last week’s newsletter and the current invitation inside my art practice to transform and trust my desire. If you know me, you know shaving my head is part of my spiritual practice. Inside the ceremony of the cut is a still space of vast surrender, obedience and faith. I am answering the invitation to change and listening for what comes next. On May 31st, I shaved my head again and have been tuning in ever since.

The invitation that’s been coming up is: “It is safe enough to trust your creative practice to take care of you”. For so long I refused to believe that, then I couldn’t believe it even when I tried, but now I know this truth to be as real as the spine supporting my body while I type this at the altar of my keyboard.

It is safe enough to trust your creative practice to take care of you.

You’ve done the work, you’ve cultivated the practices that keep you centered, you’ve learned enough to have a valuable point of view and you’ve cultivated relationships that make accountability and collaboration possible. The invitation for us to root inside this soil of safety is something I talk about in the latest podcast episode. I talk about how this felt sense of safety is partly about creative confidence and financial stability but perhaps more about the security that emerges from a practice of radical self-love¹ and the pleasure of self-actualization. 

In this season I am being invited to return to and prioritize my art practice and the infinite lessons inside as the well watering my entire creative ecosystem. I remember if I’m not engaging my “Element X” — research, poetry, making — the whole ecosystem suffers. The writing, the podcast, the teaching and my capacity to show up in creative community all suffer if I’m operating outside of a pleasure practice and being distrustful of my desire to carve out a path I can’t see but can feel.

Last week I asked, “What if your desire became more powerful than your fear?”. This week I rephrase the question, “What if we remembered our desire is more powerful than our fear?”. What we create from that powerful, embodied sense of knowing is the life-affirming well deep enough for us all to drink from.

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Sonya Renee Taylor on Instagram: ”[edit: I had to delete and re-upload this because it posted as a Reel and got cut off! Woo Mercury Retrograde!] Hey all! I realized that when I posted my recent audiogram for this video, the actual video didn’t get posted here. Thanks for the folks who asked about it! Captions are available on my YouTube (also linked in my Stories). Shout-out to @jmaseiii for this conversation! 💡If you want to ensure priority access to my “What’s Up, Y’all?” content, I always post videos to Patreon at least 24 hours before they’re available anywhere else! Become a patron and support my work at Patreon.com/SonyaReneeTaylor starting at just $1 a month✨ [video description: Inspired by Black trans revolutionary thinker, poet, and activist J. Mase, Sonya talks about reparations and how Black folks need to be able to grow their radical imaginations for what is possible in their lifetimes.]”

August 28, 2023

1. Sonya Renee Taylor offers us frameworks for radical self-love through her book The Body Is Not An Apology to her Patreon community