Acceptance Is a Practice Not an Arrival (On Sovereign Love by Dene Logan)
Reflections on sovereign love.
I spend the first weekend after winter break in glorious solitude. I go downtown on a Friday night, enjoy leisurely daytime workouts and start a puzzle that involves spreading pieces all over the kitchen table, making it impractical to use for any actual meals. I sleep diagonally on the bed, claim multiple pillows and take up the entire duvet. The apartment is quiet, but what could have felt like heavy silence feels light and spacious. I feel well and strong.
In the second week of the new year, I am feeling my commute, feeling less vibrant and more tired but I am trying to fuel myself as best as I can. I fulfill the commitments I’ve made during more rested times to myself and others. I go on an art date and spend a sunny Sunday morning sitting in the January sun with my friend J, drinking velvety smooth hot chocolate and chatting about the kind of old women we pray we become. We have spent the morning at an arts workshop doing different drawing and writing practices related to strengthening our noticing muscles and we both have noticed that we were younger than a portion of the class by decades. We wonder aloud about whether we too will be the kind of women who in our sixties, seventies, and eighties will spend a Sunday morning perusing bookstores and doing art with our friends. I try to imagine either of my grandmothers sketching or spending the morning at a touristy public market and somehow, I cannot place them here. I think about this, we talk about this and we dream and imagine what the possibilities of our life might be.
In the third week of the new year, inadequate rest, unexpected life events and too much pushing leaves me with sudden stress symptoms. I swell up and develop a bad flu overnight that keeps me home for much of the week. Each day feels like trudging through thick mud. My nose leaks, my chest is tight and congested, my body aches, my hands and feet are ice and my body rages with heat.
When the work week ends and the longed for weekend arrives, I become worse. I can’t fulfill my commitments to myself to show up for planned activities, I miss out time with my family. Though solitude while well can feel generative and wonderful, solitude when you are sick - particularly when you are sick often - feels heavy and hard. It is solitude that passes through the same canyons carved by the loneliness of pregnancy loss, chronic pain, years of working from home when my health changed. My flu activates these memories.
I want a big, interesting life, and my intention over the past few months has been to try and slowly and gently become stronger to support that life. It takes all of my reserves and practices to hold myself up now. I chant reminders to myself that I am strong, that I am practising hope, that I am capable, that I will not be defeated. I throw a jacket over my pyjamas and drag myself outside to buy soup from a nearby cafe, I turn on the television for noise. I read a rom-com, I listen to Qu’ran, I accept I need rest. I put down the “shoulds” and accept that pauses and missed classes will occur because my body’s response to intensity is to break, but they do not mean I abandon hopes, goals and new things. It just means I must keep my expectations low and be grateful for everything I can do rather than mourn what I cannot. I offer myself grace and I surrender and soften.
Surrender is the theme of my first read of 2025, a book called Sovereign Love by Dene Logan. Drawing on the work of Jung, the book steers away from communication tips or “traditional” relationship advice, but focuses on reclaiming what the author describes as healthy masculine and feminine energetics. These energetics are not meant to map onto gender, but rather the author argues, we each have masculine and feminine energies within us. Relationships of all kinds offer opportunities to learn more about ourselves, experience self growth, and practice being the most whole versions of ourselves. I’m in a coaching program with the author of the book right now, but before the coaching program started, I attended an introductory workshop about relationship energetics. Below are my notes from that workshop.
Relationship Energetics: Workshop Notes
We don’t need anyone on this planet to be anyone other than who they are for you/us to decide who we are going to be and for us to have peace in our skin.