THIS IS NOT A DRILL — LET IT BURN, LET IT STAY, LET IT REMAKE US

Captured in the Fashion District last night around 8 PM by Mitchell Royel, this moment resonates with intensity and transformation. We are currently listening to "Invading My Mind" by Jennifer Lopez, a track that perfectly underscores the energy and emotion of the evening.

We know this feeling.
The one that lives under our ribs and refuses to be reasonable.

It arrives uninvited. It doesn't ask permission. It settles into the soft center of us and starts rearranging the furniture of our thoughts. And suddenly, everything we do is haunted — the coffee, the drive, the shower, the space between breaths. We are somewhere else. We are with the thing that will not let us go.

Let's be honest about what this is.

This is want.
Real want.
The kind that scares us because it means we're alive in a way we can't control.

Somewhere along the line, we learned to shrink our longing. To make it polite. To keep it tidy and quiet and small enough to fit inside a life that doesn't ask too much of us.

But desire was never meant to be small.

It comes in like weather.
It floods the fields.
It pulses through our quiet moments and turns the ordinary into something unbearable and holy. We wake at 3 a.m. and it's already there, waiting, breathing beside us.
We can't outrun it.
We stopped wanting to.

There's a wildness in us that refuses domestication.
And thank God for that.

We feel it first in the skin.
The flush.
The ache.
The way our attention gets pulled toward one direction like iron to a magnet.

The mind tries to catch up.
It builds arguments.
It lists reasons.
It reaches for the practical and the safe.

But the body already knows.

The body has always been the honest one. It doesn't lie about hunger. It doesn't pretend the pull isn't there. It just leans — toward warmth, toward touch, toward the thing that makes us feel like we've finally come home to ourselves.

We can trust that leaning.
It's older than our fear.

We've been sold a story that letting go means losing. That to be consumed is to be defeated.

But surrender is its own kind of power. It's the choice to stop clenching. To open our hands. To say yes to the flood instead of building walls against it.

When we surrender to what moves us, we're not disappearing. We're becoming.

We're saying: I will not spend this one wild life half-lit. I will not sip when I'm meant to drink. I will not whisper what deserves to be sung.

We keep splitting the world in two — the holy and the hungry, the spirit and the flesh. As if the divine lives only in the quiet, the composed, the well-behaved.

But maybe the sacred is also here. In the obsession. In the ache. In the way something can invade our mind so completely that it burns everything false right out of us.

Desire is a teacher. It shows us what we actually value. It points, again and again, at the truth we've been avoiding.

So when it comes for us — and it will — let's not flinch. Let's not apologize.

Let's let it in.

We don't have to act on every fire.
But we do have to feel it.
We owe ourselves that honesty.

Feel the pull.
Name the longing.
Let it move through us and teach us something about who we are and what we're really reaching for.

Because a life without this heat? That's not peace. That's numbness wearing peace's clothes.

We came here to feel it all.
The wanting.
The tenderness.
The trembling edge of too much.

So here's the confession, and the sermon, and the truth all at once:

We are allowed to be consumed.

We are allowed to be wild.

And whatever it is that lives in our mind and won't leave — let it stay.

Let it burn.
Let it remind us, every single day, that we are gloriously, achingly, unstoppably alive.

-Ryder, G.G Collective

Epilogue: We are here to remember. To feel the fire and let it shape us. It’s the heat of the forge, not the burn of destruction, and it’s ours. It's always been ours. We’ve fought so hard to soften edges, to make peace with the depths, but the truth is, the sharpness — that’s where the wisdom is. When we are pressed and held in that tension between our ache and our divine knowing, that’s where we find the sacred.

There’s scripture for this — because doesn’t every soul-searching feel Biblical? “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me” (Psalm 42:7). That’s it. The deep parts of us tied to the deep mystery of creation. The roar of longing. The waves of becoming. The holy pull that lets us know we are part of an extraordinary rhythm — and we are meant to feel it all.

We are told, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10), but even in the stillness, there’s a heartbeat, a vibration, a quiet pulse surging underneath. It’s calling us to lean in, to touch the sacred within and the beyond. And sometimes it comes like a storm instead of a whisper, like Elijah finding God not in the earthquake but in the thin, gentle wind (1 Kings 19:11-12). We know this duality, don’t we, sisters? The stillness and the storm, inviting us deeper, pulling us closer.