A Letter from Nowhere
The body is speaking, but I cannot hear the message aside from an ache in the pelvis and a tightness in the wings of the shoulders and a restlessness that keeps my leg bouncing even now as I write.
My jaw aches. A pressure sits in my throat. This animal body is speaking, and this human mind struggles to distract itself from listening.
An inconvenient message, to be sure. Better to just push on with things and wait for the animal to comply.
If I ignore this building crescendo of restlessness long enough, surely it will break like a wave on the shore and I can get back to my regularly scheduled doing.
"This moment has never occurred before. What would it be like to live in a different way?" The plants give me this message over and over again, as part of their reminder that change is life and sameness is death.
And so, I try something new. I turn toward this swirling and writhing inside me. This bubbling brew of unspoken words and unfelt grievances and unheeded warnings.
There is nothing I can do about this now, I tell myself. All of this is residue. It is already done. Why must I haunt myself?
This body is truly haunted, just as this land is haunted, by the discordance and misalignment of living without integrity. Everytime we take an action that is not an outflowing of an inner knowing, we send a ripple of discord through our bodies and into the world. The ancients knew this, and spent much of their energy working toward finding and claiming this alignment so that they, and their lineage, would not experience the haunting that echos through my being today.
How can we possibly clear these layers and layers of pain, trauma, regret, powerlesness? How can we possibly find alignment with what is real and true after so many miles off the road and wanerding in the wilderness of craving-living on shallow morsels to stave off the starvation that erodes our bones? How do we find the path again?
The questions make a way in, they form a crack in the frozenness of this hardened human doing.
Under the rigid restlessness, there is an ache. Under the ache there is grief. The grief seems endless and bleak, but when I remember that it is a mirage, a temple guardian meant to keep the holiest of holies safe from the profane, the grief suddenly transforms into an ocean of love. Love for this world. Love for our human frailty and failings. Love for all of the beings of this global community. And within this ocean of love, buoyant as I now am, I an gaze up at a sky filled with the fine points of stars, filled with the luminous alignment of hope for a future that is yoked to the ecliptic of the real and the beautiful.
This animal body, loyal and true as always, could feel the withering of my soul and knew that I needed the nourishment of truth. It would not release the truth to me until I surrendered and got quiet enough to listen, and these days I am only quiet enough to listen when I am writing, when I am a hollow bone for the flow of Awen to make her music in the world.
Thank you for sitting at this campfire with me, and warming our bones together by this sacred ember. May we keep our eyes on the stars, this vibrant conjunction of hope and fate, until we meet again in a world made new by our resurrected love.
From the deep,
Erys