Thank you
I rose this morning and thanked you, again, for not yet hunting me down. 29 years ago you knelt above me in my room, vowed a god-punch of retribution if I ever ran, if I ever hid. Is that little boy still seeking witness protection in my nervous system, or soul retrieval in my dreams? Regardless, for god-punches not yet snapped from the elastic horizon, thanks. Eight years ago in Kyoto I faced eleven hundred Buddhas - life-sized, thirty-three armed, gold-flaked - and prayed the bomb remains undropped on them too. Do mushroom clouds fall with glacial torque over them still? Thank you for all weapons unused. Thank you, most of all, for the single unstruck match with which you didn’t immolate my mother; you soaked her in a witch-trial of petrol, told her ‘we'll both burn.’ Some part of me holds some part of her still swearing coma vows of coming flame. You broke your promise to murder my sister if we ever left. Thank you. You broke your promise to track us down again and again. Thank you. I never would have known defenceless astonishment as a baby falls asleep in my arms. Never would have been held up by young people calling my name. Felt a woman draw me down in the dark. Shook with helpless laughter with my mother in our spectacularly un-ablaze kitchen. To the God I prayed to, despite disbelief, to the God I begged to explain to me why all things were my fault, thank you for your silence, I’m still falling through it, finding better questions as I do. For those not drowning, not burning, not pinned down, tonight at least, thank you. For the chance left to each of us to remain undetonated, to not serve the blow, to provide some shelter for those who fall through. Thank you.
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Carbon Copies of Love
Alone in your back garden, bare feet cold on the tiny civilised Earth, I try aloud a dozen different names for God; blind carbon copies of prayers. Not that I believe there’s a correct address, or that anything asked for is lost; I’m just trying to find the right taste in my mouth. Some names are ancient, global, others free-styled halfway between poetry and jokes. I sat on this same lattice-work cast-iron chair last year, under these huge sycamores, which overlook the tidy enclosure, sobbing at the vision of her. I ask for grace to tattoo the name you gave her on my left heel and my lips; Phoenix. Grace to meet you as you are today. Alone in your little bed, bare feet snug under patchwork duvet, I try aloud a dozen different names for love, and for what lies between us; again searching for that taste in my mouth. Ask for grace to take what I’m given, by anyone at any time in any way. Together in the heavy rain, shoes wet through in the long grass, picking a rambling breakfast of apples, fennel, blackberries, cherries, under fading tongues of oak, ash, beech, soaking one last time before I leave, You’d cried hard enough to scare me, and I’m no stranger to holding grief. I take in the seeds; the children we never make are so much more than blind carbon copies of love. (I can't find the details for this painting, if you know who made it please let me know, I'd love to credit them)
Came At The Same Time As God The second best night of God’s life was when God met God in a crowded room and without words almost understood. Shyly fed small talk to the furnace smile. Held hands going home, unbearably struck by the touch. Undressed shaking, lifetimes feeling ugly inside almost washing away in body fluids, shared breath, light. God rocked God in arms until almost felt enough, and came at the same time as God. The first best night of God’s life was 9 months later, when God fell from between God’s bloody legs and again took first breath. God swore to God that God was a fucking miracle. Wired the fuses through flooding with God. Felt so safe in God’s arms. Learned to crawl, walk, touch the edges. Learned that God burned, was broken, not allowed. That God would not always come when God cried out. Felt loved one moment for being something, hated for the same the next. Became ashamed of face. Still felt safe in arms, most of the time. God told God shut the fuck up, don’t be stupid, there’s something wrong with you. Learned God wasn’t God. Had to struggle and fake it to be enough, to maybe be beloved. Decided everything was bullshit. Got ripped at the gym. Dressed slutty. Said Yes without knowing wanting. Said No with buried longing. Pretended not to give a fuck. Bought better stuff, then better stuff. Sometimes felt almost safe in arms. Sat in judgment over God’s singing voice, entrepreneurial spirit, body, children, God. Watched God declare the tragic necessity of war on God. Voted, protested, argued, wept. Hated God for Hating God. Killed God for killing God. Pressed buttons, ate, watched things, slept. Killed, was killed, cheered at killing, forgot about killing, screamed at killing. Pressed buttons, ate, watched things, slept. Felt never safe in arms, sometimes. One day saw across crowded rooms instantly and almost understood. Could love any, be with any, all was. Just wanted to hold so, remember, ugly fresh washed faces. Didn’t