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.
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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?
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