Cosmic Carrot: Are You A Gangster Of Love?

Where are my root vegetable brethren?
Do you know what it means to go deep?
I am recruiting amorous warriors.
Are you a gangster of love?
Who is with me?
Who among you will risk everything for
The feeling?

Are you more afraid of numbness than potential consequence?
Do you crush harder than a valentine’d jackboot?
Will you willingly be a fool for amore?
Then I need you
For my starry-eyed revolution,
My sexy insurrection.
I am talking about a desirous uprising.
Who will join my love-army of Cosmic Carrots?

Don’t get me started on passion
This life rides me rough.
I grab the reigns and white-knuckle it.
What can I say?
Some of us are just born with
This misfit status of awkwardness
That makes a skinsuit feel like a prison
That we just wanna get sprung from.
Yeah, I get bruised,
Yeah, I get all confused.
I don’t fit in this life right.

Don’t get me started on heartache,
On love unrequited.
On the deliciousness of limerence.
On obsession—that’s my bread and butter.

If you don’t get it—you don’t get it.
And if you do, then you know what I mean when
I say that
I need you to feel me,
Or I will die.
I will explode
In a puff of pink smoke and rainbow glitter,
‘Cause I am a mystic
And that’s how we do.

Oh, I stumble clumsily,
I adore crushingly and
I’m blinded by desire,
So if loving wildly is such a crime,
Then lock me up
And throw away the key—
No, seriously—
Handcuff me to the bedpost immediately.

I feel deeply.
I am intimate with the abyss.
I have been to the valley-bottom.
Let’s talk about ice.
Let’s talk about the deep freeze.
Let’s talk about the option of numbness,
Because you don’t get to pick and choose what feelings you shut down.
It’s an all-or-nothing proposition.
You can’t just pretend everything is fine
When you’re dying inside, and not expect
Your inner wisdom to stop whispering.
Why should it, if you’re not even listening?

Are you willing to feel the pain of the ice
Just to remember you’re alive?
Will you step into the crystalline mystery?

When we talk about passion,
We have to take it down to the root:
Vegetables sending their tendrils deep into the dirt.
Glory be to the Cosmic Carrot.
Imagine. Picture it, fearlessly flourishing in the dead of winter,
Buried under a blanket of snow,

Choosing survival despite the difficulty,
This is the life it knows.
So what must it do to continue to exist?
This humble carrot in the frozen earth
Converts its starches to sugars
To avoid forming ice crystals
Because if it freezes, it dies,
It’s curtains,
That’s it.

Its destiny is to be eaten,
In holy communion with the
Creature whose mouth receives it.
This carrot is exquisite, exceedingly delicious.
And what is the translation of the sweetness?
Those sugars were formed by the carrot’s decision to live
In spite of the ice and the frost
And the struggle.

The message encoded in the flavor is: I don’t want to die.
That sugar is the voice of the carrot saying,
I am choosing life.

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So when you feel like you feel too much,
When you want to give up,
When it seems like it would be better
To just deaden your spiritual nerve endings,
When your soul’s pilot light is on the blink,
Fan the flames of your fire-feeling.

In that lonely moment, consider the Cosmic Carrot,
Braving the inhospitable ice and only growing sweeter.
You were built for miracles.
You are the raw material of miracles.

I am willing to feel,
To fight
For your enlightenment.
Your happiness is my selfish desire
Because your upliftment is good for me.
Together we all can elevate higher.
I want to see you smile.

My Cosmic Carrot Love-Army
Stands for goodness,
For compassion,
For goofy optimism,
For laughter,
For dancing,
For inclusion.

We face a wall of resistance.
Guess what?
That’s alright.
We ain’t just here to preach to the choir.
These hater-zombies need to hear it, too.

So: are u a soldier, who follows blindly,
Or an amorous warrior?
Are you willing to stand up and fight?
Are you willing to dive into your darkness?

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I am not looking for perfection
In my gangsters of love,
You don’t have to have to have it all figured out
Or be famous
To start being amazing.
You don’t need anyone’s permission to exist.
Look at you, dizzy with heartbliss.

Listen to the white spaces around the black ink of my words.

This love has thrust.
This love has momentum.
This love is building. This love, I said,
This love has got velocity.
Will you stand with me?
This love, it is rumbling up.
This love is erupting.
Can you feel it?

The ice forms in my veins on the daily.
Life tempts me
to face the deep freeze
with numbness
Constantly.

Why do I dance ’til I am drenched in sweat?
Why do I cry when I listen to Solomon Burke?
Why is life worth it?
Why does any of this matter?
Why do I offer up my throbbing heart on a silver platter?
Why do I discuss the importance of gusto with 11 year olds?
Why do I get up on stage behind a microphone?
Passion.

My gangsters of love,
I am asking you to come awake.
I am not saying be unafraid,
I am saying be brave anyway.

In this split second, your heart is open,
Now that you are feeling it,
You can generate momentum.
Let the passion grow.
Thaw out your soul.
Resist the urge to belittle your vulnerability.
Kick out your inner cynic.

We break our own hearts and our hearts get broken
Life breaks us and yet
We keep on going.

My gangsters of love,
Alchemize the bitter into sweet.
Your very survival is on the line.
Grab your Cosmic Carrot
And plant it in the
Lush field of infinite possibility.

This is the uprising of desire.
It is beginning.
Will you willingly walk through the fire-feeling?
I am recruiting amorous warriors.

Oh passionate roots,
Who among you will you join me?

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And now…your EMOJI DVAR TORAH! Special Yiddish Proverb Edition:
Carrots and Bears Crop

‏נאָר אין חלום זײַנען מערן װי בערן
Nor in kholem zaynen mern vi bern
Only in dreams are carrots as big as bears

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This piece owe a debt of gratitude to Chef Dan Barber’s research on the Mokum Carrot, as presented on the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett, which deeply inspired me.

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