want to own, save, use to feel. Just to cross the space between without permission, without need. Stayed in the doorway watching paralysed whirlwind what believed what had to be in order to. Just wanted to make feel safe feel beautiful. From across rooms, from doorways, saw hair fall across necks, felt hands raise glasses, heard breath appear. What did the poem speak to you in you, about your journeys with life and love? I'd love to hear in the comments. Okunoin Lamps : Koyasan, Wakayama, Japan In Japan there’s a mountain named Koya-San with a temple keeping ten thousand oil lamps burning. Two of the lamps have been burning continuously for a thousand years, one lit by an emperor, the other by a poor woman who’s name has been lost, so they say. Ten years ago I stood outside that hall, staring at the ten thousand lamps, breathing them in, trying to store up the wonder inside my chest. The monks are tidying the hall, one young monk sweeping the floor with a straw broom, bowing and smiling every time he passes me. I’ve always loved fire. As a teenager me and my gang made bazookas out of deodorant cans and drain pipes. We blew up teddy bears, etch-a-sketched red hot light with burning branches at night. I still have rubber embedded in my body from jumping a bonfire when I was 21; I fell in and burned my hands and side. Whatever spirit might be, fire makes me feel it. The young monk sweeps past again, again smiling and nodding. I wonder if he has the patience to smile a hundred times at this scruffy gaijin making moon-eyes at his home. I sent matchboxes to a woman I loved. Filled the boxes with pebbles from places we’d been, tiny notes in golden ink. Decorated the outsides with cut-outs from mindfulness mandala colouring books. Posted them over the ocean to her. The monks are folding away the red altar cloths now, extinguishing the incense. My young friend bows and smiles again, and I rub my arms and stamp my feet, shivering in the winter cold. I don’t want to walk away. Fire night, a kind of wild hullaballoo at the Earthsong Camps with my Irish tribe {image Anna Ni Fhlionn} When I was seven, my step-father poured petrol over my mother and stood above her with a match in his hand. He told her “this is what will happen if you ever dare question me again.” I didn’t even know until many years later that my mother was alive by a single unstruck match. The day before catching the cable car up the flanks of Koya-San mountain, in another temple in Kyoto, I stood staring at a thousand and one life-sized, gold-flaked statues of the goddess of mercy, each one with thirty-three arms outstretched to protect us. Some of them a thousand years old. I tried to breathe them in too. America considered dropping the atom bomb on Kyoto. I could imagine it all too clearly; a frozen explosion hanging over the temple, a mushroom cloud unfolding with glacial slowness. Up on the mountain I’m getting so cold I have to dance on the spot. I don’t want to give up a minute of the light from these lamps. I want to belong there, make it part of me….something… With that love, after heart-wrenching months lost between committing and letting go, we finally knew. One last night together, then I flew home. I took the hundreds of matches left over from all the boxes I’d sent her, and stood in the dark striking them one by one, throwing them out the window into the night, saying thank you, I love you, I’m sorry, I let you go. I remembered my mother’s survival as I struck them, remembered the statues, lamps and cities of Japan. The after-images of flames filled the insides of my eyes. Six months later my ex-love told me she got pregnant that last night, and chose to have an abortion. She knew it was the right choice but it still broke her heart. She felt that tiny soul, her words, within her, even after the termination, all the way through the nine months. She gave the tiny soul a name; Phoenix. We lit candles together, put ashes on our feet. My mother’s kitchen overflows with boxes of matches, in the oddest spots. For lighting the stove and candles of course. My ex-love’s kitchen is surely full of knives, for making food. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are living cities. I’m not saying everything is ok. I’m just saying survival on any given day is always a kind of miracle, my favourite miracle. Standing breathing in the ten thousand lamps I remember hearing that fires had been lit from the embers in Hiroshima, and these fires had been kept burning and spread to sacred sites around the world. I don't know the truth. A man told me he’d juggled fire lit from Hiroshima flames. He said he ate the fire and fell to his knees and wept. The fire remembered he said. I suddenly wonder, what would it take to keep a lamp burning for a thousand years? And if fire does have a memory, what would such a flame remember? In the moment that the question arises, the young monk smiles and bows for the last time, and shuts the temple doors. Here's a candle to you and your loved ones. May you all be happy, healthy and safe. Would love to hear from you. What does this story speak to from your life, your heart?
