Purpose Vs Ambition: Leah Justine Barlow in Memorium

This past week at Deep Winter Poetry Camp at Beyul Retreat, I was finally able to pilgrim to the great boulder where Leah Justine Barlow now partially rests. I had the great blessing of praying, weeping, grieving mightily with beloveds Amelia Rose Barlow, Nicholas Adamski, Dr. Palomi Rani Sheth & Chance Kaleolani . Something moved that had not yet moved, and so, at long last, I feel somewhat able to share here about the passage of one of the great loves of my life, through these words which I spoke aloud (unplanned, open channel in the moment) at her memorial in LA…may they serve…

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…My particular story with Leah was one of great deep immediate love, and most recently I became someone who she turned to to talk to about hard things, and hard times, which there also were. And if she loved anything, she loved realness and if she despised anything, she despised inauthenticity. 

And so one of the ways that I feel personally invited by her, shall we say, to celebrate her life, is to acknowledge not only her beauty, not only her grace, not only her consummate style, not only her ability to wave a finger at you and bring you into some kind of multi-dimensional ecstatic revelation, not only her gifts as a friend, a lover, a daughter, a sister, and a mother, but also that she struggled. That she had a hard time, that she wasn’t just easy, beautiful, graceful all the time. And that struggle is a part of what I want to celebrate today because all of us struggle, all of us have our moments of immense grace and all of us have moments of challenge, moments where we feel far from ourselves, moments where it’s hard to remember what holds meaning over time, what actually matters in the face of a world that seems to constantly be convincing us to forget. 

And so I just want to bring that aspect of her here today, as a reminder and an invitation to us in this moment to feel into Purpose, into what purpose means, and how purpose is different than vocation. 

How purpose is different then what you say when people ask you what you do. 

How purpose is what brings you alive and awake each day, and how it was something that Leah was really doing her best to orient towards in her conversations with me in the last year. And it's something that I really tried to do what I could to support her in orienting towards because one of the most profound things about Leah is that she lacked conventional ambition. She didn’t care. And in this time that we’re living in, it’s very easy for that to seem like a lack of purpose.

But it’s not the same thing. 

And she was working really hard to remember with her self, with her life, with her body, how that’s not the same thing. How purpose exists independent of ambition, independent of vocation, independent of external expectations. 

And so the way that I feel called to honor her today, is to ask us each in our life, moving forward, from this moment, to begin to orient towards purpose at the level of the Soul, at the level of the root where your being connects to the great all-encompassing weave of life, the part of you that is never disconnected from that, that cannot be disconnected from that. And that Leah was working hard to stay connected to. Let’s not dishonor her by thinking it was always easy. Let’s honor her by being inside the work, the grist of what it is to orient towards Soul, to orient towards purpose, and to move in the world from that place as best we can, and to support each other in doing that, to validate each other in doing that, to recognize each other for doing that as much as we recognize each other for how good we look, or how good we’re doing in the world. 

We can do that for each other, we can remind each other all the time, and let Leah remind us as she has been reminding me so much in the last months. 

So just take a moment, and feel your root, feel your pelvis, feel your heart beating in your chest, feel her love for us. Feel her love for life. Her love for each exquisite moment, her love for strange beauty. And when it feels hard to stay oriented from that place, let her help you, she wants to help you do that. That’s part of what she can do, maybe even better now than she could before. So let her do that. And let her vitality and her extraordinary grace, and her tenacity, and her acerbic wit and her unconditional love support you in becoming more and more and more yourself. And know that in doing that, you are keeping her flame alive.