The strength of the fire lord, it burns within while the waters of the deepest sea rock me awake
The strength of the fire prod, it burns so brightly within. I have options here: to just see what comes out, what pours forth, to empty the vessel and to allow it to refill, to run away and to go somewhere else, to transform all of it into something written and tangible, or to simply feel it.
It seems strange that the later option feels the most tedious, the hardest, the scariest. At least with words I can hold the pain in my hand and examine it from all angles. To feel it would mean to disintegrate it into nothing, allow a new open space to form, and maybe this is just that. For in order to see it from the high and the low and the all around, we must feel it. I become the central point in the axis of the wheel. I become the one who steers and who sees and who transforms. I become the one who listens and who yearns. Who hears the messages on the wind. I am the one who has been there and has come out the other side and I am the one who chooses to reside within love.
I wish that there was something more, always a a yearning for something more. Someone else, some other place, some other destination. Yet the teachings and the flow always being us back to the right here. The right now. This moment where there is no space for anything else expect to just be. To e in this moment. To allow this moment to the be the axis of the discover, the place it unfolds from. Falling, falling, falling, back back back and into myself. Into my moment. Is this the way? Is this the mode? How can we cultivate presence, grounded love, connection to our treasure trove when the heart still screams and the heart still yearns.
The chase is deep, it’s old, it’s archaic. It’s all the lives where we died before it found its healing. It’s all the days that we ran instead of listening. Hands bound and tied. I find myself in a crowded restaurant, I sit in the back corner by the wall, the sun pours in, holding and warming my back. People pass by, I wonder if they’re mirrors of me, or if I can just love them as people. Unique and entirely complex. Simple underneath it all, beings of love. I notice how the more I feel, the more I tune, the more I see, the more life pours forth out of me. The more love exudes from my center.
Leather coat and basketball shorts and a hat the hides a balding head. I see love all around me. Unique expression, I see someone who woke up and chose to dress like this for some reason I will never know, and in it I see love. I see love because I have no other options. I see love because what else is there to do with the information that is given to us. We either love it or we let it control us. And the more love that we see, the more love finds us in unexpected ways. Like the wafting scent of a crackling fire. It comes through some window that I do not see. I feel it and I sense it though. Someone’s warm maple sugar perfume encompasses me, the sharp tang of brandy in the air. A little bite. My senses come alive. I smell freshly baked pizza in a stone oven. My taste buds come alive.
And still, the heart aches and the heart yearns. I romanticize a story instead of simply feeling for what would the feeling lead to? If I let this all go, what would take its place? How do I know that that too would not be taken away.
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If I were to lose my mother, I don’t know how I would ever recover. Yet too, inside, deep inside of me, I know.
If I were to live my life so entirely free, to embrace all that I see and to love it unconditionally, what would happen to me?
Is loving the life that I see a way to move away from the grief that exudes out of me, or is it a way to hold both at once, to fill myself up before the cup has drained?
Does the filling that I now do, simultaneously address and feel the feelings within while also filling me up? Allowing me to see the beauty and connection and love that’s all around me so that I cannot refute that it’s always been here?
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I feel lighter and I feel more clear. I know that others always will have opinions on what it is that I need to do, how it is that I need to dress, what it is that I need to say, to share, to not share. To express, to not express. It seems that there’s no clear options other than just following what I am guided to from within. Hands on the back of a monster, it promised me care, the child within now alive under the guidance of a creature with slick skin and dark ooze and fangs.
My eyes close and I realize that the monster is not one to fear. A grand beast that may appear frightening yet is full of love and care. Protective to the ones that play with it. Yet why does it look the way that it does? Why do the judgements of my mind deem one creature as more loving than another simply because of the way that it appears? We know and have always known that it’s what’s inside that counts, yet why then choose a form that frightens and causes fear?
To that, I ask myself, do you feel afraid? Do you feel afraid of what you see? For I don’t, though I do feel tired and I feel like being held and I feel like I wish that I could rest and find my way out of a wonderland where nothing seems familiar and everything seems unknown. Wake up from the dream! I pinch myself with a tattoo needle to see if I wake up, yet my body just ends up covered in art, markings that do not fade, markings that show that the past really was real, that what I experienced wasn’t all a dream. For it continues every day that I wake up, it continues and it continues, and it gets better and better for I become more and more aware, my reality bringing to me connections and partnerships and relationships and resources that I would not have ever fathomed without the awareness that I now exude, that now pours out of me.
Two women hold each other in an embrace that screams “I have your heart amidst all that you feel, I understand what’s going without the words” they let go once I look up and see them, they walk out the door. But there it was, the prolonged embrace of understanding. The prolonged embrace of support.
I felt it, you felt it. And for those moments we were together. We were not alone.
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Maybe that’s all that I yearn for, is to be there with you, with another, with my own soul in the hells, in the caves, in the chasms. In the empty dark spaces, in the tombs and in the ruins. To not run from the heart, to be with it even if it’s dark and deep and all else feels empty except for the rhythmic beating of the one steady source of percussion.
To be with and never run from in the dark. To then be together in the light. To be hand in hand in all realms. Balancing and honoring the old by stepping into and embracing the new.
Knowing the depths the heart can feel, never running, and never hiding, while also embracing the path into fulfillment, into dreams coming true. Walking hand in hand into the unknown. Into all that exist ahead.