PS: Want to feed your writing flow? Check out my upcoming workshops.... The Burren, a unique and captivating landscape, that's now always home for me. When I was six years old, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night, and told me to be very very quiet. I followed her downstairs, out the front door and into the car, still in my Batman pyjamas. There was a blanket and pillows in the back seat, and I lay down. Only half-awake, I thought we were heading to the dentist. But we drove out of London, across the country, and onto a ferry. We were moving to Ireland in secret, to escape my violent, semi-psychotic step-father. I’d had no idea we would leave. Mum had watched me become silent and invisible, as she tried to be, to escape his abuse. It hadn’t worked. So we escaped to another land. But he followed us to Ireland, and with mighty threats of drowning himself and abandoning his own child, he seized hold of our family again. My real father had fled Ireland for London in the early eighties, imagining the Gardai were pursuing him for some misdemeanour. His own father had been a prisoner of war in the Congo, and brought a heavy silence home with him. If my father hadn’t fled Galway, he would never have met my mother in the squats. I wouldn’t exist. Nor my three half brothers and my half sister, who have different mothers, all of whom were living in the same squats. Galway City, also always home, windy and rainy as fuck, and the weather has very bad boundaries, but so safe, so friendly, and so clearing somehow. My mother’s grandfather fled Lithuania around 1905 because Cossacks were killing Jews. He moved to London, shortened Rockiah to Rock, and got stuck right in to weird occult shenanigans with WB Yeats, Aleister Crowley and all the other fancy lunatics. Who knows where his Jewish ancestors had fled from before that? Who knows through what acts of war or forced migration my father’s ancestors came to Connemara? Who knows what abuse my step-father suffered, to make him so terrified he felt the need to paralyse us with fear too, in order to try to hold on to us? No beginning to any of this. Endless generations of handed-down suffering. By the time the Gardai broke down the doors and rescued me from my step-father, pulling me down the road to where my mother waited in the back of a police car, Ireland was home, our final escape. Buying land, staying in one place, was one of the bravest things my mother ever did. I grew up roaming western Ireland’s woods and hills. I am always grateful for the life it has given us, despite what brought us there. Slowly, amongst its trees, waters and people, I have been learning to not stay silent and not stay invisible. To not stay escaping imaginary threats in my nervous system. Ireland has given me gifts I would not trade for anything. Including the chance to not pass on shadows. What about you? What complicated thanks would you like to give? PS: Want to feed your writing flow? Check out my upcoming workshops.... After a year full of death, a ‘lost’ voice, and no sense of how to live, I had a holy fuck moment last summer. The shores of a lake in a Portuguese valley, swarming with cyber-fairies, 21st Century flower-children, gigantic totemic sculptures, tripped-out mega-tents pulsing light and sound like a psychedelic alien invasion. Boom. Boom is a festival where activism, art and altered states come together and get sexy. Intensely alive music dragged me to a stage with a single man in a mandala of instruments, loop pedals and mics, arms multiplying in mosaic like Neo in the Matrix. A Latina priestess to his left in an emerald dress incanting praise. A wild robed warrior looking dude dancing pure ceremony over and back across the stage. A cable at the base of my spine was plugged in again. Holy fuck. "This is all I want to be, need to do. That seed-cracking edge where ritual and entertainment blend. The sexiest crowd of half-naked half-wild humans dancing in the dust around me. Holy fuck, I want the sexiest crowds ever; my art-medicine re-plugging their spines into the mosaic." Transfixed, I imprinted the moment on my bones. In my imagination at least. My ‘Life-Changing’ Vow That Didn’t Change Anything I made a vow then. To always honour the poetry in the base of my throat. Even if my voice never recovers, I’ll let it flow in silence through me, at the back of the room in darkness, the street, the forest, by the waters, on the bus. Even if no one ever knows. So much energy I wanted to chew the horizon. I sat on a rock and wrote….. I spoke these words in broken churches holding hurt and hope in verse In flow the soul’s the oldest verb