Hard like stone, rough like steel
All the hard things we’ve all gotta do.
How do I keep going? Keep breathing? Keep trusting?
Each day I awake, I awake to a new world, a new set of sensations, many familiar, many known, many uncomfortable. Many pleasant, like the weight of my blankets atop me as I rest, deeply, fully, underneath.
How can I keep my awareness upon what matters? Holding my breath as the tightrope walker moves. The view of life has become quite blue recently, where has the warmth gone? Yes there is light, it’s shocking, it’s bright it’s full, and the more I surrender into my body, into my breath, the clearer I see, the more I feel. The deeper I understand. Will it ever end? Will I keep fighting against it? The call, the deep, the whole and full ache of my womb, where the wisdom flows and the rivers move, where the warmth is held. How can I ensure I will have boundaries? That I will not slip or disappear into something entirely else?
This morning I held cobra pose for a few moments, longer than usual. All this grief still coursing its way through my bloodstream. Yet I held it, the heart open to the sky, the chin lifted, the breath flowing. The sensations being exactly what they are, I saw my skin grow gold patterns across its surface. I watched as rivers of pain turned into rivers of gold, like the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi, painting gold within the spaces of broken bowls and vases. Gluing them all back together with tender intention and focus. Making something more beautiful than what was before, for now it has a full story. Of a broken and shattered self finding repair.
I find it difficult to remind myself of this at times when it feels like all I exist within is the space of an aching heart, a pain so deep it has pierced and penetrated seemingly all cells of my body, every aspect of my soul. Will I ever be ‘normal’? Able to feel the sun upon my skin again without question, with ease? Able to live a life of the living without traveling into the realms of death over and over and over and over and over again throughout the days. Maybe it’s not something that I need to fight against, but instead surrender to. Grief as a friend, as they say, I wonder if they’ve ever known it, felt it, experienced it like I do. For why would anyone want to befriend this beast, that makes me move and act with reaching, grabbing, clingy hands. Like a child in need, searching out for something to fill the space, the empty ache of a love long forgotten, unable to reach out to touch. How can I ever know them again? Have dreams again? Live in a life of the living, the lovers, the dreamers? It feels as though the only way to persevere, to know love this deeply again is to find that one other who feels it the same way as I do. Who was there, who felt the same pain. We turned away and walked our separate ways, different directions in this world, trying to cope, trying to find peace, trying to forget, yet as the body keeps the score, the soul never forgets. Though the deeper me knows that this love always exists within me, and I do not need another to fill the space, just my own presence, my own spirit, and to this I surrender.
I awake many mornings in the state of just that, the thing before the light, mourning, heavy, underneath a blanket of pressure. Sometimes I blame it on the world. Why can’t anyone just be a little bit happier? Yet a blaming hand does not make things right, it just averts responsibility. I know at some level, maybe out and beyond my current state of awareness, I chose this. I chose to shatter, to bleed, to break, to scatter. To find all the missing pieces, buried in the earth, my feet walking across the ground, the laughter of a friend over the phone, the playful curiosity of a child. I chose to shatter to then find myself again. For that seems to be the question I ask over and over and over again. Who am I? Some days the remembering is easier than others, some days it feels effortless, like a dance and an answered prayer, other days there’s a thick gloom that I must simultaneously surrender within and also fight my way through to get to the other side where there’s enough light to see clear again. One battle after another, all within. No one outside of me to blame, no one outside of me as the answer. All within, I climb my way out of pain, over and over and over and over again. Other times I just let it be. I let it be as I sit within it, and slowly it seems to transform. I find peace in a tattered flag blowing in the wind. I find sanctuary within the strength of my spirit, and the small slivers that pierce through the void. A massage train, with five people all helping the one in front release tension from their shoulders. A wacky dance, a heart that hopes. There is light even within the densests of dark spaces. There is love all around. Always.
