Something Extraordinary

I lay there on my inflatable pad in the place where the dried grass had been pressed down by some animal. I felt little ants on my fingers. I felt the Charlie horse in my calf from an exhuberant evening leaping about to Sufi Qawwali. I felt the stiffness of a night spent dozing in the back of my car. I could hear the warm, steady rhythm of her drumming, the soothing strength of her voice guiding me deeper inside my body.

“Allow yourself to make sound,” she invited. And a sigh came from me, choked by my own throat. “Good,” she echoed. I signed again, this time a growl settling in the back of my throat. “Goooood,” she encouraged. “Raawwwrrrrrr!” the growl erupted from me and exploded into a cascade of sobs. My body swinging from grief to ferocity, and back again. “I’m so aaangry!” And the drum slowed to three solid beats and spotted.

“Who are you?” she asked. “I am in the jaws of the beast,” a voice came from me. “My roots are reaching down to find their mycelial network. I am warmth and passion with nowhere to put it. I am in a glass box.” As she echoed my words back to me, old memories took shape. I was in kindergarten playing air piano with my friend in the audience at a recital. Somehow this was naughty and we didn’t get to go to the ice cream party afterwards. How was I supposed to know how to behave? I was 5! All I knew was that I had done something wrong, that being enthusiastic and participating with exhuberance was wrong, that I was wrong, that I better stay still and silent. But living without her feels like death. It’s like climbing a mountain with no arms. I am searching for a vehicle for living my life’s purpose, but without a sense of wholeness, my shadowy fingers slip through whatever they grasp.

That morning in Twin Lakes park in the wetlands of Santa Cruz, I reclaimed the trickster, the whimsical prankster. With my voice ringing out to the oaks as witnesses, I brought her home. And with all the silly songs, and goofy dances, and arm waving, and giggling she brought me that day, I felt my power return. Not the power I have resisted from the women with fierce eyes and straight backs and lifted chins, but my own brand of zany power that questions and needles and defies and staggers, who sits on a stump and sings as bikers whiz past, who asks the cashier if she wants one of the ice cream sandwiches that she’s already opened, who tells the woman who makes it all about money that she just ruined a perfectly delightful conversation, who skips into work, who exclamation in the produce section, “This melon is so good, it makes me want to talk to myself!”

This is something extraordinary. It reminds me of the last time I came back from the dead throwing donuts holes around Berkeley at midnight and walking barefoot through lecture halls, how I got even by posting fake bulletins and stealing snacks. Only now the rebelliousness is softened by a deep sense of compassion and desire to connect. Now I am an adult, so I am more likely to be ignored than admonished. Now I am capable of loving myself for being reprimanded or scorned. And I understand that this, this is what I have been trying to recover through the right relationship, the right job, the right community. I have tried to love my inner child. I didn’t realize I needed to let her live through me – to play air piano, to sing opera in my car, to wander with no thought of arriving.

A part of me is scared to death to live this way. Who will take me seriously? How will I get anything done? Those with power over my well-being will reject me, those with menace in their hearts will attack me, and those who are hungry will devour me. If I don’t plan and defend, I will wither away. And yet all those times I felt most enlivened by a sense of living from my core were times I didn’t will into being – they were times I simply found my voice within my circumstances. And the glimmer faded when I stopped trusting it as my sustenance and looked to others to validate me.

My voice isn’t my way of articulating in words how I feel, what I envision, how the light on a gently turning leaf turns fills me with awe. My voice is what comes out of my womb in syllables in some language I’ve never heard before and blankets the hills. It’s what people feel when they tell me they have no idea what I’m talking about but they love my enthusiasm. It’s what I spread up and out of myself weaving across the dancefloor. It’s what exudes from me in silence. And it is tied in some beautiful and extraordinary way to that 5-year-old playing piano on my knees. What my teacher saw as mockery was my act of homage to what stirs me beyond words – what only movement and laughter and an explosion of inner light can express.

And so I have engaged a threshold midwife, who reminds me that play and curiosity melt fear. Just as a community that is leaving the global economy to become locally sustainable must find a consultant to help them move beyond deeply held fears and beliefs about how to manage their resources, so I too need a guide to help me withdraw from all the outer circumstance, ideas, and opinions that have nourished me and become my own source of sustenance. My inner wilderness has been a place of wailing and gnashing. Now it is also a place of inexhaustible playfulness and enthusiasm. If it is possible to live from this place, I will find a way. I am no freeloader. And I am only a threat to those who have silenced the vitality of their own inner imps.

I have done enough to get myself to safety. I can stop the compulsive striving to get somewhere outside myself that will be empty when I arrive because I myself am just a shadow. I lost hope in the outer world to satisfy me, hope in relationships to fulfill me, because I have moved beyond that. I am the silly playmate I have been waiting for to bring me alive.

Nancy

“Singing, laughing, dancing to her favorite song: she’s a little girl, with nothing wrong, and she’s all alone. Eyes wide open always hoping for the sun, and she sings her song to anyone who comes along. Fragile as a leaf in autumn that’s fallen to the ground, without a sound. Crooked little smile on her face, tells a tale of grace that’s all her own. She’s a little girl with nothing wrong, and she’s all alone.” – Norah Jones