reverberated heard in ancient sermon’s cadence serve unchained once learned that faith/must curve the rain so I shapeshift, taste this waking grace as our face lifts and come the flame/our stunned tongues/must/ one day/shun shame/lung’s shape/one name/ one birth/people/one grave/one seed called/ breaks clay/takes place/milks sunlight/spilt haze/ Canopy-tsunami can we stand breathe and pray? Can these hands be the change? Can the spirit when we feel it ever stay self-contained? People were beaming at me. Why wouldn't they? Everyone shines when we do our thing. And we all have a thing, or many things I remembered. For the thousandth time. Then my mind began bouncing, like a stone skipping across water; across all the moments I made such vows before. The Breakthrough Delusion ….The week I quit my PhD, I competed against ballerinas, breakdancers and a juggling troupe for a Bursary Award. All of them gifted. I deliberately breathed in their energy to amplify myself. Moved my body in ways I never had onstage. I won. The judge said it was like witnessing the birth of a new art-form; spoken word and modern dance fused. I cycled to the beach at midnight, vowed to the waves to never spend a day slaving at work I didn’t believe in again….. …..I forgot that vow. Forgot that dance-poetry….. …..coaching, talking circles, mountain peaks, dreams, retreats; I’ve had so many breakthroughs the movie of my life could be a pure collage of climaxes, with a song by Xavier Rudd maybe. It’s been epic.…. …..And I’ve forgotten.… ……and re-membered…. …..and forgotten…. …and realised..… Breakthrough moments help us touch infinity and re-member But don’t necessarily change anything. I know you know this. Bear with me. My thousands of workshop participants have thrown the same stories at me….“I just want to explode through my fears…..get naked and cover myself in paint every day….live in a forest for six months and do nothing but write….dissolve all doubts….go on long retreats, go here, go there, make a radical break…..” Naked painting, awesome. Living in a forest, beautiful. But they’re really saying: ‘I Want to Give My Power Away.’ The unconscious story is that a dramatic experience will wash away all doubts and fears. They’ll magically be ‘on my path,’ always inspired and aligned and ‘living my purpose.’ We’re sold this story by most teachers too: ‘Just buy my thing. All your struggles will melt away.’ Bollocks. If you practice, it gets MUCH easier, lighter, more fun. You trust it more, stay longer, deeper. But Nothing is All Or Nothing. After the epic experience, you’ll fluctuate. Life will invade like the schizophrenic zoo it is. Most days will not offer a magic glade. You have to keep choosing. It’s always vulnerable. No epic moment will take away your power to choose, or your vulnerability. NO ONE is always aligned and doubt free. How to Have Life-Changing Breakthroughs Every Day Spending five minutes writing, dancing, speaking your truth when you feel resistance, is a breakthrough moment. Doing it again the next day is a breakthrough moment. Practicing when you have no idea what to do or why, is a breakthrough moment. String enough of those together, you’ll change your life more than any retreats. When I got home, my life had not changed. I went down to the same ocean and prayed. Asked the ocean to show me how to live my poetry with my voice in constant pain, exhausted with money worries from a year of voice loss stopping work. Day by day offering precious things to the waves, shaping freestyle prayers. Making smaller, more real vows every day is a breakthrough. Months later walking home, voice ragged and burning, I was pulled sideways to the waters, the infinite foaming of motion and sound. Holy fuck, I want to be that, I said to myself. I came to a dead bird, body composed as a monk. Gave freestyle prayers of thanks to its spirit, wished wings for onward flight, laid a chunk of clear quartz at the nape of its neck and walked on. The waves grew fiercer in the almost dark. I held a rose quartz aloft, ready for offering. In the moment before throwing I wondered how to give fresh shapes to the same prayers. Nothing came. I had nothing to ask for. I lacked nothing. Months of prayers washed back over me. I’d asked how to live my poetry. But that daily prayer itself had been a living poem. All I need to do, to be. This is how I live, and for a while I forgot. I gave thanks, threw the stone, walked home. I can die happy, whole. It’s more than enough. My voice is still in recovery. I’m still finding that daily poetry-prayer. Bigger and bigger crowds may well come, many days when glittering visions take body