The Center of All Things

I hear so many voices. There are those who whisper advice from their own hard-earned lessons. “You should start a business.” “You should teach that class.” “You should write for others, not yourself.” “You should be practical.” “Be strong.” “Write less poetic.” “Follow your heart.” I want to set them all on fire – watch them all smolder until the only sound I hear is the crackling of their embers and the voices in my own mind, the cacophony shouting simultaneous versions of my story reaching back to the beginning and forward into the mists. I have enough to sort out inside my own soul, and I am the only one who can tell which of my longings is closest to my root.

I hear that deepest voice echoed in each breath that shares the spirit of my despair and the elation of my moments of clarity. I hear it especially in those voices that translate all these feelings and ideas into images; images of treading water lost at sea, of climbing onto another to keep afloat and drowning you both; of taking on a falcon’s wings and gliding on the upwelling, tearing through the air while suspended…motionless. And I hear it most clearly when my mind forsakes language all together and staccato babble erupts from my loosened throat, slashing the cliffs and settling into the lullaby of breezes caressing tender buds.

These are soul songs. They are what happens when we coax the mind to focus on one wild purple iris hiding in the grass and inhale… exhale… three times, through the mouth until the jaw releases and the sternum relaxes and the soft spine from top to bottom opens and we can just be. What sounds come through us when we let the low reaching boughs cradle our bodies and rock us? What sensations bubble from root to crown as we trace our fingers the length of the scar of a trunk split open and feel it within our hearts. These wild places are not our healers, our teachers; one more thing to use and discard. I kneel in reverence with my forehead on the lichen-covered stone and my body is the mountain. When I wail into the wind, my voice is the grief of this place watching buildings rise, rivers darken, and hill-tops scalped.

If I do not utter the strange sounds that erupt from me at the sight of portals in the clouds that my language lacks the words to explain, what use is my life? What are my hands for if not to describe the weight of the sky feathering out into fingertips of blue? I am at a loss to tell you something truly of use in navigating this world we have constructed, but if I can move behind your mind in a place of solid dreams and blue dusk and shadowy feathers than these words are for far more than myself. I release the expectation that anyone understand, that anyone honor my offerings with livelihood. All I have is this energy that explodes from me when my fingertips brush rough bark, when I hear a mythological echo in a modern story of struggle, when a crowd gathers round my dream body in awe of the melody lifting from me. These things aren’t mine. Claiming them and withholding them bring equal despair to my wandering.

I used to crave belonging, being understood, being invited and being admired. Now I see all these things as sheets of glass between me and my soul – I can see the light, but not feel it’s warmth. I feel only a hard, featureless chill while the image appears so full. I have raged against it, shattered it, pierced myself and bled all my life away so many times without ever really reaching through. Now I am beginning to understand the way of things. There is no shame in a simple, modest life; not if it soothes the rebellion enough to feel still air crawling on my skin, to witness the hairs on a blade of grass, to hear the faint, crisp notes of silence. A secret world of intimate mystery, of ever-shifting shadow, of glorying in mine and yours and theirs and everything’s crashing together and trickling apart, tip-toeing and thundering, timid and boisterous.

I long to fall in love; in love with the world, in love with myself, in love with the gravity pulling me toward the center of all things, with the weight I must feel before I can soar. The pleasure of being embodied, the curiosity of an insatiable romance, the repetition of ever-broadening concentric circles rippling out and returning back – communing occasions one after another in every moment I can spare from idle survival. Within this eroticism I contact the wound, the withdrawal – birthed in protection and now serving isolation from other, from world, ultimately from soul. Only these wild things can coax me back – this wilderness around and within me. For isn’t what I envy and adore in you merely an echo of what I have turned from in myself? It is not the treasures of others I long for, but the light in them that shines because they have unearthed what I have stopped mining in myself.

So I offer what I have in faith that loving what we love is enough, and that perhaps it is the only true act of service to this world. Is it ethno-centric and arrogant of me to believe what I find in myself in those hills is universal? Wasn’t every human foot molded to feel all the textures of the earth passing beneath and shudder; each human eye to rest on a berry, a butterfly, another pupil with reverence; each ear to perceive thunder and rain and song of every color and marvel – even if we have forgotten? And isn’t poetry the thing that reminds us why we are here and what language is for? And the dream-images the ones who accompany us through loss and recovery?

So I ask you as I asked myself – what would you do if you had 15 minutes of guaranteed, complete, and loving attention? What would you say? Would you tell the story of your life or what inspires you most? Would you weep? Would you be timid or entertain? How would you show up if you knew you had nothing to earn, nothing to prove – only space to see and be seen?  I would close my eyes. I wouldn’t make a sound. I would simply listen to the movement of your breath. Exhale and feel my jaw release, my sternum relax. And let my fingers trace our wound from root to crown.

Nancy

Note: On March 24^th I stepped from the vehicle that had carried me from my life at Ananda Laurelwood, down the west coast couch-surfing, job-hunting, researching, and networking to the fourth annual Ecopsychology Conference hosted by Holos Institute at Earthrise in the hills north of San Francisco. There, timid and grateful and hopeful, I joined the tribe I had been shadowing my whole life, and my world turned to poetry.