Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. My husband sometimes jokes that it takes me an hour and a half to go to bed and two hours to wake up. He's not far off. He's really not. My bedtime routine can be 20 or 30 minutes, actually, but I always brush my teeth. I come to the side of the bed, I get on my knees, and I thank God for a beautiful, Bright day. And then I crawl into bed and I've got three things that I do very religiously, and I've been doing this for years, years and years and years and years. Sometimes I add a fourth thing, but really the three things that have been there forever are I read some kind of old school, 12-step literature, like old school. Here's what addiction is as a serious threefold disease. Mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical. Sorry, threefold. Well, they say threefold disease, but it's like mental, emotional, physical, spiritual. Sorry to botch that one. But anyway, so I read some literature, then I write in my five-year journal, and I read whatever nuggets I wrote on that day, the year before, the year before. It depends on where I'm at in the five-year journal. Right now, I'm getting to read all four of the prior years. It's just amazingly rich. I get to read what I did on that day in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and now I'm writing 2025, which is super fun. And then I read out of this book here, and that's the subject of today's vlog. This book right here is called A Year with Rumi. I am a huge Rumi fan, and this daily reader is by Coleman Barks. Now, I was pretty astounded after I'd already been reading this book and loving it for years and years and years to discover that Coleman Barks didn't actually ever learn Rumi's native language that he revealed all his poems in. I'm not even sure what that was. Arabic, Sanskrit, I don't know. He was in the, what? Twelve or 1300s from around Iran, I guess somewhere in that territory, I'm not sure. Anyway, yeah, Coleman Barks read someone else's English translations of Rumi, meditated on them and then channeled a new version. Basically. It kind of blew my mind to learn that. But so, I would say these poems are as much Coleman Barks as they are, Rumi, honestly. And the introduction to this book is wild. It's incredible. I've read it year after year. It's a real treat. Around January 1st, I get to come to the beginning of the book and read this introduction, and it's called, the Introduction is called, "The Love Religion Wild Soul Books."
So, I'm going to call this vlog, "What is" because in this introduction, and the introduction is interesting, it's written at this level that makes me feel smart just for attempting to read it. It's really intensely high level. He's just clearly an intellectual, someone who thinks and has read way beyond what I have. But there's this little three line poem in it by a poet I've never heard of, can't pronounce his name. The name is Galway Kinnell, K-I-N-N-E-L-L, and he's written this beautiful little three-line poem. When I read it for the first time, I memorized it instantly and it just soaked into me. I'm going to share it with you right now. It's the subject of this vlog. So, here's the poem.
"Whatever happens. Whatever what is is is what I want. Only that. But that."
There's a falling in love with the present moment with what actually is, with the wild twists and turns that life takes sometimes. That way that so many days can just be plodding along as they do kind of same old, same old, and then something will happen. Could be anything really, right? But something happens and everything changes. And then you assimilate, you adapt, you figure it out. You go on. A new normal gets established, the days plod along, and then something else happens. There's this synchrony between creating it and watching it and experiencing it. Somehow, along the way, I've mostly, thank God, stopped fighting it, and just started appreciating it and watching it. The deeper I've thought about what actually means anything anyway, the more I've come to a belief that at the very least, the value of a life, my life, your life, the value of living, is in getting to live?is in the experience of itself for its own sake. It is such an incredible privilege to just get to be here experiencing this. I don't know if you were in the same health class that I was in whenever we took it, fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, somewhere in that span you learned, I learned, we learned that the sperm that are swimming in that semen are so numerous that the odds that the sperm that was going to be you would reach that egg and the odds that egg would've dropped and been there out of all the eggs and that those two would've met and conceived and taken and grown so radically improbable, like buy a Powerball lottery ticket. And those are better odds, kind of improbable, like really improbable.
There's a way that Bright Line Eating? allows people to do a level of work inside that frees us up to really ultimately, hopefully, maybe get to the place where we can hear a poem like Galway Kinnell's poem, "Whatever happens. Whatever what is is is what I want. Only that. But that." We can hear that and go, yes, yes. This moment is so precious that I could say that of out of all the possibilities of all the things that could be happening, this is what I would choose. I am the genie and I got the wishes, and this was what I chose, not because it's the greatest I can possibly imagine, but because it carries with it all the brilliance of what's true, of what's actually here available. That richness is gobsmacking.