in front of me. I’ve already had plenty. But life is mostly woven of moments like these. Speaking to the rocks, the trees, the scattering of beings who are with me now. Out beyond our stories of what our dreams are supposed to be, is a place where we’re already living them, if we dare to drop in. If you made a time-lapse of your life, the split-second finish line moments, the roaring crowd podium moments, the peaks, would barely show as a flicker, compared to the tapestry of every day embodying, embracing and expressing your gifts, in the extraordinary magic of the ordinary moment. The choice is always now. PS - my posts have had thousands of comments on FB, but I've been oddly slow to get them up on my site. So my words may be a bit lonely, would you like to add yours? Share ways in which you restrict or free yourself to live your gifts in the comments. Let's help each other remember what matters most. With a dear friend in my late thirties; still basically the same idiot, but having more fun with it. And somehow getting paid to share my idiocy : ) Have you had a life-changing moment that didn't change your life, shar your story in the comments!
PS: Want to feed your writing flow? Check out my upcoming workshops.... Yeah, there’s the occasional urge to bash a face in,
maybe don a big furry hat, ride a tiny screaming pony through McDonald’s, slaughtering and pillaging, kicking up whirlwinds of French fries and packaging, and all because someone laughed at the wrong place during our power point presentation, or took an extra seven seconds at the checkout in Tesco’s. So what? Our ancestors had to battle just to get to fuck in order to make the ancestors that fucked to make us. Warfare is scribbled in the sleeve notes of our blood. Thousands upon thousands of years fighting to live creates echoes that won’t die overnight. Maybe meditate, get therapy, bake intense cakes; let loose your war cries safely. As a kid I loved to blow stuff up. I still do if I’m honest, though I often abstain these days. I still have specks of rubber embedded in my torso from leaping bonfires. A gleeful monster seared into me would love to see the world go up in flames. But not really. And so what? I had relatives in the Holocaust. Family alive by a single unstruck match. Of course I want play with fire, make it mine. We’ve all lurked behind sofas gobbling entire chocolate cakes to ourselves, fisting chips into our maws as our guts protest. Guzzled, snorted, puffed and clicked into oblivion. So what? Our ancestors had to chase horizons just to eat. Some folks still do. Of course we’re all wackos now our shelves are so packed. We suffer from having too much, too soon. We’ve all risked the foundations of our lives in rampant spurts of sex-bingo sometimes. We’re all part of the mindwarp parade feeding off of, feeding into, suffering from, racism, sexism, global inequity, the enslavement of our home planet’s seemingly infinite species and beauty. Humanity is waking from a nightmare millennia long, from a psychosis; believing we were separate, better, alone. This stuff is scribbled all over us; our epigenetic scripts are palimpsests, our schools, streets and offices force us to walk and talk weird; we’re so programmed for psycho-hopscotch we don’t even notice as we jump the steps. The thing is, we each get to heal our share. The very privilege of safety and abundance creates space for the ghosts to speak. If you have a full cupboard you’re kinda wealthy. If you have time to watch TV you have time to heal. If you have internet you have a world of free teachers. Our inherited trauma and cultural conditioning is not our fault. But healing it is our responsibility. Bring your tiny pony warlord to the dance floor or page. Bring your ghosts into the conversation. Guzzle courage, truth and love as much as all the other stuff. Let’s stop pretending we’re better than the world, or separate from it or each other, or alone in any of this. Try to use them to make everyone love and value you. Try to use them to save the world. Try to make your work like everyone else’s. Try to make your work unlike everyone else’s. Pretend that it’s a huge deal, that only you can offer what you offer. Pretend it doesn’t matter, that you don’t care. See-saw from unrealistic expectations to guilt and shame, then numb out, then start again. Keep waiting for some magic moment of ‘permission’ and ‘recognition’ from the world. Believe being ‘gifted’ means you ‘deserve’ to be at least a bit wealthy and well-known, and if you don’t become so, you’re not gifted. Believe being gifted is somehow unique, and thus stay isolated. Constantly judge yourself on whether/how much you’re doing your thing or not, and waste all your energy on these judgments, instead of doing your thing. Become ‘successful’, but feel empty and burnt out. Become great at what you do, but despair of ‘success.’ Constantly stop and start, like a schizo line-dancer. Read another self-help book. Feed your kinky addiction to shame and stuckness. OR Just drop all the stories. Drop the judgments. Make your primary commitment to never shame yourself again. And don’t shame yourself for shaming yourself either! Accept that everyone’s gifted. It’s not a big deal. Gifts are not ‘special.’ It means being given something. Therefore having something to give. Stop pretending you’re waiting for recognition - you’ve already been offered more recognition than you could ever need, but you’ve blocked it, denied it, forgotten it, because it didn’t fit your story. Deep down, because you’re scared to let it in. Our entire culture of ‘needing recognition’ from a bigger audience is unsustainable on every level - it would take 144,000 extra planets of people just to sit and clap us all. Feel how much you care. But don’t buy into drama. Skip the whole layer of pressure, justification and shame and go straight to LOVE and GRIEF. We love our gifts, and grieve when we don’t embrace and express them freely. Not because we ‘should’ do something, and ‘should’ live up to our potential. Because our heart aches to. Express your gifts whenever you can, in tiny ways, in big ways. Now. In your real life, in real ways. The world doesn’t need more superstar ballerinas and pop idols. It needs more people dancing and singing in our kitchens, in the streets. The world doesn’t need more celebrity authors and teachers, it needs us all to live the wisdom in our own bodies and hearts. The world doesn’t need more revolutionary ideas. It needs us to do what we already know is right, is enough. The world doesn’t need you to become somebody. It needs you to be yourself, as you are right now. This is true leadership. It's not a big deal. I'm right here on this journey with you, trying to remember these things every day. PS - my posts have had thousands of comments on FB, but I've been oddly slow to get them up on my site. So my words may be a bit lonely, would you like to add yours? Share ways in which you restrict or free yourself to live your gifts in the comments. Let's help each other remember what matters most. PPS: Want to feed your writing flow? Check out my upcoming workshops.... Try to forget. Forget every lesson ever learned about so-called worthiness. Santa Clause’s Naughty or Nice List, grown-ups’ hot and cold love. The classroom’s gold stars and cruel words, the playground’s hunger games. Religion’s heavens and hells, society’s carrots and sticks. The spiritual olympics measuring how ‘high’ our vibration is. The second-hand violence, second-hand trauma, second-hand footsteps. I try. I open my mouth, in silence or aloud, and call out: “Dear Beautiful Rascal, Great-Open-Source-Dream, BlablaHalleluyeah, Divine Kink, Beloved Whatever…” Maybe my brain’s cracked, maybe Grace likes playful names. Either way, I keep tasting them as I try. Try to remember. Remember prayer is the unknown reaching out to the unknowable. A human being speaking to Spirit, whatever the fuck Spirit is, whether or not it exists, whatever the fuck human is, whether or not it exists. Sometimes it flows bang on, but sometimes I call out: “I don’t even know why I’m doing this, if anything is out there, or in here, if all this is just skull-cinema so be it.” It cracks me up enough to get me lit to the touch. Sometimes my mouth’s a sublime instrument, sometimes a wretched, spasmed orifice. It doesn’t matter which. Give the bullshit regiments the slip; lay in hedge-row or windowsills yelling anything with such gusto that love, grief, gratitude, forgiveness, laughter and weeping become exactly the same thing again. Many prayers are simple: “May this being find safety and freedom to live within life’s gift, and give back to it. May all beings find the same.” Other days though it gets interesting: “May the girl with the blue hat be safe, may the stupid sky be forgiven, may we fall on our arses towards heaven, may all trees come home.” There’s no need to know who the girl with the blue hat is, or why the sky needs forgiveness. “May all beings find the same.” What would you pray for today, if you chose to, and if you gave yourself permission to pray with no pre-conceptions of what prayer means? Add yours in the comments and we can make a freetyle prayer thread together. At the age of 28, our break-up ritual almost burnt a festival down.
