13 Years Later

I'm older, now.

More informed. More embodied. The urge to expand awareness persists, along with the struggles of income and the eternal tension between a desire for travel and for nesting. But I did finally centre my life on family with the role of Auntie I couldn't be more grateful to have the honor of embodying.

Today is the spring equinox, the new year on nature's terms, and I am metabolizing the grief of being unseen. Tonight, I spoke with an individual who desires partnership with me, but who's mind is more committed to fabrications than the truth. An individual who clings to narratives of my inner world despite all empathic clarification. What do you do when you cannot translate yourself? When no matter the articulation, the angle, or the approach, nothing of your inner world gets through the Great Filter of the Other's Lens?

Honestly, my tendency has been to keep explaining. To keep translating. To keep trying to find the exact perfect collection of words to finally become recognized. Sometimes, it helps if you leave your experience aside and step into the other's world, bringing nothing but curiosity and presence to their reality. What did this mean to you? How did that feel in your body? Where in your body specifically? What does that compel you to do? What do you want? What do you fear? Can we sit with this together and simply feel it?

True attunement is so connecting.. I love it. Sometimes I hope that providing it will lead to recieving it in return, but it has been my experience that most people don't have the skill or capacity. I don't say this with blame or bitterness, but it does still carry a signature of grief in me. This is my work; to sit equanimously with grief not as a concept, but as bare sensation. To be with the tingling, the warmth of it, entering the epicentre found in the chest right up to the heated centre, and right through to find the edge and to where the warmth ceases altogether into something the mind would never label as grief. Dissolve the concept, dissolve the sensation. Over and over and over, and as always it eventually changes. And as it returns, it is known as sensation experientially.

This grief has been a core identity for me for a long time. "I am unseen. I am hurt and I am longing and I am seperate and I am trying and I am reaching and I am unseen," all wrapped up into one curdling ball of static.

This man inspires this old identity to the surface, and that's the gift. The identity is dropped. Ok, I understand now, I percieve it. It isn't me. It's ok, the sensation is just more static like everything else. The body is learning to rest around it instead of contracting.


----


A poem from 2020, 6 years ago, age 29:

When you’re sensing out into a darkness with unknown arms,
Hearing visions with unknown ears
Seeing images flicker across a mind like flames flicker shadows on stone,
When you're sensing ineffably..

“Take your place”

So many deaf ears, blind eyes,
Hands that touch but feel not,
Minds that meet but know not each other,
Met, in part and pieces,
Sense caught in segments
I learn to hold composure and tenderness,
steadily,
in my own invisibility before them

Why this space undefined?
Shards flicker
Infrastructure
What is this expectation
that a mind should touch me here?
And why this fall in heart,
With naught a soul arriving?
----

little houses.

 i remember when i would feel uncomfortable using my computer in public because of the lack of privacy, all the while telling myself it is a positive lifestyle change to treat internet time as an outing. now, over a year into this relationship with the web, i feel only gratitude for the wifi access provided throughout my city. this local coffee joint keeps me warm and distant from the autumn rain, and i am highly content to be around the quiet buzz of peterborough characters while i write. it took some time, however, to get to this point of feeling good about this change to my lifestyle, but knowing now through experience that i hold the power to kick old habits and values, i feel encouraged to continue reaching towards the goals i have long fantasized over. how can i live with a smaller footprint, wake to  sunrises revealing deep landscapes, work less, spend less, remain free to move around and yet making a comfortable home for myself? i've considered living out of a backpack, i've imagined renting for the rest of my life, and i've always longed for a private space to retreat to all the while wanting to move about the world.. i consider buying land and building a series of tiny houses, living communally with a kind group, and this idea makes life feel meaningful! i will work towards this, though the image in mind needs much refining.. for how can i spare myself from depleting my psychic energy when it comes to the cost of all of this? i reflect on the desire to own the land myself and continuously come to the thought that i am living too individualistically.. that for a sustainable life shared with a group of people that would become my kin is also to hand over hierarchy, to hand over this sense that i must own, and i must be in charge. easier said than done, though, as this tendency is so deeply set in my programming that to uproot it from my subconscious is a slow process.

~ patience. 

This is about me.

Vagueness aside, I am feeling compelled to write words out of their hiding. All of the poems, stories, reflections and essays I create are rarely shared and I am now confronting myself about their secrecy. Why do I keep my words hidden on pages darkened by a closed book? They sit silently on my bookshelf as if they were never written at all, shared only through my imaginings of releasing them in zine form, blogs and articles. I have been the only person to open those books, feeling temporarily recognized by the Other I imagined myself to be as I read my own words. My paradoxical love and fear of self-expression has twisted me into many layers of Fantasy that allow me to feel relief from internal tensions and safe from external judgement. But it is time to stop this tendency that ultimately keeps me feeling isolated from the rest of the world and especially those people I hold most dear. If I have learned anything these past couple of years, it is that participating in the Real and grounded world is where true fulfillment lies. To dream up desirable situations and live them inside my own head is no servitude to personal growth but rather a stagnating habit that makes a fool of me. Time to get real. 

hidden by smoke.

pits between days of ease,
in which i pine for exposure.
i will shallow them out
to ground level,
and at last be seen and see.

rushing.

 these responsibilities are soon to be behind me, replaced by the rhythm of living in the woods!

new suns are rising.

the morning met me,

in a place of ease

Winter Hikes.

3 hour journey and Asimov for company.