I think on the Bright Line Eating journey, there have been many moments that I cherish, but one of them that I don't talk about that often was a moment that I was in the little room where I did most of my Bright Line Eating work back in the day. This was the house before the house we live in now. I had a laptop, and this was where I was waking up at 4:30 in the morning in the bedroom and then coming to this room to write on the book proposal for the first book, "Bright Line Eating," and I was sitting at that little desk, there was just a little spot there for my laptop and a little chair where I could sit, and I was starting to write out that book proposal. "Bright Line Eating" didn't exist. The Bright Line Eating email list didn't exist. None of that existed, but I could feel it in its pregnant about to be birth nest. I felt myself eight months pregnant with this thing that was about to come. I was writing that book proposal, and it was evening. David was in the midst. I think the kids were five, five, and two. So, he was doing some sort of bathtime bedtime rigamarole, and I was there, I was thinking, and I had to go join him in a second and help. But I was thinking, and I was all up in my head about am I going to tell people about my history of prostitution? I was writing the first chapter of the book, and it was my story, and I knew I was going to share about my drug addiction that had a very clear link to the food addiction that followed it, and the recovery that I ended up experiencing and how I ended up coming to understand about the neuroscience of food addiction. But was I going to tell about the prostitution? I had this moment of clarity where I realized, "Susan, if you don't tell them, if you don't put words to that history of yours that you lived through, you will live in fear that someone else will out you on it, and they will not tell the story the way you would and what you think of as a flaw. Pull it forward and make it a feature. Just tell them the way you would and let them think what they think." And it was an empowering choice. I still was so scared that for years; I cloaked how I talked about it. If you read, go back and take a look at what I say about that in my story in the very first book. I'm very obtuse about it. I kind of say it, but I don't really say it. I never say the word prostitution, never. I still have family members that cringe every time I say it. Sorry. I know I say it a lot these days, but I don't care anymore. It has no charge for me. I've really processed through everything I've lived through to that extent pretty much. There's not really much that you can raise that I've lived through that I have any traumatic samskara around. Do you know that word, samskara? My understanding of that is that it's Sanskrit for residue, like karmic, sticky, yuck residue, not good residue. I've cleaned that up.
Being Bright allows me to do that. It's such a privilege to put the food in its place, to put the drugs in their place, to put the alcohol in its place for me. I got to put the caffeine in its place, the cigarettes in their place, the place is down and away and not in the room with me. Then start to work through the emotions and the history and the muchness that it's been and get on the other side of those emotions, those entanglements, that samskara, and what's left when all that's processed and healed and worked through is a bunch of laughs because boy, it's been a wild ride. And then freedom. And what is. I'll end on this thought.
I have no fear of death. I'm so excited to die. I just think, I just know it's so much better on the other side. No one would tolerate this life if they got a real sense of how great it is after you die. I'm certain of that, and I can't wait, but I can wait. I want to live to be over a hundred because I actually love this life. What comes next is going to be for a long, long time. So, I'm happy to be here now, that's fine. But I go for regular walks with someone. She's actually a Bright Lifer?, someone I love very dearly, and she doesn't believe in the afterlife at all. She really believes ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You become warm food, and when you die, it's over. And as we were walking along the path that we walk near our houses, she lives very close to me. One day I really sank into that perspective like, oh my God, she could be right. I mean, I have no idea that I'm right about any of that. No one knows. Who knows? And I thought, what if this life is all there is of my existence? And suddenly, every breath took on a preciousness, every moment because I do love this life. And what is gobsmacking to me? And magical, hidden, manifest, throbbing, empty, full, soft, sparkly, whispering, screeching with vibrant, aliveness, all of that at the same time. It's so amazing. The present. "Whatever happens. Whatever what is is is what I want. Only that. But that." that's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