My lover and I sat in a dust-dry straw meadow, in heat-wave England, outside a hippy day-dream called Unicorn Voice Camp (no joke!), and lit a handmade candle we’d been given on our wedding day. I was leaving for a castle in Slovenia, going to a gathering for global transformation. She was staying at camp. With her new lover. We shared, wept, giggled. The handmade candle melted almost instantly and the straw began blazing. My lover was flustered, but I've always felt friendly with fire and I jumped up and stamped out the flames with my bare feet. If we’d been distracted, left it for a minute, the whole field could have lit-up so easily. As I walked away from our messily beautiful, deliciously agonising goodbyes something lit-up in me deeper than ever before, - a knowing that it’s okay the world is the way it is, and also okay that I feel the way I feel. This wasn't a new idea filling my head, it was a sudden inflation through the cramped, needled places in my chest. I felt like a giant had just given me mouth to mouth and made my lungs twice as big. It was okay we were separating. It had been my choice in fact. And it was okay I was heartbroken, terrified, raging. It was ok that I felt abandoned, even though that made no sense whatsoever. If I held both truths at once, there was nothing to reject, nothing to fight, nowhere to run; nothing to break my world into pieces. I’ve kept coming home to that simple knowing since. It’s not a revelation; we all know it. But to live by holding both truths at once has often saved my sanity, often made the difference between being clenched-up and wretched and being able to remember, in my body, the greater holding that life offers, to know that heartbreak and wholeness are inseparable. It sometimes becomes my prayer: "It’s okay my voice has been strained, sometimes lost, for years now. Okay I’ve often been grief-stricken, scared, furious. Ok people barely look each other in the eyes on the street. Okay that it’s heartbreaking. Okay that the ridiculously exquisite woman who works in [XYZ] has a boyfriend. Okay that I ache for her when I see her. Okay I’ll never love a fraction of the bodies I could love that way. Okay I’ll never write a fraction of the poems, climb a fraction of the mountains, be cradled in a fraction of the waves, help a fraction of the people, heal a fraction of myself on any given day. And it’s okay that it breaks my heart. Heartbreak is a gift. Love and grief are carved from the same depth of space within us. Our capacity for love expands in exact symmetry to our capacity for loss. Okay I don’t know who I am or what I want. Okay it sometimes drives me crazy." It sometimes becomes my prayers for everyone: "Okay we don’t always get the job, win the day, find the answer, get heard, get seen, find our way. Okay that it fucking hurts. In fact, either thing can only be okay, when we remember that both are okay. When we hold both truths at once. Only then can we heal fully. Only then can we live fully." That is the magic trick with emotions - to never fight, flee or freeze what we feel, or what we see out in the world. To stop waging war within, and without. It’s okay. What would be your prayer, if you chose to pray this way? Let us know in the comments, we can make a thread of acceptance together. |
AuthorDave Rock is a prize-winning spoken word artist and storyteller, and a conscious writing, speaking and performing arts teacher. He's worked with thousands of people, including award-winning comedians, actors and inspirational figures. Archives
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