HumiliaseaN

The thing I will miss most about Sean was his sense of doing the thing no matter how publically he humiliated himself. These acts of ritual had weight powered by Sean’s will and your collective belief.

When he died I came across a letter he wrote begging to be invited to a birthday party for his dearest friend Liana. The willingness to put his heart out there, to say he was sorry and to build the bridge to new understandings was pure magic. The well from which he loved his community and felt held there was how he was able to generate such offers. I remember him telling me his plan for asking Liana to marry him even though they weren’t dating. He had such soul and enthusiasm it was romantically charming, way better than John Hughes. Also no sense of timing despite his proclamation in the song Anni. There was just no way Liana was going to say yes to this impossible offer. He did it anyway and that’s magic.

I wasn’t just Seans assistant he was teaching me how to navigate the world with the confidence of a white man. An act of intergenerational repair. His mother Linda also prepped us for these rooms. Always adding grace and class to the situation. We spent hours in Vegas playing this game together and he would make me ask him for money like I was doing him a favor by just asking. Dorset might say that Sean was entitled to money unlike most people he knew. That’s the thing about class ain’t it. That entitlement. It works. Its this kind of charm that makes people obey, it’s learnable. So why was I getting these lessons, certainly not to continue the fucking hellhole we are living in. No it was to learn the glamour so that I can use it to seed ideas of goodness. Also what Sean was doing, he was using his positionality in order to elevate the conversations towards all these crazy things his beautiful artist community wanted from the world. He could enter groups and talk to anyone like their best friend and that refreshing truth telling gained him both trouble and triumph.

His public humiliations were legendary. From rocking a reverse Mohawk to whatever happened to his beard at ephemeralile that year. Poor Rachel finally getting to see Sean after repairing their love and he’s this Odysseus disaster. Also the kind of poetry for two artistic souls. She is divine feminine weaving the worlds.

Want to know a secret?

After my heart was shattered and during the process of it’s undoing I cut off all my hair. Dramatic fucking break up. I wanted to visually represent the way I felt cut to pieces by lies that were totally unnecessary.I also had just quit Electrum because it was a shit show of unethical behavior. And my boyfriend had been cheating on me for a while. And Sean was in rehab partly because of me. So I am aware that I will have to find a job from this state and cutting my hair was not going to help. That was my fear that I was so unworthy, life had just confirmed it, and have no hair. It being the symbol of my beauty and heritage. Also it was a ritual, that other gift I shared with Sean, it was me entering the monastery of my own growth. Of giving my life to something bigger than broken humans. Sean gets back from rehab having only heard his side of the story and the first question he asked was did you really cut off all your hair in the breakup? Fuck yeah. He laughs at me and made fun of me a lot and I cried. He hugged me and told me it didn’t look that bad and we spent another night dreaming about how we can make the world better so people can connect more. Later I meet Rachel for the first time and I found myself facing a living muse.

The magic I learned, the one Sean knew from his own public shaming, was on the other side of fear was love. All these crazy acts of love made Sean invincible in a way that has had Icarus like endings, however it doesn’t have to be like this. It was never a solo journey. All these acts of love created this community where we will always retell Sean stories. I prepose you do what his inner circle is doing, continuing to live Sean stories through brave acts of love. To become the poet heart within that Sean saw when he gave you presence.

What Sean was teaching us in all these acts of public shaming, in all of his moments of mea culpa was how sacred humility is to the soul’s redemption. He modeled it over and over again. The reason he could feel all of you so deeply is that he had clarified his soul and recognized its imperfections. We worked on this together a lot. We had the bond that I insisted on where I would forgive him anything. And he I, we tested it a lot. He hit me across the face with a whip it canister and I thought he dislocated my jaw. He asked can you forgive that? And turns out I did offering my other cheek. The sense of ritual not lost. He never hit me again or before, but I had radically and totally consented to being limitless with him. Each time I did I was closer to tapping into this sense that love is more important than most things including pain and humiliation. In all the acts that I forgave I loved him more.

I’m a strange creature who puts myself through many endurance tests so I’m not recommending this is how anyone lives. That is the mystic path, lots of trials to clarify the soul. Lots of reasoned consent and training on my end with a ton of safety net. What all of us can do is love bravely. Love with reckless abandon like the world is in need of more of it. Love people through your ego, past the conflicts, into a United field.

Sean. was hard to witness especially in the end, the disassociation made it harder for him to gauge the appropriateness and the hero worship was its own ego trap that left him a stranger to those who held him sacred.

If we are going to heal the world then we are going to have to level up our capacity to love beyond all measure. That comes from humility, truth, and courage. We must be braver, in the ways Sean was brave with love. As the keeper of Seans women, because they all are so fucking special, I watched as he always tried to make it better. I listened as he mourned the loss of each of them and told me how he fucked it up. How empty he felt at each of their losses. I know he kept trying and each of them kept trying because there was actually so much love within them all. I can’t stop thinking about what the world would look like if that love was placed into a safe container for it to grow.

If there is any legacy to take from Sean it is that standing in the powerful truth of naming that which shames you and healing that through forgiveness deepens the well of love so much that you can touch these states where all you do is fall in love with humanity. That acts of atonement can be funny, public, cathartic and healing. On the other side is love. He fell in love all the time, he got to see the best in people. Only because he looked for it, if you look into anyones story you will find the humanity then the divinity waiting within. The more I meditatie under the tree Ram Dass taught at with Sean’s shoes waiting in the grass the more I fall in love.

I know because after forgiving Sean for leaving us, and giving me me this charge to tell his story and love hard, I spent the whole summer falling in love with everyone I met. The temple was a trip, y’all because I held space for hours falling in love with the humans there who will never get to know Sean. For those willing to stand in their truths and take that moment of humility I forgave with the kind of open heart that Sean taught me. I’m more in love with the world today than yesterday. 

I am firmly rooted in the path that creates hella shamans which is simply Sangha.

Love hard the world fucking needs it.